121–130 of 161 posts
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I'm on an old 5GB then throttled plan from T-mobile, the new ones sound pretty good if they didn't cost more than twice as much.
Crazy that you'd have to pay more for 10x the data and higher speeds...
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They have the capability, but this intersects with local building codes, zoning laws, and safety standards. It also carries increased costs over time. What's being said here is, "We don't foresee any problems with having our current level of capacity provisioning, and we're fine with the level of service we provide."
It's going to be even worse with 5g. 5g is just a spec and the current most likely way to meet that spec is with micro-cells operating at higher frequencies. They will require line of site because higher frequencies can't penetrate obstacles. To get 5g speeds and capacities, you're going to need to put towers everywhere. Smaller towers yes, but many many more of them.
The impact of land topology is seen as so important that the UK Ordnance Survey have got involved with simulating 5G coverage:
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Telecoms have the ability today to add more capacity by increasing tower density.
Yes but what happens when everyone at a stadium tries to get on the same tower? But the fault doesn't completely lie with the telcos. Getting permission to build a tower can take years.
For more dynamic situations (think Glastonbury music festival) the telcos have been deploying mobile cell towers from the back of trucks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_cell_sites
These don't just get used for pop concerts in stadiums but also for disaster response:
http://about.att.com/inside_connections_blog/hurricane_maria
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Because there's only so much wireless spectrum and at some point you saturate the link. Plus interference from other carriers reduces the capacity of the link. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's also not obvious to me that wireless is better in dense areas, especially since the main cost in wired internet is laying the cable in the first place, which is easier to do cost effectively when you have an urban marke…
How can there be interference between different carriers, if each is using their own spectrum?
In either case, the channels still have capacity limits. I'm not saying it's impossible, which is partly why I brought it up in the first place. I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in. The main advantage wires have is you can just run more of them when you reach your capacity (or in some cases you can just change the hardware at either end of the wire to newer technology).
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When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G? In a real world scenario, I would max out my data cap in 5 minutes.. Telcos will never give up their guaranteed profits by throttling speeds even with unlimited speed/capacity.
This claim just seems ... unlikely and counter to economics. Prices dropping isn't about business owners deciding they feel nice, it is about the fact that consumers reward cheap producers. If the producers refuse to drop prices when thy can, then the first person to break into the market doing something different will get crazy profits. I would liken the situation to 2007 in Australia. Sending instant messages was b…
There’s a reason it got bought for 22 billion. The telcos were digging their own walled garden grave.
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Crazy that you'd have to pay more for 10x the data and higher speeds...
I already have LTE and don’t need 50GB, but their cheapest single line if I were signing up today is $45/month for 4GB. So yes, I’d expect cell service to get either cheaper or better over time instead of more expensive and worse. It looks like MintSIM is the cheap option now, they do 5GB for $30 or 10GB for $38.
T-mobile doesn’t even charge for roaming on a whole bunch of countries. In my Australia vacation I didn’t even need to buy a new SIM card. Whatsapp and google maps all the way.
Their speeds also beat Sprint and AT&T. It’s the only carrier I have faith that screws it’s consumers the least.
AT&T has my blood on its hands by charging me $500 for roaming in Canada when I didn’t even cross the border.
T-mobile is a night and day difference.
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I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town Is Comcast really that bad? In my admittedly European experience all the service providers are (dis)functional and greedy pretty much to the same degree, none of them are good guys.
Comcast is the only broadband provider in my town that can deliver a service greater than 2 mbit/sec. AT&T has U-Verse DSLAMS in some corners, but gave up on covering the entire town and the copper network is old and crumbling. There is zero hope of any kind of fiber service showing up. In my personal experience Comcast's service isn't bad, but their rates are tied to the fact that there is no competition. My belief…
Yep. My town has exactly one provider: Comcast. They even negotiated a 50-year exclusive right of way back in the 80s by lining some local politician pockets.
I pay $250/month for internet, landline phone, and basic cable bundle.
This includes about $50 worth of bullshit “copper recovery fees” and the like which are designed to sound like taxes but are really just pure profit for Comcast.
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How can there be interference between different carriers, if each is using their own spectrum?
It depends on whether it is licensed or unlicensed spectrum. Some of the technology is in ISM bands that anyone can use. In either case, the channels still have capacity limits. I'm not saying it's impossible, which is partly why I brought it up in the first place. I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in. The main advantage wires have is you can just run more of them when you reach your capacity (or in…
The bandwidth is only limited per tower, you can easily double the throughput of a given area by doubling the number of cell towers (and reducing power to avoid interference). It’s a lot cheaper to build a new tower than to run new wires to 200 homes (permits and all). On top of that 5g gives 10x bandwidth over 4g in the same band.
> 5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos This is important for consumers. When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G? In real world scenarios, the number of people in a cell (due to limited spectrum bandwidth) limits 4G speeds, not protocol maximums. My understanding of 5G is that bandwidth can be used much more efficiently (both by being able to allocate less in idle…
When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G? In a real world scenario, I would max out my data cap in 5 minutes.. Telcos will never give up their guaranteed profits by throttling speeds even with unlimited speed/capacity.
It is important to note that data is not consumed at the same speed it is downloaded at.
> 5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos This is important for consumers. When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G? In real world scenarios, the number of people in a cell (due to limited spectrum bandwidth) limits 4G speeds, not protocol maximums. My understanding of 5G is that bandwidth can be used much more efficiently (both by being able to allocate less in idle…