The whole 5G thing is just complete bullshit. After the tech has flopped pretty much worldwide and Verizon's and AT&T's "5G REMOTE SURGERY" and "RACE TO 5G" marketing bs didn't get consumers interested, they finally decided as a last resort to pay Apple and see if that will be enough to push this technology through.
disagree, sort of. The marketing was always shit, but the 2 big differences between LTE and 5G are latency and cell size.
Cell size matters because there is a ceiling for how many devices an LTE cell can support in a certain range. Thats why you get crappy speeds/connectivity’s at concerts/events/crowded areas. As I understand it, 5g can support more devices per cell, and also can have smaller cells for more connection density. With latency, LTE has a baked in 300ms min latency that 5g does not, so 5g can be used for latency sensitive applications.
It will be a slower rollout due to the costs and infrastructure requirements, but 5g (from Verizon at least) will be faster than your home cable connection. That's a big deal.
LTE already allows 150Mbps symmetrical on an iPhone 8 (real-world speed test in London), and probably more on the newer phones.
The problem with mobile data has never been the raw speed - that is already fast enough. The problem was always how it's being sold (whether data caps, the overall - terrible - customer experience and the BS the industry is constantly pulling like AT&T sharing data for marketing purposes), and switching to a different technology won't magically change that.
From a technical perspective, it actually is a bit of a problem.
First, remember that speed is shared with everyone using the same tower (sector) as you. As data usage goes up, that will drop. In a major city where cell density is high it's less of a problem, but it's already an issue in more rural/suburban areas where cells are larger. There are plenty of places in the US that have LTE coverage, but the speed is actually pretty poor.
Second, there are some limit on the number of devices each tower can support. With embedded devices increasingly relying on cellular, we're expecting to hit those limits. So 5G allows for future system growth.
And as for data caps... more available bandwidth does help lower prices. Those prices are, at least in part, set in order to manage system load. More capacity means they can relax the pricing and/or caps.
I am aware of this, but data caps don't solve this problem either.
Data caps do nothing if everyone in a crowded area has plenty of "data" remaining and start using it all at once.
The reverse is also true, you can have towers in a low-usage area at night that are basically just burning energy, and yet if you run out of "data" you can no longer use it; so the RF airtime is essentially wasted as the only customer wishing to use it at that time & location is unable to.
Furthermore what about the "data" that somehow "expires" at the end of the month? That doesn't make sense either and proves this pricing model is just a bullshit extortion strategy and is very bad at actually addressing the problem of limited RF airtime.
The proper solution is to charge for a bandwidth, not data. The more you pay the more bandwidth you get allocated, and users can choose which plan they want based on their usage patterns.
> Data caps do nothing if everyone in a crowded area has plenty of "data" remaining and start using it all at once.
But 5G does make a difference, that's what the parent comment was trying to tell you. It allows high-density crowds to continue having high-speed access, something that is not possible today. You can barely make a phone call on NYE.
> It allows high-density crowds to continue having high-speed access
Is that an actual problem that affects many users and currently can't be resolved with LTE? I don't disagree that 5G will benefit carriers, but the hype around it being some kind of a revolution for the customer is overblown. The customer's problem is very rarely a technical shortcoming of LTE or the earlier technologies and more about how the service is sold and priced, and so far despite 5G indeed allowing much higher capacity there's no evidence that the industry as a whole is moving away from the user-hostile "data cap" model.
> You can barely make a phone call on NYE.
Isn't that a failure of the switching/call control equipment or the inter-carrier peering as opposed to tower capacity?
The key technology design dimension cell towers of almost any generation gives you is the the ability to tradeoff cell sizes and numbers of nodes with density of users. Maybe 5G gives you some incremental improvements on that, but it was always possible to put in more towers for more users.
US telecom companies in particular have always been at loath to share any cost savings with the end consumer - so I don't think consumers have any reason to be exited over marginal 5G gains on efficiency.
It's a lot easier for some mobile companies to roll out 5G than 4G too. Vodafone in the UK were still rolling with point-to-point microwave connections between masts all over the place before 4G and had to ditch that to get the bandwidth needed to support it.
Only mmWave 5G, as of now mostly used in the USA, has this problem. Sub6 5G has similar propagation to LTE. Sub6 has way less capacity than mmWave though.
I guess in the future operators will use both frequency ranges in parallel in a macro/micro cell format. If you happen to be within the range of a mmWave micro base station you will use it. If not the sub6 macro base station will make sure you remain connected with “good enough” speed.
5G isn't bullshit, but it will be years before the standards are completed to do novel things, like Vehicle-To-Pedestrian (V2P) -- imagine cars sensing humans and no longer running into them.
What its marketed as is bullshit. 5G seems essential to fit more devices in packed spaces like sports stadiums. Marketers are trying to convince users that 5g is absolutely essential even if you aren't quite sure what for yet. The news post I read today listed 4g as enabling video streaming and 5g as enabling "Hyperfast gaming and augmented reality". What a load of meaningless bullshit.
I'm not going to be one of those "the eye can't even see 60fps" people but lets not pretend that 5g is going to be anything but an incremental infrastructure upgrade that won't affect people in a non congested area.
That's basically the only problem. The marketing pushed it way too early, as they tend to do, but just way too cheery for what the reality is going to be.
But otherwise it is a serious and legitimate leap forward.
Of course it's nearly impossible to tell the sales people to keep the expectations in line with reality. Which I'm sure Verizon/ATT/etc all had engineers who knew the reality.
It's just business from hyper competitive companies where most customers won't see much of anything for years.
Customers will figure it out down the line, the companies are just kicking the can to try to exploit it for now before the other guy.
>Verizon's and AT&T's "5G REMOTE SURGERY" and "RACE TO 5G" marketing bs didn't get consumers interested
who are the ads supposed to be targeted to? why should I, as a consumer care about 5g remote surgery? it's not like only at&t subscribers have access to remote surgery.
I always found that one the most egregious of their stupid marketing BS. It's a blatantly terrible idea. If you're designing a robot surgeon, please don't rely on (or even allow) a wireless connection, and please design it in a way that handles low latency well enough that the incremental gains offered by 5G are basically moot. There's enough that can go wrong as it is. The thought of 5G actually enabling something here is frightening.
I seriously saw some """"national security experts"""" claim that America was doomed to sink beneath the waves if we didn't deploy 5G first. It was a truly shameless level of nonsense.
Since you do not include a reference to this "shameless nonsense", it would be reasonable for us to wonder if you are exaggerating in service of some preconceived beliefs of your own.
I remember reading those same types of stories a couple years ago, where winning the 5G marketing game was being discussed as if it was critical to the future of the country. Much like GP I didn't bother to bookmark the stories or go looking for them, but I am sure they are still out there if you care to look.
Fair enough...there's a special kind of 5G alarmism which proposes a relationship between 5G and global warming. I might have misinterpreted OP's mocking expression "America was doomed to sink beneath the waves" as a reference to same. Apologies if so.
Less sensationally, OP might not believe that 5G has economic and strategic importance to the US. We would disagree on that, but that argument is not very interesting to rehash.
What’s the point of 5G when I don’t even have LTE in many rural areas? I’d rather have LTE everywhere than a faster download rate when in a city but not at home.
Cell carriers try to optimize for places with the highest population densities, so they focus on faster speeds in cities over slower speeds everywhere. It's a fine balance.
Once we see them we can investigate them and adjust our understanding of RF's health effects and modify the technology to make sure it's safe.
So far nobody has proven that the RF frequencies & transmit powers used in 5G (or any other wireless networking technology, for that matter) are harmful.
Can you share any reputable studies of these effects? The amount of crazy conspiracies around 5G makes finding these “real” problems impossible, even if I’m skeptical about your claim considering the amount of information to the contrary.
Well for one, the US's own National Toxicology Program (NTP) found that "high exposure to radio frequency radiation to be associated with cancer in male rats". These results were released in 2018 and this was the world’s largest study on the topic at $25MM.
The EUROPA EM-EMF Guideline 2016 states that ”there is strong evidence that long-term exposure to certain EMFs is a risk factor for diseases such as certain cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and male infertility: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27454111
I mean, if you're going to cite something you might want to read it first:
“The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,”
...
"In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”"
Really? I guess the radiation doesn't affect your whole body when you're walking down the street and you get close to a cellular tower (you get pretty damn close to them with 5G cells), or say when you take a crowded subway and someone's making a call right next to you (oh and the phone will likely amp up its radiation power in there to be able to hop from tower to tower and maintain a connection in a moving cage of metal). Just two examples out of a million
Edit: how am I dismissing your point? I literally just addressed it. And get off your high horse, as though it is completely wacky to consider that something that permeates your environment could possibly have harmful effects on your body
It looks like a 5G array puts out about 120 Watts[1], and that's not attempting to calculate drop-off due to distance, while the sun puts out an exposure of 1,000 W/m2[2] on the Earth's surface at much much higher frequencies (5G tops out at 3Ghz, light starts at 430 THz - we know that the greater the frequency the greater the harm). Really, if we are worried about 5G then normal sunlight is in most measures orders of magnitude worse.
> as though it is completely wacky to consider that something that permeates your environment could possibly have harmful effects on your body
In this case, it kind of is! Human tissue is full of water, and water is a terrible transmission medium for RF energy, with penetration depth decreasing as a function of frequency. This is why submarine radio is receive-only and operates at a rate of characters per minute [1], why fully in-ear Bluetooth earbuds tend to drop out more than other designs, and why I'm not actually worried about low-power GHz-range RF signals like 5G. I'll get skin cancer from sunburns long before I'll get any kind of cancer from thermal radiation that can't even penetrate my stratum corneum.
You are dismissing the paper's authors when they say "exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience" by assuming they're ignorant of exposure levels and durations that people experience.
lol - so you want to cite the study, but when you don't like what it says you just decide that you can dismiss that part of it? Why did I even bother...
As an aside, I hate that news media have turned into essentially Medium, where anyone can write anything under their name. Good way to throw away your hard-earned prestige, e.g. Forbes sites.
"indecent author" - look at this credentials, if he is not an expert in this area then I don't know who is
"Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology."
> if he is not an expert in this area then I don't know who is
Someone with a degree in a relevant subject (biology or physics) who has performed research on the topic. Dr. Moskowitz has neither; his degrees are in mathematics and social psychology, and the article he published was a meta-analysis (i.e, a summary of other research in the field), not primary research.
So, what, then? Resonance? I mean, if you're not talking about thermal effects, and you're not talking about ionization, then mechanical interactions seem to be pretty much all that's left.
