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Comment by YeBanKo | Hacker News Reader

This is why I don’t want 5G. It is not going to make my cellular service better or cheaper, but it is going to enable every internet-of-shit device manufacturer to buy bandwidth from telcos and a new generation of “smart” devices will be able to call home without asking you for wifi password.

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I think low speed protocols like LoRA or relatives of it are more likely to be used for this. They're very low power, low overhead, and hard to block.

That's exactly the privacy endgame though: stuff a chip with cellular capability into everything you can and stream data to data brokers for double-dip profit whether the customer likes it (or even knows it) or not. The market for data about people seems to be almost infinite and bottomless.

This can only be fixed with legislation. I predict it will become a major battle in the future.

If I understand correctly, LoRA is more suited when you want to have a fluid decentralized networks, when nodes come in and out all the time and you aren’t concerned by latency.

This is the opposite if what telcos want. They want to have a low latency connection to every device in the house. Imagine your toaster and your tv stream in real time to an ad server what your are doing. You put a piece of bread in the toaster, while you wait you walk to your TV, start using the remote and you have a peanut butter commercial on Hulu. And this link inside the consumers homes is handled by 3 US cellphone carriers, not much competition. Or maybe it is just me being paranoid.

What does 5G have to do with that? There have been devices using 3G for years. It is very cheap and the infrastructure is pretty much everywhere.

A fully deployed 5G network will be able to support a much higher device density. Up to a million devices per sq km. Basically an antenna on every block and they will be able to connect every IoS device and scatter around a bunch of sensor, and still have some bandwidth left.

Depends on where you are, but 3G's being deprecated.

In the "5G" bundle of technologies, one of the things was specific features for connecting larger numbers of low power devices very cheaply. Think almost every >$20 gadget in your home having its own GSM modem.

5g deployment is going to be cheap enough for manufacturers to buy bandwidth and cut the consumer out of the decision entirely. They’ll get the user data for the cost of buying the bandwidth. And it’ll become a de-facto standard you won’t be able to buy a device without it.

> There have been devices using 3G for years. It is very cheap and the infrastructure is pretty much everywhere. --- My Resmed CPAP machine came with a cellular tattletale. It was a separate module with a cable to the mainboard. I unplugged it. The DME provider got all pissy about it, but I just ignored them.

I'm guessing the main reason it was a separate circuit board was so they could install a compatible cellular module depending on what country it was to be shipped to.

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