131–140 of 376 posts
>Regulators may also have to consider whether fewer operators may be better for a country, with perhaps only a single underlying fixed and mobile network in many places—just as utilities for electricity, water, gas, and the like are often structured around single (or a limited set of) operators. There are no words to describe how stupid this is.
> Of course, sophisticated representations of entire 3D scenes for large groups of users interacting with one another in-world could conceivably push bandwidth requirements up. But at this point, we’re getting into Matrix-like imagined technologies without any solid evidence to suggest a good 4G or 5G connection wouldn’t meet the tech’s bandwidth demands. Open-world games such as Cyberpunk 2077 already have hours-lon…
Few people play games built for mobiles, let alone looking to play GTA6 on an iPhone
>Regulators may also have to consider whether fewer operators may be better for a country, with perhaps only a single underlying fixed and mobile network in many places—just as utilities for electricity, water, gas, and the like are often structured around single (or a limited set of) operators. There are no words to describe how stupid this is.
The trick is that the entity that owns the wires has to provide/upgrade the network at cost, and anyone has the right to run a telco on top of the network.
This creates competition for things like pricing plans, and financial incentives for the companies operating in the space to compete on their ability to build out / upgrade the network (or to not do that, but provide cheaper service).
>Regulators may also have to consider whether fewer operators may be better for a country, with perhaps only a single underlying fixed and mobile network in many places—just as utilities for electricity, water, gas, and the like are often structured around single (or a limited set of) operators. There are no words to describe how stupid this is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If 5G lived up to everything it was touted to do, you could use a 5G hotspot for your home internet would could be a huge positive in areas that only have one ISP available. However, 5G does not live up to the promises, and your traffic is much more heavily shaped than non-wireless ISPs.
I know many households which use 5G hotspots for home internet. They even do cloud-rendered gaming and remote telework on such setups. Consistently get several hundred megabits at pretty decent latency and jitter. I'd say that lives up to many promises.
I barely get regular cell service in my house from my provider. There's no way I'd get a hotspot for a service that is a must have. Provider's "coverage" maps are such a joke to make them useless.
>Regulators may also have to consider whether fewer operators may be better for a country, with perhaps only a single underlying fixed and mobile network in many places—just as utilities for electricity, water, gas, and the like are often structured around single (or a limited set of) operators. There are no words to describe how stupid this is.
It actually works well in most places. Look up the term “common carrier”. The trick is that the entity that owns the wires has to provide/upgrade the network at cost, and anyone has the right to run a telco on top of the network. This creates competition for things like pricing plans, and financial incentives for the companies operating in the space to compete on their ability to build out / upgrade the network (or t…
Doesn't make much sense to me to abstract away most of the parts where an entity could build up its competitive advantage and then to pretend like healthy competition could be build on top.
Imagine if one entity did all the t-shirt manufacturing globally but then you congratulated yourself for creating a market based on altered colors and what is printed on top of these t-shirts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but I'll take the latency, jitter, and reliability of that fiber over cellular any day.
The reliability is definitely a bigger question, jitter a bit more questionable, but as far as latency goes 5G fixed wireless can be just fine. YMMV, but on a lot of spots around my town it's pretty comparable latency/jitter-wise as my home fiber connection to similar hosts. And connecting home is often <5ms throughout the city.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It actually works well in most places. Look up the term “common carrier”. The trick is that the entity that owns the wires has to provide/upgrade the network at cost, and anyone has the right to run a telco on top of the network. This creates competition for things like pricing plans, and financial incentives for the companies operating in the space to compete on their ability to build out / upgrade the network (or t…
It also makes it more vulnerable to legal, bureaucratic and technical threats. Doesn't make much sense to me to abstract away most of the parts where an entity could build up its competitive advantage and then to pretend like healthy competition could be build on top. Imagine if one entity did all the t-shirt manufacturing globally but then you congratulated yourself for creating a market based on altered colors and…
> Of course, sophisticated representations of entire 3D scenes for large groups of users interacting with one another in-world could conceivably push bandwidth requirements up. But at this point, we’re getting into Matrix-like imagined technologies without any solid evidence to suggest a good 4G or 5G connection wouldn’t meet the tech’s bandwidth demands. Open-world games such as Cyberpunk 2077 already have hours-lon…
The reason why there isn't as much demand for mobile data as they want is because the carriers have horrendously overpriced it, because they want a business model where they get paid more when you use your phone more. Most consumers work around this business model by just... not using mobile data. Either by downloading everything in advance or deliberately avoiding data-hungry things like video streaming. e.g. I have no interest in paying 10 cents to watch a YouTube video when I'm out of the house, so I'm not going to watch YouTube.
There's a very old article that I can't find anymore which predicted the death of satellite phones, airplane phones, and weirdly enough, 3G; because they were built on the idea of taking places that traditionally don't have network connectivity, and then selling connectivity at exorbitant prices, on the hopes that people desperate for connectivity will pay those prices[1]. This doesn't scale. Obviously 3G did not fail, but it didn't fail predominantly because networks got cheaper to access - not because there was a hidden, untapped market of people who were going to spend tens of dollars per megabyte just to not have to hunt for a phone jack to send an e-mail from their laptop[2].
I get the same vibes from 5G. Oh, yes, sure, we can treat 5G like a landline now and just stream massive amounts of data to it with low latency, but that's a scam. The kinds of scenarios they were pitching, like factories running a bunch of sensors off of 5G, were already possible with properly-spec'd Wi-Fi access points[3]. Everyone in 5G thought they could sell us the same network again but for more money.
[0] While I'm ranting about mobile data usage, I would like to point out that either Android's data usage accounting has gotten significantly worse, or Google Fi's carrier accounting is lying, because they're now consistently about 100-200MB out of sync by the end of the month. Didn't have this problem when I was using an LG G7 ThinQ, but my Pixel 8 Pro does this constantly.
[1] Which it called "permanet", in contrast to the "nearernet" strategy of just waiting until you have a cheap connection and sending everything then.
[2] I'm told similar economics are why you can't buy laptops with cellular modems in them. The licensing agreements that cover cellular SEP only require FRAND pricing on phones and tablets, so only phones and tablets can get affordable cell modems, and Qualcomm treats everything else as a permanet play.
[3] Hell, there's even a 5G spec for "license-assisted access", i.e. spilling 5G radio transmissions into the ISM bands that Wi-Fi normally occupies, so it's literally just weirdly shaped Wi-Fi at this point.