Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

5G Just Got Weird

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 300 posts

Re: 5G Just Got Weird

#231

Post by cromwellian »

everdrive wrote: post #205
cromwellian wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's more than that. There was no YouTube in 2000. Web video for wired connections was shitty. MPEG-2 was the codec dujour. Progressive Networks/Real Networks was people's conception of online video. Netflix was shipping DVDs by snail mail. If the iPhone existed in 2000, there still couldn't have been a TikTok. AR glasses for example, could totally upend all of this and require 5G low latency, and fast accurate p…

>Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? On a webpage without 80mb of javascript, it's quite useful.

At 135kbps, you're talking 18 seconds to load the average HTML webpage, which was 300k in 2007. My guess is, your memory of how speedy and useful Edge was, is like those fond nostalgia memories people had about how fast their FidoNet/WWIV BBSes loaded over 300/1200 baud.

Re: 5G Just Got Weird

#232

Post by stephen_g »

shoguning wrote: post #216
cromwellian wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 2000, I was working at OracleMobile, attened 3GPP/Mobile Congress/etc meetings, and there was a similar discussion around 3g. People were like "what's the killer app"? At the time, most phones were WML/WAP and Blackberry-like SMS/MMS/Email experiences. People speculated "maybe music or video", but it was all very vague, no one imagined the smartphone revolution that brought all of these services, like Uber. I'…

The latency is only reduced from tower to phone right? The tower still has to ping the rest of the network to find the service you were requesting to in the first place. If total latency ~ 500 ms, phone-to-tower is maybe 50ms of that in 4G. Even if it's down to ~1ms, total latency is only down 10%. Not a networking expert so maybe I'm missing something here. Perhaps better use of CDNs could make this much faster?

I would expect the last mile to generally be one of the larger contributors to latency unless you're traversing very long distances (i.e. cross country, undersea cables, etc.). For example, just looking now I get 23ms to a close speedtest server on my LTE and 3ms to the same server on my work's fibre connection. Going a larger distance (~1000km to the next large capital city) it's 43ms vs 18ms on the fibre. That's quite a significant difference, but not as bad as it used to be (3G could have hundreds of milliseconds of latency from device to tower).

Re: 5G Just Got Weird

#233

Post by jquery »

Latty wrote: post #23
smitty1e wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a Periscope anecdote, Scott Adams of Dilbert fame went on about 5G bringing enrichment via eyewear such that profiles of people you meet pop up, and any other VR variation you can imagine. The geek can groove on turning cities into the holodeck on the Enterprise. But one surmises that the appeal of gadget-free living in the country will grow, also. Seems hard to derive a good balance point with "enough" technology…

Scott Adams seems to be pretty divorced from reality, so I would take his ideas with a pinch of salt. (To clarify: He's also claimed that if Biden wins the election, Republicans will literally be hunted in the streets, and I think regardless of your political views that is pretty clearly not actually going to happen, so his ability to predict future events with any accuracy isn't something I'd trust. Source: https://…

In the same thread Scott Adams says all of us will be dead from climate change in 10 years. Scott Adams likes to pull Twitter pranks so I would take these tweets with grain of salts without knowing the larger context.

Re: 5G Just Got Weird

#234

Post by HALtheWise »

shoguning wrote: post #216
cromwellian wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 2000, I was working at OracleMobile, attened 3GPP/Mobile Congress/etc meetings, and there was a similar discussion around 3g. People were like "what's the killer app"? At the time, most phones were WML/WAP and Blackberry-like SMS/MMS/Email experiences. People speculated "maybe music or video", but it was all very vague, no one imagined the smartphone revolution that brought all of these services, like Uber. I'…

The latency is only reduced from tower to phone right? The tower still has to ping the rest of the network to find the service you were requesting to in the first place. If total latency ~ 500 ms, phone-to-tower is maybe 50ms of that in 4G. Even if it's down to ~1ms, total latency is only down 10%. Not a networking expert so maybe I'm missing something here. Perhaps better use of CDNs could make this much faster?

It seems to me like Uber doesn't depend on high bandwidth or sub-second latency.

Re: 5G Just Got Weird

#235

Post by kalleboo »

randomdata wrote: post #225
cromwellian wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's more than that. There was no YouTube in 2000. Web video for wired connections was shitty. MPEG-2 was the codec dujour. Progressive Networks/Real Networks was people's conception of online video. Netflix was shipping DVDs by snail mail. If the iPhone existed in 2000, there still couldn't have been a TikTok. AR glasses for example, could totally upend all of this and require 5G low latency, and fast accurate p…

> Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? It was sufficient to do most things, even streaming online radio. The biggest downsides were that latency was high and the annoying speaker buzz problem. 3G was a big step up. I never felt like LTE came as much of an upgrade over 3G, from there user point of view, so I question it being the defining technology for smartphones.

Yeah, the early LTE networks were not much faster than the mature HSDPA+ networks from the end user point of view. But it was certainly a necessary evolution to give the networks enough capacity to handle the ever-increasing data demands of users, 3G would not have held up for much longer.

Re: 5G Just Got Weird

#236

Post by scarface74 »

eclipxe wrote: post #226
scarface74 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sprint had unlimited 3G around 2003 called SprintVision. They also offered a service where you could stream 10-15 live cable TV channels. By 2005, this phone ( https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-mm-a900-sprint-review/ ) could play video at around 15-20fps. These are the services that Sprint offered over 3G on feature phones. https://www.sprint.com/cdma/assets/pdfs/services_guides/pers...

MobiTV!

Thank You! I couldn’t remember the name. It came out in 2003.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobiTV

On my first phone with Sprint Vision, it did 1 FPS.

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-sph-a840-sprint-review/

Re: 5G Just Got Weird

#237

Post by kalleboo »

selectodude wrote: post #151
dylan604 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have the 5G towers connect to Starlink rather than running the cabling to them.

That doesn't really fix the total bandwidth capacity issue though.

I wonder if a tower with a larger array of Starlink antennas could connect to multiple satellites and get more performance than the pizzabox-sized consumer receivers

Re: 5G Just Got Weird

#238

Post by giantrobot »

cromwellian wrote: post #178
giantrobot wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection? Very. Lots of sites had mobile versions of pages by the iPhone's release. These were originally intended for Blazor and pocket IE but they worked fine for an iPhone on EDGE. I could do e-mail just fine on EDGE as well.

Not for me. I've owned every smartphone and high end feature phone since the 90s. A Blackberry was still better than an iPhone + IMAP + EDGE in terms of subjective speed. Mobile websites sucked hard on the iPhone. (Don't even get me started on Pocket IE and the IPAQ). Quite literally my day job was Windows CE development, I was on the W3C XHTML/CSS/XForms committees, I worked on implementation of those specs on HW be…

I wonder what product you were using labeled "iPhone". Mobile Safari was head and shoulders above other smartphone browsers. It handled mobile sites of the day without any issues in my experience. It was nothing like other mobile browsers.

I went through just about every family of PDA and smartphone before the iPhone came out. Their web browsing universally sucked. The iPhone was a huge leap beyond other mobile browsers. The whole idea of clicking links being agonizing is either fiction or hyperbole.

It's funny you claim YouTube and Facebook would be terrible on EDGE when both services had mobile apps in the days of EDGE, YouTube even shipped on the iPhone. That isn't to say they aren't better served by higher bandwidth cellular service but they existed and functioned in the past.

High bandwidth connections are expected today and plenty of services would be unworkable without them. At the same time many web services are downright wasteful in their design and implementation.

Increased end-user bandwidth has just been eaten up by lazier or stupider designs and implementations. I fully expect these trends to continue as 5G rolls out. No one will actually do anything interesting because sites will load twice the ads (in 4K) and quadruple the size of their JavaScript bundles.

Re: 5G Just Got Weird

#239

Post by quantified »

thinkingkong wrote: post #11

5G doesnt seem like its enabling anything fundamentally new. The talk of any ”killer app” based on having more throughput or on these optimizations always feels like demand generation and slightly inauthentic. Are there any technologies enabled by these techniques that are not possible today?

Sidelinking seems to open up some possibilities for converging WiFi/local and base-tower networks. Along with any number of security issues...

I think the question is not “technologies enabled” but rather “useful applications enabled”. We’ll find out, I wouldn’t count it out. I would expect it to be enormously expensive if it hits, get people s/addicted/accustomed to it and they’ll pay $500/month.

Re: 5G Just Got Weird

#240

Post by Spooky23 »

balola wrote: post #230
Spooky23 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latency sensitive thing is supposed to be smart cars and roads. 5G is all about displacing terrestrial cable and telco to homes. (And profiting off of the carve out regulations around wireless. Most other applications don’t really care about latency. If anything, we’ve used software to move lower latency applications like voice to crowded, latent and unreliable networks.

It's such a myth that 5G can replace optic fibers, afterall 5G itself relies on it, if it requires setting up expensive(controversial) cell towers really really close to homes, why bother making it wireless. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/5g-as... >Noting the dense deployment of cell sites that millimeter-wave spectrum requires, he commented: "This means that a wireless company almost needs to…

It’s a lower capital expense than running fiber, and wireless carriers have more favorable regulatory environment than wired companies.
Post reply on HN