161–170 of 376 posts
“Hey, this isn’t actually supposed to be used to get work done. Keep doing simple phone stuff!“
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A problem for tech companies but not the world.
Get ready to be sold the exact same thing you already own, just "with AI" now.
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Is it really a technical capacity issue, or just market segmentation? Usually, it's possible to get so-called business service with higher upload bandwidth, even at residential addresses.
That's exactly what he said, they want you to pay for business accounts.
In San Francisco monkeybrains is the best ISP I’ve ever used to date; symmetric up/down, great ping and cheaper than any other provider
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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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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.
In a professional context, nobody knows it all in details. There are specializations: core network and RAN, and inside RAN protocol stack vs PHY, and in PHY algos vs implementation, etc.
You can see all the cellular specs (they're public) from there: https://www.3gpp.org/specifications-technologies/specificati...
5G (or NR) is the series 38 at the bottom. Direct access: https://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/38_series
It's a lot ;) But a readable introduction is the 38.300 spec, and the latest edition for the first 5G release (R15, or "f") is this one: https://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/38_series/38.300/3830...
It's about as readable as it can get. The PHY part is pretty awful by comparison. If you have a PHY interest, you'll need to look for technical books as the specs are quite hermetic (but it's not my field either).
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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…
And for some things it's just too much duplicated effort and wasted resources, T-shirts are one thing, because we don't really need those, but train lines and utilities etc. are another. I can't tell you where the "boundary" is, but if every electric company had to lay their own cables, there would only be one or two.
And in the opinion of many including mine, for example the Deutsche Bundesbahn got worse when it got privatized. They kinda exploited the fact that after reunification, there were two state railroad systems obviously, and instead of merging them into one state railroad system, it was privatized, but because it made more money for some, but not because it benefits the public, the customers. Of course the reasoning was the usual neoliberal spiel, "saving money" and "smaller government" but then that money just ends up not really making things better to the degree privatization made them worse.
Obviously not everything should be state run, far from it. But privatizing everything is a cure actually even worse than the disease, since state-run sinks and swims with how much say the people have, whereas a 100% privatized world just sinks into the abyss.
We need the freedom to do more on our mainstream pocketable devices, my hotspot for my laptop will be always throttled down to 3G, as if to say “Hey, this isn’t actually supposed to be used to get work done. Keep doing simple phone stuff!“
> 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,…
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The T-Mobile 5G Rely fixed-wireless home internet plan offers no caps and no throttling plans.
It does past a terabyte.
> During congestion, customers on this plan may notice speeds lower than other customers and further reduction if using >1.2TB/mo., due to data prioritization
So not really a cap, but a deprioritization. A few friends using it around me routinely use >2TB/mo and haven't experienced degradation, I guess there's not excessive congestion. YMMV.
> 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,…
I say this because we currently use an old 2014 phone as a house phone for the family. It's set to 2G to take calls, and switches to 4g for the actual voice call. We only have to charge it once every 2-3 weeks, if not longer. (Old Samsung phones also had Ultra Power Saving mode which helps with that)
2G is being shutdown though. Once that happens and it's forced into 4G all the time, we'll have to charge it more often. And that sucks. There isn't a single new phone on the market that lasts as long as this old phone with an old battery.
The same principle is why I have my modern personal phone set to 4G instead of 5G. The energy savings are very noticeable.