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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

#241

Post by 8note »

bityard wrote: post #178
aceazzameen wrote: post #170

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.

does that not still happen for you?

passing cell phones around still happens for my family

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

#242

Post by aceazzameen »

little_bear wrote: post #225
bityard wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I set up an old rotary phone via twilio as a house phone for our kids. They just dial 1-9, each number is programmed to a different family member. Their cousins also have one, so they can call each other whenever they want. It’s great to also have a phone that just rings in the house, for when you don’t care about getting a specific person.

That sounds awesome. Do you have any more info on your setup anywhere?

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

#244

Post by bobthepanda »

ssl-3 wrote: post #220
bityard wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may have been decades ago, but there was a time when it did not seem awkward or even unusual to just...call someone's house, or to simply stop by. There was usually a purpose in this that was more profound than just being bored or lonely or something, but none was really required. And maybe the person they were trying to find wasn't home right now, but that was OK. It was not weird to talk to whoever for a minute,…

unfortunately, these days the inundation of spam from hucksters trying to sell you something, or worse, has now made everyone extremely distrustful of unprovoked interaction.

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

#245

Post by JasserInicide »

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…

Barring some revolutionary new material where we can get EM waves to travel orders of magnitude faster through it over current stuff, I don't think we're ever getting around the latency problem.

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

bobthepanda wrote: post #244
ssl-3 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may have been decades ago, but there was a time when it did not seem awkward or even unusual to just...call someone's house, or to simply stop by. There was usually a purpose in this that was more profound than just being bored or lonely or something, but none was really required. And maybe the person they were trying to find wasn't home right now, but that was OK. It was not weird to talk to whoever for a minute,…

unfortunately, these days the inundation of spam from hucksters trying to sell you something, or worse, has now made everyone extremely distrustful of unprovoked interaction.

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by stkdump »

kmeisthax wrote: post #140
Animats wrote: post #77

> Of course, sophisticated representations of entire 3D scenes for large groups of users interacting with one another in-world could conceivably push bandwidth requirements up. But at this point, we’re getting into Matrix-like imagined technologies without any solid evidence to suggest a good 4G or 5G connection wouldn’t meet the tech’s bandwidth demands. Open-world games such as Cyberpunk 2077 already have hours-lon…

On my current mobile plan (Google Fi[0]) the kind of streaming 3D world they think I would want to download on my phone would get me throttled in less than a minute. 200 MB is about a day's usage, if I'm out and about burning through my data plan. The reason why there isn't as much demand for mobile data as they want is because the carriers have horrendously overpriced it, because they want a business model where the…

> I'm told similar economics are why you can't buy laptops with cellular modems in them

I don't know what you mean. My current laptop (Lenovo L13) has a cellular modem that I don't need. And I am certainly a cost conscious buyer. It's also not the first time that this happened as well.

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

#248

Post by ijidak »

> 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

This is a terrible example.

If supersonic mass travel could be provided safely and cheaply, demand would be bonkers.

If I could get to Tokyo in an hour for $50, I would visit every weekend.

Overall, the article is sound.

But what a terrible example of demand not filling supply.

If I had a terabit per second, indeed I probably wouldn't use it.

But you can not make travel fast enough.

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

#249

Post by hypercube33 »

nomel wrote: post #240
grafporno wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a short while Verizon enabled this on our super grandfathered plan. Well not exactly this, it was some more modern codec dubbed HD and it sounded so good it was freaky and unnerving

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

#250

Post by stkdump »

mikepurvis wrote: post #47
kelnos wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 1Gbps down, and the only application I've found to saturate it is downloads from USENET (and with that I need quite a few connections downloading different chunks simultaneously to achieve it). I have never come remotely close to downloading anything else -- including games -- at 1Gbps. The source side certainly has the available pipe, but most (all?) providers see little upside to allowing one client/connecti…

This tracks. I recently upgraded from 100mbps to 500mbps (cable), and barely anything is different— even torrents bumped from 5MB/s to barely 10MB/s. And there's no wifi involved there, just a regular desktop on gigabit ethernet.

Same here. My ISP recently did a promo to try out 1G/1G for free for a few months. I decided not to buy it after the free trial and went back to my old 500/200 line instead of paying 40% more. Yeah, it takes a minute longer downloading the latest LLM from huggingface, so what.
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