361–370 of 433 posts
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.
The most important information in this piece is the FCC making rules favoring the very telecoms they are supposed to be regulating. Not that anyone familiar with this administration (or that scumbag Pai) is surprised.
No the FCC made rules favoring the public's access to telecom services over NIMBYs. This has happened years ago for ham service.
Earlier 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…
It already is. I've got wireless light buttons in some rooms because it's too expensive to put new wires in the walls.
It doesn't require a lot of bandwidth, though.
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.)
Something that does confuse me though, is the way 5G is being touted as the solution to better home internet in the US. It only going to fast in cities, which are the perfect place for fibre or even wireless ISP using normal WiFi running point-to-point between buildings.
US poor home internet seems to be driven by lack of competition, 5G is one way of increasing competition. But surely trying to legislate local-loop unbundling (which is what happens in most of the world) would be a cheaper quicker way to drive competition?
Coming from the privileged position of living in a place with a cheap unlimited 1Gpbs home internet connection, it’s hard to see what 5G brings to the table, except perhaps a better mobile connection in train stations and concert arenas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I still have songs buffer at times. I'd posit that happens not because your connection is too slow per se, but because your Wifi/LTE coverage is spotty, and speeds on the margins of coverage can be very slow. So the real problem is coverage, not speed.
Exactly. There are lots of places where coverage and bandwidth are still bad, but 5G is actually less suited to solve that problem than 4G, especially given where it's being deployed. They're pushing on the already-high peak instead of filling the massive gaps at the lower end.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. There are lots of places where coverage and bandwidth are still bad, but 5G is actually less suited to solve that problem than 4G, especially given where it's being deployed. They're pushing on the already-high peak instead of filling the massive gaps at the lower end.
Well if you have download more data per second then you can deal with more spottiness. Because the goal is to download something. A 1Gb/s connection for half a second is better than a 100mb/s connection for 5 seconds
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are unable to convince me I should look forward to it. Since we're apparently getting rude, I'll say your argument is nothing but naive dogmatic futurist optimism. Numerous potential harms to users (relating to privacy, not EM bullshit) have been raised in this thread and all you're offering up in return is vague nonsense about cyber-chauffeurs.
Services and products that will utilize more bandwidth aren't being built, because they're not usable without 5G. 5G needs to become ubiquitous before we'd find out what the new applications will be. G5 will also reduce latency a lot, which is another vector that will open new possibilities.
Even as a techie, at some point I want to draw the line.