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5G Rollout Disappointments

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: 5G Rollout Disappointments

#81

Post by Mistletoe »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #50
Mistletoe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you flag this? That’s not what flagging is for and is one of the asbolute worst features of HN. It amounts to censorship based on user preferences. It’s a real article from IEEE, just because you don’t like it or agree with it doesn’t mean you flag it. > What does [flagged] mean? >Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.

If you think that flagging amounts to censorship then I guess you don't believe that there are bad faith actors who exploit vulnerabilities in human cognition? I don't think this ieee article is nowhere near flagging territory but there are plenty genocide and fossil fuel shills around here.

I think that's what the flag button should be for, things encouraging harm to other people or out and out lies or going to malware sites, but the IEEE article is none of that, it's a well-reasoned article with sourced facts.

Re: 5G Rollout Disappointments

#82

Post by sidewndr46 »

m348e912 wrote: post #76
afavour wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in NYC and use mmWave for my home internet and it’s genuinely game changing: ~1Gbps internet with no wires at all. Given the monopolies internet providers have in NYC it’s liberating. But my nearest antenna is a block away with pretty good sight lines. If I move my radio even 6ft in the wrong direction my speeds go through the floor. I think the 5G hype was excessive for a technology that only works in very speci…

If mmWave is also known as 5gUW, I have been very underwhelmed and I would prefer that I could turn it off in favor of traditional 5g. The push for 5g in general has been a bit of a head scratcher for me. I don't think consumers have been clamoring for multi gigabit wireless en mass. If they're like me, they would prefer consistency and reliability. Speed is less important when you can use WIFI at home and in many pl…

It depends on where you're at, but "WIFI at home" may indeed be much slower than 5G at some locations served by traditional DSL and cable modem technologies.

Re: 5G Rollout Disappointments

#83

Post by sidewndr46 »

afavour wrote: post #71
SSLy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5G mmWave is best used in dense - ie. not so often in North America - urban areas. I's going to work great in busy metro stations, shopping streets/malls, concerts. Not in suburbia.

I’m in NYC and use mmWave for my home internet and it’s genuinely game changing: ~1Gbps internet with no wires at all. Given the monopolies internet providers have in NYC it’s liberating. But my nearest antenna is a block away with pretty good sight lines. If I move my radio even 6ft in the wrong direction my speeds go through the floor. I think the 5G hype was excessive for a technology that only works in very speci…

At my house I can get 250 mbps down/35 mbps up with some clever placement of the 5G unit. This blows any other ISP out of the water.

One street over I get 1000 mbps down/250 mbps up which I am a bit salty about. There is a terrain feature that makes it impossible for me to see that same tower from my house.

Re: 5G Rollout Disappointments

#84

Post by sidewndr46 »

SSLy wrote: post #54
AHOHA wrote: post #28

5G is an umbrella for different types and technologies, and I believe that’s the confusion part of what the artice mentioned and the reader views. 5G has three main categories (technically two but separating the 2nd one to further explain it), 5G NSA (non stand alone), where the 5G RAN uses an existing 4G LTE core, 5G SA (stand alone), as the name implies, is stand alone from previous generations and has its own arch…

5G mmWave is best used in dense - ie. not so often in North America - urban areas. I's going to work great in busy metro stations, shopping streets/malls, concerts. Not in suburbia.

I keep 5G off on my phone because it in general doesn't work when I'm out and about. Conversely the 4G network seems to always have usable signal levels and may be less busy now that everyone's phone is using 5G by default.

Re: 5G Rollout Disappointments

#85

Post by usr1106 »

lucumo wrote: post #48

I just figured I'd do some measurements of the different speeds. Location: in the center of a modern well isolated family home, with HR++ glass. So not ideal for optimal reception, but I didn't care to get up from the kitchen table. Tested with speedtest.net in the browser with Android Chrome. Network is T-Mobile NL. 5G: 69.52 Mbps down, 37 ms ping 4G: 56.79 Mbps down, 34 ms ping 3G: 4.01 Mbps down, 56 ms ping I'm no…

> I'm not sure if T-Mobile is still keeping their 3G network at optimal performance. All their competitors have phased out 3G. They'll probably follow soon (though only 2G phase out is announced).

Are you saying in the NL 2G networks will be closed before 3G networks?

In Germany 3G networks are already closed, in Finland closing has been announced. But 2G networks are promised to run still for years.

Re: 5G Rollout Disappointments

#86

Post by regularfry »

m348e912 wrote: post #76
afavour wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in NYC and use mmWave for my home internet and it’s genuinely game changing: ~1Gbps internet with no wires at all. Given the monopolies internet providers have in NYC it’s liberating. But my nearest antenna is a block away with pretty good sight lines. If I move my radio even 6ft in the wrong direction my speeds go through the floor. I think the 5G hype was excessive for a technology that only works in very speci…

If mmWave is also known as 5gUW, I have been very underwhelmed and I would prefer that I could turn it off in favor of traditional 5g. The push for 5g in general has been a bit of a head scratcher for me. I don't think consumers have been clamoring for multi gigabit wireless en mass. If they're like me, they would prefer consistency and reliability. Speed is less important when you can use WIFI at home and in many pl…

With 5g you can potentially sidestep hospital IT departments with a network connection that's outside their control.

Also, it may be bold to assume that WiFi as offered is a practical option.

Re: 5G Rollout Disappointments

#87

Post by anecdotal1 »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #57

I'm about half a mile from a 5G tower and have been using a T-Mobile hotspot for about a month because the only telco that has run internet on my side of the street (in a town that literally has fiber 300 feet away) is AT&T, and then they only have DSL. This is in a Dallas suburb. AT&T? Nearly 90 bucks for 50Mbps down, 12 up. T-Mobile? 50 bucks 140 down, 50 up during peak times.

Cancel your T-Mobile and buy a Calyx (also using T-Mobile) and you'll be paying ~$45/mo (after hotspot device cost) and have no data cap or throttling (it's real, grandfathered contract from Clearwire)

I can do 800mbit+ on mine, symmetrical.

Re: 5G Rollout Disappointments

#88

Post by gpvos »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #60
muro wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar if you are from Switzerland and cross any border. If you are in Switzerland semi-regularly, either get a plan that has cheap roaming in and out of EU, or two SIMs.

Swisscom, for quite some time now, includes roaming in EU countries and the UK with unlimited calling and SMS and 40GB highspeed Internet per month. Ironically, calling a friend in Paris from Prague is free, while calling from Zurich is 70 cents a minute. My sister, who lives in Vienna, is shocked about our subscription prices (ca 70 EUR a month, unlimited everything and EU roaming as described above) while I'm more…

I pay around 19EUR but get only 5GB data, and I'm fine with that. When in CH I buy an extra bundle, but even then the costs stay very far below a crazy 70EUR. Data is blocked when I haven't paid for roaming, so no risk there.

Re: 5G Rollout Disappointments

#89

Post by giantrobot »

solarkraft wrote: post #79
fuzzfactor wrote: post #45

When Sprint first built out its digital cellphone network, their slogan was "you can hear a pin drop". It was basically true, this was more clarity and intelligibility than the full-quality land line POTS. After a year or two their airwaves got crowded and it became apparent they were compressing the audio enough to be noticeably way worse than the POTS was. Cell carriers seem to have kept performance at that low lev…

It's crazy to me how much telephony still sucks. We can stream 4K video but not some audio in reasonable quality?

If the audio of a phone call was pre-recorded on a good microphone it could sound awesome even over low bandwidth "voice" connections. Audio for voice calling is optimized almost entirely for latency. This means super short buffers and relatively simple encoding.

Streaming video/audio has a distinct advantage of not having the same latency sensitivity. It's not a two way conversation so if the stream is a second or two behind the wall clock as long as it's in sync you're never going to know unless you're watching a stream of an event you can see live, then you'll see the encode and transfer delay.

Besides latency, the microphone/audio input pipeline on a phone is in one of the shittiest recording environments it could be in. It's right next to the users mouth, sometimes far too close, so it needs automatic gain control to keep from being overdriven. It also needs to filter out the audio coming from the speaker lest it generates feedback. The microphone itself also needs to be very small and is attacked to the body of the phone so it's difficult to isolate from body sounds like the user's hand rubbing over the body.

The fact a cell phone can even transmit reasonable sounding voice is a minor miracle involving many thousands of engineer-hours. The extra processing power and bandwidth available today to handle wideband voice helps a little with quality but it's still very latency sensitive and still suffers vs less latency sensitive codecs or one-way streaming.

Re: 5G Rollout Disappointments

#90

Post by afavour »

m348e912 wrote: post #76
afavour wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in NYC and use mmWave for my home internet and it’s genuinely game changing: ~1Gbps internet with no wires at all. Given the monopolies internet providers have in NYC it’s liberating. But my nearest antenna is a block away with pretty good sight lines. If I move my radio even 6ft in the wrong direction my speeds go through the floor. I think the 5G hype was excessive for a technology that only works in very speci…

If mmWave is also known as 5gUW, I have been very underwhelmed and I would prefer that I could turn it off in favor of traditional 5g. The push for 5g in general has been a bit of a head scratcher for me. I don't think consumers have been clamoring for multi gigabit wireless en mass. If they're like me, they would prefer consistency and reliability. Speed is less important when you can use WIFI at home and in many pl…

> they would prefer consistency and reliability.

> Speed is less important when you can use WIFI at home and in many places

In my experience 5G provides that consistency: Wifi (outside of my reliable home connection) is often super flaky. With 5G on my phone I find myself connecting to (e.g.) coffee shop Wifi much less often and I tether my laptop to my phone rather than use it.

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