
U.S. is behind on 5G rules and deployment - jseliger
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/business/dealbook/huawei-5g-national-security-trade.html
======
YeahSureWhyNot
I don't think americans need the 'couple of hundred mbps' on their cellphones
in metro areas as much as they need decent 3g coverage in other parts of the
country, especially in seasonal touristy places where visitors don't know
where things are or where to go. In my personal experience, almost all of ski
resorts and beach towns on the east coast as well as small coastal towns and
wineries in California have this problem.

~~~
tomohawk
The telcos have been fibbing about their coverage of rural areas. They do that
to attract customers, but they also get subsidies for coverage. There is no
independent verification of their claims. Yet another example of government
not being competent when handing out money.

They're in the process of pulling out 3G in some rural areas I've been to.
There's even less coverage than before.

~~~
reaperducer
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. It's true that wireless carriers lie
about rural coverage because they don't think anyone will call them on it.

The State of Vermont did, though:
[https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/vermont...](https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/vermont/2019/01/24/vermont-
cell-phone-coverage-maps-dead-zone-verizon-att/2467205002/)

~~~
ianai
OP twisted it against government. I’d say it’s more a symptom of needing more
government. The US has had many decades of turning government back away from
market oversight to many disastrous effects. (I still upvoted them though. )

~~~
tomohawk
If we're going to have these large regulated monopolies, then the regulator
had better be competent. Either set the rules to allow market forces to work
or suspend market forces and regulate the monopoly/oligopoly. In the AT&T
days, you couldn't own any telco equipment (not even a phone) - you had to
rent it. The inventor of the answering machine was not AT&T, so you could buy
one but not legally hook it up. Long distance was next town over and cost
north of $2 / minute. On the flip side, we had Bell Labs and lots of
redundancy and everyone had the same service.

~~~
rayiner
Nobody in this discussion is a monopoly. U.S. cellular service has less market
concentration than: cell phones, mobile operating systems, e-commerce, mobile
phone operating systems, web browsers, or search.

~~~
GauntletWizard
One of the hardest learned lessons of the twentieth century was that you
didn't need collusion for a duopoly to become a monopoly. We have four major
carriers, everyone else leases their bandwidth. They don't talk to each other,
but their deals are a subtle form of signaling, and they have arrived at a
monoplistic market, even with competition.

Several rational actors with complete public information can still collaborate
just by their actions alone. There's an entire category of "Hat Puzzles" [1]
that involve extracting information from other players moves. The big four
(Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) don't need to collude to arrive at a
stagnant, uncompetitive market. They have found an equalibrium that benefits
all of them, and would hurt any who attempted "competition".

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_puzzle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_puzzle)

~~~
rayiner
You can’t just hand wave and say that because price coordination is possible,
it’s happening. You have to tie your theory to the facts. Sprint and T-Mobile
offer dramatically lower pricing, so there can’t be price coordination. There
is no carving up of the market—the service area of the four carriers mostly
overlap. In the LTE era, there is very little barrier to switching. (All the
carriers offer big switching incentives.) Capital expenditures remain enormous
across the board.

What exactly is the sign of lack of competition? In the last ten years, I can
think of few pieces of tech that’s gotten better faster than cell service.
When the iPhone 3GS came out, you could get peak speeds up to 2-3 Mbps. On my
XR, I’ve gotten 100 Mbps+. That factor of 20-30 increase is about the same as
the increase in iPhone CPU performance over that time (which itself has been a
stupendous success story). Maybe GPUs have improved faster? Certainly not
desktop CPUs, or mobile or desktop operating systems, or web browsers, or
search.

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corodra
Um, but in all seriousness, do we really need even faster speeds on our
phones? 5g requires even more fiber junctioned off to boxes that only have,
what was it, 500ft radius? So I can do what "faster" on my phone? I get as a
home internet replacement. Sure. Maybe offices, as long as it's nothing crazy.
But I've seen people argue for it by using Fortnite mobile. Itd take like
30seconds instead of 2 minutes to download. And? Not being an ass, other than
the occasional app updates and music sync, what all do you need fiber fast
connections on your phone or you might die waiting?

Problem I see is the same argument for 6g. Suddenly 5g isn't enough. Suddenly
all that infrastructure is going to be a waste.

Makes me think that people imagine setting up this stuff is magic and free.
New fiber lines. Crews to trench and pull cable. Line crews to go on hundreds
of thousands of poles. This isn't cheap both materials and labor.

Hell, my buddy and I got a quote about 2 years ago to run a fiber trunk line
about 1.5 miles from the interstate to an office we had in Colorado. It
roughed out to about 750k. That was with a friend who would do the boring.
Easements, code, general feasibility due to existing infrastructure. Shit
ain't easy or cheap. And we were in a rural area. I'd imagine an actual city
is about two nightmares and a trip to a suicide booth.

~~~
deelowe
What makes you think 5g is just for phones? Also, what is a "phone" exactly
these days? New ford vehicles ship with a wireless hotspot. A lot of laptops
come with sim slots. Is a tablet a phone? What about a phone that has a usb-c
port that can drive display port (or UltraGig) and supports bluetooth
peripherals?

Once 5g is ubiquitous, hardwired internet connections will go the way of
dedicated sound and video cars. Why would anyone want to deal with cable or
dsl when everything already runs over IP anyways and they already have a phone
plan?

~~~
kylec

        Why would anyone want to deal with cable or dsl when everything
        already runs over IP anyways and they already have a phone plan?
    

It’s not anything to “deal with”, it’s pretty much “set it and forget it”. But
if 5G or whatever is more competitive in terms of price and performance, I’d
have no problem switching. I welcome more ISP competition. But $80/month gets
me 1TB of transfer at ~150Mbps on Comcast, and I doubt I’ll get a better deal
over 5G.

~~~
deelowe
Time will tell, but theoretically, 5G should cost less over time. It's a hell
of a lot easier to install a bunch of microcells and provision them
electronically than to schedule house calls and send out techs. That's
assuming there are no issues with the tech.

------
orev
I’m not opposed to progress, but LTE serves my needs just fine so I don’t see
the urgency that it being pushed. I don’t see why this needs to be a “race”,
except that telcos seem to be driving urgency in the public mind potentially
to further their goal of removing the local approval process and associated
fees [1], saving them money. Without that incentive, this would be a regular
upgrade to keep up with the competition, instead of some national emergency
some are making it out to be.

[1] [https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/04/fcc-will-vote-
on-5g-plan-...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/04/fcc-will-vote-on-5g-plan-
for-faster-local-deployments-and-reduced-fees/)

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reggieband
I'm actually amazed at the amount of "we don't need this" attitude in this
thread. Is this really just sour grapes [1]?

It feels a bit like moving back to Canada where contactless payments is
standard for most transactions, while in US I had to sign a piece of paper for
$5 coffee at Starbucks. People in the US have this strange attitude that if it
isn't standard in the US then it isn't worthwhile.

How anyone can argue against faster wireless internet connections seems crazy
to me. It's like that famous quote (which Bill Gates sternly denies having
made) about 640k being enough for anyone.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes)

~~~
mehrdadn
> How anyone can argue against faster wireless internet connections seems
> crazy to me.

If it came without costs nobody would be against it. The question is if's
worth the cost and opportunity costs.

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donutdan4114
Anyone else concerned about placing these on every block? How do they affect
birds? Bees? Or the local level tracking they can do on your phones now...
Ain't no hiding.

~~~
Dove
Birds and bees, heck. I'm concerned about the effects they may have on HUMANS.

~~~
dvtrn
Well if bees go, we wont be far behind them-failing significant haste in
artificial pollination solutions, so...porque no los tres (why not all three)?

------
jMyles
I'm not at all convinced that the model of 5G and the model of Amazon
satellites providing "internet" access from above is consistent with a serious
decentralized network to serve humanity's needs.

Where are we on mesh technology at this point? I haven't caught up in like 3
years, but I hear it is coming along?

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oceanghost
There's no point in having fast internet when Verizon is still charging me per
GB.

~~~
freyr
Conceivably, if 5G increased network capacity and lowered operating costs,
Verizon could charge consumers less per GB. Usage costs are tied, at least
somewhat, to their operating costs and their supply of network capacity.

And even if the cost were the same, why would you rather pay for a slow GB
than a fast GB?

Why don't you switch to a company with an unlimited plan, if you don't like
paying per GB? Sure, they'll throttle you after you use some number of GBs,
but it's still probably a better alternative if you don't like paying per GB.

~~~
kylec
I pay for a slow GB. I’m on the AT&T “Unlimited Choice” plan, which is capped
at 3Mbps, because slower internet the whole month is better than fast internet
for part of the month, then hitting the cap and getting throttled to 128Kbps.
3Mbps is perfectly usable, 128Kbps is not.

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duxup
I'm in the "I don't think I 'need' this" category in the US.

4G is pretty fast for my use cases, I'm often on Wi-Fi... I feel like we're
looking at diminishing returns here.

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heisenbit
The US may be behind at the moment but they are catching up.Not because the US
is moving faster but by having thrown a spanner in the deployments across the
globe which were relying on Huawei delivering as agreed.

------
adrenalinelol
Most people have bandwidth caps AT HOME w/landlines. Large swathes of the
country don't have 4G. Is 4K content on our phones really going to matter?

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londons_explore
Simply legislate that no phone shall be allowed to be operated with less than
_two_ carriers.

If everyone had two SIM cards and two carriers at all times, people would soon
switch to the one with best coverage/price/speed, and suddenly there would be
real competition again.

A bit like "project Fi" is backed into two networks.

------
rayiner
It’s the same problem that sets the US back on other kinds of infrastructure.
Every two-bit municipality and HOA can abuse the legal process to hold up
infrastructure deployment, whether we’re talking about rail or 5G:
[https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/5g-wireless](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/5g-wireless).

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Causality1
What's the point? So instead of hitting the 22GB shadowcap on my "unlimited"
plan in 70 minutes at my usual 40mb/s I can do it in four minutes and eleven
seconds at 700mb/s 5G speeds. Meanwhile I still can't even check e-mail or
send a Whatsapp message when I visit my grandmother out in the boonies. 5G is
breathtakingly unnecessary.

~~~
rhexs
I have the same reservations. What impetus is there to compete against
entrenched cartels/monopolies? Inevitably 5G will have the same 1TB cap
Comcast invented in order to juice profits off the death of cable television.

LTE had the same promise. Best case 5G takes off, media conglomerates attempt
to purchase/merge with new ISPS/old telecoms rolling out 5G, the government
inevitably doesn't enforce antitrust, and we're in the exact same place we're
at now.

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jseliger
The original headline is extremely click-baity, but the content itself is much
deeper than the headline implies.

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jorblumesea
The article is far more interesting than the title indicates.

tl;dr, US govt dysfunction is largely responsible for the lack of innovation
in the area, as the military "owns" the prime 5g wireless spectrum. No US
competitor exists because there's no competitive market that is allowed to
exist.

People that are saying "we don't need 5g" are missing the point. These
problems could be applied to many future technologies.

