
5G Just Got Weird - embit
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/standards/5g-release-16
======
thinkingkong
5G doesnt seem like its enabling anything fundamentally new. The talk of any
”killer app” based on having more throughput or on these optimizations always
feels like demand generation and slightly inauthentic.

Are there any technologies enabled by these techniques that are not possible
today?

~~~
rsynnott
Last mile for fixed rural wireless broadband seems like the obvious one.
Today, this is generally done with either LTE or various proprietary things
(or if you’re particularly unlucky, satellite). 5G should allow for greater
total bandwidth, reducing the impact of contention.

And on the other side, it should be helpful for very dense urban usage. Try
using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how
you get on.

But yeah, not revolutionary, but should make existing LTE applications less
awful in some scenarios where they struggle.

~~~
bdamm
Starlink is going to dominate this. Cellular can't economically scale out to
meet the vast rural coverage. There are still plenty of towns that don't have
basic coverage even now, and to think that suddenly they're going to get 5G
equipment... seems unlikely. Meanwhile, the Starlink satellites are up and
base stations are in testing. Once they approve and start building out their
ground stations, it's SpaceX's business to lose.

~~~
woah
IIRC Starlink can handle about 2gbs per 50 sq miles due to frequency bandwidth
limitations. That's a few hundred subscribers. It's not going to make an
impact in any but the most rural areas.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Wow, that sounds like a huge limitation, no? The number of people living in
places _that_ sparsely populated must be very limited, how does it make
economical sense to launch that huge number of satellites?

~~~
FeepingCreature
Google says there's two million satellite internet users. At $50/mo, if SpaceX
can grab all of them, which seems well possible, that's 1.2 billion income a
year, even assuming that the improved service doesn't result in anybody else
switching from bad rural internet to Starlink.

A fifth of the US population lives outside of big cities. That's not a big
fraction, but it's a small fraction of a very big number. Being able to
capture that market even for a decade would basically bankroll SpaceX's Mars
goal by itself. And that's not even looking at other countries.

~~~
dragonwriter
> A fifth of the US population lives outside of big cities. That's not a big
> fraction, but it's a small fraction of a very big number. Being able to
> capture that market even for a decade would basically bankroll SpaceX's Mars
> goal by itself.

That's about 25 million households, or about $150 billion gross revenue (not
profit) over a decade at the price assumptions you give.

If SpaceX’s public estimate of total Mars program cost of $10 billion was
reasonable, that might plausibly fund the program. But it's highly dubious
that that is even on the right order of magnitude.

~~~
FeepingCreature
Eh, don't underestimate the savings from reuse that's actually practical and
not cost-plus. I think SpaceX have demonstrated the economic case for their
approach with the F9. And once SpaceX demonstrate they can put cargo on Mars,
NASA'll have to get in. Plus people may actually pay to migrate. If you think
those numbers are unrealistic, look at SpaceX's posted total costs for their
rocket development programs. I think the message is more "every space agency
has ridiculously overpaid for decades."

~~~
dragonwriter
> Plus people may actually pay to migrate.

Sure, but “rich people's vanity may help finance the program” (and NASA will
help finance the program, etc.) doesn’t anything to support “satellite
internet will finance the program _by itself_ ”.

~~~
FeepingCreature
No, I mean if cost is as stated. I'm saying cost as stated is plausible if you
account that flights may be sold.

------
elil17
As I’ve learned more and more about 5G (which is a nebulous term, really, but
what I mean specifically is the planned upcoming releases of LTE 16 and 17, as
well as the features of LTE 14 and 15 that users have yet to take advantage
of) I’ve become convinced that it’s going to transform how so much of the
world is designed.

5G technologies allow for more devices to send more data using less power.
This is achieved using a huge variety of new technologies. For instance, with
beamforming, the tower sends a directional signal to your phone based on its
location instead of broadcasting an omnidirectional signal. This uses less
power and supports for more users.

What consumers see is much higher data rates for the same price, which doesn’t
seem that important. But on the industrial side, there will be offerings that
allow for low data rate, low power applications at cheaper and cheaper prices.

~~~
lipanski
> As I’ve learned more and more about 5G

Out of curiousity, what's a good source of information on 5G? I assume the
standard itself is not the easiest thing to digest so I'd appreciate your
input.

~~~
johnnycab
Yes, the 3GPP or ITU standards can make for a dour read. Probably best to look
for sources that you find engaging. You can start with something that gives
you the basics, and/or just go straight to the vendors ─ who provide a
plethora of white papers, case studies, industry insights etc.

[https://5g.systemsapproach.org/index.html](https://5g.systemsapproach.org/index.html)

[https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g/5g-for-
consumers](https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g/5g-for-consumers)

[https://www.nokia.com/networks/5g/](https://www.nokia.com/networks/5g/)

~~~
wqTJ3jmY8br4RWa
Stranger, your links above were very helpful for me in formulating my
company's strategy in 5G. we are a big well known player. How can I get in
touch with you for a more in depth conversation?

------
mac01021
Not exactly on topic:

There have been a few HN submissions in the past linking to papers concerned
with the effect of 5G on insects.

As a layperson I was not able to evaluate those papers. But if anyone knows if
there was any kind of consensus reached about that, or even if this is
something that anyone serious is concerned about, I would appreciate the
pointer.

~~~
vbezhenar
My anecdote data. I'm living in Kazakhstan and there's an interesting
observation. We used to have lots of cockroaches in houses, especially when
houses were not very clean. It was, I think, before 1995. It seems the same
with our post-USSR neighbour countries (Russia, and so on). I used to live in
such a flat, where lots of cockroaches were running in the kitchen at night. I
remember as a child that we tried different chemicals to fight them, but with
little success. And it was similar for many other people.

And at some point they were just gone. From everyone's house. It was not just
one day, but we just understood that there are no cockroaches around.

It's still possible to find them somewhere, I guess, but that's a rare event.
Something's changed.

Some people think that's because chemicals finally became effective and
eradicated them. And some people think that's because of cellular networks
which appeared everywhere around that time. I never found definitive answer,
just speculations.

~~~
thefounder
lol! You still find cockroaches around regardless of wi-fi or 4g signal

~~~
partyboat1586
Clearly he doesn't. Do you?

~~~
arcturus17
I live in Madrid, which is a fairly clean city compared to other places I’ve
lived. We have loads of roaches, especially in the summer. We also have absurd
4G and Wifi coverage. I can only connect to the 5ghz Wifi band at home because
2.4 is saturated by the neighbors. There are still roaches where I live...

Funny thing, in the house where I grew up, I saw the same phenomenon as GP. We
had constant roach infestations in the kitchen, and after years of different
chemical treatments, they were suddenly gone for good. Always attributed it to
an effective chemical or a random biological process. Still see them in other
places in the city nevertheless.

Why are we even entertaining this on Hacker News though? Show me the papers,
GP’s anecdotes or mine are worthless.

~~~
partyboat1586
Better to counter an anecdote with an opposite anecdote than to downvote or
shutdown. To some people being shut down proves they are right. Countering
like you did provides a natural way to show the weakness of anecdotes.

------
sabas123
> In defining V2X for 5G, Seo says the most challenging thing was to provide
> high data throughput, reliability, and low latency, both of which are
> essential for anything beyond the most basic communications. Seo explains
> that earlier standards typically deal with messages with hundreds of bytes
> that are expected to reach 90 percent of receivers in a 300-meter radius
> within a few hundred milliseconds. The 3GPP standards bring those benchmarks
> into the realm of gigabytes per second, 99.999 percent reliability, and just
> a few milliseconds.

Did the previous standard lag behind or is this improvement truly this
ridiculous?

~~~
nine_k
This is what a quickly developing field feels like.

Say, in 10 years from 1985 to 1995, personal computer CPUs developed from
80286 @12MHz and 134k transistors to Pentium MMX @133MHZ and 3.3M transistors,
with at least 100x improvement in integer performance alone, to say nothing
about FPU and the vector unit (MMX). And another similar jump occurred in next
10 (well, 11) years when Intel unveiled the Core line of CPUs.

------
Havoc
>5G for cars to communicate with each other

That's pretty good news. Even a simple "sharp braking" type coms between cars
has decent potential to save lives beyond what can be achieved with radar &
the like.

~~~
kungato
How do you avoid bad actors in these scenarios? Sounds ripe for general havoc,
targeting specific people etc

~~~
cptskippy
Yeah, I could see someone have button to transmit hard braking on demand for
tailgaters.

~~~
TotempaaltJ
Regulate security measures eg signed messaging where only manufacturers can
get certificates? Maybe combine it with license plate so it's traceable to a
person?

~~~
blincoln
So the attack will then be to hook into the car's on-board computer and tell
it to send the falsified message with a fake plate number, and let the
existing cryptographic code handle the signing. Alternatively, dump a legit
cert once (e.g. by detailed examination of one on-board computer), then put
that into the malicious hardware that sends falsified messages.

This is "the DRM problem", but in reverse. There is no way to give an end user
a device that can send cryptographically-protected messages while also
guaranteeing that they can't generate messages other than the ones the
manufacturer wants them to send. One can make it very, very hard to do so,
like with TPM/trusted enclave hardware, but when the potential consequences
are people dying in car crashes, and the motivation to send false messages is
so high[1], it's just an awful idea, because it will absolutely be misused,
and people will die as a result.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication makes this even worse. At least with a tower
intermediary, there would be some sort of forensic evidence stored outside of
the vehicles involved.

[1] The ability to manipulate traffic in order to get to one's destination
faster would be a huge selling point for a lot of people.

~~~
ricardobeat
There is also no way to stop someone throwing rocks at passing cars. People
will die as a result. The deterrents in both cases will be the same: humanity,
liability and law enforcement.

~~~
blincoln
Most of the people who will use malicious signals won't set out to actually
hurt other people. They'll just use them to make tailgaters' cars brake
quickly, or manipulate traffic in some way that benefits them, like the people
in the late 80s or early 90s who figured out that putting strobe lights on
their car roofs would let them make some city signals turn green for them.
There are far, far more people who would be interested in that sort of thing
than would be interested in the electronic equivalent of throwing rocks.

It's the unintended consequences that will generally kill people, like causing
a multi-car pileup because the tailgater whose car was forced to brake was
being tailgated themselves.

There will be very little way to enforce laws against that kind of activity,
because there won't really be any forensic evidence at all.

There is no good way to do this. Even assuming a 100% flawless implementation
of a "trusted enclave", people will just buy an ECU from a scrapped car, hook
it up to a device that simulates the right sensor input to generate certain
vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and stick it in the trunk of their actual
car.

------
mellosouls
Seems a poor taste title considering the conspiracy theories around 5G that
have actually got engineers physically attacked and threatened.

Click bait is one thing but poor form in this context and publication.

------
rektide
Good article but I continue to feel like for whatever use cases 5g is fit to
serve, it seems likely to be a limited technology, used only by heavyweight
giant companies. Unlike other communications bands, there is no intent to make
any of this at all consumerly accessible.

~~~
fock
I think, the general idea is to make this very accessible. But obviously,
there will be a price to pay: buy this Matebook - no Wifi, but hey you can get
this very sweet, data-limited 5G plan for only USD50 a month. Get an unlimited
plan for USD300 a month. Or: buy this car, with superfast 5G V2V – oh, there's
a USD1000 licenses included; well, nevermind. (and remember, some companies
would have liked to use Wifi for V2V, which is freeish...)

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
I thought V2V was going to use redundant, multi-media, communications - such
as modulating a car’s lights’ LED PWM to provide a low-bandwidth signal to
other cars within line-of-sight, while also using some analogue of Bluetooth
and Wi-Fi for longe-range communications.

------
knorker
Wow, those are really cool technologies.

That said, the unlicensed spectrum thing sounds absolutely awful. Sorry your
wifi will suck because your local telco decided to beam 5GHz to your neighbor,
and your AP understands that as "collision" at best, and "weather radar" at
worst.

I thought that was thrown out of the plan, with torches and pitchforks? With
DFS wifi is already super crammed, and now "right of way" managed spectrum
people want to land grab it for profit? That's so not cool.

------
nobleach
The idea of vehicle to vehicle communication is a bit frightening. Imagine the
obscenities and insults you yell at other drivers, are now able to be
communicated directly to the object of ire.

~~~
dragonelite
And reading this a smirk came on my face, yo tesla open a comm channel to that
car.

~~~
ClikeX
Are we getting Star Trek comm channels?

"Tesla, hail the Hyundai behind me!"

------
krick
There's so much messy stuff with 5G from nearly the very beginning. And I like
it less and less.

I'm nobody in the domain of wireless physical protocols, so I wouldn't know,
of course. But does it actually even make sense to mix up peer-to-peer and
peer-to-tower communications within one protocol? Why would you even want
that? To be able to do all this stuff on the same frequencies? Having (more-
or-less) same chip for everything, regardless of if it needs close-range
and/or global network communications not only disgusts me "politically"
(privacy issues, totally absent transparency, you know all that stuff), but
also means more complicated, more expensive tech where you could do with
cheaper one. And doing everything there is to do wirelessly on the same
frequencies means these frequencies busy as fuck. Wouldn't you actually want
the opposite for the protocol you hope to become the ubiquitous high-
throughput cellular network protocol? It seems like it would make more sense
to send 2 identical messages (or even to use 2 chips, if need be) on different
frequencies if you actually need both for some reason.

------
gumbo
Can we change the title. As is, it’s just click bait.

------
justinclift
Reading through this, it doesn't sound like the people involved considered the
amount of outright misuse some of these features are likely to enable.

Haven't we already seen bad actors _will_ misuse mobile tech to track our
movements, spy on people, (etc) on a wholesale scale?

This seems to be wilfully charging down the road of making it worse?

~~~
amelius
I bet that the concerns of the average user are not really what 5G committee
members thought was most important.

~~~
justinclift
Fair point. :)

Unfortunately though, they really should.

------
CarbyAu
5G communication fine. But trust? I don't want my car accepting information
from untrusted cars or roadside infrastructure.

It will be interesting riding a motorbike through these years.

------
LockAndLol
> Private Networks

> [...]At those scales, 5G could function essentially like Wi-Fi networks.

Now that's going to get interesting, I hope. Will we finally see a reliable
alternative to 802.11?

~~~
bzb4
I thought 11ax is meant to be finally reliable?

~~~
LockAndLol
I was talking more about the alternatives. Bluetooth can be used for
networking, but personal experience hasn't been very positive with reliability
and range. LiFi never really took off. And honestly, another alternative
doesn't come to mind...

------
Maha-pudma
The privacy implications for this actually horrifies me.

------
Dylan16807
> Millimeter waves means it will be possible to build a network just for an
> office building, factory, or stadium. At those scales, 5G could function
> essentially like Wi-Fi networks.

LTE was already using a whole lot of frequencies adjacent to Wi-FI, and I'm
sure similar bands would be a critical part of making a private 5G network
since you want to go through minor obstacles. Millimeter-wave on the other
hand could be useful for speed but I bet it _wouldn 't_ be a critical part.

------
mark_l_watson
I expect and hope that 5G makes it possible to have virtual environments with
many participants, very high resolution, low latency, and high frame rate.

While there is something human and nurturing about getting a hug or shaking
someone’s hand, very high quality shared virtual spaces will open up many
business and social opportunities. Endless possibilities...

------
partyboat1586
Someone debunk this for me please:
[http://www.5gappeal.eu/about/](http://www.5gappeal.eu/about/)

Edit: I'm legitimately looking for good sources on this. Not trolling.

~~~
jiggawatts
An easy way to debunk it is to point out that the RF power spectrum of a
typical 5G device is basically the same as a 4G or 3G device. The battery
sizes are the same! It's not like suddenly every mobile phone is hooked up to
a Tesla battery and got water cooling so that it can put out kilowatts.

The difference between 3G, 4G, and 5G is largely the _protocol_ , not the
radio power!

The reason we can have 5G now, and not twenty years ago, is largely due to
Moore's law. It is now possible for embedded and mobile devices to have
sufficient computer power to "talk" using much more complex protocols than was
practical before. They can use better encodings, more complex symbols, smarter
echo and multi-path detection, clever error-correction, complex scheduling,
etc, etc...

All of this efficiency actually serves to _reduce_ the amount of time the
radio is "on", because more data can be sent in the same amount of time.
That's what "higher spectral efficiency" means! Arguing against 5G is to say
that their preference is the older, less efficient, and more RF polluting
standards like 3G and 4G.

(Mind you, first-generation 5G devices eat more battery, but that's largely
because they're right on the edge of what's possible for the logic component.
Using the latest and greatest 5nm technology saves little or no power, and
it'll be the next-gen 3nm process that will truly unlock the power savings.
There was a similar transition with 4G from 3G.)

However, such arguments with such people are futile. They didn't arrive at
their position through evidence or logic. They got there entirely as an
emotional, tribal reaction to what they see as an external group entering
their boundaries without their permission.

~~~
krick
But it would mean (pretty much by the intention of 5G) many more such devices
in proximity of every inhabitant of your downtown area, right (Edit: actually,
now that I read it, this seems to be the main point of the "appeal")? Also
more of closer-range towers pretty much everywhere, no?

> the protocol

Physical protocol, so it doesn't really debunk much. Different wavelengths,
different modes of sending/receiving. I seriously have no idea if there is or
isn't any reason to be concerned about that, and it wouldn't surprise me very
much if it eventually turns out that this isn't all just crazy people
mumbling. After all, there's no conclusive data and there's much more
initiative to support 5G than to fight it, so if there is somebody talking
sensibly about some real dangers, I expect that I wouldn't hear about them for
way too long, since they would be lost in the noise.

So, really, I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss any "dangers of the 5G"
activists, even if they aren't saying anything very conclusive right now. I
seriously don't know if there can be anything to be worried about, but I am
pretty sure that anybody who could possibly conduct any studies on that, will
allow only studies with "good" results. I kinda have some trust issues, when
it comes to dealing with large corporations.

~~~
jiggawatts
> Also more of closer-range towers pretty much everywhere

Which generally _decreases_ the required RF transmit power, because of 1/r^2
scaling laws.

> Physical protocol

Not _really_. If you read through the 5G spec, it's mostly about upping
everything. If before there were a few packet sizes, now there are more packet
sizes for more efficient packing. If some encoding topped out at, say, QAM64,
it goes to QAM1024 now, but only at short range.

Most of the above was constrained by client-side silicon protocol processing,
not radio technology.

It's vaguely similar to H.265 vs H.264. They're not _fundamentally_ different.
The newer encoding just does... more. More block sizes, more transforms,
etc...

> I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss any "dangers of the 5G" activists

You really should be that fast, in the same way that you are fast to dismiss
Flat-Earthers. The 5G conspiracy nutjobs have _zero_ interest in evidence, or
science, or facts, or any of that stuff.

> I seriously don't know if there can be anything to be worried about

If you have no understanding of the technology or the physics, don't comment.

Seriously.

The hard-core conspiracy theorists are kept going by a surprisingly large
group of ignorant people who don't know any better.

Telecoms towers have been burnt to the ground. Staff have been physically
assaulted.

This is the same idiocy as the people attacking volunteers distributing
vaccines.

If you want to reduce your personal health risk from mobile data technology,
then simply stop texting while driving.

If you want to reduce your cancer risk from radiation, use sunscreen.

But please, stop supporting the "concerned Facebook mom" group.

~~~
krick
I'd seriously rather support them, than people like you: individuals, who have
basically nothing to support their claims that "everything will be ok", but
sincerely believe that everybody around must be a "conspiracy nutjob" and must
be wrong by default. Just because I like to err on the safe side, and people
like you are more dangerous for society than these nutjobs (simply by virtue
of being paranoid).

~~~
jiggawatts
Don't take international flights then, you might fall off the edge of the
Earth.

> basically nothing to support their claims

I studied physics and I read the 5G standards manual.

Have _any_ of the 5G conspiracy theorists done either?

Have you?

------
k__
I hoped 5G would be like 4G but with much more speed, lower latency, and more
area covered by one antenna.

But it seems it won't deliver.

~~~
exciteabletom
It's hard to deliver both higher speed and longer range, because higher
frequencies don't reach as far and don't penetrate walls as well.

~~~
k__
But what I read about 5G is that its range is comparable to wifi.

Why do they do that?

~~~
exciteabletom
AFAIK, the speed is >gigabit fast, but to achieve that speed you need to have
super high frequencies and hence smaller range.

To me, it seems inconvenient as a replacement for 4G. However it is also being
used for other applications; like self-driving cars[1].

[1]: [https://www.cnet.com/news/5g-could-make-self-driving-cars-
sm...](https://www.cnet.com/news/5g-could-make-self-driving-cars-smarter-
commutes-safer/)

------
pupdogg
This might be a good time to scrap it all and start from scratch!

------
BigBalli
5G will make Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, BLE, and NFC obsolete.

~~~
cupofjoakim
I could see wi-fi (even if I don't believe it) but how would this compete with
BLE/NFC/Bluetooth? It's not like I want my wireless earbuds or my apple pay to
go up to the internet and then back to device i'm using it from, right?

~~~
progval
"Sidelinks will allow 5G-connected vehicles to communicate directly with one
another, rather than going through a cell-tower intermediary."

~~~
coronadisaster
I bet google wont implement that part... Just like they didnt implement ad-hoc
wifi

~~~
tdonovic
Wifi direct is definitely implemented on android, not sure what you are
specifically talking about?

~~~
coronadisaster
Look at this thread:
[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36904180](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36904180)

------
t0astbread
Uhh, I'm not sure what that was but I tried to access that site via Tor and on
the particular exit node I was on I got back a "418 I'm a teapot" response.
Yeah, it got weird.

~~~
erulabs
Well, it's probably a teapot!

> The HTTP 418 I'm a teapot client error response code indicates that the
> server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418)

------
lcnmrn
Can we skip 5G already?

