In Germany you can pay 35€/mo for 5GB of data traffic (t-mobile) and then enjoy the bandwidth of 5G for a full 40 seconds. It's a total joke.
I just got 50G for 30€/month with O2.
The Disappointment of 5G
131–140 of 175 posts
Re: The Disappointment of 5G
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in an older apartment complex that doesn't have the requisite connections to get wired internet from any mainstream provider in the area, so I have 5G home internet and it's quite good. No less reliable than wired was for me in the past, and I generally get speeds around 600 Gbps down/100 up. EDIT: Mbps, not Gbps
> 600 Gbps down/100 up I think you meant Mbps :)
Ah, you're right. My bad! Edited my original comment.
Re: The Disappointment of 5G
#133It's pretty funny how T-Mobile has rolled out 5G in my small town (with a single cell tower), but have not bothered to upgrade the connection to the tower so we still only get about 2mbps on a good day. Even better is the local ISP offers 10gbps fiber service and has lines directly next to the tower, but the cell tower doesn't use that, and instead has some long range microwave backhaul. I always wonder what the poin…
Which small town has 10G?
The ones that installed municipal fiber. I have some relatives in a small town in Minnesota who have this. Apparently it was some Obama era project and they've quietly had amazing Internet ever since.
Re: The Disappointment of 5G
#134I think one of the biggest improvement points of 5G, which most people don't notice, is that it improves the number of devices that can connect to the local cell tower.
With 4G, you get 100k device connections per 1 sq kilometer.
With 5G, this number becomes 1 million connections per square kilometer.
This is a very big deal if you are in a heavily congested area (big cities, major league sporting events). Also a very big deal to high priority services (like police radios, emergency services, etc), as it goes a long way to ensuring connections are available.
Also goes a long way to delivering on the promise of IoT... with 1 million connections a lot more things become possible.
It's more of an evolutionary tech, than revolutionary. Then again, 5G means means 5th generation... implying the evolutionary process. The average user won't notice it, but its still important nonetheless.
Re: The Disappointment of 5G
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not for surgery per se (which is too high of a risk), but in my country people did manage to find a similar, reasonable use case. They equipped ambulances with high-res cameras and cellular network for senior medical technicians in hospitals to give advices to medical technicians on the ambulance in real-time, which seems like a nice addition.
4G can comfortably stream 1080p video with low latency. What does 5G being to this scenario?
Network slicing allows critical bandwidth usage to be prioritized absolutely. Can’t do that with LTE.
Not to mention the sheer density of connections that can be serviced by a 5G radio over an LTE radio.
Re: The Disappointment of 5G
#136It's curious how telcos' incessant blabbering about 5G ended up getting so deep into people's heads that they began thinking it was something that would make every interaction on their smartphones instantaneous. 5G was never about the individual user. It was always about the grid; the ability to provide expected bandwidth/connectivity to more users at the same time.
Finally someone who understands.
The benefits of 5G have nothing to do with your cellphone service and everything to do with enabling connected infrastructure that could not be done with LTE.
Re: The Disappointment of 5G
#137I never bought into most of the hype and sci-fi applications pitched for 5G, but from my (German) perspective, 5G has delivered a lot. For me it mostly behaves close to WIFI performance. 4G often had way worse latency and the data speed has gone up too. On top of that, contracts with reasonable amount of data (50G/month in my case) have become available. This is quite some benefit. 5G basically enables me to treat mobile data like I used to use land line based data.
Re: The Disappointment of 5G
#138I think one of the biggest improvement points of 5G, which most people don't notice, is that it improves the number of devices that can connect to the local cell tower. With 4G, you get 100k device connections per 1 sq kilometer. With 5G, this number becomes 1 million connections per square kilometer. This is a very big deal if you are in a heavily congested area (big cities, major league sporting events). Also a ver…
5G is definitely a cool tech. What's not cool is how carriers trick people into thinking they're using "5G" (or even "6G") just because their phone's cellular data connection is operating on the 5G spectrum. What's also not cool is how carriers market their 5G services with claims of speeds that a normal user will never achieve. I've never seen a carrier market 5G as a solution for maintaining connections in congested areas, even though that realistically seems to be the big ticket item.
Re: The Disappointment of 5G
#139It's interesting that the hypeness of 5G varies greatly depending on the country.
In the US, where carriers have a say in what phones people use on their networks, the 5G hype seems to have been through the roof.
In UAE where I visit sometimes, both carriers did buy some billboards to advertise their 5G service, and that's it. I have no idea what it's like because I don't have a compatible phone.
In Russia though, where I live most of the time, 5G has never launched and none of the four carriers have any plans to launch it (especially now with all those sanctions). Everyone seems fine with LTE.
Re: The Disappointment of 5G
#140The most depressing part of it for me was all the people pushing the lies and getting a big bonus/promoted. There has been zero downside for them. We really need government to get involved and stop the blatant fraud in marketing.