There are virtually no new applications enabled IMO with 5G speeds vs LTE speeds/latency, assuming they are both not congested. 100mbit/sec LTE with 20-30ms latency is fine for nearly everything; gigabit with 5ms latency on 5G doesn't really change much, at least for the next few years.
5G NR (the access layer of 5G) isn't hugely more spectrum efficient than LTE on a bitz/hz basis, at least on a downstream basis where the most demand is (upstream is really important too though, especially for TCP, I'm not discounting that). [1].
We are getting diminishing returns on spectrum efficiency. Which means more and more spectrum required to keep up with demands, which is really what 5G enables (more channel bonding, much wider channels). However, we are totally running out of spectrum to allocate to mobile services. The spectrum that is available in large quantities is extremely high frequency and can't really penetrate walls (it will even struggle with rain).
So long term the only thing that carriers can do is densify their cell sites, which is extremely expensive from a capex perspective. Some carriers have realised this, some haven't (or don't have the funds to do it). In the UK 3UK is doing it; with thousands of planning applications to add new sites (with huge NIMBY backlash everywhere).
1: https://www.5g-networks.net/5g-technology/spectral-efficienc...
So people either have "5G" which is just a marginally better LTE working on same frequencies as 3G used to or people have 5G mmWave, which works only when they are standing at one spot of a street and in a very specific body position. The moment when there is a wall, glass, tree or a even a mist, 5G mmWave does not work.
5G is disappointment, because it was senselessly overhyped yet its overall usability for end user is not much different from 4G.
It is a major improvement for sure - not just totally marketing nonsense, but it's not the world changing impact that the carriers pushed.
You can reasonably replace your home internet with 5G
And that's not even starting on the problem of coverage. Especially in the apartment blocks with a lot of rebar in the walls. And 5G higher frequencies have even worse coverage that 4G. If I have a problem with Wifi inside my home I simply buy repeaters or wire a new AP with a cable. WIth cell network I can't do this.
We are a long way from using cell network as a primary one (if alternative is available of course).
EDIT: Mbps, not Gbps
Doing that at scale is an amazing way to drive 5G speeds and latency into the ground, making it worse than old cable connections.
I've got a 5G router that gives me 400Mbps download at around 30ms latency and have been working full-time over it for more than a year
Was £50 / month for unlimited data on a two year plan (bit more than that now due to inflation)
Mr Shannon enters the chat..
I'd say few new consumer applications (other than replacing home internet). In commercial applications like TV production being being able to pack 10x as much data into a connection at lower latency is interesting and enables some things that previously required complex/unreliable cellular bonding or wildly expensive satellite connections.
This was something anyone could see from a mile away. Generations 1-4 were about multi-plexing signals on the same spectrum (1 was frequency channels, 2 was time channels, 3 started to include multiple simultaneous access via clever math, and 4G used orthogonal frequencies to really amp up the simultaneous access).
Problem with 5G is that orthogonal frequencies are pretty much the best way we know how to multiplex, even over wires, so we had to look elsewhere for things like new frequency bands and multiple antennae, etc. These were never going to feel as impactful as the multiplexing changes did, but there was too much at stake for marketing departments, so they just plowed ahead with hype.
5G will enable the sorts of edge computing needed for stuff like facial recognition. It's fundamentally a policing/military/counterinsurgency technology being laundered as consumer tech.
https://twitter.com/2youngBadazz/status/1364621468999409666?...
I think 5G latency requirements are currently very academically driven without much practical validation, see e.g. Tactile Internet.
This goes both ways: how can anyone possibly make (let alone sell) new applications when practically no consumer has a good enough connection to use them?
I never, ever understood that argument; I simply can't imagine a hospital relying on a cellular network for such sensitive work.
ps: reminds me that emergency team came with a broken 2G portable EKG that couldn't transmit data to the cardiologist when my mother had a spasm.. driver told me that the device was around 10000 euros, it was quite shocking.
Maybe the argument was more for government officials, not for people like you.
Presumably they mean doctors can have an internet connection in remote places. But that’s not the same as being far from their patient.
Examples for "wireless" (roadless) transport of physical packets
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_comp....
Put it simply you have to sell more phones than you did last year (selling less, or even the same amount, isn't enough). If you don't have features to justify that (which you don't, as the very fast smartphone evolution has mostly stagnated), you make them up. 5G being one of them.
They’ve been saying the same exact thing since cellular data was starting to be deployed 30 years ago. Search for the AT&T “you will” campaign from the 90s to see.
With 4G, you get 100k device connections per 1 sq kilometer.
With 5G, this number becomes 1 million connections per square kilometer.
This is a very big deal if you are in a heavily congested area (big cities, major league sporting events). Also a very big deal to high priority services (like police radios, emergency services, etc), as it goes a long way to ensuring connections are available.
Also goes a long way to delivering on the promise of IoT... with 1 million connections a lot more things become possible.
It's more of an evolutionary tech, than revolutionary. Then again, 5G means means 5th generation... implying the evolutionary process. The average user won't notice it, but its still important nonetheless.
I've never in my life heard somebody on 4G LTE say, "Eugh, my connection is too slow!". It's always "fast enough" to browse the web at reasonable speeds, watch videos, or have an OK-quality FaceTime call.
Still, the carriers have to get people to upgrade their phones before 4G gets sunset. Can't exactly blame them for pushing the tech, seems like the transition to digital TV. No one was happy their old TVs were going to stop working, but such is progress.
As consumer I get to pay for a compatible device, frequently pay more for the compatible plan, and realistically, get nothing in return to show for it.
Yeah it's a trick. Marketing being what it is, it's hard to sell it any other way, they have to fallback on "buy this new shiny thing".
I do know that transmission distance goes down as the frequency (and bandwidth) increases. For example, 2.4 GHz WiFi works farther than 5 GHz, but is slower.
I also know that 5G enables high speed "micro cells".. Higher bandwidth but smaller coverage zone. The idea that every city block can have a mini cell in their corner traffic light equipment buried undergound etc., less obtrusive cell towers needed. Sort of in between WiFi and true cell towers. I like to think of it as super charged WiFi on steriods. So that's one capability 5G brings, but it doesn't mean that your local experience is using this.
So, again, it all depends.
Maybe someone else here can post a more definitive answer or techincal explanation.
So I always recommend to do the Excel sheet and include all costs for the 2 year contract.
Eg, I'm pretty sure Bill Gates or Elon Musk don't buy the newest, latest phone that comes out every single time. Because at some point you find something that works well enough, and just thinking of using something else involves effort. Even if V2 is theoretically faster or has more RAM, maybe you have no need for that yet.
As tech improves, this happens more and more often. Back in the time of 4MB RAM, memory was an ever constant worry and constraint. Today I'm at the point where I only think about RAM or disk space is when something goes nuts and fills up the available space, otherwise it's just not an issue, and I just don't think of upgrading.
I think 5G is pretty much there. After having smooth, quality playback on youtube on my phone, my needs are fully sated. There's just nothing I need that requires downloading stuff to my phone any faster, and in fact it's been a long time since I last thought about how quickly my phone downloads stuff.
I don't think you have to look to billionaires for that - surely for the majority of HN users what we spend and how often we spend it on a phone isn't limited by what we can afford?
I've been using the same ~£150 phone for I think 4-5 years - I could have afforded however many top-spec iPhones or Pixels or whatever came out in that time, but I don't play games on my phone or do anything intensive that requires it, I just need to be able to message people and browse the web basically.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/619788/average-smartphon...
The ASP of a new phone in 2021 (latest non pay walled site i could find) was $321
https://statinvestor.com/data/35666/smartphone-average-selli...
And if someone makes over $100K a year, statistically they are probably an iPhone user.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3668913/you-are-the-pr...
The ASP of an iPhone is $825
The benefits of 5G have nothing to do with your cellphone service and everything to do with enabling connected infrastructure that could not be done with LTE.
Perhaps you talk about non-pop AI/ML - I mean GPT, LLMs and chatbots.
But all I get is a higher phone bill and no option to opt out of a 5G plan even though I turn it off on my phone.
And what did we probably really get? More surveillance. You do know, don't you, that these mmWave can pinpoint you and your activity with an ever increasing exactness that should concern all of us.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8804831
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/js/2021/6657709/
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8645553
https://www.fastcompany.com/90314058/5g-means-youll-have-to-...
If someone wants to criticize the idea that 5G could be used for greater intelligence gathering please have at it. Otherwise, your DVs just make me more paranoid.
Even better is the local ISP offers 10gbps fiber service and has lines directly next to the tower, but the cell tower doesn't use that, and instead has some long range microwave backhaul.
I always wonder what the point of spending the money to upgrade the tower to 5G was.
This is dangerous - when you're in a crowd you need your phone more to be able to find out what's happening and where your friends or family are if you get separated.
So if 5G started to fix that I'd say it was an excellent thing.
Nice reference. I have had similar problems when travelling to the UK for large events. Whenever I go over for an Arsenal match (it still hurts, thank you) I have trouble just using my phone anywhere near the stadium. I haven't had that issue with similarly large events here in Dublin, so maybe we don't experience as much cell congestion.
With regard to 5G in Dublin, though, the performance has been poor. When we moved into a new apartment, a 5G router was my only option for a few months. Although I purportedly had a 5G connection, according to the router, it never worked well for video meetings or anything other than burst downloads of files.
In both cases the event is planned many months in advance, and there are incentives for both event organisers and telcos to ensure phone subscribers have a good experience (avoids “reception was terrible at Glastonbury” or “I couldn’t make any calls on Vodafone, I should switch network”).
But protests typically lack the timeframe, and (I expect) a sympathetic ear from the telcos. Even if the timeframe is know well in advance, gaining permits to stand up towers (and associated labour, equipment rental) costs money, and spending the money signals implicit support for the cause.
While load sharing among neighbouring towers could alleviate minor increases in traffic (maybe 2x) I can’t see the networks over provisioning the radio and back haul for permanent infrastructure to support a possible 10x surge and then let it sit 90% idle. Dedicated fiber leased lines are expensive.
Maybe protests should instead be organised near convention centres which already have capacity for surge traffic?
In fact my local Turkish society shindig for April 23 had connection problems despite only having 500 people in a hall and those people are collecting for earthquake victims so there's no money for luxuries.
If, however, 5G helped make this problem go away then hurray. It would be worth it.
Well that’s obviously not true. I was at the launch event for WiMAX which had huge hype and now you’ve probably never heard of it.
5G actually exists and works. In my home (admittedly near a tower) it’s faster than my gigabit Fios over wifi.
In the US, where carriers have a say in what phones people use on their networks, the 5G hype seems to have been through the roof.
In UAE where I visit sometimes, both carriers did buy some billboards to advertise their 5G service, and that's it. I have no idea what it's like because I don't have a compatible phone.
In Russia though, where I live most of the time, 5G has never launched and none of the four carriers have any plans to launch it (especially now with all those sanctions). Everyone seems fine with LTE.
Do they have a choice otherwise though?
I meant that people rarely, if ever, complain about it. It's mobile data. You use it for apps and to browse the web. That's it. 3G was already fast enough for this purpose. I say that as someone who was relatively late to get an LTE-capable phone.
It's also a common understanding that cell towers have limited capacity and if there are many people in one place, your data connection might not work.
The speeds are great. On 4G and 4G+ I've been getting speeds of 20-30mbps even though ISP's were advertising 200+mbps speeds (theoretical maximums)
On 5G I easily get 100+mbps, majority of times around 500mbps.
Where I live we get unlimited usage 5G for around $25-30
The introduction of the new spectrum has relieved the pressure on overloaded cell sites, and we’ve seen cellular speeds rise significantly.
I've been doing up my mother's connection 25 mins away from a city CBD (I live in another state). I have had to purchase a $1,000 5G modem, 2x2 MIMO directional antennae, rewired the property myself with Cat6 and an old Cisco switch and waps.
I got a 22-26x increase in download off peak and 30x increase in upload (up to about 600-700mb/s off peak)
Would've been wonderful if they just gave them the fibre they promised, though
Fixed wireless 5G is definitely faster but the medium's line of sight requirement means I'd really prefer slow 250mb/s fibre to volatile 100-750mb/s 5G
I've worked out I could hit about 2.5-3gb/s if I went 4x4 MIMO with a 10m mast and aimed it perfectly (tower is 300m away) - but there's no way to control who else is connected and taking the bandwidth - so I'm not investing anymore in her property
To understand what's going on, we need equivalent of table of 5G spec features, with columns for:
* what use case the feature enables for users * how widely the feature is implemented, * what extra cost it would could incur to include the feature in a device or connection.
The article says that "extra speed is wasted" but also says that it "enables watching video" (and I presume sending video too).
That's a huge win, isn't it?
OP also forgot to mention, in the complaint about 8G, that we already have Fake G in "4G LTE" which isn't full 4G.
Cellular customers are generally pleased that speeds have increased since this means stronger coverage indoors and in outdoor dead spots. But surveys have shown that only a minuscule percentage of people are willing to pay more for faster cellular speeds.
So people are generally happy because of the faster speeds of 5G, which is a statement about the technology. The next line is about its affordability, which does not negate the fact that people are happy about the high speeds. That "But" in the second line threw me off a bit.
- at the time I moved to it, it gave higher speeds than fibre
- I have a 30-day rolling contract instead of a year-long one
- It's cheaper than fibre
- No data limits
- I can take it with me if I move
The only thing it's not great for is gaming.
Also, the only home routers you easily get are Chinese. The Nokia LastMile seems to be invitation-only.
Modems also appear to range from £250-£900 on amazon.
So much of the 2010's internet UX is fully baked. We can communicate with voice, audio and video with the world from anywhere on cheap pocket devices. It would be harder to make this any more frictionless without some sort of new HCI paradigm. We've got wireless comms going wherever it made commercial sense, "enabling" workers to get directives and do business from their morning commutes. You can shop from the toilet.
You can also make original music in the palm of your hand for the cost of a used iPhone.
What I'm getting at is the digital revolution is here if not already over. We're in our cyberpunk future already, but surprise humans don't need too much to be absolutely sated if not overwhelmed by technology and I don't think they're itching for more of it. The business of selling tech right now is hard because so many of the jobs are _done_. All that you can do is generate hype.
I don't doubt I'm missing some of the forest through the hype trees here, but tech in the 2020's has a lot to prove to me.
Fiber will be soon available here, though, and I'll be replacing 5G with it, to get a more stable, less energy-hungry connection that is less tied to chinese suppliers of networking hardware and software.
edit perhaps what I have is only some ultimate final form of 4G, I don't know nor care really.
Its is a fact that much of recent tech development has been skewed by the explosion of mobile. It also feels as if this era is finally saturating and that might not be a bad thing. Mobile computing is obviously an amazing new dimension but it is also intrinsically a dumbed-down version of what fixed lines and more serious hardware (desktops etc) can offer.
Visions of a what a good digital society looks like vary, but resilient, high capacity fiber networks combined with a shift to more client-heavy computing would my preference. Imagine upgrading homes to be real digital hubs (e.g. supporting self-hosted clouds) offering a stark alternative to the remote mega datacenter plus puny touch screens.
The other half of the equation is now in rural areas I notice way less coverage area. They seem to have shut off 4G towers in favor of "5G" and now there are several places I used to get strong 4G coverage that I get 1 bar strength of 5G that is basically non-functional. In those areas my phone shows connected but won't load anything. One of the main ones I notice it is within my local walmart. Used to have full 4G LTE there but now that 5G is "available" I can barely load websites while inside.
5G wasn't worth the hype.
They know themselves there is no such thing as "5g" but try to explain that to the public. They said the low latency and the high bandwidth is also possible with 4g but they're just upgrading a lot of stuff.
I don't think they're selling a lie, they're just upgrading a network and have some breaking changes.
That's all I expected from 5G. 4G is more than good enough for what I do with it, in fact, I can easily watch HD video and burn through my data plan at 3G (H+) speeds, I don't really need more.
The only thing is that I assume great signal and no congestion, which is far from what we get in practice. The only reason I want 5G, and even 4G is that I can get the equivalent of full 3G speed in places where I couldn't before.
Hopefully, it will also mean bigger data plans at an equivalent price with the extra bandwidth operators get.
4G proved too hard, so the industry instead adopted what they called 4G Long Term Evolution, or LTE for short, where they'd start with a minor improvement over 3G and keep improving over time. Then they forgot to improve over time. 5G was transparently just 4G again. Then it proved too hard, so etc etc. Sigh
It was designed to save costs for network operators. Of course they couldn't market that: customers would expect cheaper plans.
Hence the hype cycle.
My biggest problem is Tech / Media / people who believed in those hype and continue to spread it, plenty of them on HN saying "true" 5G is mmWave. Or 5G is all about capacity ( that was my tagline ) which they used but then suggest the capacity is all because of mmWave ( no it is not ). And people became disappointed because mmWave never came.
5G has only arrived in the minds of marketers.
Then again, I was literally living across the street from the AT&T world hq in Dallas. Coincedence?
Then again, that was only until I hit my GB cap.
