[HN Gopher] 5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growt...
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5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows
Author : saigovardhan
Score : 120 points
Date : 2025-02-12 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| DannyBee wrote:
| Um, the airspeed analogy used up front is remarkably silly.
|
| 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.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| If Tbp speed internet was the same cost and effort as Gbps/Mbps
| internet, obviously faster is better! The marginal returns on
| speed in most settings drop off pretty quickly.
| kelnos wrote:
| Yeah I think the level of diminishing returns takes a while to
| reach when you're taking about flights. I'd be thrilled to drop
| a 6 hour flight down to 3 hours. Or 1.5. Or 45 minutes. Or 20.
| Or 10. Or instantaneous teleportation.
|
| 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.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Oh boy oh boy I'm excited for the 5G shutdown when the phone I
| haven't even bought yet will quit working :)
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| I know you are being sarcastic but 3G antennas in the US were
| only just recently shut down. 20~ years isn't bad for how
| rapidly tech advancement has been happening in the recent
| decades. Obviously AM and FM radio have been continuing for far
| longer than that but there are legal and logistical reasons for
| that, at least for now.
| xattt wrote:
| Similar to how Apple how moved forward with breaking
| compatibility for apps with older OS X versions.
| SR2Z wrote:
| I get the spirit of what you're trying to say (I think) but the
| truth is that wireless spectrum is an extremely scarce
| resource. It is bad policy to let inefficient protocols use it
| without good reason - 2G has the status of "lowest common
| denominator" and that's probably the only baseline that you
| should be able to rely on.
|
| 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...
| kfarr wrote:
| I was hoping to see some mention of latency. Agree with the
| premise that for most consumer applications we don't need much
| more wireless throughput but latency still seems way worse than
| Ethernet heyday times in college
| ianburrell wrote:
| LTE latency is 20-50ms, 5G is 1ms, Gigabit Ethernet is less
| than 1ms, Wifi is 2-3ms. Overall latency is more about
| distance, 300km is 1ms, number of hops, and response times.
|
| 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.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > 5G is 1ms
|
| I have never seen this. Where do I have to get 5G service to
| see these latencies?
| supertrope wrote:
| 1ms to the cell tower. Even on fiber Internet there's still
| single digit ms latency to servers in the same metro area.
| Only T-Mobile has deployed 5G SA (standalone). ATT and
| Verizon use 5G NSA (non standalone) which is a 4G control
| channel bonded with 5G channels so it has 4G latency.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Pretty sure splitting up latency by useless endpoints is
| not a relevant way to do it.
| mbesto wrote:
| When 5G first rolled out this was absolutely not the case.
| Not only was it not 1ms, it was like full 1000's of ms to the
| point where I actively turned off 5G on my iPhone because it
| was so bad.
|
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Could be lots of things. I'd go with "your telco was doing
| something stupid" as a first guess, tbh.
| refulgentis wrote:
| This is blatantly false. I will bet many $$$ that no one in
| this thread has ever gotten 1ms.
|
| If you search "5g latency", Google's AI answer says 1 ms,
| followed by another quote lift from Thales Group(tm) 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 http
| s://www.speedtest.net/awards/reports/2024/2024_UnitedSta....
|
| Spoiler: 23 ms median for fastest provider, T-mobile.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Latency to where? Speedtest servers or cell towers?
| refulgentis wrote:
| I assume Speedtest servers, as they wouldn't have a way
| to get measurements for individual cell towers at scale.
|
| (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)
| yaantc wrote:
| LTE total latency is 20-50 ms, and you compare this to the
| marketing "air link only" 5G latency of 1 ms. It's apple and
| oranges ;)
|
| 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)
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Always been interested in this stuff. Where would you
| recommend a software/math guy learn all this stuff? My end
| goal is to understand the tech well enough to at least have
| opinions on it. How wifi works would be great as well if
| you're aware of any resources for that.
| yaantc wrote:
| It's a good but hard question... Because cellular is
| huge.
|
| 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).
| jquery wrote:
| I was hoping to see any mention of large file downloads and
| uploads. Nevermind the article's ponderous "I can't imagine any
| use case for more than 5GB/s", that's a use case _today_ where
| higher speeds above 5GB /s would be helpful. For example, a lot
| of AAA games are above 100GB, with the largest game in my steam
| library being over half a terabyte (DCS World). Ideally I
| wouldn't have to store these games locally, but I do if I want
| to have access to them in any reasonable amount of time.
|
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I don't think the article ever claimed that _nobody_ would
| ever want speeds above 5G. But you have to admit that your
| use case is uncommon. Only a tiny fraction of people has
| anywhere near 18 TiB stored locally and an even smaller group
| regularly wants to do cloud backups of all of it. There are
| various solutions for only backing up the diff since the last
| backup, rather than uploading the full image.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The article is about mobile bandwidth only.
|
| 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!
| msh wrote:
| 5g Home internet is getting common
| eber wrote:
| I thought they were going to mention L4S or low latency low
| loss, over 5G which seems to be in the latest 3GPP 5G-Advanced
| Release 18 (2024) but I have no idea what the rollout of that
| is.
|
| 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
| pjmlp wrote:
| Still using 4G over here.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > Transmitting high-end 4K video today requires 15 Mb/s,
| according to Netflix. Home broadband upgrades from, say, hundreds
| of Mb/s to 1,000 Mb/s (or 1 Gb/s) typically make little to no
| noticeable difference for the average end user.
|
| 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.
| harrall wrote:
| 5G can be extremely fast. I get 600 MBit over cellular at home.
|
| ...and we only pay for 500 MBit for my home fiber. (Granted,
| also 500 Mbit upload.)
|
| (T-Mobile, Southern California)
| throitallaway wrote:
| Sure but I'll take the latency, jitter, and reliability of
| that fiber over cellular any day.
| vel0city wrote:
| The reliability is definitely a bigger question, jitter a
| bit more questionable, but as far as latency goes 5G fixed
| wireless can be just fine. YMMV, but on a lot of spots
| around my town it's pretty comparable latency/jitter-wise
| as my home fiber connection to similar hosts. And
| connecting home is often <5ms throughout the city.
| throitallaway wrote:
| I was considering my cell phone and hotspot experiences
| (not 5G fixed wireless.) I suppose that has some amount
| of prioritization happening in order to provide a
| "stable" experience. My experiences with LTE/5G/5GUW have
| varied wildly based on location and time.
| vel0city wrote:
| Fixed wireless sometimes operates on dedicated channels
| and priorities.
|
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _5G can be extremely fast. I get 600 MBit over cellular at
| home._
|
| 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.
| harrall wrote:
| Probably. My area used to be a T-Mobile dead zone 5 years
| ago.
|
| 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.
| ziml77 wrote:
| On one hand it's nice that the option for that fast wireless
| connection is available. But on the other hand it sucks that
| having it means the motivation for ISPs to run fiber to homes
| in sparse towns goes from low down to none, since they can just
| point people to the wireless options. Wireless doesn't beat the
| reliability, latency, and consistent speeds of a fiber
| connection.
| dageshi wrote:
| It doesn't beat it but honestly it's good enough based on my
| experience using a 4g mobile connection as my primarily home
| internet connection.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > Transmitting high-end 4K video today requires 15 Mb/s,
| according to Netflix.
|
| 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".
| pak9rabid wrote:
| Not to mention I doubt they're even including the bandwidth
| necessary for 5.1 DD+ audio.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Audio doesn't require high data rates. 6 streams of
| uncompressed 16-bit 48 kHz PCM is 4.6 Mb/s. Compression
| knocks that down into insignificance.
| nsteel wrote:
| It's frustrating the author took this falsehood and ran with
| it all throughout this article.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Verizon Fios sells gigabit in NYC for $80/mo.
|
| 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.
| randcraw wrote:
| That's what I pay for FIOS internet 20 miles north of Philly.
| I suspect that's their standard rate for 1 Gb/s service
| everywhere in the US.
| immibis wrote:
| It's not that mobile is fast, it's that home internet is slow.
| It's the same reason home internet in places like Africa, South
| Korea and Eastern Europe is faster than in the USA and Western
| Europe: home internet was built out on old technology
| (cable/DSL) and never upgraded because (cynically) incumbent
| monopolies won't allow it or (less cynically) governments don't
| want to pay to rip up all the roads again.
| md_rumpf wrote:
| Are there really use cases for faster chips? I can run all models
| I want on an H100 pod. No models exist that I can't run with at
| least 64 H100s. NVIDIA should just stop.
| ctoth wrote:
| Tell me you've never backed up a NAS or downloaded a multi-
| hundred-gigabyte game without telling me!
| jquery wrote:
| I made the exact comment somewhere else in the thread. I can't
| believe OP's article made zero mention of that.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You shouldn't be doing either of things over mobile, except as
| a last resort.
|
| The article is about mobile specifically.
| kelnos wrote:
| For practical purposes I agree, but in principle, why not?
| Especially in places where land-based ISP choice is not
| abundant or have crap speeds.
|
| 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.
| jlokier wrote:
| If I want to download a multi-hundred-gigabyte anything, I
| switch _to_ my mobile and turn on it 's Wi-Fi hotspot. It's a
| really noticable speed improvement, with the caveat that
| speed varies a lot according to location and time of day.
|
| 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.)
| James_K wrote:
| I got a 5G capable phone a few months back, and I can't say I've
| noticed a difference from my old one. (Aside from the new phone
| being more expensive, worse UI, slower, heavier, unwieldy, filled
| with ads, and constantly prompting me to create a "Samsung
| account".)
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I've found 1-bar 4G LTE to actually be enough to do work on at
| home, to my surprise (in the occasions that my in-the-ground
| cable connection up and dies on me). Only thing I don't get is
| Zoom with that, but it's nice to have a good excuse not to be
| in a meeting.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Well, I believe you can try audio only to reduce the
| bandwidth requirements. That was my excuse for anything below
| five bars...
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| What's any of that have to do with 5G? On 2 bars of 5G right
| now and I get 650Mbit download speed, it's significantly faster
| than 4G.
| James_K wrote:
| The last bit is just stuff I wanted to whine about. I
| obviously know it is faster, you don't need to explain that
| concept. I have just never had need of any significant
| internet speed on my phone. I don't download things, and only
| sometimes stream video. Most of the time I am just checking
| emails, or calendars, or something trivial like that. Unless
| I do some kind of benchmark, I can't notice the difference
| between 4G and 5G.
| jfengel wrote:
| It would matter more if you were in a crowded place, with
| more users taking up the spectrum. But yeah, as with
| computer speed, ordinary applications maxed out a while
| back.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| That's a very interesting observation - - the bandwidth
| requirement is more for the transmitter than the receiver
| as we get more and more connected devices
| dylan604 wrote:
| If 5G lived up to everything it was touted to do, you could
| use a 5G hotspot for your home internet would could be a
| huge positive in areas that only have one ISP available.
| However, 5G does not live up to the promises, and your
| traffic is much more heavily shaped than non-wireless ISPs.
| vel0city wrote:
| I know many households which use 5G hotspots for home
| internet. They even do cloud-rendered gaming and remote
| telework on such setups. Consistently get several hundred
| megabits at pretty decent latency and jitter. I'd say
| that lives up to many promises.
| dylan604 wrote:
| And I know just as many that have tried but get crap
| service, so we're even now?
|
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| I'd say its then more YMMV rather than a blanket "does
| not live up to the promises".
|
| 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.
| secondcoming wrote:
| You're getting bad 5G. I use 5G for home internet. It's
| perfect except for pings.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _I have just never had need of any significant internet
| speed on my phone. I don 't download things, and only
| sometimes stream video._
|
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| You'd figure that would incentivize cell operators not to
| market segment higher speeds behind higher prices.
|
| It's like I'm paying them extra for the privilege of
| increasing their network efficiency.
| throw0101c wrote:
| 4G (AIUI) uses different frequencies, is a sunk cost, and
| 5G needs new gear, so someone has to pay for upgrades and
| the 5G frequency auctions.
| agumonkey wrote:
| In a similar manner, I got 5G recently and used it as my
| main link, and i'm still at 150GB downloaded (multiple
| persons, multiple laptops, regular OS updates, docker pull
| etc). I'm not even smart about this .. Without constant 4K
| streaming I realized that my needs will rarely exceed
| 200GB.
| secondcoming wrote:
| 5G allowed me to avoid having to get fibre.
| Lammy wrote:
| It spies on you a lot more effectively :)
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90314058/5g-means-youll-have-to-...
|
| https://venturebeat.com/mobile/sk-telecom-will-use-5g-to-bui...
|
| https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2020/12/5g-positioning--wha...
| atian wrote:
| Yeah...
| raverbashing wrote:
| Honestly after the big investment (and with a lot of drawbacks
| introduced by it) from 5G, I don't think telecoms have a lot of
| appetite for massive investments in such a short term again
| tguvot wrote:
| it feels like telecoms walked back and started to invest into
| fiber broadband deployment
| chris_va wrote:
| With 5G, I have to downgrade to LTE constantly to avoid packet
| loss in urban canyons. Given the even higher frequencies proposed
| for 6G, I suspect it will be mostly useless.
|
| 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).
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| 5G can also use the same frequency bands as 4G, and when it
| does, apparently gets slightly increased range over 4G.
| msh wrote:
| In my part of the world 5g actually is rolled out on lower
| frequencies than 4g so I actually get better coverage.
| numpad0 wrote:
| There seem to be some integration issues in 5G Non-Standalone
| equipment and existing network. Standalone or not, 5G outside
| of millimeter wavelength bands("mmWave") should behave like an
| all-around pure upgrade compared to 4G with no downsides, in
| theory.
| thrownblown wrote:
| I just leave mine in LTE and upgrade to 5G only when I know i'm
| gonna DL something big.
| pjdesno wrote:
| Note that existing bandwidth usage has been driven by
| digitization of existing media formats, for which there was
| already a technology and industry - first print, then
| print+images, then audio, then video. People have been producing
| HD-quality video since the beginning of Technicolor in the 1930s,
| and while digital technology has greatly affected the production
| and consumption of video, people still consume video at a rate of
| one second (and about 30 frames) per second.
|
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| I'm part of the early test team for tachyon-enabled 7G. Obviously
| it's only early alpha but I think non-Googlers can get Pixel 10s
| with it at the Mountain View Google store. If you upgrade the
| firmware to version 0.3.75A sometimes short text messages arrive
| before you type them.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Higher bandwidths are good to have. They're great for rare,
| exceptional circumstances.
|
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| I have 1Gbps down, and the only application I've found to
| saturate it is downloads from USENET (and with that I need
| quite a few connections downloading different chunks
| simultaneously to achieve it).
|
| 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.
| msh wrote:
| Steam and the ps5 store can fill out my 1 gigabits
| connection.
| sheepdestroyer wrote:
| Steam can fill up much more
|
| 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 39EUR/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
| vel0city wrote:
| Steam used to max out my internet, but now its smarter
| about it and starts to decrypt/expand the download as its
| going instead of doing it in phases. This quickly maxes out
| my IOPS on even NVMe drives at only several hundred
| megabits for most games I've tried recently.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| This tracks. I recently upgraded from 100mbps to 500mbps
| (cable), and barely anything is different-- even torrents
| bumped from 5MB/s to barely 10MB/s. And there's no wifi
| involved there, just a regular desktop on gigabit ethernet.
| __alexs wrote:
| Steam downloads can easily max 1Gbps for me.
| kookamamie wrote:
| Steam downloads easily saturate my 1 Gbs. Same for S3
| transfers.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Part of it is hardware too.
|
| 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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > Instead, the number of homes with sufficient connectivity and
| percentage of the country covered by 10 Mb/s mobile may be better
| metrics to pursue as policy goals.
|
| 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".
| ai-christianson wrote:
| We live in a rural location, so we have redundant 5G/Starlink.
|
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I can pretty much guarantee you that your 5G connection has
| more bandwidth for upload than my residential ISP does
| ai-christianson wrote:
| Yeah?
|
| We're getting 30-50 mbit/sec per connection on a good day.
| repeekad wrote:
| In downtown Columbus Ohio the only internet provider
| (Spectrum) maxes out at maybe 5 mbps up (down 50-100x
| that), it's not just a rural issue, non-competitive ISPs
| even in urban cities want you to pay for business accounts
| to get any kind of upload whatsoever
| fweimer wrote:
| Is it really a technical capacity issue, or just market
| segmentation? Usually, it's possible to get so-called
| business service with higher upload bandwidth, even at
| residential addresses.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| That's exactly what he said, they want you to _pay_ for
| business accounts.
| repeekad wrote:
| Yup, I'm saying it's not a rural issue to have bad
| upload, often it's just a way to charge more money even
| in a major US city (particularly one with limited ISP
| competition)
|
| 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
| nightpool wrote:
| Yes, many residential broadband ISPs top out at 1/10th
| that.
| toast0 wrote:
| > The main challenge is the upload speed; pretty much all the
| ISPs allocate much more spectrum for download rather than
| upload.
|
| 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.
| orev wrote:
| You identified the problem in your statement: "the ISPs
| allocate...". The provider gets to choose this, and if more
| bandwidth is available from a newer technology, they're
| incentive is to allocate it to downloads so they can advertise
| faster speeds. It's not a technology issue.
| AkshayGenius wrote:
| Is there a reason we keep trying to use higher frequencies in
| every new wireless standard (Wi-Fi, 5G, now 6G) instead of trying
| to increase the maximum possible bitrate per second into lower
| frequencies? Have we already reached the physical limits of the
| amount of data the can be encoded at a particular frequency?
|
| 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.
| kmlx wrote:
| We don't move to higher frequencies just because we've run out
| of ways to pack more data into lower bands. The main reason is
| that higher frequencies offer much wider chunks of spectrum,
| which directly leads to higher potential data rates. Advanced
| modulation/coding techniques can squeeze more capacity out of
| lower bands, but there are fundamental physical and regulatory
| limits, like Shannon's limit and the crowded/heavily licensed
| spectrum below 6 GHz that make it harder to keep increasing
| speeds at those lower frequencies.
| vel0city wrote:
| 5G can operate at the same low frequencies as 2G/3G/4G. It's
| not inherently a higher frequency standard.
|
| It just also supports other bands as well.
| tliltocatl wrote:
| > Have we already reached the physical limits of the amount of
| data the can be encoded at a particular frequency?
|
| 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.
| linsomniac wrote:
| >Longer distance and penetration is not always an advantage
|
| 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. ;-)
| spacemanspiff01 wrote:
| In addition to what others have said, Often from a network
| perspective you want smaller range.
|
| 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.
| ElectRabbit wrote:
| Without 5G SA that standard is an awful battery sucker. My Pixel
| 6 looses almost 1/3 of its battery capacity when being stuck at
| 5G NSA.
|
| With my Pixel 8 and 5G SA activated (Telefonica Germany)
| everything is back to normal.
| Animats wrote:
| > Of course, sophisticated representations of entire 3D scenes
| for large groups of users interacting with one another in-world
| could conceivably push bandwidth requirements up. But at this
| point, we're getting into Matrix-like imagined technologies
| without any solid evidence to suggest a good 4G or 5G connection
| wouldn't meet the tech's bandwidth demands.
|
| 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.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| How many people consuming these services are doing so over a
| mobile network?
|
| 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.
| drawfloat wrote:
| Few people play games built for mobiles, let alone looking to
| play GTA6 on an iPhone
| Animats wrote:
| For the better games, you'll need goggles or a phone that
| unfolds to tablet size for mobile use. Both are available,
| although the folding-screen products still have problems at
| the fold point.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| On my current mobile plan (Google Fi[0]) the kind of streaming
| 3D world they think I would want to download on my phone would
| get me throttled in less than a minute. 200 MB is about a _day
| 's_ usage, if I'm out and about burning through my data plan.
|
| 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.
| bilater wrote:
| It's rare I come across something so myopic, unimaginative and
| laughable. This will age as well as the Paul Krugman
| prediction:"the Internet's impact on the economy has been no
| greater than the fax machine's". We have not even begun to
| explore the Uber/Airbnb applications of a 6G+ world. And the VR
| bandwidth ceiling lazy thought is an extension of the limited
| mindset of this author.
| kinematicgps99 wrote:
| What we really need is pervasive low data rate backup systems for
| text messaging and low fidelity emergency calls that don't kill
| handset batteries. If this means "Starlink" and/or lower
| frequency bands (<400 MHz): the more options, the merrier for
| safety. Perhaps there may come a time where no one needs an
| EPIRB/ELT because that functionality is totally subsumed by
| smartphones offering equal or superior performance.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| >Regulators may also have to consider whether fewer operators may
| be better for a country, with perhaps only a single underlying
| fixed and mobile network in many places--just as utilities for
| electricity, water, gas, and the like are often structured around
| single (or a limited set of) operators.
|
| There are no words to describe how stupid this is.
| fny wrote:
| Clearly you did not like playing Monopoly as child.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| I think that it should be run as a public service like
| utilities and should be as cheap as humanly possible. Why not?
| daedrdev wrote:
| My public utility is bad at its job because it has literally
| zero incentive to be cheap, and thus my utilities are
| expensive
| sweeter wrote:
| A private electric grid is a nightmare. Look at Texas.
| People pay more, and they get less coverage. It's worse by
| every metric. The conversation should revolve around, how
| can we fix the government so that it isn't 5 corporations
| in a trench coat who systematically defund public utilities
| and social safety nets in hopes of breaking it so they can
| privatize it and make billions sucking up tax payer money
| while doing no work. See the billions in tax funding to
| ATT, Google, etc... to put in fiber internet that they just
| pocketed the cash and did nothing.
| daedrdev wrote:
| In Texas electricity is literally less than half the
| price than the price in my state on average. (14c/kwh vs
| 34c/kwh) (I live in California)
|
| If you want to say its worse, perhaps you should check if
| its actually worse first.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| A big part of the reason that California average
| electrical price per kWh is high is that a huge portion
| of the cost is fixed costs, and California's efficiency
| push has resulted in the lowest lowest per capita
| electricity usage (and fourth lowest per capita energy
| usage) in the USA, so the fixed costs are spread over
| fewer kWh.
|
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > it has literally zero incentive to be cheap
|
| 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.
| natebc wrote:
| I believe the idea is that you shouldn't have a corporation
| provide the utility if there's only going to be one.
|
| "public utility" implies it's owned by the public not a
| profit seeking group of shareholders.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I personally like the notion of a common public
| infrastructure that subleases access. We already sort of do
| that with mobile carriers where the big 3 provide all access
| and all the other "carriers" (like google fi) are simply
| leasing access.
|
| Make it easy for a new wireless company to spawn while
| maintaining the infrastructure everyone needs.
| fny wrote:
| Because competition drives innovation. 5G exists as widely as
| it does because carriers were driven to meet the standard and
| provide faster service to their customers.
|
| 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?
| javier2 wrote:
| Well, 5G is unlikely to be built in my area for the next
| decade, meanwhile 3 operators are building networks in the
| slightly more populated areas.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Competition drives innovation, but also, we've generally
| seen that things like municipal broadband are _more_
| innovative than an incumbent monopoly carrier. Large chunks
| of the US don't have much competition at all in wired
| services, and if we approach that in wireless, we are
| likely to see the same effects starting where the local
| monopoly tries to extract maximum dollars out of an aging
| infrastructure. Lookin' at you, Comcast, lookin' at you.
| fny wrote:
| As you say, "incumbent monopoly carrier" is not
| competition, so a municipal provider which competes with
| broadband is a great idea. This article, however, is
| arguing we don't need more bandwidth, and we need more
| consolidation of major providers: I'm not convinced.
| vel0city wrote:
| The T-Mobile 5G Rely fixed-wireless home internet plan
| offers no caps and no throttling plans.
| fny wrote:
| It does past a terabyte.
| vel0city wrote:
| The fine print does say:
|
| > 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Three things are necessary then:
|
| 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.
| oytis wrote:
| Internet is treated this way in Germany, and it's slow and
| expensive. Eastern European countries that put their bets on
| competition instead of regulation have more bang for the buck
| in their network infrastructure
| HnUser12 wrote:
| They should study Canada. We're already running that
| experiment.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I dunno, it makes conceptual sense. Networks infrastructure is
| largely commodity utilities where duplication is effectively a
| waste of resources. e.g. you wouldn't expect your home to have
| multiple natural gas connections from competing companies.
|
| 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.
| newsreaderguy wrote:
| IMO this can be neatly solved with a peer-to-peer market
| based system similar to Helium https://www.helium.com/mobile.
|
| (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.
| javier2 wrote:
| Maybe it is. Building multiple networks for smaller populations
| comes at enormous cost though. In my country there have been a
| tradition for this kind of network sharing, where operators are
| required to allow alternative operators on their physical
| network for a fee set by government.
| cft wrote:
| Who are these "regulators"? Did we vote for them? Were they
| selected in the process of market competition and attrition?
| grahar64 wrote:
| In New Zealand we have a single company that owns all the
| telecommunications wires. It was broken up in the 90's from a
| service provider because they were a monopoly and abusing their
| position in the market. Now we have a ton of options of ISPs,
| but only one company to deal with if there are line faults. BTW
| the line company is the best to deal with, the ISPs are shit.
|
| Same for mobile infrastructure would be great as well.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| In NZ we also have the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG) which
| operates over 400 cellular/mobile sites in rural areas for
| the three mobile carriers, capital funded jointly by the NZ
| Government and the three mobile carriers (with operational
| costs shared between the three carriers I believe). For
| context the individual carriers operate around 2,000 of their
| own sites in urban areas and most towns in direct competition
| with each other. It has worked really well for the more rural
| parts of the country, filling in gaps in state highway
| coverage as well as providing coverage to smaller towns that
| would be uneconomical for the individual carriers to cover
| otherwise. I'm talking towns of a handful of households
| getting high speed 4G coverage. Really proud of NZ as this
| sort of thing is unheard of in most other countries.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's not that stupid IMO, they could handle it like some places
| handle electricity -- there's a single distributor managing
| infra but you can select from a number of providers offering
| different generation rates
|
| 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
| SSLy wrote:
| It works very well in at least two very rich European
| countries, and one bit less affluent but still not exactly
| poor.
| hedora wrote:
| It actually works well in most places. Look up the term "common
| carrier".
|
| 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).
| therein wrote:
| It also makes it more vulnerable to legal, bureaucratic and
| technical threats.
|
| 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.
| SSLy wrote:
| the in world practice seems to have this worked out. I am
| working for such provider right now and it is neither cash
| starved not suffocating under undue bureaucracy
| computerthings wrote:
| And private companies don't even have to be vulnerable,
| they can just do nasty things nilly willy, because it might
| be profitable and they might get away with it. Yeah, there
| _could_ be ones that don 't suck, and then customers
| _could_ pick those, but when there aren 't, when they all
| collude to be equally shitty and raise prices whenever they
| can -- which they do -- people have no recourse. They _do_
| have recourse when it comes to the government.
|
| 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.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| This was a common way to do things before the telcos in the
| USA were deregulated in the 2000s and 2010s. At the time it
| was both internet and telephone but due to the timing of de
| regulation, it never really took off with real high speed
| internet, only dsl and dialup.
|
| 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.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > This creates competition for things like pricing plans
|
| 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.
| kemitche wrote:
| The companies on top provide end user customer support,
| varied pricing models ("unlimited" data vs pay by the GB,
| etc), and so on. It allows the common carrier to focus
| solely on the network hardware.
| hedora wrote:
| They also sometimes own the machines in the field
| closets. So, anyone can rent 1U + a bunch of fiber
| endpoints for the same price. What you do with the slots
| is up to you. If there's a problem with the power or
| actual fiber optics, the common carrier fixes it. (Like a
| colo, sort of.)
| L-four wrote:
| They add value by producing complicated and convoluted
| contracts which cannot be compared easily full of gotchas.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| Common carriers have some upsides, but one downside is that
| it sometimes removes the incentive for ISPs to deploy their
| own networks.
|
| 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.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Having a single provider of utilities is great when owned by
| the gov and run "at cost". Problem is, dickheads get voted in
| and they sell the utility to their mates who get an instant
| monopoly and start running the utility for profit.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You're thinking legacy. In our new Italian Fascist/Peronist
| governance model, maximizing return on assets for our cronies
| is the priority. The regulatory infrastructure that fostered
| both good and bad aspects of the last 75 years is being
| destroyed and will not return.
|
| 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?
| recursive wrote:
| How confusing. Now I can't tell whether it's very stupid, not
| stupid, or medium stupid. Too bad there were no words.
| bluesounddirect wrote:
| Title Edit: 4G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth
| slows
| nwatson wrote:
| Someone I know at a mixed-signal company many of whose chips go
| to 5G deployments said their revenue really slowed down last year
| due to 5G deployment uptake decreasing significantly.
| transcriptase wrote:
| My understanding was that the economics/range of 5G only really
| worked in densely populated areas? Or has that changed? If not,
| once those places are saturated it makes sense that build out
| would slow.
| fny wrote:
| There is not a single 5G provider with unlimited high-speed
| access. _Not one._
|
| 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?
| Cbzjsj wrote:
| _In your country._
| epolanski wrote:
| What's the point of more bandwidth when virtually all carriers
| limit your data plans to 50 to 150 GB/month?
| Calamityjanitor wrote:
| Here in Australia they'll charge more for 5G but limit it to
| 150mbps. That's slower than LTE's max, no wonder 5G uptake is
| slow.
| cogman10 wrote:
| This article misses the forest through the trees.
|
| 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.
| rho4 wrote:
| My need for speed is a long way from saturated. 360deg virtual
| reality calls at a resolution better than my physical senses is
| just one thing my unimaginative mind can come up with on the
| spot.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Could maximum data speeds--on mobile devices, at home, at work
| --be approaching "fast enough" for most people for most purposes?
|
| 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.
| hexator wrote:
| A problem for tech companies but not the world.
| gambiting wrote:
| Get ready to be sold the exact same thing you already own,
| just "with AI" now.
| callc wrote:
| And obsolescence via "TPM2"!
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I'm all for advancements in the size of various models able
| to be loaded onto devices, and the amount of fast ram
| available for them
| ekianjo wrote:
| Good enough but most of these devices are not built to last.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| The answer is yes. But it's not just about speed. The higher
| speeds drain the battery faster.
|
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| There are some more traditional home phones which work on
| 4/5G networks with a DECT handset which talks to a cellular
| base station. You might look into switching to that model to
| replace your "cell phone as a home phone" concept. It makes
| it a bit easier to add another handset to the DECT network
| and often means convenient cradles to charge the handsets
| while the base station stays in a good signal spot with
| plenty of power.
|
| Just a thought when it comes time to change out that device.
| bityard wrote:
| I actually miss the concept of house phones. Instead of
| exclusively person-to-person communication, families would
| call other families to catch up and sometimes even pass the
| phone around to talk to the grandparents, aunts and uncles,
| etc.
| secstate wrote:
| That's a facinating obsevation! I hadn't consider the side
| effects of calling a common phone and interacting with
| other people rather than exclusively the one person you
| wanted to talk/text with. Probably distances you from (or
| never allows you to know) those adjacent to the person you
| already know.
| nsteel wrote:
| Relatedly, Nokia announced a new CEO this week with a
| datacentre/enterprise background.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/nokia-ceo-ste...
| doublerabbit wrote:
| This is all well and good, but how about we remove data caps too?
| Such a racket.
| idolofdust wrote:
| We need the freedom to do more on our mainstream pocketable
| devices, my hotspot for my laptop will be always throttled down
| to 3G, as if to say
|
| "Hey, this isn't actually supposed to be used to get work done.
| Keep doing simple phone stuff!"
| dbspin wrote:
| That's bonkers. No such restriction here in Ireland. Frequently
| get work done away from the home office on 4G hotspotted to the
| laptop.
| nonelog wrote:
| Introducing such new technologies is ALWAYS about rendering
| existing hardware "obsolete" so that new devices can be forced
| upon the consumer (who most often does not need them).
| mike50 wrote:
| Idiot author is a kindness. Data rates compared to an obsolete
| 1970s technology. Author is too old to write articles on the
| "newfanged internet". IEEE spectrum needs to kick this guy to the
| curb hard for writting crap and crossposting his book..
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