5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by rstuart4133 » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 1:49 AM UTC

protocolture wrote: post #186

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…

Your second and third paragraph are contradictory. Common carriers become the barrier to network upgrades. Always. Without fail. Monopolies are a bad idea, whether state or privately owned. Let me give you 2 examples. In australia we had Telstra (Formerly Telecom, Formerly Auspost). Testra would resell carriers ADSL services, and they stank. The carriers couldn't justify price increases to upgrade their networks and…

Yeah, I've noticed the same things with roads. They are common carriers owned mostly by the government, so they never get upgraded. That freeway near my house is always clogged.

Oh wait ... the reason that freeway is always clogged is they are ripping it up, doubling it's width. And now I think about it, hasn't the NBN recently upgraded their max speeds from 100 Mb/s, to 250Mb/s, and now to 1Gb/s. And isn't the NBN currently ripping out the FttN, replacing it woth FttP, at no cost to the cusytomer? Sounds like a major upgrade to me. And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?

If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra. In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers. That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition. But when the Libs sold Telstra it was a monopoly. Telstra just refused to upgrade the copper. The Libs thought they could fix that though legislation, but what happened instead is Telstra fought the legalisation tooth and nail and we ended up in the absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access. In the end Tesltra did give permission to change the equipment at the ends of the wires. But replacing the wires themselves - never. That was their golden goose. No one was permitted to replace them with a new technology.

Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.

Sorry, what was your point again? Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.

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

#232

Post by odo1242 » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 1:50 AM UTC

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…

"Common carrier" tends to raise prices for minimum service, though. And once the network is built the carrier is just going to keep their monopoly. You bet they're never upgrading to any new piece of technology until they're legally required to.

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

#233

Post by timewizard » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:01 AM UTC

gerdesj wrote: post #214

OK so someone has noticed that you "only" need 15MBs-1 for a 4K stream. Jolly good. Now let's address latency - that entire article only mentioned the word once and it looks like it was by accident. Latency isn't cool but it is why your Teams/Zoom/whatevs call sounds a bit odd. You are probably used to the weird over-talking episodes you get when a sound stream goes somewhat async. You put up with it but you really s…

That's a 1/4 megabit per second. The codec should be around 32,00 bytes and thus 256,000 bits. The problem is the Internet is not multicast so if I'm on with 8 participants that's 8 * 32,000 bytes and our distributed clocks are nowhere near sample accurate.

If you really want to have some fun come out to the country side with me where 4G is the only option and 120ms is the best end to end latency you're going to get. Plus your geolocation puts you half the nation away from where you actually are which only expounds the problem.

On the other hand I now have an acquired expertise in making applications that are extremely tolerant of high latency environments.

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

#234

Post by timewizard » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:09 AM UTC

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…

It actually has nefarious benefits. Look up the term "HTLINGUAL" or "ECHELON." It's certainly nice for the government to have fewer places to shop when destroying our privacy.

The trick is that this is essentially wireless spectrum. Which can be leased for limited periods of time and can easily allow for a more competitive environment than what natural monopolies allow for.

It's also possible to separate the infrastructure operators from the backhaul operators and thus entirely avoid the issues of capital investment costs by upstart incumbents. When done there's even less reason to tolerate monopolistic practices on either side.

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

#235

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:15 AM UTC

reaperman wrote: post #218

gerdesj wrote: post #214

OK so someone has noticed that you "only" need 15MBs-1 for a 4K stream. Jolly good. Now let's address latency - that entire article only mentioned the word once and it looks like it was by accident. Latency isn't cool but it is why your Teams/Zoom/whatevs call sounds a bit odd. You are probably used to the weird over-talking episodes you get when a sound stream goes somewhat async. You put up with it but you really s…

There is no way that "15MBs-1" is more clear than "15MB/s", especially in an environment which lacks the ability to give text superscript styling.

Even worse when it's actually 15Mb/s.

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

#236

Post by kjellsbells » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

I follow what the operators tell Wall St, because the executives have large personal financial stakes in getting it right (modulo fraud, but lets trust for now).

For example, at the last investor day that AT&T held, they indicated [0:pdf] that their growth plans are in broadband fiber, not building more 5G capacity to serve a surge in traffic. Reading their charts and knowing how AT&T traditionally worked, I believe that they are going to try to cut the expense of running the 5G network via various optimizations and redirect capital heavily to go after the fiber broadband market instead, using convergence (ahem: price bundling) to win subscribers.

(I bet it really stuck in their craw that Comcast mastered the bundle so well that they even built a successful MVNO on the back of their xfinity customer base and parked their tanks on AT&Ts lawn while the latter was futzing about with HBO.)

However, bundling is a price compression game, not an ARPU growth game. If you start at $100 a month and then begin chipping away with autopay discounts, mobile convergence, free visa gift cards and all that nonsense, pretty soon you are selling broadband for $35 a month and can't make it work except with truly cruddy service, which leads to high churn rates. So we'll see how this turns out.

[0:pdf] https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/reports-...

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

#237

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:22 AM UTC

nsteel wrote: post #142

maxsilver wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why? The conclusion that "somewhere between 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s marks the approximate saturation point" wouldn't be any different.

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

#238

Post by nomel » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:26 AM UTC

timewizard wrote: post #233

gerdesj wrote: post #214

OK so someone has noticed that you "only" need 15MBs-1 for a 4K stream. Jolly good. Now let's address latency - that entire article only mentioned the word once and it looks like it was by accident. Latency isn't cool but it is why your Teams/Zoom/whatevs call sounds a bit odd. You are probably used to the weird over-talking episodes you get when a sound stream goes somewhat async. You put up with it but you really s…

That's a 1/4 megabit per second. The codec should be around 32,00 bytes and thus 256,000 bits. The problem is the Internet is not multicast so if I'm on with 8 participants that's 8 * 32,000 bytes and our distributed clocks are nowhere near sample accurate. If you really want to have some fun come out to the country side with me where 4G is the only option and 120ms is the best end to end latency you're going to get.…

The first time I learned about UDP multicasting, I thought it was incredible, wondering how many streams were out there that I could tap into, if only I knew the multicast group, and all with such little overhead! Then I tried to send some multicast packets to my friend's house. I kept increasing the hop limit, thinking I was surely sending my little UDP packet around the world at that point. It never made it. :(

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

#239

Post by aaplok » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:29 AM UTC

kjellsbells wrote: post #236

I follow what the operators tell Wall St, because the executives have large personal financial stakes in getting it right (modulo fraud, but lets trust for now). For example, at the last investor day that AT&T held, they indicated [0:pdf] that their growth plans are in broadband fiber, not building more 5G capacity to serve a surge in traffic. Reading their charts and knowing how AT&T traditionally worked, I believe…

My understanding is that 6G is expected to make use of a good decentralised fibre network, with small radio units at the end points of this network providing the wireless contact point. With interoperability being on the books for 6G, whoever controls the fibre network is in for a lot of money (unless the article we're commenting on is right).

So it might make sense for operators to focus on developing fibre regardless.

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

#240

Post by nomel » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:31 AM UTC

grafporno wrote: post #215

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,…

5.6 kbit/s is enough for voice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Rate

Back in the day, if you knew the secret menu, you could change the default vocoder to use on the network. The cheap cell company I used defaulted to half-rate. I would set my phone to the highest bitrate, with a huge improvement in quality, but at the expense of the towers rejecting my calls around 25% of the time. When I would call landline phones, people would mention how good it sounded.