

The Promise of 5G - twsted
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/15/the-promise-of-5g/

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jccalhoun
I skimmed through the article and saw hyperbolic statements like, "Now with
the leap to 5G networks, we can start to completely reshape entire industries,
and rethink how we run our cities and manage critical national
infrastructures." I thought to myself, "Ugh, who is writing this crap?" then
scrolled up and saw it was "Hossein Moiin is executive vice president and CTO
of Nokia Networks."

I never thought I would long for the good old days when Mike Arrington would
just write about companies he invested in instead of cutting out the middle
man and letting companies write their own articles.

~~~
pixelbath
Same with the prosthetics story. Increased bandwidth over mobile networks
could enable them to print more arms? This is only solvable with 5G?

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slight
What a load of nonsense. The idea that faster and faster wired and wireless
broadband open up huge new opportunities just doesn't make any sense to me. 4G
just gives me webpages a bit faster, it's not even especially noticeable most
of the time. I can already stream 720p video to my phone which is more or less
indistinguishable from 1080p at that size. What other massive fast downloads
do you need on a mobile device while data caps are still in the low gigabytes?

~~~
gbl08ma
You are ignoring the fact that it's not just mobile devices that take
advantage of fast mobile data connections. Being able to bring a LTE hotspot
on long out-of-home stays is pretty nice, and while you may not want to do big
downloads on your phone or watch 1080p videos on a screen with less vertical
resolution than that, you may want to do so on your laptop.

If for you 4G is only slightly faster than 3G, then blame your service
provider, because it's not supposed to. Where I live (Portugal) I get 2-7
Mbit/s speeds with 3G and 10-40 Mbit/s speeds with 4G. But most importantly, I
was getting 100 ms pings with 3G while 4G pings are more like 20 ms. Or
perhaps your service provider is limiting LTE usage to phones and forbidding
tethering, which is silly too.

LTE is, right now, the only way to even get proper Internet connections on
rural areas, where the alternative is DSL with speeds below 1 Mbit/s, and
sometimes not even that. I believe it's also much cheaper for the network
operators to cover those areas with wireless Internet than by laying copper,
let alone fiber.

The main issue, that can't be stressed enough, is indeed the data caps. As
things are now, higher speeds only lead to hitting the limits in less time.
Worse, some sites now seem to detect faster connections and deliver
more/heavier content over these ( _cough_ YouTube in auto quality mode _cough_
), completely ignoring that a faster connection may still have caps. But I
have no doubt there are uses for having fiber-like experiences over wireless
broadband, especially if the latency is reduced (IMO more important than
increasing the speed).

~~~
slight
I'm not saying it has no uses, just that it's not going to bring some sort of
revolution, especially with such low data caps. If the current networks aren't
rolled out more widely then giving hot spots of very very high speed isn't
going to lead to new services as there's not wide enough coverage.

I use my mobe for tethering on holiday and it's great but the only problems I
have in that case are bad 3G coverage.

Yes of course the bump from 10mbit (which I get with HSDPA, top speeds on
HSDPA here in Barcelona are over 15mbit) to something like 40 is useful if
you're using it for your desktop/laptop but that's not really what this
article is about.

The general assumption that higher and higher data rates will enable new uses
just doesn't hold true to me. In the last few years my home connection has
gone from 30mbit VDSL to 300mbit fiber and honestly it's only really
noticeable in a few edge cases like downloading games on Steam. I see no
radical new use cases taking any sort of advantages of these sorts of speeds,
just as I haven't for 4g mobile networks.

~~~
z3t4
This reminds me of the famous quote: "Everything that can be Invented has
already been Invented".

But I agree with you that if you have a 10 GB monthly limit, higher bandwidth
wont change much.

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snorrah
Due to line contention / crosstalk, my 4G connection is now faster than my
continuously degrading home VDSL2 connection (BT's "super fast broadband"
fibre-to-the-cabinet offering).

However, it still doesn't mean a huge amount because data caps here in the UK
seem pretty restrictive. It costs a small fortune to get a data package that
might start to give you a landline-replacement service: A 20GB package is
probably going to be £40 a month or more.

~~~
jsingleton
I regularly find my 4G is faster than friends' fixed broadband. It's often not
worth connecting to the WiFi.

The one problem is contention. Mobile networks may give you full signal but
they'll have under-provisioned the back-haul and won't connect you. Very
annoying when this happens.

I used to have unlimited data on 3G but couldn't find a 4G package which
offers this. I'm sure it isn't a technical limitation as it's available in the
far east.

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ricardobeat
Somehow I made it through the whole article. I'd love to hear why the author
thinks increasing bandwidth by 10x will cause such massive changes. Does 5g
tech improve concurrency/crowded towers, range, latency? Will radios be simple
and cheap enough for IoT? This report is so devoid of content I wonder if
there is some marketing agenda behind it.

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mdasen
More than the speed of 5G, I'm hoping for its capacity. If it offers 40x the
capacity of 4G (within the same amount of spectrum), it could become a good
contender to replace home broadband (and add a lot of competition). T-Mobile
already offers 7GB for $50 and 40x that would be 280GB, plenty for most home
users. Fixed broadband prices could be significantly cheaper than mobile
broadband and installed antennas could offer better reliability and and speed
than mobile devices.

It could create a much nicer and more competitive market for home broadband.
With AT&T owning DirecTV and Dish owning a bunch of spectrum, there are two
companies that could want to do installed, fixed home broadband in the 5G era
to support a triple-play of wireless, tv, and home-broadband. Sprint is
sitting on over 200MHz of spectrum in most areas with a lot of it being high
frequency BRS and EBS spectrum (2.5GHz). Installed, fixed, directional
antennas would work a lot nicer with that spectrum than mobile devices and it
would offer up a new revenue stream for a company that has lost $50B since
2006.

If 5G really has a big boost in capacity, it could make a big impact against
home-broadband monopolies. Wired might still offer a better experience for
enthusiasts, but given that a lot of people I know want to save $20 a month
and drop from 110Mbps to 25Mbps, the competition could have broad appeal for a
lot of people.

~~~
Gracana
> T-Mobile already offers 7GB for $50

Does that include tethering? I've noticed a lot of carriers offer a... well,
not a large amount of data, but some amount that's on the better side of
terrible, but if you tether, the limit is much lower.

~~~
boredinballard
Includes tethering, for me at least. I use the $30/month prepaid which has a
similar data plan structure. As far as I know, T-Mobile let's you do whatever
you want with your phone and data.

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_mikz
What? Faster internet? Again? How 4G helped? 0. We need power efficient
network, not faster one. It would be faster than what you get through fiber.
Does that make sense? Shouldn't we focus on making the networks cheap, power
efficient and with most possible coverage? This article screams bulshit to me.

~~~
emj
Faster transfers means less time and less total power draw from the radio.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Why do you think it'll mean less total power draw? Didn't we see that devices
consumed more energy when using 4G vs 3G? Why do you suspect 5G will be
different?

[http://developer.att.com/application-resource-
optimizer/docs...](http://developer.att.com/application-resource-
optimizer/docs/best-practices/comparing-lte-and-3g-energy-consumption)

~~~
emj
Thanks for the superb article, I'm basing my statements from testing in real
world. I have some 3G/4G phones connected to large batteries, transfering 1MB
to 100MB now and then, while they do run different kernels the 4G phones
consistently draw less power.

YMMV!

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pbowyer
5G? I'd be happy with reliable 3G coverage in the UK.

~~~
eliaspro
3G coverage? I'd be even happy with reliable EDGE coverage. Half of my daily
commute has no coverage at all. Location: one of the most economically
powerful regions in Europe/West of Stuttgart/Böblingen in southern Germany.

The network coverage (with all three major networks) along railroads in
Germany is a fucking joke.

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ksec
We need to hugely increase capacity. 4G Speed is fine, but it wasn't designed
for these kind of intensive use we are doing today. We can do 20 - 30Mbps on
most 4G network during normal use, when things go bad it stops loading.
Dropping to mere 1 - 3 Mbps with high latency.

We need even lower latency, best case 4G is around 20 - 30ms. Most of the time
it is 50+ to 90ms. That is much better then then 100s to 300ms in 3G. But 5G
should bring even the worst case to 10ms max. Latency is important in Webpage
/ Apps loading speed.

And then hopefully 5G can do all these while using even less energy then 4G.

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yeldarb
One thing I would like is more tower capacity for dense events like sporting
events and music festivals. Even with a strong 4g connection I often can't
even reliably get a text to go through while tailgating at a football game.

~~~
edwhitesell
That's usually a result of poor backhaul capacity. A lot of tower sites likely
still running on copper (or PtP wireless) instead of fiber, so the capacity
just isn't there for locations that only have a lot of connected devices
"sometimes"

Many sporting venues, universities, college/corporate campuses have on-site
cells or wifi offloading already built. But there are lots of them that don't.
In the past, it's because the carriers won't pay for the capacity themselves,
but want the location to do so. Which doesn't make sense, because if you owned
a venue, how would you pick between ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile & Sprint? You're
definitely not going to pay all of them to put in cells.

Wifi offloading makes it somewhat easier for the location to build-out
capacity, but it's still not cheap. 100s of thousands of dollars...

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nugga
One thing nobody seems to mention is NAT. When can we have end-to-end
connectivity with phones? More bandwidth is nice but if the connection is
still crippled what good is it for?

~~~
ghshephard
IPv6 resolves that.

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Joeri
For IoT you don't need higher speeds, you need lower power requirements. I am
much more interested in things like LoRa networking. It allows upgrading base
stations to receive sensor data directly from the sensor, while the sensor can
run years on battery power. It allows retroactive upgrades of buildings with
sensors without having to put in new cabling or figure out where to put
bluetooth networking gear.

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quonn
The article at least mentions latency, which would provide measurable gains. I
don't think the bandwidth of 4G is holding the network back in any way.
Progress is nice of course, but better 3G coverage, affordable global roaming
and higher data caps are more important.

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jsingleton
5G hardware is still pretty bulky. It requires a motorised trolley. I'm sure
that will be miniaturised though.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30224853](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30224853)

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AriaMinaei
VR websites will need this.

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mtgx
Does 5G bring forward secrecy and strong end-to-end encryption for phone calls
and texts? If not, why not? The likes of AT&T don't want to upset their
spymasters?

~~~
indeyets
the good thing is, that it's trivial to use alternative voice-apps over 4g. no
one forces us to use the default one

with 5g it would be even more so

