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Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#261

Post by zinekeller »

distances wrote: post #205
kenhwang wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The utilities need owner approval to initially run the lines into the building and into every unit. You're welcome to get your own contract, but if they don't have permission by the owner to dig into the ground and drill into walls to run the lines to you and a place to put meters and equipment, you're not getting the internet/gas.

Sure, but the gp clearly didn't mean that as they specifically mentioned the contract and the connection separately: > everyone rents and you are dependent on landlords for your internet contract as well as your actual ethernet connection

Unlike in sane countries where the government has either an independent provider (like Australia's NBN) or mandates the previous monopoly to open up their lines to competition (like UK's BT's Openreach or Japan's NTT), there is no equivalent concept in the US. For calls, sure, there is a concept of an incumbent local exchange carrier, but there's no such thing as an ILEC for internet services.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#262

Post by PaulHoule »

gerad wrote: post #254
kjellsbells wrote: post #45

Having the 5G logo on your phone doesnt necessarily mean your phone is speaking 5G. It's...complicated. - Most US operators do not have ubiquitous 5G radio coverage, so, they do what is called 5G NSA where your traffic ultimately ends up veing processed by the 4G core infrastructure that they have. Which is already overloaded and a bit creaky. - Some operators can do real 5G, "5G SA", where the whole flow end to end…

Here in the US I think the killer app is breaking the local cable company’s monopoly on providing high speed internet to the home.

Somewhat, but the carriers are kinda half-hearted about it, particularly when they talk with investors. FWA users use a lot of gigabytes per dollar that they spend and if the carrier thinks in terms of that metric it may see it as bad for business, possibly cannibalizing more expensive mobile plans.

FWA is a spotty solution anyway. Economically it works best in the ‘WebPass model’ where you server a whole apartment building in an urban area that has a clear line of site.

Rural carriers are averse to maintaining their copper networks, never mind installing fiber. If you are fortunate you have a line of site to a tower but probably you are less fortunate. When you head south from Ithaca, NY you encounter a dissected plateau at an altitude around 2000 feet. There is no ‘highest hill’. A tower on one ridge can sorta see into the immediately adjacent valleys (though the sides may be steep enough to still make shadows) and under 1 GHz maybe into the next valleys over. Heading South down to Alabama the mountains get bigger but it is basically the same story, where FWA goes to die. It is delusional that it could be cost-effective or even effective universally because in a lot of cases there isn’t even a road or a power line at the top of the ridge.

FWA really does create competition for people where geography is favorable but it is no answer for the many people still stuck with slow DSL.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#263

Post by PaulHoule »

yawnxyz wrote: post #242
discordance wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Australia 5G is awesome: https://imgur.com/gallery/BFTTMRS Measurement was taken a decent distance from the city in the suburbs.

Whoa what service are you using? I’m on Vodafone 300gb plan and it’s always one bar on 5g. I rarely see speeds that fast too; downloading a game pass game is usually 1MB/s for me

This is a story I see a lot in the US. Two customers, even with the same carrier, seem to get very different coverage. I thought circa 2010 that I got the same coverage with a prepaid as a postpaid phone but starting around 2018 I would go to New York City and have trouble w/ my prepaid phone.

There seems to be some phone and plan that gets better coverage than another but it is by no means documented. Maybe it just ‘works better the more money you spend’ but without any explanation of what the rules are I am afraid of spending a lot and still getting bad coverage.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#264

Post by topicseed »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #235
mackman wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a team that prototyped the “watch the game on your phone at the game” using WiFi. Nobody used it. That isn’t going to be the killer app either.

What if players had first-person camera streams available, and you could choose which stream to watch on your phone?

Works great in F1, would be fun in soccer, football, or even basketball.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#265

Post by PaulHoule »

spookthesunset wrote: post #96
kjellsbells wrote: post #45

Having the 5G logo on your phone doesnt necessarily mean your phone is speaking 5G. It's...complicated. - Most US operators do not have ubiquitous 5G radio coverage, so, they do what is called 5G NSA where your traffic ultimately ends up veing processed by the 4G core infrastructure that they have. Which is already overloaded and a bit creaky. - Some operators can do real 5G, "5G SA", where the whole flow end to end…

The “real” 5g isn’t for your phone, it is to replace your home internet. For that, you want fast and low latency and that means a dense amount of cell towers. The fact that “real 5g” has a shorter range is actually a positive. It means you can make your shit super dense.

There are two kinds of 5G.

One of them is the mm wave which is very high performance over line of site, makes the most of diffraction so it often does well near-line-of-site, then quits working. It is particularly unsuited for handsets because your hand and other body parts can block the antenna. This is a great answer for FWA in favorable geography.

The other 5G is similar to 4G but a bit better performing and my understanding it is actually a bit cheaper for the carrier. 4G infrastructure manages a higher level of spectral efficiency than people thought possible before because of the very close coordination between towers, they actually pipe the baseband signal (around 100 MHz bandwidth) by fiber optic to a central location and process the signals collectively. My understanding is that 5G has a system for coordinating the towers that is still efficient, but not so crazy expensive. So it is ironic that carriers market 5G as something that costs consumers more money because the real driver for it, from the telco perspective, is lower costs.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#266

Post by ip26 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #198
Animats wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Telcos desperately need a killer app or use case that drives 5G adoption. They haven't got one. * Self driving cars? No. * Internet of Things? No. * Metaverse? No. * Remote surgical operations? You gotta be kidding. Everyone in a big stadium can watch the show on their phones, though. If someone was willing to pay for the hundreds of tiny cell sites required.

I thought the killer app would be to replace at home wired broadband with 5G wireless. I still think it looks compelling.

Trouble is, as far as I can tell, at 5G frequencies you need micro stations all over the place. If your suburban street has 10 houses and needs 5 stations (with fiber runs to each) to offer mmWave to everyone, it’s basically just the same thing as home broadband yet more expensive.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#267

Post by causality0 »

My experience is the same as yours. If I leave 5G turned on my phone insists on staying connected to a 5G network even when that speed is less than two megabits per second in an area where 4G speeds exceed 50 megabits. It takes it the better part of a minute with no signal to fall back to LTE, which means constant connectivity loss when driving. Every six months or so I turn 5G back on to see if coverage has improved but it never has.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#268

Post by lotsofpulp »

cycomanic wrote: post #85
optymizer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked with telcos in multiple countries, I can assure you, we cannot have a lot of nice things because of them.

While I am not big on defending telcos, let's not forget that they are under enormous price pressure (for the fibre backbone essentially they need to double available throughput every 18 month or so without increasing cost) at the same time it's the software/service companies who really made enormous profits based on these developments, while data capacity is becoming more and more a commodity.

That is because data capacity is a commodity, and should earn profit margins of near zero, like any utility does.

Also, no one asked ATT to lose billions of dollars by buying Time Warner HBO and DirecTV. Or Verizon with Yahoo.

But they wanted to chase that Comcast vertical monopoly dream. And it will never yield any utility for customers.

It should all be a utility, like water, gas, and electric. And do the one job, installing pipes (and upgrading them) to people’s houses and delivering the goods.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#269

Post by Enginerrrd »

kenhwang wrote: post #193
distances wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a renter be dependent on the landlord for Internet? I rent (non-US) and have my own Internet, electricity, and gas contracts.

The utilities need owner approval to initially run the lines into the building and into every unit. You're welcome to get your own contract, but if they don't have permission by the owner to dig into the ground and drill into walls to run the lines to you and a place to put meters and equipment, you're not getting the internet/gas.

That's interesting, this is largely routine on the west coast, at least for residential renters. All without owner permission.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#270

Post by 51Cards »

martinald wrote: post #250
ninjha wrote: post #9

In my day to day, 5G uses more battery, has similar speeds to LTE, and is less reliable than LTE... I just go into settings and turn off 5G. Occasionally I'm at the airport (or someplace with the "real" wideband 5G) and I want to download a movie quickly. At that point I turn on 5G and get 2 Gbit down, which is convenient!

The actual real benefit of 5G for me is beating very congested LTE towers at peak times. There are a lot of spots where the 4G mast (especially on LTE800) is completely congested, but 5G is much* better, though definitely starting to see 5G congestion in places now.

In time as people upgrade their phones the balance should shift then, with the 4G spectrum becoming less congested. Personally I don't find the speed increase of 5G to be a need as I never found 4G to be slow. I'll be quite content to lock to the 4G bands if they open up more.
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