
Australia’s 4G network is faster than 5G: study - gscott
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2019/07/20/australia-fast-4g/
======
ricardobeat
Amazingly the article refrains from providing any numbers for Australia. From
the original report:

\- 5G: 792mbps

\- 4G: 950mbps

[https://www.opensignal.com/blog/2019/07/08/5g-boosts-the-
max...](https://www.opensignal.com/blog/2019/07/08/5g-boosts-the-maximum-real-
world-download-speed-by-up-to-27-times-4g-users-top-speeds)

~~~
keyle
In my experience, you never get that outside of the town centre. 10mbps cap in
the suburb on 4G.

Anyway, this doesn't really highlight how good our 4G is, it highlights how
poor our interconnected fibre network is. It's a bloody multi-generational
disaster, a train wreck salvaged. And the price of it all lands on the
consumers.

For example, I'm on cable, and life is good. When I get migrated (by force) to
fibre, I will have less bandwidth and pay more. It's also wildly known at the
moment to have constant drop outs. YAY the future.

And remote areas are put on Satellite, they were never going to run fibre to
the home.

~~~
stephen_g
You won't go onto FTTP, they will use the Telstra HFC cable and you just get a
different modem. Most of the drop-out problems I think are fixed.

The less bandwidth and paying more are only due to stupid pricing models from
the infrastructure provider (NBN), for anybody who isn't familiar with the
system. There's no technical reason for it in 60% of the country. They could
upgrade anybody in the FTTP footprint to gigabit this afternoon and anybody in
the HFC footprint to at least 250 or 300Mbps but are limiting everybody mostly
to 100Mbps (but most people are on lower speeds) just because they want to
gouge providers for bandwidth. The artificial limitations created by these
pricing models also mean that a lot of providers skimp on buying the necessary
bandwidth, so for most providers (there are only a few good ones) there are
unnecessary slow-downs at peak times as the artificially limited bandwidth
gets congested. It's madness!

The rest is unfortunately served by satellite, FTTN or FTTC that aren't able
to deliver the speeds, or for the fixed wireless footprint it is also limited,
but to a large degree only because the LNP government shelved the planned
backhaul upgrades to save some money, so there are all these wireless towers
that are served by low-speed microwave backhaul. The plan had been to upgrade
any tower to fibre backhaul once the microwave backhaul reached a certain
level of utilisation, before it was fully congested. That now doesn't happen,
so those users just have to deal with speeds dropping significantly at peak
times.

~~~
uikoeixueo
I'm in an apartment tower which is vendor locked to Internode (IINet/TPG
aren't even available).

I'm fortunate that the connection is 100/40/unlimited for $60 AUD, but it
still annoys me that I have _no_ options to obtain a static IP whatsoever.

~~~
t4ko
It's not as good as a static IP but you can look into DynDNS providers to have
a static way to access your machines from outside. Almost every provider has a
free option and it's very easy to setup.

------
crispinb
Well I don't know about faster than 5G, but for my rural location it's a
lifesaver. I get a steady 60Mbps down, 12-15 up, which is just a tad better
than my previous 0.3Mbps ADSL. It's kind of amazing and is literally what
enables me to live where I do (ie. for remote work).

4g here is also far better than the shithouse fake NBN foisted on us by our
far-right government, which loathes and fears any technology more recent than
coal & witch burning.

~~~
emmelaich
Good post until the last sentence! NBN history is far more interesting than
that!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network)

~~~
zizee
Agreed. As per the HN guidelines:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle

HN is a great place for considered discussion. Let's keep it that way.

~~~
baroffoos
To be fair, it's a true statement. The NBN is shithouse and compared to what
was promised originally, it could be considered fake.

~~~
zizee
This is the part that is questionable:

> our far-right government, which loathes and fears any technology more recent
> than coal & witch burning.

~~~
manicdee
Let sleeping dogs lie, is my advice here.

~~~
crispinb
Yes, let's do that please. The tone wasn't right for HN.

------
reaperducer
I've found that 3G in Beatty, Nevada is faster than 4G in Pasadena,
California.

(The downside is that you have to live in Beatty, Nevada. ;))

I've noticed these kinds of discrepancies every time I leave a major city. I
don't trust the G anymore. It's all either really good, or really terrible
from mile to mile regardless of how it's branded.

~~~
JohnFen
I've always considered "#G" to be just a marketing term, and therefore largely
meaningless.

~~~
grecy
It absolutely is.

I worked at a Telco that installed extremely old hardware, but because it was
theoretically capable of achieving speeds that were similar to the low-end of
3G, they branded and marketed it as 3G.

Marketing loved it.

When you pulled out your phone it clearly said "2G" on the screen, but you
were paying for 3G.

------
tpmx
"The United States, meanwhile, enjoyed a 5G maximum speed of 1815Mbps – about
three times as fast as 4G users’ maximum speed."

This report seems to be lacking a reality check. (Is it _practically_ possible
to get ~600 Mbps from LTE? Exotic bundles like LTE MIMO don't really count
unless they're actually offered as part of regular plans.)

~~~
stagger87
At the 30.72 MS/s rate, 2k FFT size, 1201 subcarriers occupied per FFT, QAM256
on each subcarrier, 4x4 MIMO, you get ~576Mbps max throughput (pure number of
bits transferred per second). This ignores encoding, cyclic prefix, and all
the other overheads associated with the LTE protocol.

~~~
tpmx
So I guess that's where the article author got the "LTE speed". It was
probably from some aussie mobile operator's "theoretical maximum speed" number
or similar.

------
djsumdog
I wish they wouldn't just use '4G' and '5G' as if they were one concrete
thing. List the actual individual protocols.

Sprint use to offer 4G in the United States that was Wi-Max based, but now
almost all 4G is LTE. In Australia there was a Wi-Max provider (Vivi Wireless)
but on a different frequency than the US and only via hot-spots (no phone
support, that I know of).

Is 4G for all these reports LTE? What exactly is 5G in all these contexts? Are
we talking about the same protocol, or another collection of protocols
expected to have x speed at y range?

~~~
wmf
AFAIK NR is the only 5G protocol.

Exposing protocol details to consumers _when those details do not correlate
with performance_ is likely to just cause confusion.

~~~
pdemporg
NR is the only 5G protocol (aside from Verizon's abortive proprietary 5G TF),
but it couldn't hurt to at least specify if the spectrum being used is sub-6
or mmWave. This factor (700--3500 Mhz vs 26, 28, 39 GHz) is going to have the
largest impact by far on the experience in terms of the bandwidth/coverage
tradeoff.

When it comes to discussing these two distinct clusters of spectrum, the
difference is so stark that we might as well be talking about different
protocols.

5G and 5G pro?...

------
danfo
4G is plenty fast enough. The next tangible leap has got to be unlimited data.
Is that something 5G might help with?

Recently moving back to Australia after a year living in Finland, I really
miss unlimited 300Mbit/sec 4G for 25€/month (~$40 AUD).

It's well and good that our mobile networks are as good as the Finns
(anecdotally), speed and reliability wise (whoops, as long as you dodge
Telstra outages). Sure there are a couple of 'unlimited' plans popping up in
Australia now, but it's more like 'trickle at 1.5Mbit/sec when you use up your
allowance'. Like a lot of things, I think Australia would do well to copy-
paste what the Finns are doing. Education, telecoms, energy, well-being, ...
for our post-coal economy we'd do well to learn it and scale it.

~~~
rosege
Optus have offered a 5g plan that I think is unlimited - its only available in
a very small footprint though while they continue to roll it out.

I moved back from the Netherlands a few years ago. I'm awaiting the NBN at my
place in the next few weeks hopefully. Then I will be able to get the same
connection that I had in Amsterdam in 2011. This is after the government has
spent $50bil+ on the NBN - go Australia!

~~~
danfo
Oh, it's happening! That's fantastic.

Good luck with the NBN lottery! In inner-city Brisbane I'm lucky to have NBN
and non-NBN fibre options. But I would cancel fixed fibre in a heartbeat for
unlimited 5G if it meant only taking a bandwidth hit.

------
duxup
I remember when I got an early 4G phone on Verizon (I think it was a Droid
something or other).

It was INSANELY fast. Presumably because I was one of the few folks on it and
Verizon had built out all the towers and bandwidth was ready for growth.

As time passed the performance suffered, granted 4G seems plenty for me most
of the time.

~~~
bscphil
It still is insanely fast, from my perspective. I get at least 50 Mbps down,
which is just crazy which you think about the fact that it's a low power
handheld device. Enough to stream 4k video, if I wanted to (I don't). More
than enough to load even the absurdly large web framework of the month in less
than a second. I can't see ever wanting faster Internet on my phone.

~~~
dzhiurgis
Providers in Lithuania now sell mobile broadband. We’ve got one for a marina
with 60 boats and 8 cameras. They setup little router with a bit more serious
antenna. We get ~130/30 for €25 per month - all actually unlimited data.

------
kevin_thibedeau
The purpose of 5G isn't to deliver faster speed to an individual end point.
It's to add more capacity to a single cell site. Marketing will continue to
lie with their "up to" promises but don't expect to reap any significant gains
from the latest radio tech.

~~~
wmf
If the cell site has more capacity but a similar number of customers, would
those customers not get more throughput?

------
gzu
LTE seems plenty fast enough for typical phone usage. Not sure how much 5G
will improve mobile experience in the near future without massive advances in
VR.

Is all this telecom positioning to setup a replacement for landline internet
service?

~~~
mfer
5G can handle more devices being connected. All those smart things that want
to phone home. It's likely 5G will let many more devices be connected and
phoning home without using our personal internet connections.

I wonder what it would look like for my TV to be connected and sending my
viewing habits back to the manufacturer without a method for me to turn it
off. 5G makes this idea much easier.

Phone companies can get contracts with all these device manufacturers and make
money that way.

~~~
reaperducer
_I wonder what it would look like for my TV to be connected and sending my
viewing habits back to the manufacturer without a method for me to turn it
off._

If you have cable, satellite, or streaming this already happens. The only way
to watch TV without being watched is to use an antenna or local storage.

~~~
mfer
It depends on who is watching. For example, if I am watching Netflix I expect
them to know what I watched. But, would I expect my TV (the visual device) to
know what I watched and report back to the TV manufacturer? I can choose to
not connect my TV to the Internet or use something like Pie Hole to stop that
device from reporting. If the TV used the cell network how would I stop the TV
from reporting?

------
p49k
Should be noted that one stated advantage of 5G over 4G is latency, which is
certainly a component of determining what is “faster.”

~~~
dzhiurgis
Pointless didactics, but latency determines who is quicker, not faster :)

Medium (wireless vs copper vs fiber) defines who is faster.

------
armagon
People are actually demanding 5G? (Or is that hype, trying to make people
think that other people are demanding it?)

I can only think of one conversation I've had in which 5G was even mentioned,
but boy, I know people here in rural Canada would like affordable data plans,
and I don't see that 5G is going to help at all.

~~~
microcolonel
Urban Canada needs affordable data too. We have the most expensive telco in
the world, across the board.

------
mfer
This is where marketing and confusion can come in. There is what the
technology is capable of and then the network backing it. For example, where I
live I get a fraction of what 4G can provide. The reason is the cell phone
providers network. I could get far faster speeds out of 4G if the providers
provided it.

5G has some positives and negatives over 4G. For example, 5G frequencies
interfere with the detection of water vapor for weather forecasts, are hyper
local so lower latency but need to have towers in every neighborhood, can
handle more devices connected (so all the hardware reporting back to
manufacturers and others can phone home), and has the potential for faster
speeds.

In theory, 5G is faster than 4G. In practice, I'm not likely to see the faster
and I don't need it for my day to day activity.

~~~
selectodude
5G is just a protocol. It'll be rolled out on low band frequencies because it
_is_ more efficient than LTE, but re-farming spectrum is a big deal so they're
going to roll it out on high band frequencies first.

~~~
kurtisc
I thought 5G and 4G are both LTE?

~~~
Synaesthesia
No, 5G is a new standard. It's kinda confusing because there are so many
standards, 3G, 3.5G, 3.95G, 4G etc.

~~~
snuxoll
It’s also hella confusing because there’s not a marketing or real protocol
name attached beyond the “5G” moniker, at least not that I could easily find.

I can name GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSPA, 1xRTT, EVDO, WiMAX, and LTE off the top of
my head and tell you what “G” they are associated with (1, 2, 3, 3.5, 2, 3, 4,
4 respectively).

5G is a vaporous term with no real definition right now other than “whatever
the fuck the ITU has decided to call 5G”.

EDIT: I guess they’re calling the air interface “5G NR (New Radio)”. How
memorable. Guess with everyone finally getting on the same page with LTE in
the current generation they felt no need to come up with a real name.

------
mehrdadn
Related question: what exactly is the LT in LTE supposed to mean? What's
considered "long-term" here? Been confused to see 5G coming out already when
4G was supposed to be long-term.

~~~
freehunter
It's not "long term" in "this technology will exist for a long time" but
rather "it will take a long time to get this technology fully rolled out".

Carriers started releasing what they called "4G" networks, but those networks
did not meet the standards required to call it 4G. So they came up with LTE
because it's a long-term evolution of 3G service, evolving until it meets the
standards for 4G.

~~~
mehrdadn
Wow, you just blew my mind, thanks. So what is "true" 4G here? Is it LTE-A? Or
does it not even exist? All this time I used to think the "fake" 4G (3.9G?)
was HSPA and the "real" one was LTE and that LTE-A went beyond that, but now
I'm not sure what's what anymore!

~~~
freehunter
4G requires data rates of 100mbps while moving and 1Gbps while stationary.
LTE-A only hits 300Mbps, but the ITU eventually gave up fighting it and now
calls LTE-A officially "4G" even though it doesn't meet the original standard.

[http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/48.as...](http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/48.aspx)

~~~
wmf
In retrospect this is evidence that sometimes setting ridiculously ambitious
goals isn't enough to make them happen. IMO a new generation per decade is a
good pace but 10x per decade is a lot more reasonable than 100x.

------
MarkMc
In Australia cost of 4G has been the limiting factor, not speed. But now we
can get 200gb per month for $40 [0] which makes me wonder weather the NBN was
worth it.

[0] [https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2019/06/mobile-broadband-vs-
ho...](https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2019/06/mobile-broadband-vs-home-
wireless-broadband-whats-the-difference)

~~~
paranoidrobot
>which makes me wonder weather the NBN was worth it.

Yes, the original NBN plan was definitely worth it. Even the current NBN plan
is still in many cases going to be better.

The reason <choose wireless technology> is "faster" than <choose NBN
connection option> is because there's a lower density of people using it for
higher bandwidth applications.

Do you remember the 3G networks in Australia before the iPhone 3G launch? It
was fantastic and fast, and there were some unlimited plans but few phones
that could make use of it. Then the iPhone comes along, everyone suddenly
every mobile network grinds to a halt as they don't have a high enough tower
density and/or not enough tower backhaul.

It took Vodafone and Optus a long long time to fully recover from that.

If carriers don't carefully manage demand, they're going to run into major
congestion issues - their networks just can't handle a significant shift of
data from wired to wireless.

------
noodlesUK
And here I am in the Pacific Northwest, remembering how insanely fast LTE felt
like a few years back, but now it’s awful in my area (used to consistently get
>50mbps). Now LTE often means that my phone has a connection of ~3mbps... Is
it just T-mobile, or is this just normal levels of congestion?

------
rb808
Anyone know of a dirt cheap 3G-only plan in the USA? I saw some in Europe and
its just what I need really.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
I used redpocket.com for a plan for my Nokia 3310 3G. I think it was $10 a
month.

~~~
bacon_waffle
How do you like the Nokia 3310 3G? Have been tempted to buy one of those (or
the 8110 4G bananaphone), main hesitation is around losing Signal and maps(?)
though I understand there are ways to sideload an old version of Google Maps
to the 3310.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
I loved it. I was so free. Unfortunately I had to go back to a smartphone in
order to monitor security cameras and my Simplisafe alarm system at my new
business. I wish I could go back.

------
treelovinhippie
Probably because Telstra 5G is currently using the same spectrum as 4G.

Telstra 5G 2019: 3.5GHz

Telstra 5G planned future: 26 - 28GHz

------
thereare5lights
This is a clickbait title. Their 5G network is worse than their 4G network.
Their 4G network is not faster than 5G in general.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Their 4G beats a lot of other countries 5G. But yes theoretically 5G is a lot
better and generally should be faster. It’s also got other capabilities like
support for higher density (devices per sq km)

~~~
contingencies
Australian density is significantly less than Asia. In China FWIW on typical
mobile devices I often observe connectivity issues with planes landing, trains
moving and so forth. Especially near borders (HK/Macau).

------
ffk
For me, the exciting part of 5G is the connection density.

The estimated density for a 4G network is: 4,000 devices / km^2.

The estimated density for a 5G network is: 1,000,000 devices / km^2.

The density means we can scale up machine <-> machine interactions
significantly, rather than focus on human <-> machine interactions that we
have today.

~~~
jsjohnst
While I don’t know the exact numbers for 5G, those numbers are way way way off
(on the high side) for 4G and I highly suspect are more than an order of
magnitude on 5G, if not more.

------
test1978
Same in India 4G was slower than 3G in the beginning

------
m3kw9
Prob not using 5Gs fastest modes

------
basicplus2
Australias 4G is 3Gpp and their 4G plus is 4G,

I dont know what their 5G is bit I suspect it is not 5G

