5G Rollout Disappointments
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
This article has a thorough explanation (1)
In most nowadays 5G implementation is the first one, where you get a slight enhanced LTE, as it’s easier to implement, SA, which provide extra features is still not widely used -although it’s changing, and then you have the least adopted one is the mmwave due to its new bands (unlike the sub-6GHz) that require new radio/towers/etc. on a higher frequencies (also higher noise), and also new UE (or user equipment/device), which so far only very limited devices support that. In Canada, we did some cell surveys utilizing robots/drones to map the areas at different altitudes to find the deadzones and coverage, and you can say in most of the results, NSA can have the coverage as the LTE, mmwave in some cases we had not just to maintain a clear line of sight to get any signal, but also we have to be relatively close. So mmwave adoption might still in its early stages, it’s also why so operators went with C-band instead.
(1) https://dgtlinfra.com/5g-standalone-sa/#:~:text=What%20is%20....
But my nearest antenna is a block away with pretty good sight lines. If I move my radio even 6ft in the wrong direction my speeds go through the floor. I think the 5G hype was excessive for a technology that only works in very specific circumstances and it’s led to some disappointment.
The push for 5g in general has been a bit of a head scratcher for me. I don't think consumers have been clamoring for multi gigabit wireless en mass. If they're like me, they would prefer consistency and reliability.
Speed is less important when you can use WIFI at home and in many places, which is going to be faster and more reliable. I always suspected something else was pushing the massive investment and marketing of 5g. Maybe cost massive savings on new spectrum leases?
I don't know for sure, but when the I saw a commercial that said 5g would help doctors at a hospital diagnose illness faster (using networked equipment) I was like why the hell would hospitals even want to use 5g?
Ethernet, Fiber, maybe wifi. But 5g?? Craziness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpzF2JOgiwE
Everything this guy talks about can be accomplished by traditional wifi and ethernet.
Also, it may be bold to assume that WiFi as offered is a practical option.
> Speed is less important when you can use WIFI at home and in many places
In my experience 5G provides that consistency: Wifi (outside of my reliable home connection) is often super flaky. With 5G on my phone I find myself connecting to (e.g.) coffee shop Wifi much less often and I tether my laptop to my phone rather than use it.
One street over I get 1000 mbps down/250 mbps up which I am a bit salty about. There is a terrain feature that makes it impossible for me to see that same tower from my house.
4G was a major stepup in speed and given the rise of smartphones and platforms like YouTube, the speed increase made sense. There was an actual use for it. The speed increase for 5G seems to not really be needed though? At least for a majority of people 4G seems to do exactly what it needs to do.
My carrier once called and wondered if the 5G is working, and how I experience it. I'm guessing that was a PR stunt, since otherwise I wouldn't have noticed the awesome things they do for me in the background... But I might be too negative on this point. Maybe they actually wanted to know if their technology was working, by calling me and asking...
Swiss carriers have gigantic roaming charges.
Every time. I fly through Zurich (from Austria) I blow through my roaming limit 60 seconds after landing because I forgot to disable data.
1MB/16€
Yes that is Megabyte not Gigabyte
Ironically, calling a friend in Paris from Prague is free, while calling from Zurich is 70 cents a minute.
My sister, who lives in Vienna, is shocked about our subscription prices (ca 70 EUR a month, unlimited everything and EU roaming as described above) while I'm more surprised by costs she incurs while visiting.
To me the deal is fine. It may not be the cheapest but I never incur any additional costs.
Even globally you get 100MB free internet with your subscription per month and can buy additional packages for about 20EUR per GB, which I don't think is unreasonable.
Other carriers are more on a rip off spree. While SALT intices customers with cheap subscription offers they may hit you very badly with internet roaming costs. Until very recently they didn't even allow to set a limit.
Of course, the counterargument is that higher speed enables a new generation of (web) applications. Perhaps that materializes one day, but at this point it mostly remains irrelevant for the consumer.
If I can halve the download time that allows another user to use the bandwidth sooner.
Instead they expect you to migrate to a wirelss solution.
Yes, your 1Gbps Ethernet is enough for majority of your needs. Except you are not the only one using the 1Gbps Ethernet.
If that’s right, then all the consumer-oriented ads for 5G are pointless.
Even if they weren’t, people are using more and more bandwidth just naturally loading ads and shit I guess.
But they still charge extra and lot of it here for the contract...
One could understand, why they need to market the hype ( or bait ) to switch to 5G. On the other hand, most of the marketing point, like self driving vehicles, remote surgery operation, mmWave for everyone, or so called up to 20Gbps are by most's [1] people's standard "lying". They could have used other marketing points , but somehow marketing for tech has become something else.
If you talk to most if not all engineers working on 5G, whether that is the 3GPP spec, or actual network implementation in both software and hardware. They would all tell you the truth, 5G is simply a better 4G. And to be honest, as an Engineers, Tech Enthusiast, and also a consumer. That is good enough for what it is.
[1] May be not America because it seems you could get away with Tesla type of marketing and hype without immediate penalties.
Right now, as it was pushed as something we're supposed to want for ourseleves and allow us to do rocket surgery from our phones, people just got burned and either learned to kill it in the settings or bitch about it all day long.
I was watching a wireless home bridge review, and half of it was the reviewer looking into the settings and documentaton how to force 4G to get better speeds (spoiler: 4G was effectively faster). And that's a bog standard consumer targeted video with 700K views at launch.
Meanwhile, 3 out of the 4 big networks in Poland market it as a premium feature, and only offer 5G to the customers on more expensive plans or for extra fees. (The network that gives 5G to everyone is Plus, and their plans are cheaper as well.)
It has been (and it will be) a major cost for families, besides the complication, especially for the older people that have now to deal with either a crappy external decoder or a crappy smart TV (as "normal" TV are in practice unobtanium).
And all we got (where it works) is just a lot more people viewing videos on Tiktok.
I've actually gone in and set the preferred network to LTE and every now and then I try setting it back, and almost every time I set it back within the day.
Doing some speed tests back and forth, LTE tends to have significantly less latency, higher bandwidth, and just works while every single web page load on 5G feels like a gamble.
Though coming back to the original discussion a lot of issues with 5g are backhaul problems which aren't indicated by the signal bar.
Boiling it down to "connection strength to the cell site" is, literally, the same as using wifi strength bars to evaluate internet speeds at home: it doesn't even begin to tell the whole picture.
Even in remote areas (various parts of western Maharashtra), whenever 5G is available, it's a noticeably better experience than 4G.
5G has increased capacity over 4G, so even if all 4G users would switch to 5G, you will still have better service.
* More users on the 5G sites dragging that greenfield under-used speed mark down to the more typical value.
* Much of the hype 'best' with extremely high HZ spectrum that has short distance and low penetration E.G. Mostly giant sports stadiums.
* Suburbs and rural areas not a good match for the distance (frequency use) or capital investment required.
Count me as unimpressed with 5G. I wish they’d focus on better geographic coverage and more reliable coverage instead.
Having said that, I just went through Copenhagen airport and the 5G network there is really good: Very low latency, very fast initial connect, and very fast download speeds.
So 5G can deliver the end-user experience it promised.
Uh, Nokia? Samsung? Whatever Amazon and the startups are cooking?
Yes, really.
This seems unsurprising.
One other thing is that 5G as it stands now is a bit of a hybrid, still relying on LTE networks and control planes to do management functions. Some networks are working on, and have partially built out, 5G-native control planes but it's not done, it's new, and that also means those functions are still working out the bugs
It was basically true, this was more clarity and intelligibility than the full-quality land line POTS.
After a year or two their airwaves got crowded and it became apparent they were compressing the audio enough to be noticeably way worse than the POTS was.
Cell carriers seem to have kept performance at that low level ever since.
Plus lots of times it seems like it's no longer full-duplex, after a pause more like voice-activated from either end before it starts transmitting to the other party.
Streaming video/audio has a distinct advantage of not having the same latency sensitivity. It's not a two way conversation so if the stream is a second or two behind the wall clock as long as it's in sync you're never going to know unless you're watching a stream of an event you can see live, then you'll see the encode and transfer delay.
Besides latency, the microphone/audio input pipeline on a phone is in one of the shittiest recording environments it could be in. It's right next to the users mouth, sometimes far too close, so it needs automatic gain control to keep from being overdriven. It also needs to filter out the audio coming from the speaker lest it generates feedback. The microphone itself also needs to be very small and is attacked to the body of the phone so it's difficult to isolate from body sounds like the user's hand rubbing over the body.
The fact a cell phone can even transmit reasonable sounding voice is a minor miracle involving many thousands of engineer-hours. The extra processing power and bandwidth available today to handle wideband voice helps a little with quality but it's still very latency sensitive and still suffers vs less latency sensitive codecs or one-way streaming.
I think about this every time I use make a voice call on a cellphone -- in terms of audio quality, it blows my mind how inferior it is to what we had on POTS lines in the 80s.
The fastest 5G contract these days is 500Mbit. Most people are fine with paying for the much cheaper 100Mbit contracts.
So even if 5G has speed benefits, usually I wont notice.
Are we still at the stage people think Real 5G = mmWave? Which is what I believe 99.99999% of the internet comments were suggesting and at least 90% of HN believes in 2022.
> What does [flagged] mean?
>Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.
I for one didn't think 5g == mmWave, but I specifically chose TMobile because their initial 5g rollout plan made way more sense for me, as it wasn't mmWave, where others seemed to be focusing there.
Your comment seem to come up with more reasons it isn't doing as well as it could, while basically going into the same direction as the article. Why would you flag it for being basically right, even in a boring way ?
These short term gains ruin the game for everyone. Wireless bandwidth is precious.
"Integrated sensing and communication" is the search term to get you started.
Location: in the center of a modern well isolated family home, with HR++ glass. So not ideal for optimal reception, but I didn't care to get up from the kitchen table.
Tested with speedtest.net in the browser with Android Chrome. Network is T-Mobile NL.
5G: 69.52 Mbps down, 37 ms ping 4G: 56.79 Mbps down, 34 ms ping 3G: 4.01 Mbps down, 56 ms ping
I'm not sure if T-Mobile is still keeping their 3G network at optimal performance. All their competitors have phased out 3G. They'll probably follow soon (though only 2G phase out is announced).
Anyway, 4G → 5G is an improvement, but not orders of magnitude. That might be a bit much to expect though.
I also measured my wifi/fiber connection. Got to 162.86 Mbps and 17 ms ping. Still much better than the mobile networks. (And lower than I expected, so probably time to debug a bit.)
5G: Rx 233 mbps, Tx 90 mbps, ping 18 ms
4G (LTE): Rx 185 mbps, Tx 63 mbps, ping 19 ms
It's hard for me to tell where is the 5G tower, but the LTE one is on the condo block across the street. EDIT: I think they're co-located.
I guess it just depends on what is the infrastructure around you and how close is it.
Are you saying in the NL 2G networks will be closed before 3G networks?
In Germany 3G networks are already closed, in Finland closing has been announced. But 2G networks are promised to run still for years.
The rollout is a bit curious though. In Germany providers are incentivised to connect people no cover area (iirc they have to connect at least x% of the population). Sort of makes sense but also cuts off potentially very interesting use cases (for example rural areas where 5G could be used for agricultural machinery).
“5G towers are faster but they have less range. What problems would you expect when rolling it out across the nation?”
They identified all of the major ones in the article.
Just like many in tech did when 5G was announced.
And yet somehow we’re still here.
The reality is that 5G was hugely desired by the telecoms because it eases their problem with the amount of load the cell system has to carry. And deploying it is very expensive, so they wanted public money to help. Which means they wanted to get people excited about it, thus the hype machine was put into overdrive.
Of course broad-area surface-penetrating surveillance is not what this technology is being rolled out for at all.
I can do 800mbit+ on mine, symmetrical.
What is this article even trying to accomplish?