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5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

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

#141

Post by kiwijamo »

grahar64 wrote: post #127
pr337h4m wrote: post #88

>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.

In New Zealand we have a single company that owns all the telecommunications wires. It was broken up in the 90's from a service provider because they were a monopoly and abusing their position in the market. Now we have a ton of options of ISPs, but only one company to deal with if there are line faults. BTW the line company is the best to deal with, the ISPs are shit. Same for mobile infrastructure would be great as…

In NZ we also have the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG) which operates over 400 cellular/mobile sites in rural areas for the three mobile carriers, capital funded jointly by the NZ Government and the three mobile carriers (with operational costs shared between the three carriers I believe). For context the individual carriers operate around 2,000 of their own sites in urban areas and most towns in direct competition with each other. It has worked really well for the more rural parts of the country, filling in gaps in state highway coverage as well as providing coverage to smaller towns that would be uneconomical for the individual carriers to cover otherwise. I'm talking towns of a handful of households getting high speed 4G coverage. Really proud of NZ as this sort of thing is unheard of in most other countries.

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

#142

Post by nsteel »

maxsilver wrote: post #27
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 aver…

It's frustrating the author took this falsehood and ran with it all throughout this article.

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

#143

Post by porridgeraisin »

yaantc wrote: post #62
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.

LTE total latency is 20-50 ms, and you compare this to the marketing "air link only" 5G latency of 1 ms. It's apple and oranges ;) 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 t…

Always been interested in this stuff. Where would you recommend a software/math guy learn all this stuff? My end goal is to understand the tech well enough to at least have opinions on it. How wifi works would be great as well if you're aware of any resources for that.

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

#144

Post by Calamityjanitor »

epolanski wrote: post #125

What's the point of more bandwidth when virtually all carriers limit your data plans to 50 to 150 GB/month?

Here in Australia they'll charge more for 5G but limit it to 150mbps. That's slower than LTE's max, no wonder 5G uptake is slow.

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

#145

Post by ClumsyPilot »

hedora wrote: post #133
pr337h4m wrote: post #88

>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…

> This creates competition for things like pricing plans

If the common carrier is doing all the work, what’s the point of the companies on top? What do they add to the system besides cost?

Might as well get rid of them and have a national carrier.

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

#146

Post by agumonkey »

James_K wrote: post #40
fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's any of that have to do with 5G? On 2 bars of 5G right now and I get 650Mbit download speed, it's significantly faster than 4G.

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…

In a similar manner, I got 5G recently and used it as my main link, and i'm still at 150GB downloaded (multiple persons, multiple laptops, regular OS updates, docker pull etc). I'm not even smart about this .. Without constant 4K streaming I realized that my needs will rarely exceed 200GB.

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

#147

Post by viraptor »

> Could maximum data speeds—on mobile devices, at home, at work—be approaching “fast enough” for most people for most purposes?

That seems to be the theme across all consumer electronics as well. For an average person mid phones are good enough, bargain bin laptops are good enough, almost any TV you can buy today is good enough. People may of course desire higher quality and specific segments will have higher needs, but things being enough may be a problem for tech and infra companies in the next decade.

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

#148

Post by hexator »

viraptor wrote: post #147

> Could maximum data speeds—on mobile devices, at home, at work—be approaching “fast enough” for most people for most purposes? That seems to be the theme across all consumer electronics as well. For an average person mid phones are good enough, bargain bin laptops are good enough, almost any TV you can buy today is good enough. People may of course desire higher quality and specific segments will have higher needs,…

A problem for tech companies but not the world.

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

#149

Post by kemitche »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #145
hedora wrote: post #133

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…

> This creates competition for things like pricing plans If the common carrier is doing all the work, what’s the point of the companies on top? What do they add to the system besides cost? Might as well get rid of them and have a national carrier.

The companies on top provide end user customer support, varied pricing models ("unlimited" data vs pay by the GB, etc), and so on. It allows the common carrier to focus solely on the network hardware.

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

#150

Post by vel0city »

fny wrote: post #110
suddenlybananas wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that it should be run as a public service like utilities and should be as cheap as humanly possible. Why not?

Because competition drives innovation. 5G exists as widely as it does because carriers were driven to meet the standard and provide faster service to their customers. This article is essentially arguing innovation is dead in this space and there is no need for bandwidth-related improvements. At the same time, there is no 5G provider without a high-speed cap or throttling for hot spots. What would happen if enough peo…

The T-Mobile 5G Rely fixed-wireless home internet plan offers no caps and no throttling plans.
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