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Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

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Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

#81

Post by rayiner »

xexers wrote: post #72
nfriedly wrote: post #23

Faster speed is great, but what about bumping the data caps? I was able to hit ~70mb/s over 4G several years ago (in ideal conditions). That's enough to burn through most bandwidth caps in a couple of minutes! Even most "unlimited" plans still throttle you after some point.

It could be that many of these companies want to keep the caps low so that you need to purchase both home internet and mobile internet. If I had a 100gb cap, I'd ditch my home DSL and simply use my phone as a hotspot all the time. Here in Canada, Bell & Rogers own both the cellular networks and the home internet networks. They are highly incented to sell you BOTH.

That doesn’t make any sense. Here in the US, Verizon and AT&T don’t offer home Internet in the vast majority of the country, and Sprint and T-Mobile don’t offer it at all. The wireline divisions of AT&T and Verizon also make very little of the companies’ profits (Verizon’s wireline profit margin is typically 2-5%). Goldman Sachs has been trying to get Verizon to sell its wireline division for years. Why would it sandbag it’s wireless service to prop up its wireline division?

Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

#82

Post by martinald »

Someone1234 wrote: post #10
fredley wrote: post #2

I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone, primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the mainstream.

And related to that, how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift the bottleneck from between handset & tower, to the tower's own infrastructure. Mobile vendors won't mind because your phone will say "5G" in the status bar and they can charge more. But in reality your phone to web-site performance (particularly outside of artific…

Most sites have fibre backhaul now. And then point to point wireless can do 10gig+ these days anyway to a tower that does have fibre backhaul.

Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

#83

Post by manmal »

Someone1234 wrote: post #10
fredley wrote: post #2

I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone, primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the mainstream.

And related to that, how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift the bottleneck from between handset & tower, to the tower's own infrastructure. Mobile vendors won't mind because your phone will say "5G" in the status bar and they can charge more. But in reality your phone to web-site performance (particularly outside of artific…

Another factor to add though is that traffic likely won’t increase by 14x at the same time. Apps will mostly finish payload transmission earlier, leaving the connection unused for a longer period of time. So there likely won’t be as many concurrent transfers in a cell as there are now.

Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

#84

Post by martinald »

xur17 wrote: post #58
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5G is less about just faster network anyways. The goal as far as I understand is to use something like gre bonding to achieve some support for transparent handoff between base station and home network. So in theory if you are in your own wifi the network should not need to talk to your phone.

Would this transparent handoff work for just calls, or for data as well? I'd love to see a solution to the wifi to 4g data handoff issues I run into.

Multipath TCP is a solution to this, Apple has it in iOS. But adoption is really low.

Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

#85

Post by martinald »

gene-h wrote: post #35

Frankly I'm wondering if 5G will ever take off. One problem with 5G is that it uses higher frequencies, which carry more bandwidth, but don't go through obstacles so well. So you need much more hotspots, which A is creating zoning nightmares and B is an expensive proposition. Really performance is similar to that of wifi. So the question is why not just use wifi? There's a bunch of wifi hardware already installed, we…

I sort of agree.

Vodafone in UK very rarely bothers deploying LTE2600 unless it is a super busy place like a train station. They rely mostly on LTE800, they've started doing LTE2100 as 800 is getting so congested. But they're not even bothering with the high frequency bandwidth they already have; so I really can't see them bothering with even higher and more expensive to deploy spectrum (again, unless it is super crowded places, but LTE2600 with micro/pico cells can handle this really well now).

I also noticed the same in the US when I was roaming, even in lower manhattan there was a load of LTE700 and only sporadic higher spectrum LTE1700/2100.

I think LTE with loads of carrier aggregation will work just fine, I can't see this being much of a step. Apart from maybe better handoff between networks; but it isn't suddenly going to enable a new load of applications/devices like it is being hyped up for.

Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

#86

Post by martinald »

callesgg wrote: post #73

Since 4G came out i have never had to think about the internet speed of my phone. Only when it has been connected to wifi abroad. What we need is not speed or bandwidth, it is penetration and range. *It is probably a regional thing i can image that 4G could be quite slow in the midst of Tokyo.

TBH LTE800/LTE700 covers the range and penetration quite well. A rural macrocell can cover 20-30km. 5G isn't going to solve the underlying physics here.

There's also LTE450 which could do absolutely ridiculous distances (used in Russia and Scandinavia I believe).

Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

#88

Post by kayoone »

DenisM wrote: post #38
nfriedly wrote: post #23

Faster speed is great, but what about bumping the data caps? I was able to hit ~70mb/s over 4G several years ago (in ideal conditions). That's enough to burn through most bandwidth caps in a couple of minutes! Even most "unlimited" plans still throttle you after some point.

T-Mobile has 50gb throttle limit that’s only enforced during congestion.

Meanwhile T-Mobile in Germany has a 4GB cap for 45 EUR/mo

Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

#89

Post by xexers »

rayiner wrote: post #81
xexers wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be that many of these companies want to keep the caps low so that you need to purchase both home internet and mobile internet. If I had a 100gb cap, I'd ditch my home DSL and simply use my phone as a hotspot all the time. Here in Canada, Bell & Rogers own both the cellular networks and the home internet networks. They are highly incented to sell you BOTH.

That doesn’t make any sense. Here in the US, Verizon and AT&T don’t offer home Internet in the vast majority of the country, and Sprint and T-Mobile don’t offer it at all. The wireline divisions of AT&T and Verizon also make very little of the companies’ profits (Verizon’s wireline profit margin is typically 2-5%). Goldman Sachs has been trying to get Verizon to sell its wireline division for years. Why would it sand…

You're probably right. I'm just throwing out a hypothesis.

Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase

#90

Post by askvictor »

martinald wrote: post #82
Someone1234 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And related to that, how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift the bottleneck from between handset & tower, to the tower's own infrastructure. Mobile vendors won't mind because your phone will say "5G" in the status bar and they can charge more. But in reality your phone to web-site performance (particularly outside of artific…

Most sites have fibre backhaul now. And then point to point wireless can do 10gig+ these days anyway to a tower that does have fibre backhaul.

Even with fibre, it wouldn't take many users on the theoretical capacity of 5g to saturate the uplink.
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