191–200 of 376 posts
> 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,…
> Consider a very brief history of airspeed in commercial air travel. Passenger aircraft today fly at around 900 kilometers per hour—and have continued to traverse the skies at the same airspeed range for the past five decades. Although supersonic passenger aircraft found a niche from the 1970s through the early 2000s with the Concorde, commercial supersonic transport is no longer available for the mainstream consumer marketplace today.
OK, "Bad Analogy Award of the Year" for that one. Traveling at supersonic speeds had some fundamental problems, primarily being that the energy required to travel at those speeds is so much more than for subsonic aircraft, and thus the price was much higher for supersonic travel, and the problem of sonic booms meant they were forbidden to travel over land. When the Concorde was in service, London to NYC flights were 10-20x more expensive on the Concorde compared to economy class on a conventional jet, meaning the ~4 hours saved flight time was only worth it for the richest (and folks just seeking the novelty of it). There are plenty of people that would still LOVE to fly the Concorde if the price were much cheaper.
That is, the fundamental variable cost of supersonic travel is much higher than for conventional jets (though that may be changing - I saw that pg posted recently that Boom has found a way to get rid of the sonic boom reaching the ground over land), while that's not true for next gen mobile tech, where it's primarily just the upfront investment cost that needs to be recouped.
Currently 5G doesn't even meet their very own 3 objectives namely:
1) Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) - eMBB, 2) Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) - mMTC, 3) Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) - URLLC
The article is just focusing on the first part that's arguably can be met by prior standard the 4G LTE+ if it's only about 1 Gbps bandwidth of the 5G lower range microwave frequency bands or FR1.
For most parts of the world, 5G higher range millimeter waves (mmWave) band or FR2 are not being widely deployed and implemented that can delivered bandwidth much higher than 1 Gbps but then again the wireless transmission ranges and distances are severely limited for mmWave compared to microwave or RF.
One of the notable efforts by 3GPP (5G standards consortium) for objectives part 2 and 3 is the DECT NR+ [1]. It's the first non-cellular 5G standard that can support local mesh wireless networks but it's availability is very limited now although no base stations modifications are required for its usages since it's non-cellular and the backhaul to base stations can be performed by the existing 5G connectivity. I'd imagined that it will be available inside most phones now since the standard already out for several years but it seems only Nordic is interested in the new standard.
The upcoming 6G standards probably need to carry on and focusing on the 2 and 3 objectives of 5G even more so, since it's expected machine to machine (M2M) will surpass the conventional human-to-human (H2H) and even the new (H2M) with the rise of IoT and AI based system for example intelligent transports of (vehicle-to-everything) V2X systems.
[1] DECT NR+: A technical dive into non-cellular 5G (30 comments):
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is yes. But it's not just about speed. The higher speeds drain the battery faster. 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 tho…
I actually miss the concept of house phones. Instead of exclusively person-to-person communication, families would call other families to catch up and sometimes even pass the phone around to talk to the grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc.
> 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,…
Once every few months I'm in a situation where I want to watch YouTube on mobile or connect my laptop to mobile hotspot, but then I think "I don't need to be terminally online", or in worst-case scenario, I just pay a little bit extra for the data I use, but again, it happens extremely rarely. BTW quite often my phone randomly loses connection, but then I think "eh, god is telling me to interact with the physical world for five minutes".
At home though, it's a different situation, I need to have good internet connection. Currently I have 4Gbps both ways, and I'm thinking of changing to a cheaper plan, because I can't see myself benefitting from anything more than 1Gbps.
In any case though, my internet connection situation is definitely "good enough", and I do not need any upgrades.
> 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…
It's not that mobile is fast, it's that home internet is slow. It's the same reason home internet in places like Africa, South Korea and Eastern Europe is faster than in the USA and Western Europe: home internet was built out on old technology (cable/DSL) and never upgraded because (cynically) incumbent monopolies won't allow it or (less cynically) governments don't want to pay to rip up all the roads again.
Also you can deliver well over 1 Gbps over coax or DSL with modern DOCSIS and G.fast respectively. But most countries have started dismantling copper wirelines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Texas electricity is literally less than half the price than the price in my state on average. (14c/kwh vs 34c/kwh) (I live in California) If you want to say its worse, perhaps you should check if its actually worse first.
A big part of the reason that California average electrical price per kWh is high is that a huge portion of the cost is fixed costs, and California's efficiency push has resulted in the lowest lowest per capita electricity usage (and fourth lowest per capita energy usage) in the USA, so the fixed costs are spread over fewer kWh. Conversely, Texas has significantly above average use per capita, spreading the fixed cos…
Further, the LA fires might have also been caused by a downed line so that's going to be a fairly big cost to the power company.