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Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

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Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#241

Post by liability »

godelski wrote: post #219
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The efficiency of flash doesn't matter much if I have to wait for it to physically get to me, vs just opening up my browser.

Alright, so I should just download a significant portion of YouTube and news websites because I may want to watch those videos randomly? Or I have to wait to get home. Unless we're talking about terabytes of storage on my phone, I don't think this is feasible (for all the video and music I could want at a given time). Fact is that streaming is just convenient. Like really convenient. I wish there was more stuff that…

Is there any particular reason why your phone or laptop couldn't opportunistically download all the latest videos from your YouTube subscriptions on WiFi while you sleep?

Maybe you don't subscribe to channels and the system could never anticipate your whims and desires... but I wager it would work great for most users.

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#242

Post by com2kid »

renaudg wrote: post #119

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…

Just ran a speed test, 55Mbps down, 5.5Mbps up.

An increase in upload speed would be a game changer.

That download speed can stream 4k w/o issue. The upload speed could use some improvements, I can imagine better scenarios if I could stream high res video off to a cloud AI processing system!

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#243

Post by liability »

majormajor wrote: post #198
liability wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know that. Currently consumers don't have the (legal) option, so extrapolating their current behavior to their potential desires is fallacious.

I could've been doing this with iTunes for TV shows for years. 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.

> iTunes for TV shows for years.

Which is way more expensive than streaming services. Prohibitively so for wide swaths of the general population who don't have tech industry salaries. The cost of one TV show from iTunes can approach the price of several months of Netflix.

With copyright reform, that needn't be the case.

(Note that for many consumers, Netflix is already considered too expensive. Several people sharing the cost of one account is pretty common from what I've seen.)

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#244

Post by jorblumesea »

m12k wrote: post #240
jorblumesea wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You can't see how Russia benefits from sowing disinformation and confusion about a possible next-gen technology? One that has the possibility of adding hundreds of billions of dollars and high skilled jobs to the US workforce?

I just finished the NYT article and it claims the move is because Russia doesn't have a 5G play, so they try to undermine everyone else's. I guess that might hold some credence.

Even if they did have a play, they'd be smart to sow disinformation and slow down or stop adoption of next-gen technologies, as those represent huge economic boons and advantages to the countries that adopt them first.

Similar to 4G, the first to 5G will create companies and startups taking advantage of the new infrastructure. As countries onboard onto 5G, these well placed companies will out compete any native companies. This is what happened with 4G in the US, and why US tech has dominated the space in the past decade.

Russia's goal is to weaken the West in any way it can.

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#245

Post by com2kid »

xoa wrote: post #40
jchw wrote: post #2

I’m ambivalent. Cellphone internet is already faster than cable internet for many people. Even if the 5g health risk is complete bunk, do we really need 5g? Usually when I want internet that fast I want it at home or work. As such, I am a bit more excited for Wifi 6.

I'll admit I've quite understood this ambivalence about WAN links, and particularly not on tech sites. Consider: would you find no different on your LAN going back to 10Base-T, or being restricted exclusively to 802.11a-1999 for all networking (no wired at all) in a spectrum crowded environment, and thus with double-digit latency at all times? Or is gigabit or even higher actually useful in a variety of ways? How abo…

> For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections.

A repeated dream. In reality thin clients suck even on a LAN. Remoting from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini sitting right next to it had unacceptable latency.

Which is rather confusing given that modern machines can encode video at over 60fps....

Same OS to same OS is better, but not great. Every few years someone comes along and tries to deploy thin clients, and it never takes off en masse, good enough for a few limited scenarios though.

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#246

Post by petra »

apcragg wrote: post #105
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you work in the industry?

Not for the big telecomm's but I design parts of the radios and DSP algorithms implementing the major cellular technologies.

Deploying 5G mm-wave "everywhere" seem like a huge expense.

How will telecomm's justify that ? what do you see as the big use cases ?

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#247

Post by cyphar »

kube-system wrote: post #109
DenisM wrote: post #4

I remember the abundant “cell phones cause cancer” and “WiFi is like a microwave” scares 20 years ago, they all ended when people got their hands on nice and shiny touchscreen smartphones.

Not to imply that you are, but I prefer to embrace nuance rather than neglect it myself by dismissing misunderstandings of it. WiFi is a lot like a microwave, just with some important differences. WiFi is just modulated and about 1/1000th the power. There are real reasons why SAR regulations exist. I blame the misunderstanding squarely on journalists who picked up early stories about SAR limit studies and did an awfu…

Microwaves operate using standing waves (that's what does the cooking). Wi-Fi doesn't.

People who say "WiFi is like a microwave" aren't trying to educate other people about the EM spectrum. They're trying to fearmonger by saying "WiFi is cooking you like a microwave".

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#248

Post by jorblumesea »

harshreality wrote: post #214
jorblumesea wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear that the widespread adoption of faster mobile technologies has enabled technology companies like Facebook, Google, Youtube, Netflix etc to thrive. Investment in infrastructure has unforseen benefits that only seem obvious in hindsight. America basically "owned" the 4G world and reaped the benefits. Not doing this for 5G will basically just hand hundreds of billions of dollars in jobs and growth to C…

Netflix, youtube, and facebook can stream fine on lower bandwidth links. The economic value of high resolution mobile streaming seems rather low, at best. Most likely negative, because most content is just time-wasting, and because content that actually matters tends to not depend so much on resolution beyond SD or basic HD (720p). Other potential applications, as mentioned elsewhere, tend to run into 5G not being fa…

> Netflix, youtube, and facebook can stream fine on lower bandwidth links.

They really cannot, at least with quality levels that make people actually want to watch them.

> The economic value of high resolution mobile streaming seems rather low, at best.

Many multi-billion dollar companies and streaming services would disagree. As would many investors.

> Most likely negative, because most content is just time-wasting, and because content that actually matters tends to not depend so much on resolution beyond SD or basic HD (720p)

This is entirely your opinion about what content you prefer. Once again, there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars that says otherwise.

> 5G might be better than 4G for mobile side energy use, but unless it's close to 802.11ax levels and mobile providers offer cheap bandwidth-limited service plans, I don't see why anyone would use it for IoT applications.

This is not the problem 5G solves. It solves latency, availability and throughput.

> I'm sure new businesses will capitalize on increased bandwidth from 5G, but I'm doubtful that it will benefit society.

You are doubtful that the creation of numerous companies, highly paid jobs and adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the US economy won't benefit society?

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#249

Post by asdff »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #58
_bxg1 wrote: post #33

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…

It's a real shame internet is controlled by telecoms

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#250

Post by liability »

godelski wrote: post #221
liability wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People binge-watching a TV series could certainly anticipate their near-future media demands and download the series through means other than cellular networks. Downloading video and storing it on flash memory could eliminate a huge chunk of the demand for streamed video.

Streaming is just downloading in order. Data downloads while I watch/listen. That's super convenient. That's the big advantage of streaming. Keeping that data or dumping that data is a different issue.

Streaming is downloading, but without the timeshifting properties you get from storing the media to flash. With properly downloadable media, you can download in the evening, on your wired residential connection, and watch during the day when you only have a cellular connection.
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