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No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

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Re: No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

#111

Post by DenisM »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #106
DenisM wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? TMO is faster than Comcast, they just need more capacity.

Because there's only so much wireless spectrum and at some point you saturate the link. Plus interference from other carriers reduces the capacity of the link. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's also not obvious to me that wireless is better in dense areas, especially since the main cost in wired internet is laying the cable in the first place, which is easier to do cost effectively when you have an urban marke…

How can there be interference between different carriers, if each is using their own spectrum?

Re: No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

#112

Post by cc439 »

LyalinDotCom wrote: post #30
dgllghr wrote: post #4

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.

We need that money for more adventures in the middle east and urban welfare though.

Re: No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

#113

Post by oscilloscope »

wlesieutre wrote: post #98
ac29 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's their standard ONE plan: $70/month for 1 line, but much cheaper with more (for four lines its $160/month). Tmobile does have some prepaid plans and older grandfathered plans, but the ONE plan is pretty good, especially at the multi-line rates.

Any carriers do better pricing for a single line with high caps? $840/year on service for a single phone feels crazy to me.

You'd probably need to go with an MVNO plan like PagePlus or Mint SIM.

Re: No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

#114

Post by roenxi »

staplers wrote: post #55
jupp0r wrote: post #12

> 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.

This claim just seems ... unlikely and counter to economics. Prices dropping isn't about business owners deciding they feel nice, it is about the fact that consumers reward cheap producers. If the producers refuse to drop prices when thy can, then the first person to break into the market doing something different will get crazy profits.

I would liken the situation to 2007 in Australia. Sending instant messages was basically free from the telco's perspectives - but they charged 20c or something to the sender. Insane margins.

The first company that I remember challenging that was Apple, who bypassed the whole business and enabled essentially free text messages with iMessage. 10 years later, the markup on using text messages seems to have been completely wiped out. Apple also happened to be the most profitable company in the world through that period.

Sure, iMessage isn't linked directly to the profits, yet somehow the invisible hand seems to have been working.

Re: No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

#115

Post by lunchables »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #109
paco3346 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang, that's good. I've only ever once seen anything over 100 and that was when LTE was brand new. Now I tend to average between 15-50. (This is in West Michigan)

Hi fellow Michigander! I used to have the same on ATT, but recently got T Mobile: https://photos.app.goo.gl/wngQxpA5nqL27ikI3 112 down, 14 up. Unlimited, for less than 3 GB cost at ATT. Honestly don't know why I still give Comcast $25/mo.

Because of the bandwidth limit on your "unlimited" cell service.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16334690/t-mobile-unlimit...

Re: No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

#116

Post by CountSessine »

roenxi wrote: post #114
staplers wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This claim just seems ... unlikely and counter to economics. Prices dropping isn't about business owners deciding they feel nice, it is about the fact that consumers reward cheap producers. If the producers refuse to drop prices when thy can, then the first person to break into the market doing something different will get crazy profits. I would liken the situation to 2007 in Australia. Sending instant messages was b…

If the producers refuse to drop prices when thy can, then the first person to break into the market doing something different will get crazy profits

Market entry is difficult because it's gated by spectrum availability. It's hard for new competitors to offer wireless services. The market for wireless services in most countries is very cozy - it's usually one or two incumbent carriers that are about the same size, own about the same amount of spectrum, and don't work very hard to take market share from each other. I would argue that in a lot of cases, wireless services markets are stuck in a Nash equilibrium.

Smart regulation that might fix this would be to outlaw service contracts and cancellation fees to allow consumers to exploit pricing 'mistakes' (which is how you'd break a Nash equilibrium), and maybe force the carriers to re-bid on their spectrum every 5 years. Unfortunately another common problem with wireless services is regulatory capture - in my country, all the regulators who watch the wireless industry also end up working for it.

Re: No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

#117

Post by Zigurd »

fredliu wrote: post #9

When "4G" was initially commercialized, one could have claimed it has No "Material Difference Between 3G and 4G". HSPA(+) was just faster 3G, already reaching lower end of 4G bandwidth requirement, minimally qualifiable as 4G. But has 4G/LTE eventually turned out to be "one generation" better than 3G? Hell yeah. Same thing here for 4G-5G transition. The real deal is when milimeter wave got massively deployed and comm…

LTE is materially different from 3G, because the protocols are different AND the radios are different. For example, you can make an all-IP network with LTE. You can't do that with 3G. Ironically, though, most phone calls, even on LTE networks, are still 3G circuit-switched phone calls.

Also, this article is correct that there is no similar difference in "5G." There is really no such thing, outside of carrier marketing, as "5G." One could try retrofitting meaning to "5G," like "OK now we'll really do packet switched phone calls" or something like that. But almost all the technologies that come under the heading 5G were foreseen and often standardized when LTE standards were first written.

LTE stands for Long Term Evolution. It's meant to be a durable, evolving set of standards for wireless communication.

Re: No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

#118

Post by jhayward »

wyldfire wrote: post #63
staplers wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cap that they set is a function of their capacity. If we use spectrum more efficiently, prices can drop or caps can go up.

This is an unsupported assertion. Most caps are not sensitive to the environment they are consumed in, whether bandwidth tight or bandwidth plenty.

Re: No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

#119

Post by wlesieutre »

EpicEng wrote: post #110
wlesieutre wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on an old 5GB then throttled plan from T-mobile, the new ones sound pretty good if they didn't cost more than twice as much.

Crazy that you'd have to pay more for 10x the data and higher speeds...

I already have LTE and don’t need 50GB, but their cheapest single line if I were signing up today is $45/month for 4GB.

So yes, I’d expect cell service to get either cheaper or better over time instead of more expensive and worse.

It looks like MintSIM is the cheap option now, they do 5GB for $30 or 10GB for $38.

Re: No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”

#120

Post by jburgess777 »

macintux wrote: post #79
phinnaeus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't we just increase 4G capacity in that case?

I would imagine there are fundamental limitations on the available bandwidth that splitting the traffic across multiple frequencies would alleviate...but that's just speculation.

LTE Advanced already supports a feature called carrier aggregation where your phone can transfer data on multiple different frequencies at the same time to boost its aggregate throughput:

http://www.3gpp.org/technologies/keywords-acronyms/101-carri...

Unfortunately that does not boost the overall capacity available so the higher peaks speeds may not improve the average experience.

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