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5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: 5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

#21

Post by throitallaway »

harrall wrote: post #17
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #8

> Transmitting high-end 4K video today requires 15 Mb/s, according to Netflix. Home broadband upgrades from, say, hundreds of Mb/s to 1,000 Mb/s (or 1 Gb/s) typically make little to no noticeable difference for the average end user. What I find fascinating is that in a lot of situations mobile phones are now way faster than wired internet for lots of people. My parents never upgraded their home internet despite there…

5G can be extremely fast. I get 600 MBit over cellular at home. …and we only pay for 500 MBit for my home fiber. (Granted, also 500 Mbit upload.) (T-Mobile, Southern California)

Sure but I'll take the latency, jitter, and reliability of that fiber over cellular any day.

Re: 5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

#24

Post by chris_va »

With 5G, I have to downgrade to LTE constantly to avoid packet loss in urban canyons. Given the even higher frequencies proposed for 6G, I suspect it will be mostly useless.

Now, it's possible that that raw GB/s with unobstructed LoS is the underlying optimization metric driving these standards, but I would assume it's something different (e.g. tower capex per connected user).

Re: 5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

#25

Post by School-Cotton »

jquery wrote: post #16
kfarr wrote: post #5

I was hoping to see some mention of latency. Agree with the premise that for most consumer applications we don’t need much more wireless throughput but latency still seems way worse than Ethernet heyday times in college

I was hoping to see any mention of large file downloads and uploads. Nevermind the article’s ponderous “I can’t imagine any use case for more than 5GB/s”, that’s a use case today where higher speeds above 5GB/s would be helpful. For example, a lot of AAA games are above 100GB, with the largest game in my steam library being over half a terabyte (DCS World). Ideally I wouldn’t have to store these games locally, but I…

I don't think the article ever claimed that nobody would ever want speeds above 5G. But you have to admit that your use case is uncommon. Only a tiny fraction of people has anywhere near 18 TiB stored locally and an even smaller group regularly wants to do cloud backups of all of it. There are various solutions for only backing up the diff since the last backup, rather than uploading the full image.

Re: 5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

#26

Post by dclowd9901 »

James_K wrote: post #18

I got a 5G capable phone a few months back, and I can't say I've noticed a difference from my old one. (Aside from the new phone being more expensive, worse UI, slower, heavier, unwieldy, filled with ads, and constantly prompting me to create a "Samsung account".)

I've found 1-bar 4G LTE to actually be enough to do work on at home, to my surprise (in the occasions that my in-the-ground cable connection up and dies on me). Only thing I don't get is Zoom with that, but it's nice to have a good excuse not to be in a meeting.

Re: 5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

#27

Post by maxsilver »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #8

> Transmitting high-end 4K video today requires 15 Mb/s, according to Netflix. Home broadband upgrades from, say, hundreds of Mb/s to 1,000 Mb/s (or 1 Gb/s) typically make little to no noticeable difference for the average end user. What I find fascinating is that in a lot of situations mobile phones are now way faster than wired internet for lots of people. My parents never upgraded their home internet despite there…

> Transmitting high-end 4K video today requires 15 Mb/s, according to Netflix.

It doesn't really change their argument, but to be fair, Netflix has some of the lowest picture quality of any major streaming service on the market, their version of "high-end 4K" is so heavily compressed, it routinely looks worse than a 15 year old 1080p Blu-Ray.

"High-end" 4K video (assuming HEVC) should really be targeting 30 Mb/s average, with peaks up to 50 Mb/s. Not "15 Mb/s".

Re: 5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

#28

Post by rsynnott »

mbesto wrote: post #13
ianburrell wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LTE latency is 20-50ms, 5G is 1ms, Gigabit Ethernet is less than 1ms, Wifi is 2-3ms. Overall latency is more about distance, 300km is 1ms, number of hops, and response times. With mobile, I bet contention and poor signal are more of an issue. 5G is a noticeable improvement over LTE, and I am not sure they can do much better.

When 5G first rolled out this was absolutely not the case. Not only was it not 1ms, it was like full 1000's of ms to the point where I actively turned off 5G on my iPhone because it was so bad. I can only speculate 5G was so saturated on the initial rollout so it led to congestion and now its stabilized. But latency isn't only affected by distance and hops - congestion matters.

Could be lots of things. I'd go with "your telco was doing something stupid" as a first guess, tbh.

Re: 5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

#29

Post by SR2Z »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #4

Oh boy oh boy I'm excited for the 5G shutdown when the phone I haven't even bought yet will quit working :)

I get the spirit of what you're trying to say (I think) but the truth is that wireless spectrum is an extremely scarce resource. It is bad policy to let inefficient protocols use it without good reason - 2G has the status of "lowest common denominator" and that's probably the only baseline that you should be able to rely on.

There are a ton of other inefficient allocations of spectrum^1, but not all spectrum is suitable for all purposes and the bands for cellular connectivity are highly sought after.

1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/United_S...

Re: 5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

#30

Post by eber »

kfarr wrote: post #5

I was hoping to see some mention of latency. Agree with the premise that for most consumer applications we don’t need much more wireless throughput but latency still seems way worse than Ethernet heyday times in college

I thought they were going to mention L4S or low latency low loss, over 5G which seems to be in the latest 3GPP 5G-Advanced Release 18 (2024) but I have no idea what the rollout of that is.

One of the issues with this 5g vs 6g is the long-term-evolution of it all -- I have no idea when/where/if-at-all I will see improvements on my mobile devices for all the sub-improvements of 5g or if it's only reserved for certain use cases

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