5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Now let's address latency - that entire article only mentioned the word once and it looks like it was by accident.
Latency isn't cool but it is why your Teams/Zoom/whatevs call sounds a bit odd. You are probably used to the weird over-talking episodes you get when a sound stream goes somewhat async. You put up with it but you really should not, with modern gear and connectivity.
A decent quality sound stream consumes roughly 256KBs-1 (yes: 1/4 megabyte per second - not much) but if latency strays away from around 30ms, you'll notice it and when it becomes about a second it will really get on your nerves. To be honest, half a second is quite annoying.
I can easily measure path latency to a random external system with ping to get a base measurement for my internet connection and here it is about 10ms to Quad9. I am on wifi and my connection goes through two switches and a router and a DSL FTTC modem. That leaves at least 20ms (which is luxury) for processing.
Perhaps we should insist on more from formatting from above. That's probably a post processing thing for ... gAI 8)
Doesn't work well in pure text mediums.
Мб and хз are both common acronyms in Russian, so this reads as “может быть, х** знает”, roughly: “maybe, f--- if I know”
If you really want to have some fun come out to the country side with me where 4G is the only option and 120ms is the best end to end latency you're going to get. Plus your geolocation puts you half the nation away from where you actually are which only expounds the problem.
On the other hand I now have an acquired expertise in making applications that are extremely tolerant of high latency environments.
That's basically me. 80ms on LTE or 25ms on Starlink.
Used to be 1200-1500ms on BGAN, 160ms on 3G.
It has all the latency associated with cell networks combined with all the latency of routing all traffic through AWS.
As an added bonus, about 10% of sites block you outright because they assume a request coming from an AWS origin IP is a bot.
Maybe you are thinking of working around bufferbloat?
Usually multiplayer games have some correction and if you have really stable latency it can work pretty well (of course never as well as 0 latency). But usually, the jitter is the killer because it makes actions delayed AND unpredictable.
Your network needs to be End to End running on 5G-A ( 3GPP Rel 18 ) with full SA ( Stand Alone ) using NR ( New Radio ) only. Right now AFAIK only Mobile networks in China has managed to run that. ( Along with turning on VoNR ) Most other network are still behind in deployment and switching.
[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-05-5g-non-public-network-...
This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress usually has a temporary cell network (I think up to LTE last year) set up for the duration of the event, on a temporary license. And that's basically just done for fun.
F1 TV also gets radio spectrum which they use for something like 4G for their wireless cameras.
I think Microsoft took bandwidth efficiency a bit too far here.
Modern home/office internet connections are mostly optimised for throughput but rarely for latency - that's the province of HFT.
You see tales from the kiddies who fixate over "ping" times when trying to optimize their gaming experience. Well that's nice but when on earth do you shoot someone with ICMP?
I can remember calling relos in Australia in the 1970s/80s over old school satellite links from the UK or Germany and it nearly needed radio style conventions.
I've been doing VoIP for quite a while and it is so crap watching people put up with shit sound quality and latency on a Teams/Zoom/etc call as the "new" normal. I wheel out Wireshark and pretend to watch it and then fix up the wifi link or the routing (Teams outside VPN - split tunnelling) or whatever.
That seems to be the theme across all consumer electronics as well. For an average person mid phones are good enough, bargain bin laptops are good enough, almost any TV you can buy today is good enough. People may of course desire higher quality and specific segments will have higher needs, but things being enough may be a problem for tech and infra companies in the next decade.
This is robber baron behavior. We aren't sending our kids to the coal breakers anymore (at least not until OSHA is shut down and child labor laws are ruled unconstitutional violations of the 1st amendment), but we are all being squeezed to the limits of our incomes and sanities, so directors and investors and the CEO can buy more yachts.
I say this because we currently use an old 2014 phone as a house phone for the family. It's set to 2G to take calls, and switches to 4g for the actual voice call. We only have to charge it once every 2-3 weeks, if not longer. (Old Samsung phones also had Ultra Power Saving mode which helps with that)
2G is being shutdown though. Once that happens and it's forced into 4G all the time, we'll have to charge it more often. And that sucks. There isn't a single new phone on the market that lasts as long as this old phone with an old battery.
The same principle is why I have my modern personal phone set to 4G instead of 5G. The energy savings are very noticeable.
Just a thought when it comes time to change out that device.
There was usually a purpose in this that was more profound than just being bored or lonely or something, but none was really required.
And maybe the person they were trying to find wasn't home right now, but that was OK. It was not weird to talk to whoever for a minute, or to hang out for awhile.
Nowadays, the ubiquity of personal pocket supercomputers means that the closest most people ever get to that kind of generally-welcome (if unexpected) interaction is a text message.
"Hey, I'm in front of your house. Are you home?"
And maybe that works more efficiently between two individuals than knocking on the door did, but otherwise this present way of doing things mostly just serves to further increase our social isolation.
Sometimes it seems that the closer it is that our technology allows us to be, the further it is that we actually become.
IT does not help with the just phoning bit but does with stopping by.
I do not get that many spam calls but I think that varies a lot, especially between countries with different laws about it.
Besides, telemarketing, door-to-door sales, and scams of all kinds aren't new -- at all.
All of these things existed Back In The Day when a friend might just knock on the door because they happened to be in the neighborhood, too.
Similarly, I find that it’s hard to catch family on their cell and much easier when I call their home.
passing cell phones around still happens for my family
(Alternately, if you don't have the option to use VoWiFi, you could take literally any phone/tablet/etc; install a softphone app on it; get a cheap number from a VoIP number and connect to it; and leave the app running, the wi-fi on, and the cellular radio off. At that point, the device doesn't even need a[n e]SIM card!)
Once every few months I'm in a situation where I want to watch YouTube on mobile or connect my laptop to mobile hotspot, but then I think "I don't need to be terminally online", or in worst-case scenario, I just pay a little bit extra for the data I use, but again, it happens extremely rarely. BTW quite often my phone randomly loses connection, but then I think "eh, god is telling me to interact with the physical world for five minutes".
At home though, it's a different situation, I need to have good internet connection. Currently I have 4Gbps both ways, and I'm thinking of changing to a cheaper plan, because I can't see myself benefitting from anything more than 1Gbps.
In any case though, my internet connection situation is definitely "good enough", and I do not need any upgrades.
4K video reaches you only because it's compressed to crap. It's "good enough" until it's not. 360p TV was good enough at some point too.
Yes, but I assume when they say the "consumer" they mean everyone not us. Most people i've had in my home couldnt tell you the difference between a 4K bluray at 2 odd meters on a 65" panel vs 1080p.
I can be looking at a screen full of compression artificts that seem like the most obvious thing i've ever seen and ill be surrounded by people going "what are you talking about?"
Even if I can get them to notice, the response is almost always the same.
"Oh...yeah ok I guess I can see. I just assumed it supposed to look like it shrug its just not noticable to me"
I expect a future of screens that are natively subtly 3D and where you could see someone's nose hair without focusing. Only then they will notice "why do they look blurry and flat" when comparing it to an old TV.
Today if you get closer to a TV you will see blur. Tomorrow you will see the bird's individual strands of feathers.
"Good enough" is temporary.
They either won’t notice or won’t care and even if they do, it takes far longer than enthusiasts expect for the line to move.
Large numbers of people still say in 2025 that ‘4K is a gimmick,’ so I’m not holding my breath. ‘Good enough’ lasts much longer for the majority than most realise.
Look at displays today: I can’t even buy a modern one with motion quality that matches what I had 20 years ago. Why? Because for the average consumer, what we have is ‘good enough’ and has been for a long time.
> Today if you get closer to a TV you will see blur. Tomorrow you will see the birds individual strands of feathers
No, I’ll see blur. Unless you’re suggesting we’ve magically solved sample and hold induced motion blur in the consumer display space?
Of course, I know you meant in a still frame however if I wanted to stare at a high quality still image, I’d save myself the money and just go with some nice framed artwork instead.
> “Good enough” is temporary.
I’ll grant you this on a long enough timeframe. But it’s got a long tail and it’s gonna be a slow ride.
I would constantly see friends and family just tune to the standard def 4:3 version of the channel often being terribly stretched despite having a new widescreen HDTV. I'd ask why they're watching the SD channel instead of the HD version, and it seemed like most people didn't even notice it. I'd often suggest/go ahead and change the channel to the HD version and talk about where these HD channels are, but the next time I'd visit it would be on standard def 4:3 again.
Streaming video gets compressed to crap. People are being forced to believe that it is better to have 100% of crap provided in real time instead of waiting just a few extra moments to have the best possible experience.
Here is a trick for movie nights with the family: choose the movie you want to watch, start your torrent and tell everyone "let's go make popcorn!" The 5-10 minutes will get enough of the movie downloaded so you will be able to enjoy a high quality video.
That's because your source video is crap.
I'm not sure if you realize it, but all forms of digital media playback are streaming. Yes, even that MP4 stored locally on your SSD. There is literally no difference between "playing" that MP4 and "streaming" a Youtube or Netflix video.
Yes, even playing an 8K Blu-Ray video is still streaming.
Does that help?
Business should learn to earn just good enough to make by.
There are no words to describe how stupid this is.
If you want to say its worse, perhaps you should check if its actually worse first.
Conversely, Texas has significantly above average use per capita, spreading the fixed costs across more kWh, but still results in higher annual costs per capita, despite lower per kWh rates.
Further, the LA fires might have also been caused by a downed line so that's going to be a fairly big cost to the power company.
That's, I assume, a reference to the 2018 Camp Fire.
> That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates.
The Trust established to pay PG&E liabilities for the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp Fires, which discharged PG&E's responsibility for them, receives no additional ratepayer funds after its initial funding and is in the wind-down process expecting a single final top-off payment to already approved claimants. So, no, its not a huge bill that will be paid out of future rates.
Do private utilities have any incentive to be cheap?
The reason we have utility regulations in the first place is because utilities are natural monopolies with literally zero incentive to be cheap. On the contrary, they are highly incentivized to push up prices as much as possible because they have their customers over a barrel.
...which is unusual with many utilities, but is also pretty common with wireless carriers in much of the world.
"public utility" implies it's owned by the public not a profit seeking group of shareholders.
Make it easy for a new wireless company to spawn while maintaining the infrastructure everyone needs.
This article is essentially arguing innovation is dead in this space and there is no need for bandwidth-related improvements. At the same time, there is no 5G provider without a high-speed cap or throttling for hot spots. What would happen if enough people switched to 5G boxes over cable? Maybe T-Mobile can compete with Comcast?
> During congestion, customers on this plan may notice speeds lower than other customers and further reduction if using >1.2TB/mo., due to data prioritization
So not really a cap, but a deprioritization. A few friends using it around me routinely use >2TB/mo and haven't experienced degradation, I guess there's not excessive congestion. YMMV.
1. It must be well-run.
2. It must be guaranteed to continue to be well-run.
3. If someone can do it better, they must be allowed to do so - and then their improvements have to be folded into the network somehow if there is to be only one network.
Regulators have other ways to incentivize quality/pricing and can mandate competition at levels of the stack other than the underlying infrastructure.
I wouldn't expect that "only a single network" is the right model for all locations, but it will be for some locations, so you need a regulatory framework that ensures quality/cost in the case of a single network anyway.
(I know that helium's original IoT network mostly failed due to lack of pmf, but idk about their 5G stuff)
Network providers get paid for the bandwidth that flows over their nodes, but the protocol also allows for economically incentivizing network expansion and punishing congestion with subsidization / taxing.
You can unify everyone under the same "network", but the infrastructure providers running it are diverse and in competition.
Same for mobile infrastructure would be great as well.
Having 5 competing infrastructures trying to blanket the country means that you end up with a ton of waste and the most populated places get priority as they constantly fight each other for the most valuable markets while neglecting the less profitable fringe
The trick is that the entity that owns the wires has to provide/upgrade the network at cost, and anyone has the right to run a telco on top of the network.
This creates competition for things like pricing plans, and financial incentives for the companies operating in the space to compete on their ability to build out / upgrade the network (or to not do that, but provide cheaper service).
Doesn't make much sense to me to abstract away most of the parts where an entity could build up its competitive advantage and then to pretend like healthy competition could be build on top.
Imagine if one entity did all the t-shirt manufacturing globally but then you congratulated yourself for creating a market based on altered colors and what is printed on top of these t-shirts.
And for some things it's just too much duplicated effort and wasted resources, T-shirts are one thing, because we don't really need those, but train lines and utilities etc. are another. I can't tell you where the "boundary" is, but if every electric company had to lay their own cables, there would only be one or two.
And in the opinion of many including mine, for example the Deutsche Bundesbahn got worse when it got privatized. They kinda exploited the fact that after reunification, there were two state railroad systems obviously, and instead of merging them into one state railroad system, it was privatized, but because it made more money for some, but not because it benefits the public, the customers. Of course the reasoning was the usual neoliberal spiel, "saving money" and "smaller government" but then that money just ends up not really making things better to the degree privatization made them worse.
Obviously not everything should be state run, far from it. But privatizing everything is a cure actually even worse than the disease, since state-run sinks and swims with how much say the people have, whereas a 100% privatized world just sinks into the abyss.
I used to work at a place that did both on top of the various telcos. We offered ‘premium service’ with 24 hour customer support and a low customer to modem and bandwidth ratio.
Most of our competitors beat us in price but would only offer customers support 9-5 and you may get a busy signal/ lower bandwidth in the back haul during peak hours.
There was a single company that owned the wires and poles, because it’s expensive and complex to build physical infrastructure and hard to compete, but they were bared from selling actual services or undercutting providers because of their position. (Which depended on jurisdiction).
It solved the problem we have now of everyone complaining about their ISP but only having one option in their area.
We have that problem now specifically because we deregulated common carriers for internet right as it took over the role of telephone service.
If the common carrier is doing all the work, what’s the point of the companies on top? What do they add to the system besides cost?
Might as well get rid of them and have a national carrier.
I was stuck with a common carrier for years. I could pick different ISPs, which offered different prices and types of support, but they all used the same connection... which was only stable at lower speeds.
Common carriers become the barrier to network upgrades. Always. Without fail. Monopolies are a bad idea, whether state or privately owned.
Let me give you 2 examples.
In australia we had Telstra (Formerly Telecom, Formerly Auspost). Testra would resell carriers ADSL services, and they stank. The carriers couldn't justify price increases to upgrade their networks and the whole thing stagnated.
We had a market review, and Telstra was legislatively forced to sell ULL instead. So the non monopolist is now placing their own hardware in Telstra exchanges, which they can upgrade. Which they did. Once they could sell an upgrade (ADSL2+) they could also price in the cost of upgrading peering and transit. We had a huge increase in network speeds. We later forgot this lesson and created the NBN. NBNCo does not sell ULL, and the pennies that ISPs can charge on top of it are causing stagnation again.
ULL works way better than common carrier. In singapore the government just runs glass. They have competition between carriers to provide faster GPON. 2gig 10gig 100gig whatever. Its just a hardware upgrade away.
10 years from now Australia will realise it screwed up with NBNCo. Again. But they wont as easily be able to go to ULL as they did in the past. NBN's fibre isn't built for it. We will have to tear out splitters and install glass.
The actual result is worse than you suggest. A carrier had to take the government/NBNCo to court to get permission to build residential fibre in apartment buildings over the monopoly. We have NBNCo strategically overbuilding other fibre providers and shutting them down (Its an offence to compete with the NBN on the order of importing a couple million bucks of cocaine). Its an absolute handbrake on competition and network upgrades. Innovation is only happening in the gaps left behind by the common carrier.
Oh wait ... the reason that freeway is always clogged is they are ripping it up, doubling it's width. And now I think about it, hasn't the NBN recently upgraded their max speeds from 100 Mb/s, to 250Mb/s, and now to 1Gb/s. And isn't the NBN currently ripping out the FttN, replacing it woth FttP, at no cost to the cusytomer? Sounds like a major upgrade to me. And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?
If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra. In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers. That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition. But when the Libs sold Telstra it was a monopoly. Telstra just refused to upgrade the copper. The Libs thought they could fix that though legislation, but what happened instead is Telstra fought the legalisation tooth and nail and we ended up in the absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access. In the end Tesltra did give permission to change the equipment at the ends of the wires. But replacing the wires themselves - never. That was their golden goose. No one was permitted to replace them with a new technology.
Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.
Sorry, what was your point again? Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.
"Things don't improve without competition" sounds like a fairy tale somebody tells themselves to justify a position. People like nice things. They don't need competition to motive them to work towards those things. Granted competition usually speeds things up, but it "nothing improves without competition" clearly wrong. There are too many counter examples.
Which is just as well, because the things we are discussing here are prone to forming natural monopolies. Roads, water, the telephone service, electricity supply - the thing they have in common is you will have one supplier, and you can't change to a different one. There is no competition. So the discussion wasn't about "should there be competition or not", because there is no choice. The discussion was about "who should own a monopoly - people you elect, or people whose only primary interest is extracting money out of their assets (which happen to be you)". You seem arguing for private ownership, and then using competition as the justification - when there is no competition.
By the by, other places do this competition thing far better than the USA. The NBN the parent was complaining about is indeed a government owned monopoly. Their asset is "the last mile". The arrangement in Australia is they are a common carrier in the strictest meaning of the term. But they are not allowed to sell to the public, that's the ISP's job. The NBN's prices are thrashed out in some back room somewhere between the ISP's and the government, in front of a set of open books. The ISP's are allowed to use other technologies like 5G and Starlink without penality, by law. As an consequence every Australian household gets to chose between 100's of ISP's, literally. Those ISP's are require by law to advertise "minimum expected speeds", and none of this "unlimited (meaning we get to define the limit)" bullshit is allowed. In other words, it's nearly a perfect competitive market.
One effect of that is there is no "net neutrality" argument here. The NBN is barred from such distinctions because it's a common carrier. The ISP's are free to do whatever they damned well please, and as a consequence you get all sorts of deals that violate net neutrality. 5G with limited downloads, but unlimited streaming from some platform is free for example. If you don't like that, say because your ISP blocks ports move to one that doesn't. You might be thinking "ahh, but moving between ISP's would be hard". But no, the law mandates churning between ISP's is free, fast, involving no more than a few minutes downtime, and requires no interaction at all with the ISP you're moving from.
Creating near a perfect competitive market in an area that is prone to forming natural monopolies does require some heavy handed government intervention. The NBN was one of the most heavy handed interventions I've seen in a while. The private operators where given every chance to build a new network on the condition it be open to all retailers (including them) at a price the government had some control over. They declined. Partially because government price control on a monopoly was too much to bear, but I think also because they thought their ownership of the copper network was too big a hurdle for even the government to overcome. The government overbuilt it with fibre. In a country that's even more spread out than USA, that was a huge undertaking. I suspect it would be impossible in the USA, where 1/2 the population allows themselves to be brainwashed by large corporates into thinking "government always bad, government always inefficient".
Yes, the government is inefficient compared to private operators in a competitive market. But the corporates who want you to think the government always runs things badly are the ones who want to take control of government owned monopolies. If you want to know what inefficiency looks like, join one as an employee. You won't get to see what's happening otherwise. The sausage is ugly, but they unlike the government are allowed to hide it from prying eyes. So they do, and tell you they are doing a wonderful job. Apparently you swallow it up.
> I recently heard all the lead water pipes are being replaced in the USA.
We still have lead pipes to many houses in chicago, and will for the foreseeable future. The water supply people(government) have utterly failed at replacing them in a timely fashion.
> Open source projects improve all the time
Because theyre extremely competitive. With minimal barriers to entry there are different devs trying to get their code merged and different projects trying to be the top dog. When one shows weakness another pops up.
Regardless, Illinois munis don't really have a choice about this anymore.
The point was space telescopes. Nice attempt goal post move.
You mention NASA and the space industry. Sorry, but I'm failing to see the connection. NASA does cutting edge space exploration. They have no customers, they sell nothing, they aren't by any definition "an industry". Anything that's simple enough to be taken on by "industry" they contract out. They only take on the near impossible stuff - like landing a rover on mars. And they have a near impecible record at pull those sorts of things off. Amazing. Literally world beating. Bravo.
Most of their feats are world firsts, almost all are far harder than the previous one they pulled off. They have no competition. Yet your claim was, and I quote, "Things don’t improve without competition". I'm getting cognitive dissonance here. Clearly they do.
> Because theyre extremely competitive.
Do you develop much open source? Do you even use it? The "man in Nebraska" meme is so common it even has a cartoon: https://xkcd.com/2347/ Trust me, that man truly wishes he had some competition. He doesn't, but he plods on, turning out the code that supports the internet without it. Again we have a clear counter example to your thesis "you can't have improvement without competition". These examples are everywhere. You would have to be willfully blind not to see them.
Look, no one argues competitive markets aren't a great tool. The trouble is they aren't that easy to create. Then competition weakens. The solution isn't to go into denial and claim there will be no improvement. Or worse claim being privately owned means there is competition, so we will be ok if we just sell it off. That's just daft. In fact it's worse than daft. Believing lies peddled corporations that want to control stuff you must buy from them at a price they dictate is like subscribing to a cult.
> Roads, water, the telephone service, electricity supply
Fun fact, the US has such a variety of fibre providers, because they have such a variety of electricity and water supply. Its called Subducting. They make partnerships with fibre providers and subduct in the fibre with the power lead in.
So they have 3 speeds.
1. Cities, with ancient telstraesque legislative monopolies, getting BEAD funding to be replaced.
2. Townships and cities with private power/water and 1/2/10/100 gig fibre options.
3. Deep rural with hundreds of wisp cowboys.
10 years ago I remember reading about a township of 900 people being passed by a rural fibre company. Fish lake township or something.
>Their asset is "the last mile".
No their asset includes the last mile, but its includes all the way back to 121 points of interconnect. The original, far better model was to have only 21, but the ACCC at the behest of the big 4 ISPs interceded and determined that government intervention is better than engineering. All under Labor mind. Simms has never shown any network engineering credentials. The NBN is literally welfare for Telstra Optus, AAPT and Vocus.
>One effect of that is there is no "net neutrality" argument here.
Net Neutrality in Australia has more to do with the big 4 peering agreement.
>The private operators where given every chance to build a new network
Private networks have been consistently hampered by the NBN. None of them (rightly) would want to attempt a national network. State based private/public co funding would have gotten you the same result faster and cheaper. But Labor wanted one more BIG NATIONAL PROJECT to hang their hat on.
>Creating near a perfect competitive market
It was Turnbull who slightly corrected the NBN funding model to make it halfway profitable. We still have an issue where NBN is serviced largely by the big 4 (who lobbied to have it built this way) wholesalers, and anyone who cant reach 121 poi's is forced into wholesaling.
>In a country that's even more spread out than USA
Rural australia is still mostly just NBN Fixed Wireless and Satellite. And neither of these is largely going to be overbuilt by NBN Fibre. Labor is promising to bring a few more towns online with fibre but not everything.
Honestly I have never seen anyone as confidently wrong on the internet before.
As I'm sure you are aware the term least mile has always included everthing up to and including termination at the exchange. The only thing that's changed is the name of the exchange. It's now called a POI.
Yes there are fewer of them. It did reduce costs and engineering complexity. There is no consensus whether it effected competitiveness, but given the NBN has been in operation for a decade now and there are many, many ISP's, most small, any detrimental effect must be near negligible. It's time you put that tired old debate behind you.
> The NBN is literally welfare for Telstra Optus, AAPT and Vocus
Telstra earnings dropped off a cliff when the copper became worthless. If that's welfare I'd hate to see what some real competition would do to them. The other three never had fingers in the consumer last mile pie. They bought it off Telstra before, now the buy off the NBN. They buy at the same price as every other ISP. Where is this welfare you speak of?
> Net Neutrality in Australia has more to do with the big 4 peering agreement.
I'm not sure you know what net neutrality means.
> State based private/public co funding would have gotten you the same result faster and cheaper.
Wow. Such confidence. Admit it, you don't have a clue what that would cost. Also admit not one state offered to do it. I think you hallucinating random possibilities.
> It was Turnbull who slightly corrected the NBN funding model to make it halfway profitable
I have a lot of time for Turnbull. His rear guard actions managed to derail Abbotts attempt to kill the NBN. God knows what we would have done if our internet didn't support video during COVID. However, it did involve buying $800 million for the Optus HFC network that was so degraded it was written off. His FttN is being ripped out long before it's anticipated EOL, and replaced at great expense. That's because it costs a small to run air-conditioned nodes a few hundred metres from every house, and the performance topped out at a 1/10 of what the NBN is offering now. So sadly the compromises made to save the NBN are now having to be rectified at great expense. And knowing all this, you are saving it saved us money! Delusional.
> Rural australia ...
I wasn't referring to rural Australia. According to google the average population density of urban Australian is an order of magnitude lower than the USA. Cable runs are consequently much longer. Compared to the effort the USA would need to put in, replacing them was indeed a huge undertaking.
> Honestly I have never seen anyone as confidently wrong on the internet before.
Having reviewed the outright falsehoods you told above, I'm guessing I'm dealing with quite the bullshitter. And I guess, true to form, you will carry on.
In select areas, some of which are currently served by third party fibre providers, who can provide up to 10G, who now will be forbidden to pipe in to new non business customer dwellings.
>And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?
Right, a single giant telco monopoly is bad. Instead of removing the monopoly we built a new monopoly and tipped money in.
>If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra.
They sold it off AND enforced ULL. Its the same thing, monopoly is forced to be better, still lagging behind competitive markets.
>In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers.
Right see my comment about the singapore model, where they just rent glass instead of a service.
>That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition.
In the cities we had ADSL2+ competing with HFC and Fixed Wireless. The only monopoly was Telstras, who prevented people running residential fibre in their pit and pipe asset. HFC was a hack to use overhead wires because people could not use pit and pipe. That asset has been gifted to NBNCo who also have a legislative monopoly and also dont play nice.
> absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access.
Yeah there were a few instances of them fighting it. Which is another reason why monopolies are bad.
>But replacing the wires themselves - never.
Happened all the time. Actually they negotiated a shutdown due to NBNCo, certain copper services were simply stamped beyond economical repair and Telstra could choose to simply cancel services as part of the deal. I think you are upset about the customer owned piece of copper from the demarc in, which most residents would never upgrade.
>Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.
No one wants to commit to a national scale rollout of fibre. But many people are happy to roll out community and metro scale fibre. The key is open access. When you have a restricted pit and pipe asset, there can only be one provider. But funnily enough, commercial properties like housing estates and apartment buildings dont give a shit and let people come through and overbuild the NBN. TPG had to take NBN co to court and NBN withdrew rather than risking the rest of their monopoly.
>Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.
My point is that common carrier sucks. If you instead made the pit and pipe asset the common resource, there would be little to no issue. Or just run glass like Singapore.
I think you read what I posted and decided that what I said was "Private ownership is better than public"
Which is often true but not my point.
My point was that a common carrier with a legislative monopoly is always worse than anything else you can imagine.
Telstra - Bad when the government owned it, bad when it was private. We literally required legislative intervention to get ULL which was an absolute positive despite Telstra misplacing keys and refusing entry etc.
NBNCo - Bad under labors original implementation (ACCC really messed up the special access undertaking and it cant be repeated enough. Rod Simms should be fired out of a cannon into the sun. Hes the greatest villain in Australian internet history), Bad under the LNP (They fixed the market a bit, but introduced the postcode lottery and reduced competition by acquiring the HFC networks). Will not be made better by private ownership. Gets better every now and then, but requires ACCC, Ministerial and its own governance to sign off on changes. NBNCo is not the only imaginable model (private or public). Singapore, a government owned last mile monopoly, is really well done and very hard to argue with. Because they just sell glass.
You have clearly reacted to my posts from an ideological position. You see criticism of the governments terrible telco monopoly, as criticism of government action overall. (We have some pretty sweet state government fibre in Queensland for instance, they make themselves difficult to transact with but once you get in there they rock) You believe in immutable things like Natural Monopolies. The "Natural Monopoly" isn't the wire. The Natural Monopoly is the pit and pipe. And Pit and Pipe can already be shared.
Its going to hurt you, but let me put this to you. It would have been quite easy to run "NBNCo" as simply a common access arrangement to the pit and pipe. Instead of criminalising deployment of internet to residences, the government could instead subsidise underserviced areas. (which is the correct keynesian arrangement that Labor should be clamouring for if the NBN wasnt just a grab to brand the internet as something Labor did)
I cannot express to you how crazy it is, when I compile a map of fibre providers in metro areas, to see really good private fibre wholesalers holed up in private estates. It looks like a map of gerrymandered congressional districts in the USA. On one side of a fence you can get cheap blistering fast internet and on the other its gig at best with a nice big asterisk about CVC. Not to mention how many places these fibre providers already had hardware ready to go years before NBN came along. Basically, thanks to both Labor and the LNP, the best internet services in this country are available only to people who can afford brand new homes in private estates or inner city apartment buildings. Its BONKERs. Its absolutely MENTAL. My own mother lives in an estate that had 2 stages. Stage 1 was Telstra, now NBN VDSL, and 3 doors up the road when Stage 2 was built, they brought a private provider in first and I remember qualifying it for a 5 gig service 4 years ago. Its the same number of penalty units to overbuild the NBN as importing a million dollars of cocaine. And you would need to be importing vast quantities of drugs to see the NBN, any NBN, as the ideal path forward.
And whats great is you can hate the NBN but still support the government being the agent of success. They could atomise it (my preferred term as privatisation implies selling it to your mate steve and still having it be legislatively required to be shit) or ask it to simply provide pit and pipe. Or just glass. The government could do any number of sensible things, but it wont. Labor cant face up to the monster they created, and the LNP cant face up to the monster they claim to have fixed.
The trick is that this is essentially wireless spectrum. Which can be leased for limited periods of time and can easily allow for a more competitive environment than what natural monopolies allow for.
It's also possible to separate the infrastructure operators from the backhaul operators and thus entirely avoid the issues of capital investment costs by upstart incumbents. When done there's even less reason to tolerate monopolistic practices on either side.
Nationalizing telecom is a great way to reward the tech oligarchs by making the capital investments in giant data centers more valuable. If 10 gig can be delivered cheaply over the air, those hyperscale data centers will end up obsolete if technology continues to advance at the current pace. Why would the companies that represent 30% of the stock markets value want that?
Open-world games such as Cyberpunk 2077 already have hours-long downloads for some users. That's when you load the whole world as one download. Doing it incrementally is worse. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 can pull 100 to 200 Mb/sec from the asset servers.
They're just flying over the world, without much ground level detail. Metaverse clients go further. My Second Life client, Sharpview, will download 400Mb/s of content, sustained, if you get on a motorcycle and go zooming around Second Life. The content is coming from AWS via Akamai caches, which can deliver content at such rates. If less bandwidth is available, things are blurry, but it still works. The level of asset detail is such that you can stop driving, go into a convenience store, and read the labels on the items.
GTA 6 multiplayer is coming. That's going to need bandwidth.
The Unreal Engine 5 demo, "The Matrix Awakens", is a download of more than a terabyte. That's before decompression.
The CEO of Intel, during the metaverse boom, said that about 1000x more compute and bandwidth was needed to do a Ready Player One / Matrix quality metaverse. It's not that quite that bad.
For my area all the mobile network home internet options offer plenty of speed, but the bandwidth limitations are a dealbreaker.
Everyone I know still uses their cable/FTTH as their main internet, and mobile network as a hotspot if their main ISP goes down.
The reason why there isn't as much demand for mobile data as they want is because the carriers have horrendously overpriced it, because they want a business model where they get paid more when you use your phone more. Most consumers work around this business model by just... not using mobile data. Either by downloading everything in advance or deliberately avoiding data-hungry things like video streaming. e.g. I have no interest in paying 10 cents to watch a YouTube video when I'm out of the house, so I'm not going to watch YouTube.
There's a very old article that I can't find anymore which predicted the death of satellite phones, airplane phones, and weirdly enough, 3G; because they were built on the idea of taking places that traditionally don't have network connectivity, and then selling connectivity at exorbitant prices, on the hopes that people desperate for connectivity will pay those prices[1]. This doesn't scale. Obviously 3G did not fail, but it didn't fail predominantly because networks got cheaper to access - not because there was a hidden, untapped market of people who were going to spend tens of dollars per megabyte just to not have to hunt for a phone jack to send an e-mail from their laptop[2].
I get the same vibes from 5G. Oh, yes, sure, we can treat 5G like a landline now and just stream massive amounts of data to it with low latency, but that's a scam. The kinds of scenarios they were pitching, like factories running a bunch of sensors off of 5G, were already possible with properly-spec'd Wi-Fi access points[3]. Everyone in 5G thought they could sell us the same network again but for more money.
[0] While I'm ranting about mobile data usage, I would like to point out that either Android's data usage accounting has gotten significantly worse, or Google Fi's carrier accounting is lying, because they're now consistently about 100-200MB out of sync by the end of the month. Didn't have this problem when I was using an LG G7 ThinQ, but my Pixel 8 Pro does this constantly.
[1] Which it called "permanet", in contrast to the "nearernet" strategy of just waiting until you have a cheap connection and sending everything then.
[2] I'm told similar economics are why you can't buy laptops with cellular modems in them. The licensing agreements that cover cellular SEP only require FRAND pricing on phones and tablets, so only phones and tablets can get affordable cell modems, and Qualcomm treats everything else as a permanet play.
[3] Hell, there's even a 5G spec for "license-assisted access", i.e. spilling 5G radio transmissions into the ISM bands that Wi-Fi normally occupies, so it's literally just weirdly shaped Wi-Fi at this point.
I don't know what you mean. My current laptop (Lenovo L13) has a cellular modem that I don't need. And I am certainly a cost conscious buyer. It's also not the first time that this happened as well.
The PS5 and Xbox Series S/X both had disks that were incapable of holding a terabyte at the launch of The Matrix Awakens. Not sure where you are getting that info from, but both the X S/X and PS5 were about 30GB in size on disk, and the later packaged PC release is less than 20GB.
The full PC development system might total a TB with all Unreal Engine, Metahumans, City Sample packs, Matrix Awakens code and assets (audio, mocap, etc) but even then the consumer download will be around the 20-30GB size as noted above.
It's getting pretty reasonable these days, with download speeds reaching 0.5 gbit/sec per link, and latency is acceptable at ~20ms.
The main challenge is the upload speed; pretty much all the ISPs allocate much more spectrum for download rather than upload. If we could improve one thing with future wireless tech, I think upload would be a great candidate.
We're getting 30-50 mbit/sec per connection on a good day.
In San Francisco monkeybrains is the best ISP I’ve ever used to date; symmetric up/down, great ping and cheaper than any other provider
For any folks who are using cable internet, or shitty DSL, I strongly recommend checking to see if Monkeybrains serves your home. If you have symmetric fiber, or are happy with Webpass, then it might not make sense to switch.
If you're lucky and get pointed at a good site, you can get great speeds. I was getting 500Mbps up/down. If you're unlucky, you might only get 50Mbps.
There's always some jitter and packet loss on the connection too -- much more than a wired connection. Online gaming was not great. Congestion control algos suffered because of this. I would see TCP throughput drop by 90% over long distances because congestion control isn't tuned for these network conditions.
And in the rain my connection would drop out every few minutes.
But for $35/month it was great value, and the whole company is friendly and easy to deal with.
For 5G, a lot of the spectrum is statically split into downstream and upstream in equal bandwidth. But equal radio bandwidth doesn't mean equal data rates. Downstream speeds are typically higher because multiplexing happens at one fixed point, instead of over multiple, potentially moving transmitters.
Now, it's possible that that raw GB/s with unobstructed LoS is the underlying optimization metric driving these standards, but I would assume it's something different (e.g. tower capex per connected user).
I can grant that a typical usage of wireless bandwidth doesn't require more than 10Mbps. So, what does "even faster buy you"?
The answer is actually pretty simple, at any given frequency you have a limited amount of data that can be transmitted. The more people you have chatting to a tower, the less available bandwidth there is. By having a transmission standard with theoretical capacities in the GB or 10GB, or more you make it so you can service 10, 100, 1000 more customers their 10Mbps content. It makes it cheaper for the carrier to roll out and gives a better experience for the end users.
What I find fascinating is that in a lot of situations mobile phones are now way faster than wired internet for lots of people. My parents never upgraded their home internet despite there being fire available. They have 80MBit via DSL. Their phones however due to regular upgrades now have unlimited 5G and are almost 10 times as fast as their home internet.
…and we only pay for 500 MBit for my home fiber. (Granted, also 500 Mbit upload.)
(T-Mobile, Southern California)
My experiences on portable devices have also seen some mixture of performance, but I'm also on a super cheap MVNO plan. Friends on more premium plans often get far more consistent experiences.
Is your T-Mobile underprovisioned? Where I am, T-Mobile 5G is 400Mbps at 2am, but slows to 5-10Mbps on weekdays at lunchtime and during rush hours, and on weekends when the bars are full.
Not to mention that the T-Mobile Home Internet router either locks up, or reboots itself at least twice a day.
I put up with the inconvenience because it's either $55 to T-Mobile, $100 to Verizon for even less 5G bandwidth, or $140 the local cable company.
I also have Verizon.
Choice of service varies based on location heavily from my experience. I’m a long time big time camper and I’ve driven through most corners of most Western states:
- 1/3 will have NO cellular service
- 1/3 will have ONLY Verizon. If T-Mobile comes up, it’s unusable
- 1/3 remaining will have both T-Mobile and Verizon
My Verizon is speed capped so I can’t compare that. T-Mobile works better in more urban areas for me, but it’s unpredictable. In a medium sized costal town in Oregon, Verizon might be better but I will then get half gigabit T-Mobile in a different coastal town in California.
One thing I have learned is that those coverage maps are quite accurate.
It doesn't really change their argument, but to be fair, Netflix has some of the lowest picture quality of any major streaming service on the market, their version of "high-end 4K" is so heavily compressed, it routinely looks worse than a 15 year old 1080p Blu-Ray.
"High-end" 4K video (assuming HEVC) should really be targeting 30 Mb/s average, with peaks up to 50 Mb/s. Not "15 Mb/s".
They're constantly running promotions "get free smartglases/video game systems/etc if you sign up for gigabit." Turns out that gigabit is still way more than most people need, even if it's 2025 and you spend hours per day online.
Also you can deliver well over 1 Gbps over coax or DSL with modern DOCSIS and G.fast respectively. But most countries have started dismantling copper wirelines.
Years back, when FTTH started rolling out in Ireland, some of the CPE for the earliest rollouts only had 100Mbit/sec ethernet (on a 1Gbit/sec service)...
- If you deploy XGS-PON, unlocking the max speed doesn't cost you anything.
- I have six devices that can hit 1~2 Gbps over Wi-Fi 6/7 in my household, a wired 2.5GbE connection to my desktop computer, and my TV.
10G internet doesn't make your streaming better, but downloads the latest game much faster. It makes for much less painful transfer of a VM image from a remote datacenter to a local machine.
Which is good and bad. The good part is that it makes it easier for the ISPs to provide -- most people won't be filling that 10G pipe, so you can offer 10G without it raising bandwidth usage much at all. You're just making remote workers really happy when they have to download a terabyte of data on a single, very rare occasion instead of it taking all day.
The bad part is that this comfort is harder to justify. Providing 10G to make life more comfortable the 1% of the time it comes into play still costs money.
I have never come remotely close to downloading anything else -- including games -- at 1Gbps.
The source side certainly has the available pipe, but most (all?) providers see little upside to allowing one client/connection to use that much bandwidth.
I'm getting my Steam games at 2Gbps, and I am suspecting that my aging ISP's "box" is to blame for the cap (didn't want to pay my ISP for the new box that officially supports 8Gbps symmetrical, and just got a SFP+ adapter for the old one). I pay 39€/M for what is supposed to go "up to" 8Gbps/500Mbps on that old box.
Games from Google Drive mirrors are coming at full speed too. Nice when dling that new Skyrim VR 90GB mod pack refresh
Only the newest routers do gigabit over wifi. If most of your devices are wireless, you'll need to make sure they all have wifi 6 or newer chips to use their full potential.
Even if upgrading your router is a one-time cost, it's still enough effort that most people won't bother.
I barely get regular cell service in my house from my provider. There's no way I'd get a hotspot for a service that is a must have. Provider's "coverage" maps are such a joke to make them useless.
I can routinely go around most of the metro area on any given day and get hundreds of megabits of throughput back home at <10ms latency on a plan that's costing me ~$30/mo on a device that cost less than $400. I can be in a crowded sports arena and on my regular cellular internet and still manage to pull >50Mbit down despite the crowd. Several years ago, I'd be lucky to even get SMS/MMS out quickly and reliably.
to the person that is affected by it, it's not a good thing. we can argue all day about it but you're wrong to whoever you're arguing against at that point.
But other people do.
And the main resource that is limited with cell service is air time: there are only so many frequencies, and only so many people can send/receive at the same time.
So if someone wants to watch a video video, and a particular segment is (say) 100M, then if a device can do 100M/s, it will take 1s to do that operation: that's a time period when other people may not be able to do anything. But if the device can do 500M/s, then that segment can come down in 0.2s, which means there's now 0.8s worth of time for other people to do other things.
You're not going to see any difference if you're watching the video (or streaming music, or check mail), but collectively everyone can get their 'share' of the resource much more quickly.
Faster speeds allow better resource utilization because devices can get on and off the air in a shorter amount of time.
It's like I'm paying them extra for the privilege of increasing their network efficiency.
5G can also operate on additional higher frequencies than regular 4G deployments. But often a lot of 5G you see deployed are in the same 700-1900MHz-ish kind of range.
“The initial access period includes the transmission of beamformed SSBs that provide the UEs with a basic synchronization signal and demodulation reference signals. This allows for UEs to save power by going inactive and rejoining the network at a later initial access period. At the physical layer, the UE will receive the SSBs from a single antenna or using one or more spatial filters, such as a multi-panel handset used to overcome hand blockage. The UE will use the received SSB for synchronization and determining the control information. The beam reporting stage includes one or more possible SSB CSI reports which are transmitted in the random access channel. The report includes information for the strongest serving cell and may include a set of the next strongest cells within the same band to assist with load balancing. The number of reported additional cells depends on the carrier frequency, the previous state of the UE in the net- work, and the bands being monitored. In a newly-active state, the UE reports the top 6–16 additional cells across each active frequency range. This reporting helps to manage handover and mitigate cell-edge interference. In the final steps, the UE has connected to a serving cell and is ready to start receiving data. Further beam refinement and channel estimation can occur by transmitting reference signals with more precise beams. Although not specified in the standard, a typical CSI-RS would cover smaller portions of the reported SSBs’ directions or combine coherently across a multipath channel. Using more directional or precise beams can increase the SNR–thereby improving the channel estimates and beam alignment. Beam refinement can also be used to adjust the beamforming slightly to track highly mobile UEs.”
Your linked article even agrees: “Carriers can still see which cell towers your device connects to, use the strength and angle of your device’s signal to the tower, and then look up your device’s unique cellular identifier to determine your general location. Your location may never be private when you’re connected to a cellular network”
Fun fact: modern Wi-Fi standards do this too and it's possible to use the backscattered emissions to see through your walls lol https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a425750...
> Consider a very brief history of airspeed in commercial air travel. Passenger aircraft today fly at around 900 kilometers per hour—and have continued to traverse the skies at the same airspeed range for the past five decades. Although supersonic passenger aircraft found a niche from the 1970s through the early 2000s with the Concorde, commercial supersonic transport is no longer available for the mainstream consumer marketplace today.
OK, "Bad Analogy Award of the Year" for that one. Traveling at supersonic speeds had some fundamental problems, primarily being that the energy required to travel at those speeds is so much more than for subsonic aircraft, and thus the price was much higher for supersonic travel, and the problem of sonic booms meant they were forbidden to travel over land. When the Concorde was in service, London to NYC flights were 10-20x more expensive on the Concorde compared to economy class on a conventional jet, meaning the ~4 hours saved flight time was only worth it for the richest (and folks just seeking the novelty of it). There are plenty of people that would still LOVE to fly the Concorde if the price were much cheaper.
That is, the fundamental variable cost of supersonic travel is much higher than for conventional jets (though that may be changing - I saw that pg posted recently that Boom has found a way to get rid of the sonic boom reaching the ground over land), while that's not true for next gen mobile tech, where it's primarily just the upfront investment cost that needs to be recouped.
There are plenty things that *could* require more bandwidth than video, but it's not clear that a large number of people want to use any of them.
With mobile, I bet contention and poor signal are more of an issue. 5G is a noticeable improvement over LTE, and I am not sure they can do much better.
I have never seen this. Where do I have to get 5G service to see these latencies?
I can only speculate 5G was so saturated on the initial rollout so it led to congestion and now its stabilized. But latency isn't only affected by distance and hops - congestion matters.
If you search "5g latency", Google's AI answer says 1 ms, followed by another quote lift from Thales Group™ saying 4G was 20 ms and 5G is 1ms.
Once you scroll past the automated attempts, you start getting real info.
Actual data is in the "SpeedTest Award Report" PDF, retrieved from https://www.speedtest.net/awards/united_states/ via https://www.speedtest.net/awards/reports/2024/2024_UnitedSta....
Spoiler: 23 ms median for fastest provider, T-mobile.
(at least, I don't recall being able to get that sort of info from iOS APIs, nor have I ever seen data that would have required being derived that way)
FYI, the air link latency for LTE was given as 4-5 ms. FDD as it's the best here. The 5G improvement to 1ms would require features (URLLC) that nobody implemented and nobody will: too expensive for too niche markets.
The latency in a cellular network is mostly from the core network, not the radio link anymore. Event in 4G.
(telecom engineer, having worked on both 4G and 5G and recently out of the field)
In a professional context, nobody knows it all in details. There are specializations: core network and RAN, and inside RAN protocol stack vs PHY, and in PHY algos vs implementation, etc.
You can see all the cellular specs (they're public) from there: https://www.3gpp.org/specifications-technologies/specificati...
5G (or NR) is the series 38 at the bottom. Direct access: https://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/38_series
It's a lot ;) But a readable introduction is the 38.300 spec, and the latest edition for the first 5G release (R15, or "f") is this one: https://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/38_series/38.300/3830...
It's about as readable as it can get. The PHY part is pretty awful by comparison. If you have a PHY interest, you'll need to look for technical books as the specs are quite hermetic (but it's not my field either).
It also takes ages to back up my computer. 18 terabytes of data in my case, and that’s after pruning another 30 terabytes of data as “unnecessary” to back up.
Are you downloading AAA games or backing up your computer over mobile?
Also, I hope you're doing differential backups, in which case it's only the initial backup should be slow. Which it's always going to be for something gargantuan like 18 TB!
One of the issues with this 5g vs 6g is the long-term-evolution of it all -- I have no idea when/where/if-at-all I will see improvements on my mobile devices for all the sub-improvements of 5g or if it's only reserved for certain use cases
There are a ton of other inefficient allocations of spectrum^1, but not all spectrum is suitable for all purposes and the bands for cellular connectivity are highly sought after.
1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/United_S...
Lower frequencies have the advantage of longer distances and permeating through obstructions better. I suppose limited bandwidth and considerations of the number of devices coexisting is a limiting factor.
It just also supports other bands as well.
Basically, yes (if you take into account other consideration like radiated power, transmitter consumed power, multipath tolerance, Doppler shift tolerance and so on). Everything is a tradeoff. We could e. g. use higher-order modulation, but that would result in higher peak-to-average power ratio, meaning less efficient transmitter. We could reduce cyclic prefix length, but that would reduce multipath tolerance. And so on.
Another important reason why higher frequencies are preferred is frequency reuse. Longer distance and penetration is not always an advantage for a mobile network. A lot of radio space is wasted in areas where the signal is too weak to be usable but strong enough to interfere with useful signals at the same frequency. In denser areas you want to cram in more base stations, and if the radiation is attenuated quickly with distance, you would need less spectrum space overall.
Exactly. When I was running WiFi for PyCon, I kept the radios lower (on tables) and the power levels at the lower end (especially for 2.4GHz, which a lot of devices still were limited to at the time). Human bodies do a good job of limiting the cell size and interference between adjacent APs in that model. I could count on at least a couple people every conference to track me down and tell me I needed to increase the power on the APs. ;-)
At the end of the day, there is a total speed limit of Mb/s/Hz.
For example, in cities, with a high population density, you could theoretically have a single cell tower providing data for everyone.
However, the speed would be slow, as for a given bandwidth six the data is shared between everyone in the city.
Alternatively, one could have 100 towers, and then the data would only have to be shared by those within range. But for this to work, one of the design constraints is that a smaller range is beneficial, so that multiple towers do not interfere with each other.
mmWave is a flop.
I used to have some early engineering material outlining what had been approved for use in each country and 24GHz was pretty damn common. Could be that changed I havent kept up.
I do know in Australia we have sweet FA and 5G isnt very interesting at all.
For instance it's completely stalled in South Korea which has one of the highest 5G coverage and market penetration. In Japan I found articles from 2023 claiming the mmWave coverage was "0.01%" then, I don't know if it expanded in the meantime. In Europe there's virtually zero production deployments or devices sold with the compatible modem/antennas. While there are small deployments in Australian cities, Apple doesn't bother selling compatible models. Etc.
“Hey, this isn’t actually supposed to be used to get work done. Keep doing simple phone stuff!“
1. The whole point of video is that you need all of the data, in order
2. Video is the only thing, really, that requires that much data per second of sensory input.
Mobile devices aren't really getting more pixels. And hardware isn't improving enough the we have spare cycles for decoding/decrypting/rendering 16K video or whatever, and even if it did, the batteries can't handle that. It's obvious to me that we don't need more bandwidth. My phone would be instantly dead if I was downloading and processing data at a gigabit per second.
Other than downloading very large files (why?), I don't think we'll invent any new use cases that can make use of more bits or second.
Lord Kelvin, 1897
Investing in more bandwidth is a massive waste on the scale of billions of dollars when you consider that time and capital could be better spent improving existing coverage, lowering latency, and making the service more reliable. Creating a next gen standard that requires new hardware and new devices to support a use case that doesn't exist and can't materialize with today's devices is just silly.
L4S is on its way, and may finally be the beginning of the end for bufferbloat and congestion, and vendors of mobile devices are in an almost unique position of being able to roll out network stack changes en masse. And just for once, consumer incentives, vendor incentives and network operator incentives all align - and it's incremental, and lacking in incentives for bad actors.
See this blog entry: https://www.ietf.org/blog/banishing-bufferbloat/ for more on L4S and bufferbloat. And this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/105/materials/slides-10... for a proper technical deep dive.
The development of L4S has been a pincer operation across all levels of the network stack, integrating everything previously understood about latency and congestion in real networks, and one of the most impressive bits of network engineering I've seen in the history of the Internet.
Not sure what's going on there.
(Also, where're you getting 'over 80'? From a quick search there seem to have been maybe 5 masts damaged/destroyed.)
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/least-90-phone-masts-a...
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-90-attacks-on-phone-m...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-52164358
https://www.businessinsider.com/77-phone-masts-fire-coronavi...
> I see you're down to 5 damaged. Good for you.
Who's 'you' in this context?
So it didn't happen, because it was *obviously* made up? The problem with such reasoning is, it does not require substantiation. You should find 20 people that also believe it(shouldn't have a problem on this platform) and you can start a religion.
Like, even if it had been 80 masts destroyed, the ongoing impact would be nil; they'd just have been replaced and 80 masts is in any case a trivial number (it's difficult to get numbers on how many exist because the ONS data counts nano cells, but there seem to be over 60,000 'real' masts in the UK, anyway.)
[1]:https://www.nperf.com/en/map/GB/-/2012851.Three-Mobile/signa...
For example, at the last investor day that AT&T held, they indicated [0:pdf] that their growth plans are in broadband fiber, not building more 5G capacity to serve a surge in traffic. Reading their charts and knowing how AT&T traditionally worked, I believe that they are going to try to cut the expense of running the 5G network via various optimizations and redirect capital heavily to go after the fiber broadband market instead, using convergence (ahem: price bundling) to win subscribers.
(I bet it really stuck in their craw that Comcast mastered the bundle so well that they even built a successful MVNO on the back of their xfinity customer base and parked their tanks on AT&Ts lawn while the latter was futzing about with HBO.)
However, bundling is a price compression game, not an ARPU growth game. If you start at $100 a month and then begin chipping away with autopay discounts, mobile convergence, free visa gift cards and all that nonsense, pretty soon you are selling broadband for $35 a month and can't make it work except with truly cruddy service, which leads to high churn rates. So we'll see how this turns out.
[0:pdf] https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/reports-...
So it might make sense for operators to focus on developing fibre regardless.
I guess its a nice quality filter, but still. I can't be the only one but feel like the mobile web experience has taken a nose dive over the last 10 years as we got so many more mobile data users, and mobile web developers forgot how to write for slow internet speeds in the same time.
For those criticising 5G, most mobile network has yet to move to Stand Alone network with NR yet. And after that they will have to refarm all the 4G spectrum to 5G. They could also replace equipment that were 4G / 5G to 5G+ / 5G-A, allowing cheaper Massive MIMO hence much higher capacity. Doing all that while continue to tune the network both front and backend. Despite 5 years into 5G we are still behind in many aspect. Most likely due to COVID.
But it seems some network has NO interest to further improve on current tech. I assume they would do minimum investing once they force everyone to 5G.
It's obvious that mobile data usage is constrained by available user time in mobile usage contexts. People use their mobile devices when they aren't busy doing something else and that time is limited. Most people are at the limit. Previous growth was driven both by adding more per user hours AND by adding new users. The author only showing data for overall bandwidth consumption masks the real drivers of the trends being discussed.
Mobile speed requirements are constrained by being a ~6-inch hand-held screen. You don't need 4K or ultra-res textures on a 6-inch screen.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/nokia-ceo-ste...
Perhaps this has something to do with limited mobile bandwidth?
Now imagine we add more bandwidth: what would happen to Comcast and other fiber monopolists if people started replacing fiber with 5G?
Other factors, such as jitter, transmission delay, queuing delay, etc., also impact quality. However, if the delay occurs mid-transmission (e.g., due to network congestion or routing inefficiencies), there’s little that can be done beyond optimizing at the endpoints.
[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Latency_(audio)#Telepho...
This is a terrible example.
If supersonic mass travel could be provided safely and cheaply, demand would be bonkers.
If I could get to Tokyo in an hour for $50, I would visit every weekend.
Overall, the article is sound.
But what a terrible example of demand not filling supply.
If I had a terabit per second, indeed I probably wouldn't use it.
But you can not make travel fast enough.
So you want me to trade my horrible 100mbit line with ok latency for anything between 10 and 120mbit depending on the time of day with a latency if over 50ms guaranteed. And you also get a CGNAT IP and thus no incoming connections because who needs ipv6!
Once users stop demanding higher speeds, you can still get a lot more growth by giving them higher data caps or even unlimited plans.
This will make 5G home routers a very attractive option, particularly when the only other options you have available are cable and/or DSL.
I think wireless providers competing in the same playing field as traditional ISPs will turn out to be an extremely good thing for consumers.
It's metro, which is lower-priority, but still.
Hard pass.
5G is far from ubiquitous as it. Though how would we even know? I feel like my phone is always lying about what type of network it's connecting to and carrier shave the truth with shit like "5Ge" and the like.
I have not, ever, really thought "Yeah, my phone's internet is perfect as-in". I have low-signal areas of my house, if the power goes out the towers are sometimes unusable due to the increased load, etc. I do everything in my power to never use cellular because I find incredibly frustrating and unreliable.
Cell service has literally unlimited headroom to improve (technologically and business use-cases). Maybe we need more 5G and that would fix the problems and we don't need 6G or maybe this article is a gift to fat and lazy telecoms who are masters at "coasting" and "only doing maintenance".
Outside of my home (where I admit I'll never give up my 10 Gbit fiber), I'll always default to using 5G. It's always faster and more stable than any kind of "free wifi" at a coffee shop or hotel or anything, if I'm working out of home, I'm tethering to my phone, racking up 120 GB/mo or so of usage.
Currently 5G doesn't even meet their very own 3 objectives namely:
1) Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) - eMBB, 2) Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) - mMTC, 3) Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) - URLLC
The article is just focusing on the first part that's arguably can be met by prior standard the 4G LTE+ if it's only about 1 Gbps bandwidth of the 5G lower range microwave frequency bands or FR1.
For most parts of the world, 5G higher range millimeter waves (mmWave) band or FR2 are not being widely deployed and implemented that can delivered bandwidth much higher than 1 Gbps but then again the wireless transmission ranges and distances are severely limited for mmWave compared to microwave or RF.
One of the notable efforts by 3GPP (5G standards consortium) for objectives part 2 and 3 is the DECT NR+ [1]. It's the first non-cellular 5G standard that can support local mesh wireless networks but it's availability is very limited now although no base stations modifications are required for its usages since it's non-cellular and the backhaul to base stations can be performed by the existing 5G connectivity. I'd imagined that it will be available inside most phones now since the standard already out for several years but it seems only Nordic is interested in the new standard.
The upcoming 6G standards probably need to carry on and focusing on the 2 and 3 objectives of 5G even more so, since it's expected machine to machine (M2M) will surpass the conventional human-to-human (H2H) and even the new (H2M) with the rise of IoT and AI based system for example intelligent transports of (vehicle-to-everything) V2X systems.
[1] DECT NR+: A technical dive into non-cellular 5G (30 comments):
With my Pixel 8 and 5G SA activated (Telefonica Germany) everything is back to normal.
Time to make it cheap!
Nobody would shrug at being able to fly 2x faster. The reason it stopped is because it made lots of noise and was expensive. Not because it was not needed.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would not want faster flights if it could be done at reasonable cost.
But if there are little to no applications for faster Internet speeds -- which for the most part there aren't -- then it just kinda doesn't matter.
Complete BS. This misses the critical and common issue of user contention with 4G, which is the main relief 5G brings.
If all you do is compare peak throughput on paper you will miss the real world performance issues. In reality you will never see "good" 4G speeds, there just isn't enough bandwidth to go around in practice due to the lower frequency bands it operates in.
I've got both a 4G and 5G LTE router, both are Cat20 which means in theory can operate at up to 2 Gbit/s. Yet in practice, with any of the carriers in the UK the 4G modem will scape 40 Mbit/s at best in the wee hours, and drop as low as 3 Mbit/s at peak time. The 5G one will give me 600 Mbits all day long... because there is enough bandwidth to go around for all users, this is the key difference.
It could be that mobile applications have hesitated to rollout features like 4K streaming video because most users don't have true 5G coverage. We might not see mobile data growing because we've failed in our 5G infrastructure goals. The political atmosphere might not support building out more 5G networks either.
IOW: Apps could definitely use high bandwidth & low latency networking (think AI acceleration, remote storage, volumetric telepresence etc) if we had it reliably, but our due to wireless transition apps are adopted to stagnating speeds.
The article is about mobile specifically.
For example, my only choice is Comcast's 1.2Gbps/25Mbps service. If I need faster upload I have to tether to my phone. And I rarely get anywhere near that full 1.2Gbps down.
And there are people in areas even less well served by traditional ISPs where their primary Internet connection is wireless.
My phone, a mid-range Android from 3 years ago, usually downloads over 4G much faster than any of the wired or fibre networks I have access too, including the supposedly newly installed dual fibre links at work, or the "superfast broadband" zone at my local library. It's also much faster than the 4G router at home.
I've downloaded terabytes over my phone, including LLM weights, and my provider's "unlimited" data plan seems fine with it. (They say 3TB/month in the small print.)