271–280 of 339 posts
Having the 5G logo on your phone doesnt necessarily mean your phone is speaking 5G. It's...complicated. - Most US operators do not have ubiquitous 5G radio coverage, so, they do what is called 5G NSA where your traffic ultimately ends up veing processed by the 4G core infrastructure that they have. Which is already overloaded and a bit creaky. - Some operators can do real 5G, "5G SA", where the whole flow end to end…
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In dense permanent environments a bunch of cables will most likely be cheaper than having enough 5G cells to give everyone few hundred Mbits of transfer. In scattered environment the range is too short to excuse the cost of covering it with 5G There is no niche for it except for "my landlord didn't install proper internet so I use 5G" coz it happened to be alreadhy in range
I mean you aren’t wrong. But cable has a monopoly on most peoples home internet today. If you could (theoretically) kick their ass with fast internet that completely bypasses asshole cable companies, more power to you.
Recently they put in ‘fiber to the node’ to a nearby crossroads, I now have two 18 Mbps lines which, fortunately, give about 100% of the rated performance so I can’t complain much. I can even use Docker now, YouTube, Netflix, and online gaming are all pretty good. (The Samsung TV, outside of game mode, and some monitors, like the monitor on an Alienware ‘gaming’ laptop, add more lag than the DSL does.). I have a load balancer that sends different connections on different lines so collectively the system meets the FCC broadband definition. Still the people down the road get better speeds without the load balancer for less money.
I’d say it is not just a ‘lack of competition’ but ‘pernicious competition’ that is going on here. For instance, the cable company has less reason to serve my valley because people who want TV can get it from satellite. There are plenty of old and poor people who would rather spend $65 a month for 1 Mbps DSL than $70 for 300 Mbps cable and they will go to public meetings to try to keep the better service away. So in some sense competition from legacy satellite and legacy telco makes service worse.
(TV of course is a great case study of ‘pernicious competition’ because of the structure of the industry. Your local OTA TV station tries to keep a secret that you can tune in free with an antenna because they get cash when you subscribe to cable. There is cable, multiple satellite providers, plus a number of IPTV providers but they all provide the same bundle at the same price. There is no way I can say I want CNBC and Bloomberg and the BBC but CNN, Fox and MSNBC can all go to hell. Given that they get paid no matter if people watch they have no need to maintain quality or a brand promise. CNN tried to go direct-to-consumer but decided it didn’t want to threaten the current cash cow even though it may be a doomed business…. It’s hard to tell because there are powerful forces that will try to rebuild the bundle out of Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus and all that.)
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> But do you have any examples of this having ever happened? Yes, there are whole Wikipedia lists of this having ever happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbank_network This is no rocket science. I mean, even utilities grids in open markets work like this, for stuff like power and even gas. Nowadays even railway networks in Europe are decoupled from operators. Why do people still cling to old monopoly tales?
Demand for power and gas—or banking services—doesn’t scale by orders of magnitude every few years.
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WiFi is a 'simple' system designed for a few, static devices. Cellular systems are designed for many more devices and, crucially, full mobility. These are orders of magnitude more complex than WiFi. Then, specifically 5G is about increasing capacity (number of devices), reducing delays, and stringent reliability.
There's nothing within the 5G spec itself that commands that every single cell site needs to be a massive MIMO supporting 1000s of users at once. Making a micro cell supporting just a family home is enough, then something a bit higher for small businesses supporting 10-100 users, then the likes of Starbucks can deploy bigger ones and finally the Sports stadiums and Corporate offices gets the really high end stuff. Co…
OK, I will bite. Comparing 5G vs 4G as Technology is completely different to 5G vs 4G in real world implementation. That is a bit like asking if Core i9 is faster than Core i7 without knowing the clock speed, core count, cache and power budget. Or for Software developers comparing Python vs Ruby without knowing the code and VM, JIT or not Most 5G network around the world are deployed in higher frequency spectrum. Hen…
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Why would I want to replace my home internet with something less secure, less reliable, lossier, and slower?
Speak for yourself...my parents live in a rural area and just switched from a local wireless isp (via some directional/long range 802.11 setup) to a tmobile 5g router and it's been an absolute godsend in terms of speed and reliability. Growing up there was depressing and I was flabbergasted to see them join this century with something I'd consider "high-speed" (seen it hit 200mbps personally).
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> Telcos desperately need a killer app or use case that drives 5G adoption. They haven't got one. * Self driving cars? No. * Internet of Things? No. * Metaverse? No. * Remote surgical operations? You gotta be kidding. Everyone in a big stadium can watch the show on their phones, though. If someone was willing to pay for the hundreds of tiny cell sites required.
I thought the killer app would be to replace at home wired broadband with 5G wireless. I still think it looks compelling.
For example, my inlaws live in semi-rural South Carolina and a new cell tower was built about a mile away from their home ~2 years ago. T-Mobile's Home Internet product indicates there's no service at their address for even though I have what looks to be full signal strength indoors on their "5G UC" network (indicates mid-band & mmWave from what I can tell, but in this location it's likely just mid-band). Every speed test I've executed from my T-Mobile-connected phone (Galaxy S22) is in the 600-700Mbps range and it doesn't vary based on the time of day.
Verizon Wireless indicates that they're not in the service area either for their 5G home Internet product, although I don't have data points from any UE on their network in that area.
It wouldn't be so bad if phones were better at switching to the best available signal, they they could use the efficient 5G connection when it's available, but fall back to 4G when the 5G is blocked by a building or something (which I gather is more common due to the high frequencies used in 5G). But they seem to insist on connecting to a crappy 5G signal even if an excellent 4G signal is available. Same with 3G, whi…
I always get annoyed when people nag around about WIFI - because they cannot understand how many things happen in radio communication even if you sit behind the laptop and you have router in other room and you have 10 neighbors having their laptops/routers also running. They expect stuff should "just work" and reality unfortunately is much more complicated.
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It may be worse for the end user but it's great for corporations. Samsung could sell you a smart TV with built-in 5G so that it can always serve you ads even if you never connect it to your wi-fi.
Can't they already do this now? Is 5G necessary?
As long as the manufacturer foots the eSIM bill (and it's profitable) they can serve ads.