It’s Not Just You: 5G Is a Big Letdown | Hacker News Reader

It’s Not Just You: 5G Is a Big Letdown

wsj.com

37 pointsimpish920829 comments

From my perspective: I can't tell if 5G matters or not, but I can say that the cell networks have definitely improved in quality over the last several years.

Whatever they are doing certainly doesn't seem to be making things worse.

I think "5G" is just a fancy wrapper for "we are going to upgrade our networks at a cost of billions of dollars - just like we always do - but we need to make it sound a bit shiner to the investors or they will balk". Combine with clever accounting on the earnings reports (i.e. attribute as much to "5G" as possible) and everyone is happily deceived.

There is a new failure mode I experience not uncommonly,

when 5G is available, but weak (or saturated?), my data performance drops off dramatically; my iPhone doesn't fail down, but keeps trying the 5G path even when it's not performing.

(I've also had this problem at the edge of WiFi range; data keeps trying to route over very low bitrate or packet-lossy WiFi... but if I turn off WiFi entirely, boom.)

I have noticed this as well. Basically the same behavior as when a terrible (saved) Wi-Fi network is in range and my phone will not concede attempting to connect en lieu of a more performant cellular connection.

Is there not some wireless network protocol designed to deal with this issue, or is it one of those "sometimes" things?

What actually happens to a TCP connection when you go from 5G to LTE and back?

I'm assuming 5G/LTE/etc works on the link layer, so TCP shouldn't notice at all aside from a dropped packet here or there.

This is a very anecdotal article. The technologies involved in 5G are without a doubt better than their predecessor generation. Service quality versus LTE varies depending on location, but -- to counter anecdotes with anecdotes -- I personally find 5G to be remarkably faster and better, am very pleased with 5G hotspot service for backup internet access, and I think the article doesn't do justice to the topic.

Progress has been underwhelming because the innovations are not stunning to consumers when pricing goes up every year while connectivity is becoming more and more of a metered utility.

Technological progress too often is based upon what will increase profit for shareholder driven companies, rather than for adding real value and simplifying lives of the consumers it was meant to serve.

There is a plateau for how much shareholder driven technology can sustain itself, and that ends exactly where consumers are no longer eagerly driven to buy new consumer products and services. It is being demonstrated a lot lately as despite many sites having an astronomical number of users, many of them rarely log in. It's time for companies to start paying attention to alternate metrics to drive their business models than just subscriptions, market investment, and net profit. Pricing and reliability will likely be the most competitive points in economies like this.

https://archive.is/DLiEk

5G is a massive marketing miss (or misunderstanding?) Because speed presented in 5G hype articles were speed of mmWave (Ultra Wide Band), but for most of people mmWave is not going to work because those frequencies can't penetrate obstacles, including walls, glass or even vegetation.

So people will usually get Sub-6Ghz 5G on their phones, which is only marginally faster than current LTE and now we have the source of disappointment here.

As I see it, sales people were selling mmWave speeds, without realizing that it is not going to work for most of their customer.

Maybe I am using my phone wrong, but probably the largest bandwidth usage on my phone is watching 1080p youtube, which is.... probably no more than 20mbit/s? Spotify occasionally takes more than 2 seconds to load a podcast, and sending emails with 10mb attachments can take upwards of 3 seconds. I don't personally see the utility in having a 100mbit connection on my phone. Wifi is pretty ubiquitous if I need it for my laptop at faster speeds than that, generally wifi is available either for free, or for a few bucks (on an airplane).

> I don't personally see the utility in having a 100mbit connection on my phone.

Many of us want higher speeds for IoT projects.

Seriously curious what sort of IoT project needs 100mbit. How much sensor data can one be pumping out? I'd be more interested in latency.

Eh it used to be very cost competitive to slap up LTE mobile devices in remote areas for internet. Now we have starlink and 5G has reduced range/doesn't handle trees and valleys as well as 4g/3g it's not so much the case. I got like 3x of these 4G lte modems sitting about doing naught since starlink activated here.

> I don't personally see the utility in having a 100mbit connection on my phone.

Oh I do. I can grab my laptop, sit anywhere, grab my phone and setup a hotspot, and work away without any concern.

If 5G coverage was better, I would drop my gigabit internet provider right now.

I disagree, a few notes.

Most carriers haven't switched all services yet, sms haven't converted from 4g to 5g; some phone call processes haven't. If phones have to be connected to both 4g and 5g few of the benefits will be fully seen yet (congestion, battery life, coverage)

TMobile relaunched mobile broadband as a high-speed service, t-mobile announced a wireless video service.

This is anecdotal, but I'm curious if this happens to anyone else: any time I try to establish a connection over 5G ultra wideband, it seems to hang for a good 5 or 10 seconds. Like if I take out my phone and try to visit a website, it hangs for 5-10 seconds and then loads. It got to the point where, if a website took a while to load, I would check if I was connected to 5G or not. Eventually I disabled 5G and the problem went away.

I think I've seen the same thing. I use Verizon in SF for both an iPhone and for their 5G home internet service, so I've got some basis for comparison.

During the setup for the home internet, they were very particular about where to place the device for line of sight to the tower. It consistently gets 1Gbps down and 300Mbps when in 5G UWB mode. There are rare situations in which it falls back an LTE connection that is somehow unimaginably worse than phone tethering.

On the other hand, when I'm using my phone, it'll sometimes _think_ it has the ability to do ultra wideband, but it doesn't work, and the icon disappears and suddenly I'm back on ordinary 5G again with a bit of a hiccup that you note. If I ensure that my phone has clear line of sight to the base station, and confirm that it is using UWB, then I can get similar speeds and latency to the 5G home internet device.

The ultra wideband mode is very sensitive to where you are in relation to the base station, so on a phone moving around your house it may be inconvenient or frustrating to have your phone attempt to use it.

I never quite understood the need to make "5G" this standalone solutions to all problems of the future. It was by definition a bundle of technologies that improved upon existing tech. Nothing fundamentally new was ever going to happen. Phones have internet now, they will have internet after 5G.

Mobile telecom companies are 90% advertising, marketing, sales and (handset) finance operations, and only 10% is "provide mobile network connectivity" (and lots of effort is spent to outsource as much of that 10% as possible to the lowest bidder).

Branding 5G as the next best thing since sliced bread benefits the first 90% of the business as idiots flock to them with their wallets open. By the time they realise what 5G really is, it's too late and they would've already parted with their money (whether onto new handsets/plans for consumers, or various IoT-related things for businesses).

What did people think was going to happen? A 5G tower only has a 500 meter range. It was never going to be about blanketing America in Wi-Fi.

The most important use case was to add additional capacity in dense urban areas. Or like, Stadiums where 100k phones can all sap the network at once.

5G towers dont just have a 500 meter range, low band is the same as 4G and C mid band is more than 500 meters. 5G doesn't just mean millimeter wave.

Are you talking about Low Band, High Band, or mmWave High Band 5g?

There are a few flavors but I’m assuming you meant mmWave. The telco I work for has only deployed mmWave 5g in Stadiums in my city and similar large cities. We have deployed Low Band 5g “nationwide” and it’s only 20% faster than LTE. Mid Band 5g has only been deployed in select cities in 2022.

*disclaimer: I’m not a RAN engineer. I googled all of the info above.

These are not they told us though.

They promised for the highest bandwidth bands, and gave us the lowest tier.

20% faster than what speed LTE?

4G (what the Long Term Evolution was supposed to reach) has a limit of 1Gbps [1]. I don't think I ever got a 1G speed on a 4G/LTE phone. I have no doubt that 5G will be faster than 4G just as I have no doubt it won't meet any marketing promise.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#IMT-Advanced_requirements

The reality is that the higher capacity goes not towards giving you more speed, but towards supporting more users per cell.

I got close to that back when it was new. These days there’s too many users on most towers to achieve it.

Also not an expert, but my friend is an industry RF engineer. And the way he described it is that the only "meaningful" improvement on the industry-side is the extra capacity that the new higher frequency range provides. Everything else is just slicing and dicing the existing frequency range (and dethrottling some customers) for marketing purposes.

Living in suburbs, 5G gives me about 10x better throughput than any other current option. A fiber connection will soon be available though, which will easily replace the 5G.

I know at least one MVNO that's leveraging 5G oversubscription to lower customer non-interactive usage.

Guess who's vertical, untethered enough to do that...?

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