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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

#371

Post by gerdesj »

madwolf wrote: post #322
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…

A decent quality stream is not 256 kilobytes per second (1/4 megabyte), as you write. You probably meant 256kilobits, which is only 32 kilobytes. For speech that’s VERY high quality. Teams actually uses either G.722 or SILK codec, which is just 40kbit/s. That’s 5 kilobytes per second.

256kbps (yes I was pissed and miss-typed B for b and a few other transgressions) or whatever is sod all these days for throughput, as you well know, so worrying your codecs down to 40kbps means nothing if your jitter buffer is going mad!

Modern home/office internet connections are mostly optimised for throughput but rarely for latency - that's the province of HFT.

You see tales from the kiddies who fixate over "ping" times when trying to optimize their gaming experience. Well that's nice but when on earth do you shoot someone with ICMP?

I can remember calling relos in Australia in the 1970s/80s over old school satellite links from the UK or Germany and it nearly needed radio style conventions.

I've been doing VoIP for quite a while and it is so crap watching people put up with shit sound quality and latency on a Teams/Zoom/etc call as the "new" normal. I wheel out Wireshark and pretend to watch it and then fix up the wifi link or the routing (Teams outside VPN - split tunnelling) or whatever.

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

#372

Post by bobdvb »

xattt wrote: post #345
lozf wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that note, the BBC deployed a temporary 5G SA non-public-network to broadcast King Charles' Coronation, giving over 1Gbps uplink over 1km of the procession route. More details are in the award-winning white paper linked from this[0] blog post. [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-05-5g-non-public-network-...

I could not imagine any private news-gathering organization to set up a temporary cell network for coverage.

I know a few companies that have managed to get the license to do it.

F1 TV also gets radio spectrum which they use for something like 4G for their wireless cameras.

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

#373

Post by bdavbdav »

In the metropolitan area I live, it’s not the theoretical maximum speed that’s the issue - 30mbps would be more than enough for almost anything. It’s the contention in high traffic areas. The phone just doesn’t work near mainline stations in London.

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

#374

Post by kiwijamo »

wingworks wrote: post #257
kiwijamo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NZ we also have the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG) which operates over 400 cellular/mobile sites in rural areas for the three mobile carriers, capital funded jointly by the NZ Government and the three mobile carriers (with operational costs shared between the three carriers I believe). For context the individual carriers operate around 2,000 of their own sites in urban areas and most towns in direct competition wi…

Ironically, often you get way faster speeds out on a RCG tower too. (probably due to few users), vs when in the city, where I often get pretty average speeds be it 4g or 5g.

It depends. Some RCG towers have a single channel (sometimes small 10 MHz bandwidth or large 20 MHz bandwidth) which all carriers share which will not perform as well as some native towers where up five channels are operated using CA (Carrier Aggregation) providing up to 100 MHz of total bandwidth. You'll see most of these in smaller towns. However I've seen RCG towers operate with multiple channels across which they load balance all customers (regardless of their native carrier) which are indeed pretty good (but AFAIK, RCG doesn't do CA but I could be wrong on that front). Those higher capacity towns are often in areas like beach towns where they expect lots of traffic during weekends and holidays.

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

#375

Post by bigfatkitten »

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.…

> 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.

That's basically me. 80ms on LTE or 25ms on Starlink.

Used to be 1200-1500ms on BGAN, 160ms on 3G.

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

#376

Post by porridgeraisin »

yaantc wrote: post #165
porridgeraisin wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always been interested in this stuff. Where would you recommend a software/math guy learn all this stuff? My end goal is to understand the tech well enough to at least have opinions on it. How wifi works would be great as well if you're aware of any resources for that.

It's a good but hard question... Because cellular is huge. In a professional context, nobody knows it all in details. There are specializations: core network and RAN, and inside RAN protocol stack vs PHY, and in PHY algos vs implementation, etc. You can see all the cellular specs (they're public) from there: https://www.3gpp.org/specifications-technologies/specificati... 5G (or NR) is the series 38 at the bottom. Dir…

Forgot to get back to you on these.. thanks for the links!
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