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Comment by tremere | Hacker News Reader

Why would I want to replace my home internet with something less secure, less reliable, lossier, and slower?

It may be worse for the end user but it's great for corporations. Samsung could sell you a smart TV with built-in 5G so that it can always serve you ads even if you never connect it to your wi-fi.

Or better yet, serve you ads when you're not using the TV where it randomly comes on from time to time and displays an image ad and then turns off again.

Yes, and not just TVs but any piece of electronic equipment with 5G built-in will be capable of serving ads and sending usage information back without needing access to the user's WiFi or router

Can't they already do this now? Is 5G necessary?

Well, they can just stuff a 5G NB-IoT modem inside of newer TVs, using eSIMs received by OTA (either WiFi or a previous valid eSIM).

As long as the manufacturer foots the eSIM bill (and it's profitable) they can serve ads.

Speak for yourself...my parents live in a rural area and just switched from a local wireless isp (via some directional/long range 802.11 setup) to a tmobile 5g router and it's been an absolute godsend in terms of speed and reliability. Growing up there was depressing and I was flabbergasted to see them join this century with something I'd consider "high-speed" (seen it hit 200mbps personally).

Several of my teenage years involved a lot of conniving to get better internet to our rural house. Best I managed before moving out was very high latency and unreliable microwave at 1Mbps. Now there's great LTE and I think even 5G there.

Because it's cheaper and more convenient for you ISP and you'll just need to eat the crappier service when noone will want to deploy fiber to your house anymore.

In London, in an apartment block, I tried BT broadband (60Mbps max), then Virgin cable (100Mbps for £55 / month, prices go up for more speed), then EE 4G (£30 / month for 200Mbps +/-50Mbps, unlimited d/l upload is also over 60Mbps, about 6x on Virgin).

I don't game, so don't care about ping.

So, where I am, using 4G for my home internet is faster and cheaper, and I can gift data to my phone. I have not had any issues with reliability.

I'd be really surprised if you don't have at least one altnet in an apartment building, Hyperoptic is pretty common in London.

I've got access to 4 seperate FTTH providers now in my apartment (all using different infrastructure, not including resellers): VM, Openreach (BT) FTTP, Hyperoptic and now Community fibre.

The limiting factor on speed now is WiFi, which cannot manage 1gig even closer to the router.

In Southampton, there are lots of places around the city where 4G coverage is simply not reliable. Even with a strong signal you can get speeds that vary from literally nothing to 60MBPs. I once lived within half a mile of the centre and could never connect to anything between 5pm and 11pm which rendered the service entirely useless.

We've had 4G for ten years or more now, I'm not ready to put my faith in 5G and don't expect to be any time soon.

I almost signed up for a new office a mile from the centre where the best cable speed on offer was 20Mbps and the thought of relying upon mobile internet was enough to make me think twice.

I'm currently in semi-rural location, no mobile service at all indoors but, 200 metres from the fibre cable cabinet, enjoying cheap and reliable 60Mbps without a hitch.

Mobile signal remains spotty in Southampton, I’m unable to use 5G at home because I’m in the dead zone between the coverage of three masts. That’s less of an issue in recent years though because the terribly named “toob” have rolled out fibre across most of the city, and will sell me a line doing a gigabit up and down for £25 a month, which is less than I was previously paying for DSL over a bit of wet string.

Probably council rejecting new masts if it is like most places in the UK.

3UK have thousands (maybe 10k?) new masts in planning to really improve 5G coverage (and they have the spectrum to actually deliver 2gig/sec to phones in the real world). Annoyingly the (vast in many cases) majority will are being rejected on suprious grounds by the council.

The reality where I live (North of England) is the opposite: cash-strapped (and often greasy-palmed) councils will approve masts willy-nilly, to the annoyance of locals who find out only after they're erected. Very occasionally this generates any actual organised blowback.

I'm curious, what are the actual objections to mobile masts being erected? They don't make a noise, they're not (despite the conspiracy theorists) in any way dangerous. All I can think of is that people don't like the way they look, but I don't really see them as being any uglier than a lamppost or street sign.

Mainly aesthetics, the new 5G masts are much larger and need to be sited in densely populated areas where there is already a significant amount of unwelcome street furniture.

Conspiracy theories regarding harmful radiation can also be a factor.

In Copenhagen I tried 500Mb/s cable for about £30 / month, and didn't need to go any further. They since upgraded it to 1000Mb/s.

Several other companies could provide similar speeds at similar (some lower) costs through a fibre connection, which was installed throughout the building.

5G home broadband seems like a fix for when the market for wired options is broken.

The same arguments apply to wireless headphones. (And I'm not disagreeing with you)

No, that's specious. The user experience matters a lot more when using headphones. The weight and tension and tethered nature of a wire degrade the user experience when it comes to an apparatus that goes on your head.

In contrast, I personally do not derive any pleasure from liberating my home internet gateway from a cable that goes to the wall.

> The user experience matters a lot more when using headphones.

Sure, for the use cases where, for example, you're moving too much, wireless is good

But you get an inferior experience on most other cases, for example, switching it from one device to another, not to mention spectrum crowding etc

> But you get an inferior experience on most other cases, for example, switching it from one device to another

I almost always have a better experience switching from one device to another. It’s zero extra taps (just play/pause of some content on the second device) on my Jabra earphones or zero to one taps for my AirPods (one if they’re already playing media on the original device).

Compare that to wired headphones, which I would need to unplug and then snake around my desk to the second device.

That is, if your device supports it, but upgrades take time and my headphones still work great (and weren't too cheap)

Well, the use case where your headphones are connected to one device and you are moving around accounts for, say, 80% of the time spent using headphones. So even if other use cases get more annoying, it really doesn't matter unless they become unbearable (and disconnecting BT on my phone and then connecting from my laptop to the headphones, which is about the worse case scenario, is not unbearable).

I venture to say that in my social circle, over 50% of people own wireless noise canceling headphones.

Yet many of the same people demand wired internet. Hence I don't believe wireless internet and headphones are comparable.

I’ve been using 5G while waiting for fibre to be laid and use it for day-to-day internet connectivity

It’s 20-30x faster than my VDSL2 line and only £8/month more expensive

And apart from the day of the Queens funeral it’s been really reliable

On the day of the funeral throughput was like 28kbps, whereas 4G from the same tower was 100Mbps so I presume the teleco had an internal network issue with their 5G backhaul / network (probably sold all the capacity to broadcasters)

> less secure

Not really. The link layer is encrypted, and you're almost certainly running SSL on top of it.

You shouldn't!

But mature 5g isn't supposed to be any of those.

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