41–50 of 339 posts
I wish I could get a 2G phone. 3G I'd settle for. All I want is email, Maps, Uber and a Camera. Everything else is just addicting time wasting behavior. I love when my plan runs out of fast data and puts me on that throttled level.
But email, map or uber use tons of data where 2G and 3G were not decided for? So you will still need a 4G, no?
map: preloaded maps were a thing before. So, no.
uber: preloaded maps. No, again.
Fantastic here, but heavily area dependent, low-latency and I often see speeds above 250Mbps. 20Mbps is not enough for a phone I use for tethering. 5G home internet is a thing here now too (Australia), and in a lot of cases beats the alternative.
Wonder what the difference of electricity cost is between running your home router via 5G and wire.
Its impressive that you can get a gigabit, WiFi 6 capable router with a new Qualcomm 5G/LTE chipset to fit in such a small power envelope!
- 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 runs on 5G infrastructure, but whether this is faster than LTE or not depends on the spectrum band in use. Verizon have some high bandwidth spectrum, but it doesnt propagate as well as lower (and slower) frequencies like what Tmo has. But if you expect to get those blazing multi gig speeds, you really have to be on that high bandwidth stuff. For most people, most of the time, they wont, so they wont see much improvement over LTE.
- I assert that it is dawning on operators that consumers are not interested in paying $10 extra per month for 5G. This is a bit of a problem when those same operators spent or borrowed billions to obtain the spectrum in the first place. Did I mention that the era of cheap money is now over and those debt payments are due?
- Telcos desperately need a killer app or use case that drives 5G adoption. They havent got one. And remember, the app must be one that telcos can monetize. They still have scars from their failure to capture the value of smartphone applications in the LTE era.
I was skeptical about the utility of 5G until I downloaded the whole of the Witcher 3 onto my Steam Deck through my phone at 200mbps while on holiday. To be honest I’m still somewhat skeptical, and maybe I should have left the Steam Deck at home instead of taking it on holiday, but I was very aware in that moment that I was living in the future.
Locally 3g was the most reliable. I think we're working backwards in accessibility of the network. It seemed just a few years ago, all we needed was a tower every so often, now we have towers and microcells. Is it a capacity issue or have we pushed into a spectrum that is more suited to dense cities rather than less dense towns?
I wish I could get a 2G phone. 3G I'd settle for. All I want is email, Maps, Uber and a Camera. Everything else is just addicting time wasting behavior. I love when my plan runs out of fast data and puts me on that throttled level.
Android 13 has eBPF-based network throttling options in the developer options, which will give you a similar 128kbps experience without sacrificing battery life. This applies on all interfaces, including WLAN, with the affordance of being able to switch back without dropping flows. I wouldn't recommend it for WLAN from a total system capacity perspective, as throttling eats up air-time.