>Parkinson's Law. Increase in 5G bandwidth will be filled with next-gen media.
Perhaps, Jevons paradox might be more apt in this case, as huge investments in 5G Infrastructure indicate that 4G/LTE efficiency/usage ratio has peaked.
Nevertheless, any nascent demand for next-gen media in the next few years can be served via 5G NR, Wi-Fi 6 and inter-related standards like Wi-Fi HaLow,Vantage etc.[1] and Blutetooth 5 with synergistic and overlapping features, until 'real' 5G establishes itself, sometime in the next decade.[2][3]
My comment was from the perspective of the stakeholders i.e. governments/academia/spectrum holders, various steering groups/SIG/committees, policy makers, environmentalists, OEM's, chip designers/fabs, banks, telcos et al., who are not only aware of the challenges ahead but have to be fully invested and efficiency matters. [1]
They could adopt the default position suggested by you and do nothing; it will certainly be favourable and indeed profitable for all the incumbents in the short term, but they will only be postponing the inevitable. A new generation of mobile standard is a well-trodden path, from the beginning of 1980's with the advent of 1st Generation of wireless telecommunications and every decade since then. It is without a doubt paved with riches and there will be winners and losers ─ however, the biggest driver has been innovation and not just about the 'win' and to suggest that 5G might fail is pure fantasy.
It is a non-sequitur to compare stand-alone video formats with a constellation of technological advancements, encompassing a multitude of disciplines, which have had a profound impact on us.
While cable boxes could be replaced by subsidized smartphones, my question is "Why?". A wired connection will always be less capricious than a wireless one [citation needed], so if your TV is in a fixed position there's no benefit. At best, you could get a little bit of flexibility w/in your domicile, but wouldn't this problem be better solved with better wiring? And who moves their frequently TV anyways?
Also, before anybody comments something about 5G helping out in broadband deserts, I'd argue that point is invalidated by the reduced penetration depth due to the much higher frequency of 5G. Let's just invest in rural broadband instead
We as a society, might benefit more, but, like socialized healthcare, that's not how the market works. The bandwidth to support renting out smartphones-as-hotspots for home wifi connections will make Verizon wireless and AT&T quite happy (at Comcast's expense), so the question is less "why", and more "who, and for how much"?
Depends what you want to do, how you want to communicate, do you broadcast / mesh, uni/bi directional, etc. It's a "how long is a piece of string" situation.
From cheap, slow, long range deployments like LoRa (100 devices sending tens of bytes) to satellite broadcast (any number of synchronised devices), and a few things in between.
If the bandwidth is available then people will find a way to fill it. Streaming games, higher res video, remote terminals replacing low end PC hardware, who knows?
Good point, though I'll note that streaming games, high-res video, and remote terminals are already available (at least via high-speed ethernet connections), so the "next generation" would be higher quality or wider availability rather than genuinely new forms of media.
My instinct is that there are diminishing returns past a certain point. We're certainly not there yet, but once cellular networks allow you to stream high-definition VR content and upload data at the same rate, it seems like there's nothing more that additional bandwidth could add.
I see it as a philosophical issue... bandwidth is for the transmission of information, and there's only so much information that a human being can receive and provide at a given moment. At some point you're running up against the maximum bandwidth of the human user.
> once cellular networks allow you to stream high-definition VR content and upload data at the same rate, it seems like there's nothing more that additional bandwidth could add.
Well there is this famous quote "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." from 1943 and it turned out to be very wrong.
"High-definition VR content" isn't the same as "indistinguishable from reality". When movies were first introduced to theaters, with small frames per second rates, without color and without any sound on the medium itself, people were quite stunned and e.g. took cover when a the movie showed a train approaching at high speeds. Nowadays it seems primitive to us from a technological standpoint.
There is a trend that some people don't accept lossy audio encoding. Maybe one day, videos will get a same trend and people want lossless videos, in full 360 degree VR, intensity resolution beyond perceptual limits and constantly high enough angular resolution for your eyes to foveate any area of the screen and see no pixels. That's quite a huge amount of data to transmit. Add in buffering so that you can seek, etc.
As for genuinely new forms of media, I could think of some: full-body experiences with feeling of touch, smell, etc either live or recorded possibly professional in a studio or just you sharing your last vacation to venice.
Taking it further: uploading your consciousness to a body which is a large distance away, making physical travel of humans mostly obsolete: Maybe one day we can represent the brains of human individuals as data and send it with light speed around the earth and throughout space.
So here's an example of "next gen" media streaming in action. I was recently at a MotoGP race. MotoGP has a streaming media app that allows for you to stream cams from your favorite racers on your mobile device in very high quality. This would be really cool to use for the many hours of racing throughout the day at the race track, but while its technically possible with current technology for me to do it the cost is prohibitive. With significantly higher throughput per tower, the cost of data should significantly be reduced, making it really cheap to have a crowd of people at the race track have a few 1080p each.
On-demand streaming of identical content to hundreds of users at the same time is not an efficient use of bandwidth.
It's like Netflix versus cable television - you can push the equivalent of hundreds of 1080p streams through a broadcast cable television, but attempting to push on-demand IP packets to an equivalent number of subscribers would bog down horrifically if they even attempted to stream a single show (let alone how you have cable tuners that can tune multiple shows at once).
What you need there is something much more akin to broadcast television - either a digital OTA video broadcast (good ol' digital television), or a microcell using multicast to broadcast a stream to any interested party.
(of course your phone probably doesn't have a DTV tuner, but when a RTL-SDR dongle is like $20, you should probably be asking why your phone isn't integrating that functionality. These days they don't even have FM tuners on phones anymore... despite the fact that in virtually all cases those are already built into the cellular chipset. IP-based singlecast is not a good paradigm for a lot of the use-cases that people come up with, it's just that it's the most profitable one for carriers, so it's the only one they'll support.)
In this instance its not all identical content though. In this example, each bike has three cameras, along with a dozen or so camera angles around the track. Users can pick and choose a lot of those different views and combine a hybrid view of their own personal choosing.
Of course, this could also be accomplished with DTV tuners, but there's a much higher probability of users having a 5G chipset on their phone than having a DTV tuner capable of tuning to multiple channels and an antenna.
So essentially you want you want an app that lets you pick a couple multicast groups to add yourself to, and then displays them in this "hybrid view of their choosing".
It's the same as what the app is currently doing, just with multicast groups instead of singlecast. And by doing so, you reduce the network load by N/M, where N is the number of users and M is the number of streams each user runs on average.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that this probably isn't currently implemented, but that's the kind of thing we should be looking at, before we decide to screw up weather forecasting and radioastronomy so that you can see your NAAAYYSSSCARR.
Even 5G is going to get eaten up under certain types of load, so it makes much more sense to look at ways to reduce traffic, the easiest of which is broadcasting rather than singlecast.
"...before we decide to screw up weather forecasting and radioastronomy so that you can see your NAAAYYSSSCARR."
This isn't the place for cheap comments like that.
Even if you have a point ideologically speaking we live in the real world where consumer money talks louder than forum comments. 5G is coming whether we like it or not because of people wanting to stream data for entertainment.
I guess that we can revisit that if weather forecasting does become substantially less reliable. And with global climate change, maybe we'll need reliable weather forecasting. But me, I'll be dead before it gets too bad, dog willing.
It is dependent on supply/demand and business model. You could have asked the same thing when Google/Yahoo as a search engine came into play "why do you think the knowledge of millions would be widely available and relatively cheap/"free"?
For how long? Is there a saturation and pull-back at some point?
Personally, I used my home gigabit extensively the first few months... but a year later I frequently find myself still tethered to my cellphone's 4G plan. It doesn't make a difference except once in a blue moon when I want to download something big.
More like AR, if you can run a computationally complex AR environment in the cloud and stream it in realtime to thin client devices it reduces the requirements for portable glasses etc.
Pretty bold predictions, I'd say. People still buy cable even with the rise of a half dozen streaming platforms and as long as you have to buy internet from a cable company, people will still be cowed into buying cable. Comcast (or anyone else, they all play the same exact game) can just make internet only packages egregiously expensive unless you also buy a cable subscription because many customers don't have another telecom option, and lawmakers are on the telecoms side.
5G is also going to need to have better coverage than anything ever made before if its to replace in home wifi. As it stands I drop calls when I walk into different rooms of my house on the data connection. 4G drops to 3G or even edge all the time going in and out or between buildings. That being said, I'm waiting to see what route telecoms pounce on to force us into 5G use. Will they degrade other data connections or go the planned obsolescence route? Either way, they are going to get their return, this isn't done out of technical altruism.
I would adopt a 5G to Ethernet/WiFi router just for the ability to drop Comcast. I would pay a premium to drop Comcast, but I don't have any other high-speed options. They have been so incredibly horrible. What I really want is some means, any means, to have a reliable high-speed connection that doesn't require 20+ hours on the phone and multiple service calls to admit that the connection from their box to my house is faulty. Being able to take my "home" connection with me on the road is just a side-benefit.
Edit: that said, I would probably also be pretty happy with a 4G plan that I could use for this purpose.
Cable boxes will be replaced by subsidized free smartphones in exchange for "always on" subscriptions. No more home WiFi for low-end market.
Personally, the industrial 5G IoT applications are far more interesting.