I think this message should have been at the top of the 5G marketing, and would have helped the reception of the technology as bringing an altruistic angle.
Right now, as it was pushed as something we're supposed to want for ourseleves and allow us to do rocket surgery from our phones, people just got burned and either learned to kill it in the settings or bitch about it all day long.
I was watching a wireless home bridge review, and half of it was the reviewer looking into the settings and documentaton how to force 4G to get better speeds (spoiler: 4G was effectively faster). And that's a bog standard consumer targeted video with 700K views at launch.
> I think this message should have been at the top of the 5G marketing, and would have helped the reception of the technology as bringing an altruistic angle.
Meanwhile, 3 out of the 4 big networks in Poland market it as a premium feature, and only offer 5G to the customers on more expensive plans or for extra fees. (The network that gives 5G to everyone is Plus, and their plans are cheaper as well.)
At least here in Italy, we were hassled with those kind of "rocket surgery from your phone" :) ads, and told (whether right or wrong) that we had to change most of our TV's so that they could narrow the video transmission band to allow for more band for this marvellous 5G.
It has been (and it will be) a major cost for families, besides the complication, especially for the older people that have now to deal with either a crappy external decoder or a crappy smart TV (as "normal" TV are in practice unobtanium).
And all we got (where it works) is just a lot more people viewing videos on Tiktok.
They are, and so are 99% of articles ( even Tech Enthusiast focused ) on the internet.
One could understand, why they need to market the hype ( or bait ) to switch to 5G. On the other hand, most of the marketing point, like self driving vehicles, remote surgery operation, mmWave for everyone, or so called up to 20Gbps are by most's [1] people's standard "lying". They could have used other marketing points , but somehow marketing for tech has become something else.
If you talk to most if not all engineers working on 5G, whether that is the 3GPP spec, or actual network implementation in both software and hardware. They would all tell you the truth, 5G is simply a better 4G. And to be honest, as an Engineers, Tech Enthusiast, and also a consumer. That is good enough for what it is.
[1] May be not America because it seems you could get away with Tesla type of marketing and hype without immediate penalties.
They really are, but you can’t convince people to upgrade their handset on ‘our network is going to get shittier and shitter unless you move to a new technology’.
But it's not like they're dismantling the 4G infrastructure yet right? For a while at least I would have assumed people moving to 5G would steadily free up capacity on 4G bands.
Exactly, the same way 3G became unusable for internet anytime your phone reverted to it, even thought at as a protocol it is perfectly appropriate for things like loading basic websites. Throttled 3G makes 4G look amazing. Rinse and repeat for 5G.
It's crazy to me that some carriers still charge extra for 5G when this was the real goal. They're actively incentivizing me to stay on 4G and increase congestion.
Yes, your 1Gbps Ethernet is enough for majority of your needs. Except you are not the only one using the 1Gbps Ethernet.