81–90 of 161 posts
5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos Or companies that want to break the residential broadband monopoly in a local area. Personally, I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town. 5G would be a complete success if that happens.
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It's straightforward QoS management. Public service users get absolute priority, even if that means kicking everyone else off the network. After that, voice and SMS get priority, because they're important to users and have very low data rates. IP traffic can have whatever's left on a fair queuing basis. Most operators use deep packet inspection and can perform fairly sophisticated traffic shaping.
That makes some sense. But "kicking people off" is a crappy answer. Especially since you are setting up a constant storm of users trying to reconnect. Easy to see how that will not play well with idle connections.
The network isn't that dumb. The technical details are far beyond the scope of a HN comment, but the network can gracefully deny service to users. Think about what happens if you run out of data allowance or prepaid credit - your phone doesn't frantically spam the network, it just asks for service and is politely told to try again later. If all else fails, you can just de-register all the devices connected to a given cell site and revert them to emergency calls only.
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> I would max out my data cap in 5 minutes Counterargument: there are fundamental reasons for data caps. To provide service at a high speed to lots of people at a reasonable price, edge-case data users must be throttled. Increasing capacity reduces the number of users who must be throttled.
Then they should apply caps or throttling during hours when capacity is a concern and let me download 100 GB of games from Steam between 4 and 7 AM when the Netflix watchers have gone to bed.
Do we need a better protocol for cell data and would this improve throughput and latency?
> 5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos This is important for consumers. When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G? In real world scenarios, the number of people in a cell (due to limited spectrum bandwidth) limits 4G speeds, not protocol maximums. My understanding of 5G is that bandwidth can be used much more efficiently (both by being able to allocate less in idle…
When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G? In a real world scenario, I would max out my data cap in 5 minutes.. Telcos will never give up their guaranteed profits by throttling speeds even with unlimited speed/capacity.
Alternatively, are you suggesting (on a website that is ostensibly about venture capitalism) that the entire foundation of economics and markets is shakey?
I hate when these anti-market socialist/communist type comments pop up. Everyone hates their ISP/cellular provider and mindlessly upvotes nonsense like this. There's zero truth to what you're saying!
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> I would max out my data cap in 5 minutes Counterargument: there are fundamental reasons for data caps. To provide service at a high speed to lots of people at a reasonable price, edge-case data users must be throttled. Increasing capacity reduces the number of users who must be throttled.
Then they should apply caps or throttling during hours when capacity is a concern and let me download 100 GB of games from Steam between 4 and 7 AM when the Netflix watchers have gone to bed.
So it doesn't depend on time of day, but how many other customers are sharing your tower.
https://www.t-mobile.com/customer/mydatausage.html
> Data prioritization will only be noticeable when you access a congested tower and have used over 50GB of data in a particular billing cycle. You will continue to get unlimited high speed data on your smartphone when you aren’t accessing a congested tower. In that way it’s different from data throttling, which slows you down for the remainder of your bill cycle regardless of network conditions, all the time.
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I am ashamed of my country (America) that we as a nation, federally speaking, don't provide the funding needed to empower everyone in rural areas with high speed internet as a right. The Internet powers so many important things today and if we're talking about "thousands of dollars per household" it is totally doable.
Why should those of us who don't choose to live in the country have to subsidize the lifestyle choices of those that do choose to live in the country? And, before you go thinking I'm just the radical conservative, recognize that this cuts both ways. I'm also of the opinion that we shouldn't be subsidizing people's high-carbon lifestyles by making roads free, for example.
I've heard that 5G will be especially beneficial to rural areas, where it will have the bandwidth, speed, and coverage capability to replace broadband, DSL, and satellite. Can someone with industry knowledge confirm whether this is true?
I am ashamed of my country (America) that we as a nation, federally speaking, don't provide the funding needed to empower everyone in rural areas with high speed internet as a right. The Internet powers so many important things today and if we're talking about "thousands of dollars per household" it is totally doable.
It's a nice thought, but where in the budget do you propose we find several tens of billions of dollars?
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Private companies don't own spectrum, they lease it. They pay the government substantial sums of money for the temporary, revocable right to use a chunk of spectrum. Light is already nationalised, the government just chooses to rent it out, partly on the basis of need and partly on a market basis. That allocation system isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than declaring everything from DC to daylight an IS…
Good point about owning vs leasing. But there's also a lot of room between private spectrum rights and the ISM band free-for-all.
Consider the digital television transition - it freed up a substantial amount of spectrum for other users, but it took many years and cost billions of dollars. Broadcast TV and radio is less significant today than it was in 2009, but there are thousands of spectrum user groups who would find it difficult to switch to dynamically managed spectrum, not to mention the potential safety issues.
The RF spectrum is a busy old place. We can carve out little bits here and there, but there just aren't many useful blocks left that aren't already being used by something quite important. Most of those allocations involve co-ordination with the ITU and couldn't be significantly altered without international agreement.
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/january_201...
Hopefully Germany doesn't f*ck this up again...