Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the advantages of 5g come from using it as a home connection. My building is locked in with spectrum and I'm limited to 100mbps, despite ATT serving fiber all over town. I can't do anything about it because it would require having a telecom wire our building for their service, the equivalent of moving heaven and earth. If I could pick up a 5g signal I could opt for that instead. It's like suddenly having an o…
Don't higher 5G frequencies have difficulty penetrating buildings?
Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying
351–360 of 433 posts
Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because you’re mostly correct doesn’t mean you’re correct. My watch is always asking me if I’ve fallen and need emergency services (I horse around a lot), but wearable connected medical devices are and will be a big thing. I have lots of friends and family who kill time taking online courses or watching educational videos. This is the same argument badmouthing the Internet because of social media which ignores t…
You can already stream online courses and watch educational videos with 4g... same with wireless medical devices. What does 5g offer that 4g already hasn't?
Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point being made in this thread is that we don't know what improvement it might bring. But making it available will probably spur a lot of innovators to create something amazing and useful that could definitely make your life better.
Okay, that's a very fair statement I can agree to. However, I mostly argue that the taxpayer cost doesn't justify the gains. It's expensive and most counties and cities have to foot the bill or heavily subsidize it. If the telecom company wants to foot the bill. Good on them. No arguement here. If the city has to, go fuck yourselves. Its diminishing returns to a ridiculous level.
Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn’t happen now though - the video doesn’t download comptlelty as fast as possible, it downloads 30 seconds or so ahead of the play position. 4G is perfectly fine for that, but if I Street watching a 40 minute video before I go on the tube, I can’t finish once underground
That is the promise of faster networks. Static content would no longer need 'streaming', as in caching these bit chunks...you would simply get the entire segment, and the device would deliver it to you at the appropriate 'speed'.
If it was line speed, a 40 minute episode would download with current 4g while I was waiting for the next train. On WiFi it would be down before I walked out of range.
Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems the cap is not a universal constant - my cap with Comcast is actually 1024GB. I honestly thought 1024GB was enough that I'd never actually get very close to it, but wow, I don't have a single month under 200GB. In fact, most months are above 500GB for me. Of course not everyone uses 500GB a month. But still, I think the data cap story has to change if 5G is really to compete with other last mile options. Als…
Verizon 5g home is uncapped, 300mps, and $50-$70/mo. That’s already better than Comcast for me - faster and cheaper. Soon as they come to my town I’m switching. But the main point is that competition will drive down prices even more. I don’t think you appreciate what 5g is - it’s not just an improvement over 4g in speed (LTE is already fast enough), it’s a dramatic improvement in the throughput per square mile. The c…
>"A state-of-the-art router"
This is not going to be a sticking point for most people, but I hope they don't try very hard to lock you into some horrible modem-router combo. I don't even trust a Comcast modem, but here we are, with probably no standard 5G home modems... I know I can always just hook another router/AP on top, but it's obviously going to add complexity, especially depending on how head-ass the router portion of the device is, and personally as someone moving towards 10 GbE at home... it just feels like it would be unnecessarily complicated.
>300mps, and $50-$70/mo.
I think it's going to depend a lot on where you live. It would be $70/mo for me because I don't use Verizon phone plans. This does in fact beat my current Comcast plan: 250 Mbps at $96.95/mo. But despite how much I don't really like Comcast, I have to say: my uptime has been impressive, and the reliability of the performance has been good. I would not want to trade this for worse ping/jitter/reliability at a lower cost.
>But the main point is that competition will drive down prices even more.
This would be nice. It would be beneficial to people who don't even care about 5G.
The thing is, I think that it will only practically benefit people in regions where 5G exists. I remember hearing a lot about how fiber would drive down cable prices too, and it may have, but despite promises I pretty much know nobody who actually has fiber home internet.
Since 5G is wireless, perhaps it will have better odds than fiber. Still, it has a lot of challenges to go through. Even 4G is still not available consistently everywhere.
I'm less skeptical now, but I think I'll just wait and see. I'm still more or less ambivalent about the rollouts hitting roadblocks for now, until it's obvious that it really will be transformative. I'm sure mega corporations like Verizon that stand to gain a lot from this don't need our support to push this to market if its actually that big of a deal.
Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but they would download their content once and store it locally instead of repeatedly re-streaming it every time. 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 contro…
Agreed. If 5G delivers as promoted, there is no reason to 'stream' any static content...it simply caches to your flash memory in milliseconds (song) or seconds (movie, Netflix already has mobile downloading). I can see a case for streaming in VR/AR or active content (live/multiplayer,etc), but streaming static content isn't efficient.
Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously sentiments like "640 KB is enough for everyone" hilariously failed to predict the value of faster and more powerful computers. At the same time, most people's personal use of computers hasn't kept up with the capabilities of the high-end of consumer grade products. Lots of people only really use a web browser, and even an ad-infested website will run fine on most 10-20 year old computers. You can say "we do…
> website will run fine on most 10-20 year old computers 20 years ago computers had 32 MB of RAM. So no, they won't run a modern website.
Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Funny how people even on a tech website seems to be stuck at "640 KB is enough for everyone". When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers. Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in yo…
Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny how people even on a tech website seems to be stuck at "640 KB is enough for everyone". When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers. Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in yo…
5G is a step back. It's a short range link, which may be nice in a densely populated area, but is useless outside that. And it already seems like providers are rolling back 4G support in rural areas.