[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 : 227 points
Date : 2025-02-12 17:04 UTC (1 days 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.
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| Incredibly different scenario, but I think you knew that
| before leaving a snarky comment... or at least I hope you
| did.
| 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.
| tguvot wrote:
| if we go by useless endpoints, let's compare apples to
| apples. on fiber network equivalent to cell tower will be
| probably splitter. i guess it has sub 1ms latency
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Why? The conclusion that "somewhere between 100 Mb/s and 1
| Gb/s marks the approximate saturation point" wouldn't be
| any different.
| nsteel wrote:
| Yes, you've nailed exactly why it's frustrating. They
| still could have written his piece almost as is, even
| including the napkin-math extrapolations for future tech,
| and it would have carried a little more weight.
| 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.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| Several Western European countries have deployed XGS-PON at
| scale, offering up to 10 Gbps, peaking at ~8 Gbps in
| practice. Hell I even have access to 25 Gbps P2P fiber here
| in Switzerland.
|
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Very few people have home equipment that can do anything
| close to 10Gbps, of course; this is all largely future
| proofing.
|
| 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)...
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| It's going to depend a _lot_ on your telco and region.
| secondcoming wrote:
| You're getting bad 5G. I use 5G for home internet. It's
| perfect except for pings.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm getting bad 5G ~= 5G does not deliver as promised.
|
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| During the pendemic, I was stuck working from home, and
| for a couple of periods my home internet connection was
| quite unreliable (it's DOCSIS, and nearby construction
| kept damaging the cable; eventually the cable company
| actually strung the cable across the road, _attached it
| to a tree_, and ran it back, to bypass the construction
| site). So I regularly had to tether on my (then LTE)
| phone. And it was _fine_; it was actually surprisingly
| okay.
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| 4G and 5G can use the same frequencies, but they don't
| coexist on the same frequencies like the different
| revisions of WiFi can.
|
| 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.
| 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.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Let's say that 5G is 10x faster than 4G. Why do you need
| faster than 65MBit download speed on a mobile phone?
| adrr wrote:
| What provider? I have yet to get over 300Mb/sec on either
| TMobile or Verizon. Tmobile is suppose to have the fastest
| speeds according to reports.
| 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...
| johnwayne666 wrote:
| The UE could decide not to participate:
| https://www.androidauthority.com/android-15-location-
| privacy...
| Lammy wrote:
| That's completely a false sense of security with 5G
| systems, because the way it achieves that high bandwidth is
| by literally "steering the beam" to follow you, i.e.
| precise location surveillance is an implicit part of using
| it: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.13390
|
| "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...
| johnwayne666 wrote:
| Sure but you linked articles about the 5G positioning
| system which the UE could choose not to participate to.
| jowea wrote:
| Does using the internet use less battery?
| 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.
| stkdump wrote:
| Same here. My ISP recently did a promo to try out 1G/1G for
| free for a few months. I decided not to buy it after the
| free trial and went back to my old 500/200 line instead of
| paying 40% more. Yeah, it takes a minute longer downloading
| the latest LLM from huggingface, so what.
| __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".
| kalleboo wrote:
| It's interesting how different people's experiences are.
|
| 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.
| 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
| simoncion wrote:
| I am also a quite happy Monkeybrains customer, and have
| been for a couple of years now.
|
| 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.
| iamcalledrob wrote:
| As a (former) long-time monkeybrains customer, it's a
| mixed bag. For a casual home internet connection they're
| great. For WFH where you need something reliable, perhaps
| not.
|
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| were they using WiFi as the wireless layer?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Check out Breezeline (previously WOW), they cover nearly
| the entirety of Columbus and many of the surrounding
| areas. The minimum plan has 10 up but you can get ~50 up
| with the standard consumer plans. Bit shitty to deal with
| though, even for an ISP.
| nightpool wrote:
| Yes, many residential broadband ISPs top out at 1/10th
| that.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I'm in NYC, Spectrum is my ISP. 500mb/s down, 10mb/s up. I
| used to live in a building with symmetric 1G fiber from
| Verizon, but they don't serve my building.
| ai-christianson wrote:
| Maybe once download gets so fast people have a hard time
| figuring out what to do with it (2-10g+) they'll start
| finally increasing upload.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| That seems unlikely, as it is just more bandwidth they'd
| have to pay for.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I'm at 300/10. Actual upload is a bit higher I think, it
| seems they try and account for IPv4 header overhead or
| something. If I pay some absolutely bananas monthly fee I
| can get 30mbps up advertised. That isn't really fast
| enough for me to notice the difference and the service is
| unreliable anyways.
| 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.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| What do you need faster upload speeds for?
| 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. ;-)
| consp wrote:
| That works if you control all the radios. If there is some
| other device screaming into the void you are screwed either
| way. (been there)
| linsomniac wrote:
| One event I particularly remember, the venue had _ONE_ AP
| (and they had assured us that they could provide WiFi
| coverage for our 500 users, that was set to high power,
| their AP I found during the event, it was on the floor
| under a bench outside the master ballroom. This was the
| venue that I eventually tracked down was handing out DHCP
| leases with IP addresses that had a gateway address in a
| different subnet than the client IP. That was,
| admittedly, 2005, but the confidence they had in being
| able to serve our attendees, despite us telling them it
| wasn 't going to be as easy as they thought, was
| stunning.
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| 5G's trick is MIMO. Basically just using more channel space for
| more data. In some places that means 3G/4G spectrum + 24GHz +
| 60GHz. And responding when you close a door and the 60GHz goes
| away. In some parts of the world where licensing worked out
| differently, it might just be a couple chunks of old 4G
| spectrum. Its not a monolith.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| In most places it's 2G/3G/4G bands, either repurposed or
| through dynamic spectrum sharing, plus sub-6 bands.
|
| mmWave is a flop.
| protocolture wrote:
| Its a flop in this circumstance for sure.
|
| 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.
| marzullo wrote:
| mmWave is amazing in any kind of packed arena/stadium.
| Never was able to even use my phone at a basic level
| before, now can get low latency gigabit+ speeds which is
| insane.
| 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.
| Maakuth wrote:
| Here in rural Finland, 4G/5G is the only option available to
| me. I'm getting 50-150Mbps download speed, but often just a
| dozen Mbps upload. On the night hours it's better and that's
| when I my game downloads and backup uploads. I think there's
| going to be another municipal FTTH program, let's see if I
| get a fixed line at that point.
| john_minsk wrote:
| Right now - not many. But at some point in the future, if
| metaverse is everywhere, you can pull out a phone and a
| combined data for the room you are in might be 100GB. Would
| we want to have 6G then?
| 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.
| stkdump wrote:
| > I'm told similar economics are why you can't buy laptops
| with cellular modems in them
|
| 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.
| john_minsk wrote:
| So true. I remember the first time I got access to 5G was on
| a short visit to Dubai. I got a sim card with ~20GB of
| traffic and was super excited to try speedtest. My brother
| told me not to do that because 5G is so fast that if
| speedtest doesn't limit the traffic size for the test it will
| consume all of it within 30 seconds the test runs. Guess
| what? I didn't run the test because I didn't want to pay
| another $50 for the data package. If I have 1Gbit connection
| even with 100G. What's the point? I'm still kind of on 4G if
| I want 100G to last me a month...
| Peanuts99 wrote:
| Seems damn expensive. In the UK you can get a SIM card for
| PS20 with unlimited data & calls which is run on one of the
| larger 5G networks. I usually have the opposite problem
| though, I barely use 5GBs on a given month.
| markedathome wrote:
| > The Unreal Engine 5 demo, "The Matrix Awakens", is a download
| of more than a terabyte. That's before decompression.
|
| 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.
| 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:
| Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the
| campfire fire. That's a huge bill that needs to be paid
| and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the
| campfire fire.
|
| 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.
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Utilities do have incentive to be cheap as long as there
| are is the presence of competing offerings and the lack
| of collusion.
|
| ...which is unusual with many utilities, but is also
| pretty common with wireless carriers in much of the
| world.
| 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.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Coverage requirements could be part of the spectrum
| auction, like when Google managed to get "no SIM locking"
| part of the spectrum requirements for the 700 MHz band,
| opening up Verizon phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2
| 008_United_States_wireless_sp...
| 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
| Sabinus wrote:
| How come it's failed to provide cost effective internet in
| the US then?
| 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.
| wingworks wrote:
| Ironically, often you get way faster speeds out on a RCG
| tower too. (probably due to few users), vs when in the
| city, where I often get pretty average speeds be it 4g or
| 5g.
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| Your second and third paragraph are contradictory.
|
| 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.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| Yeah, I've noticed the same things with roads. They are
| common carriers owned mostly by the government, so they
| never get upgraded. That freeway near my house is always
| clogged.
|
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Things don't improve without competition. Roads have to
| be a monopoly because they take up so much space but we
| should endeavor to have as few monopolies as possible
| because they breed complacency every single time. At
| least here in Chicago the roads are horribly mismanaged
| but we just have to put up with it.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| Last I looked the NASA's capabilities of NASA's space
| telescopes have been improving rapidly. I'm not aware of
| any competition. Roads where I live have improved
| immensely during my lifetime. I'd lay long odds yours
| have too over the decades, despite your claims. All
| without competition. I recently heard all the lead water
| pipes are being replaced in the USA. The water supply
| people have no competition. Open source projects improve
| all the time. They aren't driven by competition.
|
| "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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Im not reading all this so Ill just respond to the first
| paragraph. The space industry was dead in the water
| before spaceX showed up. Minimal innovation and spend
| trending down every year and now spaceX has sparked a
| complete reversal. Competition matters.
|
| > 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.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Feels a lot like whitelabeling. Where you have 200 companies
| selling exactly the same product at slightly different price
| points but where there isn't really any difference in the
| product.
| odo1242 wrote:
| "Common carrier" tends to raise prices for minimum service,
| though. And once the network is built the carrier is just
| going to keep their monopoly. You bet they're never upgrading
| to any new piece of technology until they're legally required
| to.
| timewizard wrote:
| It actually has nefarious benefits. Look up the term
| "HTLINGUAL" or "ECHELON." It's certainly nice for the
| government to have fewer places to shop when destroying our
| privacy.
|
| 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.
| 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.
| odo1242 wrote:
| If regulators do this, it would have to be municipal carriers,
| like the one in that city in Tennessee.
| 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._
| angio wrote:
| Three UK has unlimited 5G data plans.
| 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
| gambiting wrote:
| Sure, but why is my Samsung tumble dryer "enhanced with
| AI" now? You know what it does? You turn it on, it shows
| "optimising with AI" on the screen....to show you the
| most used programme. That's not AI, that's a counter in a
| text file somewhere. But of course everything has to have
| AI now so my tumble dryer now has AI. The market has
| spoken.
| nerdponx wrote:
| And in the meantime the real physical buttons that last
| for millions of presses have been replaced with finicky
| touch buttons that don't work when there's a drop of
| moisture on the screen, and the whole panel dies after 2
| years (only 1 year warranty sorry) and they don't sell
| replacements so you have to buy a new dryer or get a
| janky offbrand replacement off of Ebay and spend an
| afternoon trying to figure out how to install it (if it's
| even possible).
|
| 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.
| thmsths wrote:
| We need to enforce minimum warranty periods per product
| category. We already have a detailed classification of
| every single product for import duty purposes, let's
| reuse that and apply specific warranties. For instance, a
| car or an appliance should have a 5 years warranty. They
| simply consume too much resources to produce, transport
| and recycle to justify a shorter lifespan.
| encom wrote:
| What "programs" does a tumble dryer even need? You press
| the ON button, and it should continue until its contents
| are dry.
| teamonkey wrote:
| A problem when the world's pension funds contain significant
| holdings of US tech stocks
| 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.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| That's not a bad idea, thank you! I always hate having to
| retire perfectly good working hardware just because a spec
| requirement change.
| 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.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| My siblings are much older than I am and when I was 10 my
| sister was starting her relationship with now-husband. One
| time he called our house phone, I picked up, and said "yeah
| sister is home but she's busy at the moment so you can
| spend five minutes talking to me instead"
| ssl-3 wrote:
| It may have been decades ago, but there was a time when it
| did not seem awkward or even unusual to just...call
| someone's house, or to simply stop by.
|
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| unfortunately, these days the inundation of spam from
| hucksters trying to sell you something, or worse, has now
| made everyone extremely distrustful of unprovoked
| interaction.
| graemep wrote:
| There is a lot less of that in IRL interaction than
| online interaction. I find months can go buy without
| anyone knocking on my door.
|
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Not everyone is paranoid.
|
| 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.
| Aeglaecia wrote:
| i yearn for the days of dropping in unannounced , which
| is now a social faux pas
| little_bear wrote:
| I set up an old rotary phone via twilio as a house phone
| for our kids. They just dial 1-9, each number is programmed
| to a different family member. Their cousins also have one,
| so they can call each other whenever they want. It's great
| to also have a phone that just rings in the house, for when
| you don't care about getting a specific person.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| That sounds awesome. Do you have any more info on your
| setup anywhere?
| xattt wrote:
| I'm looking to set up an Asterisk server that takes calls
| over Bluetooth on any paired cell phones inside the house,
| or falls back to a VoIP line if no phones are at home.
|
| Similarly, I find that it's hard to catch family on their
| cell and much easier when I call their home.
| 8note wrote:
| does that not still happen for you?
|
| passing cell phones around still happens for my family
| pjmlp wrote:
| I can vouch that pass the phone around is still a thing in
| southern Europe, or being sundenly dropped into a group
| video call where everyone gathers around the phone to be in
| view.
| derefr wrote:
| Given that it's a house phone, have you tried enabling Wi-Fi
| Calling (VoWiFi) in the carrier settings (if you have that
| option), and then putting the phone in Airplane Mode with wi-
| fi enabled? AFAIK that should be fairly less impactful on
| battery.
|
| (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!)
| chefandy wrote:
| Or just port the number to Magic Jack for $20 and get a
| cordless phone $20 at Target that you have to charge once
| per week if you don't just keep it on the dock, and pay
| like $5/mo or less for service. And you can make/receive
| calls from that number on a mobile phone using their app.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Due to a bunch of reasons combined, I'm stuck on a plan where I
| have 5GB of mobile data per month, and honestly, I never really
| use it up. I stopped browsing so much social media because it's
| slop. I don't watch YouTube on mobile because I prefer to do it
| at home on my TV. I don't stream music because I keep my
| collection on the SD card. Sometimes I listen to the online
| radio but it doesn't use much data anyway. Otherwise I browse
| the news, use navigation, and that's pretty much it.
|
| 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.
| trevithick wrote:
| It won't be a problem for them. They'll find a way to make it
| not enough - disable functionality that people want or need and
| then charge a subscription fee to enable it. And more ads. Easy
| peasy.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I think it's more that mobile transfer speeds is no longer the
| bottleneck. It's the platforms and services people are using.
| If you record a minute video on your phone it ends up as like
| 1GB. But when you send it on a messaging app it gets compressed
| down to 30MB. People would notice and appreciate higher quality
| video. But it's too expensive to host and transfer for the
| service.
| grafporno wrote:
| 5.6 kbit/s is enough for voice
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Rate
| nomel wrote:
| Back in the day, if you knew the secret menu, you could
| change the default vocoder to use on the network. The cheap
| cell company I used defaulted to half-rate. I would set my
| phone to the highest bitrate, with a huge improvement in
| quality, but at the expense of the towers rejecting my calls
| around 25% of the time. When I would call landline phones,
| people would mention how good it sounded.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| For a short while Verizon enabled this on our super
| grandfathered plan. Well not exactly this, it was some more
| modern codec dubbed HD and it sounded so good it was freaky
| and unnerving
| sureIy wrote:
| I don't understand this "good enough" argument. We never really
| needed anything we use daily today. Life was "good enough" 100
| years ago (if you could afford it), should we have stopped?
|
| 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.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > 4K video reaches you only because it's compressed to crap.
|
| 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 "
| sureIy wrote:
| You can't ask someone today to see what they're not used to
| see.
|
| 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.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > Only then they will notice "why do they look blurry and
| flat" when comparing it to an old TV.
|
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| It reminds me back when HDTV was starting to roll out to
| things like cable television. Often cable companies kept
| the standard def versions of the channels on the normal
| channel numbers while the HD version of the channel would
| be that number +500 or +1000 or whatever.
|
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| > 4K video reaches you only because it's compressed to crap.
|
| _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.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Streaming video gets compressed to crap.
|
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| "streaming" was shorthand for "video-on-demand services
| like Netflix".
|
| Does that help?
| vekatimest wrote:
| "Streaming" as most people think of it is "heavily
| compressed video optimized for low bandwidth being piped
| over a network", usually with no user choice of
| resolution, encoding, or playback settings
| pjmlp wrote:
| That is the thing with capitalist exponential growth, it
| doesn't last forever, eventually it flattens out, where new
| goods only get acquired due to existing ones being replaced, or
| newer generations getting to acquire their first products.
|
| Business should learn to earn just good enough to make by.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Business culture of the 50s and 60s was closer to this,
| largely due to how taxes on corporations worked. At least if
| I'm to believe some business historians I follow.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That and there wasn't any VC culture as such.
| 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..
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Is that such a foregone conclusion, though? Many technologies
| have had phases where customers eagerly embrace every improvement
| in some parameter--until a saturation point is reached and
| improvements are ultimately met with a collective shrug.
|
| > 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.
| teleforce wrote:
| I wonder why the poster blatantly changed the original title
| altogether since it's very misleading?
|
| 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):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905644
| Thaxll wrote:
| 4g is more than enough on mobile.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I think what matters a lot more is the peak data rate per cell,
| not per device.
|
| 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.
| tomxor wrote:
| > for those with good 4G connectivity, 5G makes much less of an
| improvement on the mobile experience than advertisers like to
| claim
|
| 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.
| gerdesj wrote:
| OK so someone has noticed that you "only" need 15MBs-1 for a 4K
| stream. Jolly good.
|
| 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.
| reaperman wrote:
| There is no way that "15MBs-1" is more clear than "15MB/s",
| especially in an environment which lacks the ability to give
| text superscript styling.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Sorry mate, an old habit.
|
| Perhaps we should insist on more from formatting from above.
| That's probably a post processing thing for ... gAI 8)
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Old habit from where? Is this a personal preference or a
| lesser known convention?
| batiudrami wrote:
| Pretty common physics convention, uncommon when referring
| to data speeds but common for other things measured over
| time.
| reaperman wrote:
| Someone said physics, it's also very common in
| engineering. But academically and professionally, I've
| only seen it with superscript.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Used that a bunch in physics class in school. Makes it
| much easier to calculate with units since you simply add
| up the exponents of the units instead of having to
| consider the notation around the units.
|
| Doesn't work well in pure text mediums.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Even worse when it's actually 15Mb/s.
| notpushkin wrote:
| 15 Mb*s-1
| forgotTheLast wrote:
| Mb*Hz
| alanfranz wrote:
| Which could be written as 15Mbps with no doubt whatsoever.
| timewizard wrote:
| That's a 1/4 megabit per second. The codec should be around
| 32,00 bytes and thus 256,000 bits. The problem is the Internet
| is not multicast so if I'm on with 8 participants that's 8 *
| 32,000 bytes and our distributed clocks are nowhere near sample
| accurate.
|
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| The first time I learned about UDP multicasting, I thought it
| was incredible, wondering how many streams were out there
| that I could tap into, if only I knew the multicast group,
| and all with such little overhead! Then I tried to send some
| multicast packets to my friend's house. I kept increasing the
| hop limit, thinking I was surely sending my little UDP packet
| around the world at that point. It never made it. :(
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Mbone.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Barring some revolutionary new material where we can get EM
| waves to travel orders of magnitude faster through it over
| current stuff, I don't think we're ever getting around the
| latency problem.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It's usually not a speed of light problem. It's a problem of
| everyone optimizing for bandwidth, not latency, because that
| is the number that products are advertised with. Speed of
| light is 200'000-300'000 km/s in the media used, that should
| not be very noticeable when talking to someone in the same
| country.
| lambdaone wrote:
| See my comments about L4S.
| silisili wrote:
| Oh you'd love Project Genesis.
|
| 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.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Latency is an issue but it's not the biggest one. Most real-
| time protocols can adjust for latency (often using some sort of
| OOB performance measurement port/protocol.) The issue is
| jitter. When your latency varies a lot, it's hard for an
| algorithm to compensate.
| fulafel wrote:
| You can't fix problems caused by network latency by
| adjustments in real time apps like video/audio calls or
| gaming.
|
| Maybe you are thinking of working around bufferbloat?
| ratorx wrote:
| I agree for video + audio calls, but I'm not sure for
| gaming.
|
| 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.
| gscott wrote:
| Secret is to try off alg.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 5G is (at least on paper) _very_ low latency; couple of ms.
| lambdaone wrote:
| It is until you congest it. Then, like all other network
| technologies, performance collapses. You can still force
| traffic through with EDC, buffering, and re-tries, but at
| massive cost to overall network performance.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Cellular technologies can be configured to degrade
| differently to WiFi. The device gets fewer assigned slices,
| so the bandwidth reduces, but latency should remain static.
| xattt wrote:
| How does voice call quality degrade? Does it switch to a
| tinny bit rate?
| ksec wrote:
| It is not on paper. Couple of ms ( 4ms ) is real, except it
| is not normal 5G but specific superset / version of 5G.
|
| 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.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Although the deployments are very limited, wouldn't the 5G
| mmWave coverage, in NFL stadiums for example, need to have
| both New Radio (NR) and Stand Alone (SA)? Or is there some
| bodge for down-rating your mmWave experience to a non-Stand
| Alone network? I understand you won't get SA end-to-end
| calling an endpoint on an LTE network, but, with 5G FWA
| also needing SA to achieve full performance, SA should be
| pretty widespread in the US, or is it?
| ofcrpls wrote:
| US Stadium mmW deployments and showcases at marquee
| sporting events happened well before SA was ever out of
| the labs.
| lozf wrote:
| On that note, the BBC deployed a temporary 5G SA non-
| public-network to broadcast King Charles' Coronation,
| giving over 1Gbps uplink over 1km of the procession route.
| More details are in the award-winning white paper linked
| from this[0] blog post.
|
| [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-05-5g-non-public-
| network-...
| xattt wrote:
| I could not imagine any private news-gathering
| organization to set up a temporary cell network for
| coverage.
| gspr wrote:
| And then comes all the latency _jitter_ inherent in a shared
| resource like 5G, and on top of that shenanigans like
| (transparently) MITM-ing TCP streams on a base station by base
| station base.
| madwolf wrote:
| A decent quality stream is not 256 kilobytes per second (1/4
| megabyte), as you write. You probably meant 256kilobits, which
| is only 32 kilobytes. For speech that's VERY high quality.
| Teams actually uses either G.722 or SILK codec, which is just
| 40kbit/s. That's 5 kilobytes per second.
| wcoenen wrote:
| Tangentially related to the topic of the bandwidth efficiency
| of Teams: screen sharing in Teams has a very low framerate of
| about 3 to 4 fps. It is driving me insane, especially when
| the presenter starts relentlessly scrolling up and down and
| circling things with the mouse cursor.
|
| I think Microsoft took bandwidth efficiency a bit too far
| here.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| As they say: make it work, make it fast, and finally, make it
| cheap...
|
| Time to make it cheap!
| kjellsbells wrote:
| I follow what the operators tell Wall St, because the executives
| have large personal financial stakes in getting it right (modulo
| fraud, but lets trust for now).
|
| 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-...
| aaplok wrote:
| My understanding is that 6G is expected to make use of a good
| decentralised fibre network, with small radio units at the end
| points of this network providing the wireless contact point.
| With interoperability being on the books for 6G, whoever
| controls the fibre network is in for a lot of money (unless the
| article we're commenting on is right).
|
| So it might make sense for operators to focus on developing
| fibre regardless.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Yes, this distributed radio idea is a feature of both 5G and
| 6G. You stick the dumbest, dullest parts of the radio
| electronics up on the tower and trunk them all back over
| fiber to an aggregation/control point a few kms away, and
| then trunk the agg points back to the packet core a few
| hundreds of km away. That needs a lot of fiber to carry the
| backhaul. I dont know if operators are thinking of using this
| fiber to also incidentally deliver broadband service, but
| today that doesnt happen: for one, oftentimes the mobile
| operator doesnt own the fiber, they just lease it.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| I am actually using less mobile data since I have fiber. Of-
| course I can also get gigabyte speeds on my mobile thanks to
| 5G... (This country can be pretty nice although I will deny it
| under torture).
| ijidak wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| satellite2 wrote:
| I find the premise of the article completely out of touch with
| the growth environment of the last 40 years. Of course the median
| consumer don't have an application for more than what the current
| infra can offer, it has consistently been the case since
| broadband inception. The reason is simple, no one will create
| applications designed for the median consumer with requirements
| higher than what the infrastructure can offer as this is
| guaranteed to fail. I thought it was clear that it was a typical
| offer driven market. Reading this article I'm really afraid that
| we will shoot ourselves in the foot if we forget this. A bit like
| what is happening with CPUs.
| consp wrote:
| The providers have alreadyy fixed this (coming soon near you): My
| fixed network operator, instead of finally forcing the fiber
| supplier to honor their contract and fix the final 5m of cabel,
| is pushing me to use a 5g box for fixed internet.
|
| 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!
| fulafel wrote:
| The "fast enough" illusion comes from having consumers adjust for
| years to flaky wireless connections after we had a good period of
| steady broadband performance improvements. If the latter had
| continued at the same rate, we could now rely on home users
| having at least 10-100 Gbit/s bandwidth and could build entirely
| different kidns of applications.
|
| 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.
| srmarm wrote:
| The problem I find is with the backhaul rather than the 5G
| signal. I can still get unreliable internet with a strong 5G
| signal. Even today I find for general internet browsing is good
| 3G is OK and can even support a video stream. My understanding is
| that 4G/5G allow for better network design and the faster
| headline speeds are just a positive for marketing as much as
| anything else.
| nick_name wrote:
| For VoIP applications, one-way mouth-to-ear delay should ideally
| be less than 150 ms for natural conversations [1].
|
| 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...
| munhitsu wrote:
| My personal bugbear is the network coverage. Context: London / UK
| (EE). Yes, I have 5G at home, but it's just one bar and sometimes
| even this one bar will disappear. Yes, there is 5G/4G all around
| the city, but you can't hold an uninterrupted conversation over
| FaceTime Audio while on the overground train or driving. I'll not
| even discuss the underground. However, uninterrupted, low-
| latency, average bandwidth is a hard market and even harder to
| design.
| rsynnott wrote:
| My impression (from pretty limited recent experience) is that
| mobile networks in UK cities (at least London and Manchester)
| are _notably_ worse than in other European cities. I initially
| thought it was just a London thing, and, okay, London's very,
| very big, but was recently in Manchester, which has no such
| excuse, and it was also pretty terrible.
|
| Not sure what's going on there.
| Garvi wrote:
| Most people are shunning the covid topic for various reasons,
| so no one is bringing up the fact that the British torched a
| lot of their 5G infrastructure to "stop the spread of covid".
| There were over 80 such arson incidents, but I'm sure this
| number will go down with time.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I'm guessing that that was probably not in city centres,
| tho.
|
| (Also, where're you getting 'over 80'? From a quick search
| there seem to have been maybe 5 masts damaged/destroyed.)
| Garvi wrote:
| In your search results. It was well over 80 at the time.
| 80 is the number mostly cited nowadays. I see you're down
| to 5 damaged. Good for you.
|
| 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...
| rsynnott wrote:
| Vast majority of those were not destroyed or damaged. I
| think some of the tabloids may have conflated "any
| vandalism or attempted vandalism" with "actually
| damaged", but, well, that's tabloids for you.
|
| > I see you're down to 5 damaged. Good for you.
|
| Who's 'you' in this context?
| Garvi wrote:
| That's not really ambiguous.
|
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, I'm unsure why you're so excited about it.
| Whether it happened or not feels almost irrelevant to me
| (it'd be far from the worst behviour by loonies during
| the pandemic), but there seems to be very little evidence
| that it actually did happen in significant numbers.
|
| 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.)
| zipy124 wrote:
| Yup, I recently travelled to Hong-Kong from the the UK and
| noticed just how much better coverage was in the city. I expect
| poor coverage when I'm in Yorkshire, but there is no excuse for
| just how bad London's coverage is. A lot of it seems to come
| down to which carrier you are on, a quick look at coverage maps
| [1] and you can see what carrier you are on is really important
| in some parts of the country.
|
| [1]:https://www.nperf.com/en/map/GB/-/2012851.Three-
| Mobile/signa...
| mecdu92 wrote:
| For me 3G is still 100% sufficient for my usage. Also the latency
| has not been a problem for me, but jitter is. The good thing
| generally latency is pretty much stable so jitter (which is
| derivative of latency) is minimal. I already don't understand
| what 4G added to me, let alone 5G
| Nyr wrote:
| 3G (which nowadays is 3.5G) is sufficient for you only because
| everyone else is on 4G or 5G.
| lambdaone wrote:
| Wireless networks' latency problems are almost entirely caused by
| contention, buffering, and vast over-booking of bandwidth, where
| raw bandwidth number competition has been over-valued relative to
| actual network application performance.
|
| 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.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| The most data intensive thing you can stream to a device is
| video. For two reasons:
|
| 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.
| baq wrote:
| > There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All
| that remains is more and more precise measurement.
|
| Lord Kelvin, 1897
| brianwawok wrote:
| And carriers limit video bandwidth. I forgot the details, but
| on certain tmobile plans you got capped to 1080p or a lower
| resolution, only on the higher plans can you get whatever your
| phone will support. Let's the user pay less for less fancy
| video, and the risk of stirring up the net neutrality pot.
| ksec wrote:
| I have been arguing since 2020 ( That is before majority of 5G
| being deployed ) that we need 6G not as another 10 - 1000x
| bandwidth / capacity improvement. We have enough within 5G
| roadmap already. 6G should make it cheaper for both devices and
| carrier, more efficient and simplified because current 5G is
| overly complex.
|
| 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.
| kittikitti wrote:
| After reading this, I can't help but point out the misinformation
| about 5G coverage. At least in America, 5G coverage is at best
| around 50% of the country. I distrust the carrier claims and maps
| about their coverage because even in covered areas I'm not able
| to get advertised speeds.
|
| 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.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| My biggest issue isn't the raw speed, it's the quality of the
| connection. What does it matter if it's theoretically so fast if
| you can never get a decent connection? I live in a decent size
| city with supposedly great 5G coverage according to 3rd party
| maps. Yet, I often struggle to load simple images with a brand
| new phone and an unlimited data plan.
|
| It's metro, which is lower-priority, but still.
| mrandish wrote:
| This article is just a mess. It constantly switches contexts
| between speed and data usage. In the paragraph about White House
| task force projections it implies they were wrong but switches
| between speed/data usage context to justify the claim. It also
| bounces between mobile and wired, which are obviously very
| different.
|
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| The issue is that they never offer the actual listed speed. Not
| anywhere close to it. Mobile network is usually worthless in my
| experience these days in most busy cities. I might be waiting a
| good 2 minutes for a pageload if the tower is heavily saturated.
| That is most of my experience in fact. Websites like the mobile
| version of reddit are way too heavy and don't work at all. HN
| works, but the articles it links usually don't unless its an html
| blog post. Social media like instagram buffers terribly for
| crappy connections. Even the old guard youtube doesn't let you
| cache a large portion of the video anymore before playing.
|
| 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.
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