News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by fredley on Thursday February 15, 2018 @09:08AM (#16384047)
I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone, primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the mainstream.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by Someone1234 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @09:48AM (#16384373)
And related to that, how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift the bottleneck from between handset & tower, to the tower's own infrastructure.

Mobile vendors won't mind because your phone will say "5G" in the status bar and they can charge more. But in reality your phone to web-site performance (particularly outside of artificial benchmarks) may not improve substantially.

Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by adventured on Thursday February 15, 2018 @10:14AM (#16384618)
> how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift the bottleneck

Expanding tower capacity is part of the 5G build-out. There's an upgrade spending binge going currently. The US wireless market has enough competition now, mostly thanks to T-Mobile, to force all of the carriers to properly upgrade. They're not wasting any time, all of them are aggressively pursuing it as a competitive advantage.

AT&T and Verizon have been losing customers to T-Mobile for years now. If they make the mistake of claiming 5G, when it's not, T-Mobile will just use it as an opportunity to hammer them. Competition, it works.

This also gives the large carriers in the US an opportunity to go after taking more broadband business from Comcast.

Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by martinald on Thursday February 15, 2018 @02:46PM (#16386915)
Most sites have fibre backhaul now. And then point to point wireless can do 10gig+ these days anyway to a tower that does have fibre backhaul.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by askvictor on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:16PM (#16387202)
Even with fibre, it wouldn't take many users on the theoretical capacity of 5g to saturate the uplink.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by Retric on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:41PM (#16387942)
5g is shared bandwidth from ~20Gbps download 10gbps upload, increasing the number of users over a minimum does not increase peak bandwidth just utilization.

Considering multiple carriors would each have 20gbps and there are ~200,000 cell towers in the US we are talking massive bandwidth in aggregate.

Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by manmal on Thursday February 15, 2018 @02:47PM (#16386925)
Another factor to add though is that traffic likely won’t increase by 14x at the same time. Apps will mostly finish payload transmission earlier, leaving the connection unused for a longer period of time. So there likely won’t be as many concurrent transfers in a cell as there are now.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by briffle on Thursday February 15, 2018 @10:05AM (#16384535)
Even if it loses 60% of its speed due to congestion, if the price and monthly quotas are comparable to my home cable connection, I'll be saying good-bye to Comcast.. (especially if they have any decent upload speed, I push a lot of docker/vagrant images)

I actually think the home market would be an ideal place for them to start, as its much less 'mobile' so if you get coverage, your not going to have spotty coverage while they fill in the gaps.

Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by joezydeco on Thursday February 15, 2018 @01:03PM (#16386095)
T-Mobile just bought Layer3. They're totally gunning for home broadband/video.

https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news-and-blogs/uncarrier-tv-cl...

Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by haikuginger on Thursday February 15, 2018 @09:30AM (#16384212)
It doesn't look like they considered substantial congestion for either 4G LTE or 5G, which should mean that while the specific bandwidth numbers may not hold up, the speed ratio should be comparable in production.

You can see that they evaluate LTE at 50Mbps, which is around what Verizon phones were getting when they first started going to market but before congestion and backhaul limitations were hit due to the number of LTE devices on the network.

Currently on LTE with AT&T, I can usually hit 10-20Mbps, so applying the 14x ratio, I'd expect to be able to get 100-300Mbps with 5G once congestion takes hold, which is quite sufficient.

Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by Retric on Thursday February 15, 2018 @10:08AM (#16384555)
I think the biggest difference is going to be raising monthly download caps. 4gig to ~50 gig is huge, but T-mobil has 50 gig caps now. So, I could see most people getting by with 500 gig / month for home internet connections.

Which is going to put a lot of pressure on ISP's to improve.

Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by jsgo on Thursday February 15, 2018 @10:36AM (#16384832)
I'm genuinely hoping that it puts ISPs in a bad position to have no dominance in the market.

I've been under a "provider" who caps out at 10Mbps with, sadly, about 40% uptime with our neighborhood for about 5 years (constant outages. On a first name/you've got my phone number basis with the contracted technician, as is quite a few people in the neighborhood). I joined the board to get out of it. We're due to get out of it at the end of March, but Spectrum has zero interest of coming in and servicing people. CenturyLink said they'd be willing... but want a 5-7 year contract and everyone in the neighborhood is understandably against that idea.

So yes, bring on the time when mobile bandwidth is such that low caps aren't "needed" and the speed is high enough to get rid of ISPs as an option.

Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by woah on Thursday February 15, 2018 @12:31PM (#16385831)
What's the difference between an ISP and a cell phone company?
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by jsgo on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:54PM (#16388073)
I can switch to any cell phone provider I wish at any given time. ISPs that isn't the case for the vast majority of the US.

I was originally with Verizon, but the pricing was a bit steep so I left (grandfathered unlimited data plan, but was paying pretty heavily for 2 said plans).

I switched to Sprint and that was working fine, their unlimited data plan was working and the prices were much cheaper. However, the previously mentioned fiasco with our ISP meant that tethering was now important to me as a fallback when needed and Sprint's plan didn't include tethering and it was a bit steep at the time (as a developer, I have to work on things at night sometimes from home and garbage internet won't suffice there. I empathize heavily with the people in the neighborhood who work from home constantly/online classes, I do).

So I switched to T-Mobile with the Simple Choice plan at the time with basically same features, but 14GB tethering per line and added two more lines for the kids at a reasonable rate. January I switched to the One plan and added International Plus (unlimited tethering) and I predominantly tether now and only connect to my actual router that leverages the garbage ISP when I need to use my internal network (and I check the internet at that point and it is still bad). Plus, tethering is typically 3x faster than said ISP. Needless to say, I absolutely love T-Mobile in our location, it isn't great everywhere though from what I hear, and it works fine for me as an outright replacement (I don't do Netflix or other streaming from computer, so my tethering isn't particularly damaging. Plus, not in an area of high congestion).

So there's a ton of difference here: I've been able to move around as needed to get what works best for me when it comes to the cell phone company side of the equation and I've been hamstrung with the ISP side of things. Plus, I don't even dislike Verizon and Sprint, they work well, but it just didn't work for my needs. With ISPs and the limited competition, they have little incentive from their peers to make me like/accept them, case in point the ISP we're stuck with until end of March.

Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by Retric on Thursday February 15, 2018 @12:38PM (#16385883)
Competition.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by the_mitsuhiko on Thursday February 15, 2018 @09:27AM (#16384187)
5G is less about just faster network anyways. The goal as far as I understand is to use something like gre bonding to achieve some support for transparent handoff between base station and home network. So in theory if you are in your own wifi the network should not need to talk to your phone.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by xur17 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @12:14PM (#16385682)
Would this transparent handoff work for just calls, or for data as well? I'd love to see a solution to the wifi to 4g data handoff issues I run into.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by martinald on Thursday February 15, 2018 @02:47PM (#16386926)
Multipath TCP is a solution to this, Apple has it in iOS. But adoption is really low.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by ilovecars2 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @06:59PM (#16388870)
There are also some unsolved challenges with Multipath TCP, at least last time I studied it in 2014/2015.

For example, when multiple good links are available, Multipath TCP will tend to flip flap between them rather than stabilise on one or the other. You can also get massive reordering which will tend to throw off the congestion control algorithm, but I believe that issue has since been resolved. Good chance are there are some other issues that make MPTCP not quite suitable for widespread use right now.

Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by votepaunchy on Thursday February 15, 2018 @09:46AM (#16384353)
How is this different from WiFi Calling?
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by freehunter on Thursday February 15, 2018 @10:09AM (#16384568)
Hopefully it improves over that technology... I regularly get dropped calls switching from wifi to LTE networks, especially if I spend any amount of time on the edge of my wifi network (like if I take the call inside the house and then walk to my garage).
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by xutopia on Thursday February 15, 2018 @11:43AM (#16385418)
It hasn't become more congested. The providers throttle on purpose to reduce costs.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by minikites on Thursday February 15, 2018 @09:50AM (#16384397)
I regularly get less than 1 Mbps download on Verizon's LTE, so I have almost no hope for 5G to help this issue.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by matz1 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @10:06AM (#16384542)
why? if the article is true then with 5G you will get 14 Mbps, which is significant improvement isn't it ?
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by minikites on Thursday February 15, 2018 @10:36AM (#16384828)
If it's a capacity issue, it doesn't matter how fast your phone can connect to the tower, the issue is connecting the tower to the rest of the internet.
Re:Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase by raesene9 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @11:01AM (#16385022)
yeah they're 50Mbps seems awfully low, heck I can get 100Mbps on 4G and I live in a rural village in Scotland.