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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?

#281

Post by jaredhallen »

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…

I live in a rural area, so I obviously have my bias associated with that. But for me, investment in more coverage would have much more value than investment in higher bandwidth for areas that are already covered.

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

#282

Post by jaredhallen »

PaulHoule wrote: post #262
gerad wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> Rural carriers are averse to maintaining their copper networks, never mind installing fiber.

My rural area is served by an independent telco/ISP. They would agree with the part about maintaining copper, but installing fiber has actually been their solution due to the lower cost of ownership over the long term. I wish more carriers saw it that way.

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

#283

Post by tqi »

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.

imo Telcos have delivered jack shit in terms of "developments" except extract rent from their monopoly positions.

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

#285

Post by browningstreet »

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…

Either way, my 5G iPhone is far less capable of connectivity out in the world than my last one, more so if I go indoors. Even just inside a door.

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

#286

Post by mijoharas »

roxgib wrote: post #50

It wouldn't be so bad if phones were better at switching to the best available signal, they they could use the efficient 5G connection when it's available, but fall back to 4G when the 5G is blocked by a building or something (which I gather is more common due to the high frequencies used in 5G). But they seem to insist on connecting to a crappy 5G signal even if an excellent 4G signal is available. Same with 3G, whi…

Side note: I have the same rant for laptops, wifi and 5ghz/2.4Ghz. If a network is on both most clients will just prefer the 5ghz no matter the signal quality/packet loss.

As a user I'd rather have a working slightly slower connection than a broken faster* one.

*Not actually faster due to packet retransmission time from packet loss

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

#287

Post by mijoharas »

ozim wrote: post #279
roxgib wrote: post #50

It wouldn't be so bad if phones were better at switching to the best available signal, they they could use the efficient 5G connection when it's available, but fall back to 4G when the 5G is blocked by a building or something (which I gather is more common due to the high frequencies used in 5G). But they seem to insist on connecting to a crappy 5G signal even if an excellent 4G signal is available. Same with 3G, whi…

Unfortunately "switching to best available signal" is a really hard problem. More so for a device in motion and on really short waves like Ghz frequencies. I always get annoyed when people nag around about WIFI - because they cannot understand how many things happen in radio communication even if you sit behind the laptop and you have router in other room and you have 10 neighbors having their laptops/routers also ru…

> I always get annoyed when people nag around about WIFI - because they cannot understand how many things happen in radio communication even if you sit behind the laptop and you have router in other room and you have 10 neighbors having their laptops/routers also running. They expect stuff should "just work" and reality unfortunately is much more complicated.

Oops, maybe don't have a look at my comment about then then[0]. :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34569334

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

#288

Post by minton »

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…

I live in a rural area (not a single Starbucks in the county), and in 50% of the town, my phone has 5GUW coverage. I can download apps, playlists, and movies quickly. I recently downloaded UPBGE (430MB) on my iPhone in only a few minutes. This wasn’t possible on LTE and is worth the extra $10 for me.

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

#289

Post by Dylan16807 »

harpratap wrote: post #112
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.

> If someone was willing to pay for the hundreds of tiny cell sites required. We are already doing that, it's called WiFi. 5G SA is nothing but a souped up WiFi signal, and it should be treated as such and not how we have been treating 4G up until this point. Telcos need to change their business model otherwise the tech giants might end up eating their lunch

> 5G SA is nothing but a souped up WiFi signal,

Let's not conflate too many things. Maybe current deployments are in that frequency band, but "5G SA" just means the connection is legitimately 5G.

In theory all 4G frequencies will get converted to 5G, and it will be a moderate improvement. Separately 5G is expanding into the wifi arena and the ultra fast near-line-of-sight arena. But "SA" is not how you tell the difference. It will all be SA eventually.

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

#290

Post by _huayra_ »

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.

I went to tmobile's 5g internet after Comcast refused to negotiate better terms on renewal. I live in a HCOL metro but have yet to be hooked up to the local fiber company, so although this 5g home internet isn't so great (high latency, trash-tier upload speeds), download is good and it is great to have an option against the Comcastopoly.
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