191–200 of 433 posts
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Competition to cable should improve speed and reduce internet prices. Right now we only have cable in most of the country, when 5g is out we will have three more last-mike providers: ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
oh wait, two of those already are last mile providers in many parts of the country... I'm not sure who exactly they're going to end up completing with.
There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast. I can only assume it's a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)
> at best it's just... faster internet Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet. There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Sil…
Really surprised to see the beating heart of tech that is HN turn into a luddite forum on this occasion. Last week I got upgraded from 4G to 5G for home broadband here in London, UK. It just became commercially available in my area (on Three) As I said in another comment, my average speeds went up from 5-10Mbps to 150-250Mbps and peak ones from 20-25Mbps to 350-400Mbps. It absolutely is the game changer it's advertis…
My 4G connection in Austria has been able to do 120Mbps for years now, sometimes even 180Mbps. What you are seeing might simply be that you are mostly alone in your cell, and not really 5G related. Once more people have a 5G modem, things will get worse for you again.
Of course, with all things in life there are tradeoffs. The tradeoff in this case is a 5G provider infrastructure radio every few hundred feet in urban areas to enable the LoS beamforming with the density factor required.
There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast. I can only assume it's a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)
You can hear some particularly wild assertions like this in the long running commercial throughout the past few episodes of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. They are formatted as conversation between Gladwell and an AT&T exec. It always starts with "what are some things that might be enabled if bandwidth improved and latency decreased" and then just jumps immediately to some Internet of Things utopia.
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> drawing a wire to connect a button to a light How are you getting power to the light?
Wirelessly?
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> at best it's just... faster internet Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet. There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Sil…
pervasive AR/VR is supposed to be the killer app for 5G, but i'm personally not excited about it (à la 3D TV). just give me the lower prices we were promised by the carrier oligopoly in exchange for all those governmental concessions (not holding my breath).
But in that case , downloading the data locally seems like a real option.
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Faster, yes. But "cheaper" is just marketing hype. There's no way the telecom companies are going to pass any potential savings on to any end user. Shareholders will poop a brick if they adopt technology that reduces RPU.
But it will or should bring competition to Comcast and cable companies alike! Who doesn't want more options for home broadband?
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They could, but...they don't want to. So they won't!
You don't know that. Currently consumers don't have the (legal) option, so extrapolating their current behavior to their potential desires is fallacious.
It would be way less convenient, though. So I don't. I don't know which device I'll end up watching on, and don't want to deal with syncing and all that shit.
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Sure, livestreaming videos to VR headsets would be great, and the desirable 2x8k@120hz would require 5G. But if that's the use case then there's no need to hurry with 5G since most applications would be just fine with local wifi and haven't proven significant demand.
You can't necessarily prove demand for even retroactively obvious products without the products sometimes. I don't think VR is something you are extremely likely to do on the go. AR on the other hand has potential.
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Streaming pre-recorded video (e.g. movies) over the radio is wildly inefficient considering flash memory costs peanuts. The primary reason it's done is because we're in desperate need of copyright reform (streaming is being used by the video industry as a form of DRM.)
That's not true though. It's not like the people who currently spend lots of time watching niche videos on YouTube (myself included) would start ordering flash memory with those videos instead if only it wasn't for copyright. The case for movies is a bit stronger, but my family's movie/TV show routine is to figure out what we want to watch last minute, then find that on netflix or crunchyroll or piracy sites and then…
IF you have children, you're probably familiar with the concept of streaming Frozen for the 50th time. If you're using netflix or spotify or similar, you're probably also familiar with the concept of something that was previously available just vanishing because of circumstances outside of your control.
Streaming is mostly a DRM/copyright enforcement tool. The only time streaming is actually adding value is live streaming.