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It's getting pretty reasonable these days, with download speeds reaching 0.5 gbit/sec per link, and latency is acceptable at ~20ms.
The main challenge is the upload speed; pretty much all the ISPs allocate much more spectrum for download rather than upload. If we could improve one thing with future wireless tech, I think upload would be a great candidate.
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
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.
FYI, the air link latency for LTE was given as 4-5 ms. FDD as it's the best here. The 5G improvement to 1ms would require features (URLLC) that nobody implemented and nobody will: too expensive for too niche markets.
The latency in a cellular network is mostly from the core network, not the radio link anymore. Event in 4G.
(telecom engineer, having worked on both 4G and 5G and recently out of the field)
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.
We live in a rural location, so we have redundant 5G/Starlink. It's getting pretty reasonable these days, with download speeds reaching 0.5 gbit/sec per link, and latency is acceptable at ~20ms. The main challenge is the upload speed; pretty much all the ISPs allocate much more spectrum for download rather than upload. If we could improve one thing with future wireless tech, I think upload would be a great candidate.
Honestly after the big investment (and with a lot of drawbacks introduced by it) from 5G, I don't think telecoms have a lot of appetite for massive investments in such a short term again
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The last bit is just stuff I wanted to whine about. I obviously know it is faster, you don't need to explain that concept. I have just never had need of any significant internet speed on my phone. I don't download things, and only sometimes stream video. Most of the time I am just checking emails, or calendars, or something trivial like that. Unless I do some kind of benchmark, I can't notice the difference between 4…
It would matter more if you were in a crowded place, with more users taking up the spectrum. But yeah, as with computer speed, ordinary applications maxed out a while back.
Higher bandwidths are good to have. They're great for rare, exceptional circumstances. 10G internet doesn't make your streaming better, but downloads the latest game much faster. It makes for much less painful transfer of a VM image from a remote datacenter to a local machine. Which is good and bad. The good part is that it makes it easier for the ISPs to provide -- most people won't be filling that 10G pipe, so you…
I have 1Gbps down, and the only application I've found to saturate it is downloads from USENET (and with that I need quite a few connections downloading different chunks simultaneously to achieve it). I have never come remotely close to downloading anything else -- including games -- at 1Gbps. The source side certainly has the available pipe, but most (all?) providers see little upside to allowing one client/connecti…
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> 5G is 1ms I have never seen this. Where do I have to get 5G service to see these latencies?
1ms to the cell tower. Even on fiber Internet there’s still single digit ms latency to servers in the same metro area. Only T-Mobile has deployed 5G SA (standalone). ATT and Verizon use 5G NSA (non standalone) which is a 4G control channel bonded with 5G channels so it has 4G latency.
Lower frequencies have the advantage of longer distances and permeating through obstructions better. I suppose limited bandwidth and considerations of the number of devices coexisting is a limiting factor.
> 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…
They're constantly running promotions "get free smartglases/video game systems/etc if you sign up for gigabit." Turns out that gigabit is still way more than most people need, even if it's 2025 and you spend hours per day online.