
At this point, 5G is a bad joke - CrankyBear
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3575510/at-this-point-5g-is-a-bad-joke.html
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jkchu
I am personally fine with my current phone speeds. I even use my phone as a
hotspot for my laptop when I do coding at the park.

Curious what the bottlenecks for people are that make them want 5G so
urgently?

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1123581321
For one, many people don’t have data fast and low-latency enough to make
hotspot usage a good enough experience.

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ac29
If your signal levels are poor enough that 4G is slow, 5G isnt going to help
unless you happen to be extremely close to a mmWave access point with nothing
but air in between it and your phone.

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ksec
It isn't just Signal, but Network Capacity.

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ArkVark
The point of 5G is to allow carriers to serve more data with the same amount
of spectrum. Usually that leads to consumer benefits in the form of a cheaper
rate per megabyte. That's basically it.

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bitminer
I disagree. I think the purpose of 5G is to allow carriers (formerly known as
The Phone Company) to sell value-added services to other companies large and
small. IoT, video-on-demand, Big Data, AI, automation, etc. The bandwidth
story is the distraction.

Guess who pays?

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ArkVark
IoT devices are cheap and tiny and so are rarely on the latest cellular
standards. Your typical IoT use case is smart metering and logistics - hardly
big data users.

In most of those other use cases, the carrier serves as basically a big dumb
pipe.

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proce55ing
Yes and the cost models are being driven down even more by Cat-M and NB-IoT.

I've been working in the IoT space for some time and there's now a real shift
into these technologies for large scale telemetry deployments like you
described. The shutdown of 2G networks across the world have ruled out a lot
of the cheaper modems.

There are other benefits, such as enabling a larger set of solutions to be
battery powered and for an increased lifespan.

High density, sparse traffic solutions like you described are often termed as
mMTC (Massive Machine Type Communications). The main benefits to 5G in these
regards focus on the mobile network and their ability to manage a higher
volume of subscribers and therefore lower their costs to the end customer.

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kierank
I have 5G home broadband in London and receive 700Mbps down with no cap.
There's service from multiple operators. Yes we've had teething issues but
they were all resolved.

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Dayshine
With who? I've never seen unlimited data only sims in the UK.

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jimsmart
Three provide exactly this.

[http://www.three.co.uk/unlimited-data](http://www.three.co.uk/unlimited-data)

There may be others: I didn't look.

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Eleopteryx
Feeling somewhat validated in my choice to upgrade to a discounted phone from
2019 rather than spring for a newer phone with 5G support. I just had a
feeling 5G was going to be something I would certainly eventually want to
have, but wouldn't make a huge practical difference in the short-term (the
next couple of years).

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Fr33maan
There is a 5g specification called 2D2 which is an acrobym for device to
device. Could we create a "p2p" network so we don't need to all pay provider
to get internet but rather share bandwidth ?

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quantum_state
The pop up ads from the site is very annoying and out of date ...

