
5G Underwhelms in Its First Big Test - harambae
https://www.wsj.com/articles/5g-underwhelms-in-its-first-big-test-11577788203
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sandworm101
What did people expect? Unless you have an antenna literally pointing in every
window of your apartment, reliable 5G ends at the first external wall. It is
borderline line-of-sight. Middle of Time Square? Sure. Inside a stadium
watching the Olympics? It will work there too. In the parking structure under
that stadium? No.

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ksec
What you are referring to is mmWave part of the 5G. Which is what media hyped
about. Reality is 5G is many things, and it will improve once there are more
mobile phone supporting it.

On one hand I think most of the public are far too hyped with 5G. On the other
hand you have people who dont fully understand 5G saying 5G is absolutely
useless.

Sometimes I wonder how should one report these sort of news, if you go into
too much details most people dont want to understand, but if you mention all
the pros without the cons you will left reader not fully informed.

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zamadatix
It's easy to report: talk about what stuff is actually being implemented in
the next 6 months. The problem is you won't get as many people to read your
article because what 5G could do in some places in 5 years if you believe the
carrier press releases sounds a lot more fantastic than what it actually means
for people now.

The same thing happened with "4G" (which never became the actual 4G
standardized in 2009).

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ksec
It is a Chicken and Egg problem. Lots of the basic 5G infrastructure should be
in places when they were testing Massive MIMO in 3GPP R13 /14\. As far as I am
aware ( not well versed in the US situation ), there were no new Sub 6Ghz
Spectrum for 5G, so unless you are T-Mobile which refarm the whole 600Mhz for
5G, you are stuck with Refarming part of your 4G Spectrum at the expenses of
current 4G users and capacity.

>The problem is you won't get as many people to read your article

I guess that is the biggest problem of all.

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taurath
It’s incremental - the idea that there’ll be significant new industries
because we can now do 4k60fps video over cell is not yet proven. Mostly just
that people will continue to stop using cable and land lines for
entertainment.

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foxyv
4G was absolute garbage when it first came out. It was VERY spotty and would
die randomly. I would reserve judgement for now. I'm hoping that honestly
good, wireless home internet will be the result of this though.

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sandworm101
Glad you have 4G. We are still waiting. Less than half the area of my
province/state (BC) has any cell coverage. I live 5km from an international
airport, but at this rate 5G won't be at my house for a decade or more.

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xt00
The main benefit of 5G is for the cell carriers. With more spectrum available
and various channels usable in a more efficient way they can provide more
total bandwidth if they want to. Seems likely they will just slowly inch up
the speeds in a game of chicken with the various carriers. Of course they will
whitelist speedtest.net. :)

