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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by jchw on Saturday August 24, 2019 @10:52AM (#20787423)
I’m ambivalent. Cellphone internet is already faster than cable internet for many people. Even if the 5g health risk is complete bunk, do we really need 5g?

Usually when I want internet that fast I want it at home or work. As such, I am a bit more excited for Wifi 6.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by tehlike on Saturday August 24, 2019 @10:55AM (#20787441)
It might unblock new products.

Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices, and bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc.

There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places.

You can imagine stadia running on mobile on the extreme. Everything cloud streamed.

Faster internet means when it matters you wont have to wait downloading a large binary, even though you dont need to be utilizing it 100% of the billing cycle.

A mobile surgery center can be operated by a world renowned md, at the comfort of yheir home

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by jchw on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:06AM (#20787522)
>It might unblock new products.

>Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices.

If these new things rely on 5g, how well will they work as soon as they move out of range of 5g internet?

>Bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc.

>There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places.

But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by ripdog on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:22AM (#20787638)
>If these new things rely on 5g, how well will they work as soon as they move out of range of 5g internet?

That's... true for all network-based technologies. Electricity is great, but if you don't have a grid connection, battery or means of generating it... you can't use it.

>But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet.

5g includes a high-frequency version which is extremely high-throughput but short range and murdered by walls. There is a lower-throughput version at a much lower frequency which has solid range comparable with low-frequency 4g.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by settsu on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:11AM (#20787560)
Historically, “can” has rarely become “did” with regards to improvements in rural broadband internet access.
Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by epmaybe on Saturday August 24, 2019 @01:11PM (#20788343)
There are definitely a lot of ideas and research behind them that are just waiting for more accessible low-latency internet connections. Robotic surgery was an interesting one for me, as the latency was a tremendous bottleneck for remote applications.
Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by tehlike on Sunday August 25, 2019 @08:56PM (#20796733)
Yes! From the days of 14400kbps(my first dialup connection), to 56kbps, to 128k, 1mb and now 1gb, each one of them found more use few years after they are introduced.

5g wont be an exception.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by starsinspace on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:28AM (#20787672)
Same here. I see all this marketing hype about 5G but I just don't know what I would do with it. Maybe I could some day get gigabit internet on my smartphone then... but what for? Streaming 8K video on the go? I fail to see any use case, at least for me.
Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by DenisM on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:02AM (#20787489)
Competition to cable should improve speed and reduce internet prices.

Right now we only have cable in most of the country, when 5g is out we will have three more last-mike providers: ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by jchw on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:11AM (#20787561)
Well, that it certainly isn't going to do unless wireless providers suddenly decide to stop capping data so tightly. I don't think wireless providers are cheaper today if you include things like that in the calculation.

Not to mention many people already use AT&T and Verizon for their home internet...

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by tehlike on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:23PM (#20788021)
Data caps will go away over time.

People with things like nest cameras routinely go over 1tb data cap on comcast fiber. These people started moving to att. Over time, i do expect competition to work its way, on data cap matters at least.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by DenisM on Saturday August 24, 2019 @01:53PM (#20788582)
Take a look into 5g, eg Verizon, - it’s aimed to be last mile competition, and have the same caps. Comcast is capped at 200gb, I imagine 5g would be similar.
Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by jchw on Saturday August 24, 2019 @02:13PM (#20788706)
It seems the cap is not a universal constant - my cap with Comcast is actually 1024GB. I honestly thought 1024GB was enough that I'd never actually get very close to it, but wow, I don't have a single month under 200GB. In fact, most months are above 500GB for me.

Of course not everyone uses 500GB a month. But still, I think the data cap story has to change if 5G is really to compete with other last mile options.

Also, Today, wireless providers segment the crap out of their market, upcharging for basically anything, including "tethering." With Comcast, for all of their many faults, I can at least use my own modem, connect my NAS and have it accept connections from the open Internet, and of course connect a boatload of computers and network devices with no problems. Wireless providers, to gain parity, would have to suddenly cede control and offer plans that essentially offer no restrictions with dedicated IP addresses. It isn't clear to me that this will be priced any differently from existing last-mile providers. It's not like good wireless plans are cheap today in the U.S. as it is.

5G may in fact improve wireless speeds, but the hype has been that it will be game-changing and industry-shifting and I just don't see it. I'm sure the market will get segmented up such that many people will basically pay the same amount or possibly even more than they did for effectively the same outcome.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by DenisM on Saturday August 24, 2019 @04:50PM (#20789625)
Verizon 5g home is uncapped, 300mps, and $50-$70/mo.

That’s already better than Comcast for me - faster and cheaper. Soon as they come to my town I’m switching.

But the main point is that competition will drive down prices even more.

I don’t think you appreciate what 5g is - it’s not just an improvement over 4g in speed (LTE is already fast enough), it’s a dramatic improvement in the throughput per square mile. The caps in place today are preventing small number of people from hogging the bandwidth in the area, which is no longer a problem.

https://www.verizonwireless.com/support/5g-home-faqs/

https://www.verizonwireless.com/5g/home/?cmp=KNC-C-HQ-PRO-R-...

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by jchw on Saturday August 24, 2019 @06:04PM (#20790013)
OK. That does at least improve my outlook on 5G. I actually was just skeptical wireless providers would do better even if they could, but this looks interesting. Some thoughts:

>"A state-of-the-art router"

This is not going to be a sticking point for most people, but I hope they don't try very hard to lock you into some horrible modem-router combo. I don't even trust a Comcast modem, but here we are, with probably no standard 5G home modems... I know I can always just hook another router/AP on top, but it's obviously going to add complexity, especially depending on how head-ass the router portion of the device is, and personally as someone moving towards 10 GbE at home... it just feels like it would be unnecessarily complicated.

>300mps, and $50-$70/mo.

I think it's going to depend a lot on where you live. It would be $70/mo for me because I don't use Verizon phone plans. This does in fact beat my current Comcast plan: 250 Mbps at $96.95/mo. But despite how much I don't really like Comcast, I have to say: my uptime has been impressive, and the reliability of the performance has been good. I would not want to trade this for worse ping/jitter/reliability at a lower cost.

>But the main point is that competition will drive down prices even more.

This would be nice. It would be beneficial to people who don't even care about 5G.

The thing is, I think that it will only practically benefit people in regions where 5G exists. I remember hearing a lot about how fiber would drive down cable prices too, and it may have, but despite promises I pretty much know nobody who actually has fiber home internet.

Since 5G is wireless, perhaps it will have better odds than fiber. Still, it has a lot of challenges to go through. Even 4G is still not available consistently everywhere.

I'm less skeptical now, but I think I'll just wait and see. I'm still more or less ambivalent about the rollouts hitting roadblocks for now, until it's obvious that it really will be transformative. I'm sure mega corporations like Verizon that stand to gain a lot from this don't need our support to push this to market if its actually that big of a deal.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by ledauphin on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:08AM (#20787540)
oh wait, two of those already are last mile providers in many parts of the country...

I'm not sure who exactly they're going to end up completing with.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by DenisM on Saturday August 24, 2019 @01:54PM (#20788591)
Each other. Three providers better than one.
Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by xoa on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:30AM (#20787692)
I'll admit I've quite understood this ambivalence about WAN links, and particularly not on tech sites. Consider: would you find no different on your LAN going back to 10Base-T, or being restricted exclusively to 802.11a-1999 for all networking (no wired at all) in a spectrum crowded environment, and thus with double-digit latency at all times? Or is gigabit or even higher actually useful in a variety of ways? How about for your persistent local memory speed, is SSD or even modern HDD of no benefit vs something on PATA or IDE or whatever from the 90s? I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying that yes, having more bandwidth available has and continues to be quite valuable.

So then take that and remember that there is zero fundamental difference between LAN and WAN except latency based on distance and even that isn't that restrictive on Earth, particularly within a country. It's about 93 miles per millisecond RTT under ideal vacuum/air/photonic-bandgap fiber, or 70% of that in standard optical fiber, so 1/90 of a second say could easily be enough for a round trip to anything within a good 300-500 miles. And at a minimum, any application done on a LAN right now could apply directly. For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections. A lot of things that many people currently centralize could be decentralized again if it was ubiquitous that the population just WireGuard into their LAN from anywhere within a hundreds of miles or more and have an experience essentially the same as being on the LAN itself.

I mean yeah, we can imagine all sorts of future AR/VR applications or enhanced privacy via onion routing and the like (essentially being able to burn some spare bandwidth on it for the same experience as present) and the like too. But is it even necessary to imagine that far? We use LANs right now, and that for most people there is a dramatic split in their LAN/WAN experience isn't down to physics (most people aren't going more then 500-1000 miles away with great regularity).

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by com2kid on Saturday August 24, 2019 @02:43PM (#20788920)
> For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections.

A repeated dream. In reality thin clients suck even on a LAN. Remoting from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini sitting right next to it had unacceptable latency.

Which is rather confusing given that modern machines can encode video at over 60fps....

Same OS to same OS is better, but not great. Every few years someone comes along and tries to deploy thin clients, and it never takes off en masse, good enough for a few limited scenarios though.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by proverbialbunny on Saturday August 24, 2019 @04:46PM (#20789603)
>A repeated dream. In reality thin clients suck even on a LAN. Remoting from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini sitting right next to it had unacceptable latency.

It's the tech you're using. It's most likely streaming jpeg images.

Try, for example, Steam Sharing, but share something like notepad. You can minimize it and it will work as remote desktop. You'll find yourself on another computer with virtually no latency, as if it is native.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by merpnderp on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:01AM (#20787475)
At 5pm after work I get around 0kbps because everyone is leaving work and uploading selfies, starting music, playing a video or whatever. 5G would vastly improved the congestion problem so I could at least message I’ll be late as I’m stopping for milk, or I’ll be late as I’ve been in a wreck and am about to be airlifted.
Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by posixplz on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:58AM (#20787873)
5G has nothing to do with the problem you’ve described — a symptom of insufficient tower backhaul. It’s typical for 4G LTE operators to deploy a minuscule 100Mbit fiber connection per tower. We should be investing in 1Gbit backhaul of LTE.A, but that’s not a sexy message for consumer TV ads.

The farce of 5G is that it’s a pure marketing ploy. It’s not driven by technical need.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by merpnderp on Saturday August 24, 2019 @03:19PM (#20789120)
I figured it was the tower congestion as I’m in a small town with lots of 1gig backhaul. My company alone has 2 lines running to the closest big city.

And I’m not sure the congestion issue is made up. The saturation levels for 4G are quite achievable.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by Johnny555 on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:19AM (#20787607)
Are you sure 5G is the only answer, or could your telco invest in more 4G infrastructure? (which they are probably reluctant to do with 5G around the corner)
Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by toast0 on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:53AM (#20787843)
Ignoring the problematic new spectrum...

If 5g is reasonable to run on existing spectrum (I think this is generally true, but I don't know if mobile devices are configured for it), and it allows for more concurrent use (this is the promise, yes?), and if there are sufficient deployed devices to make it useful, refarming the spectrum to 5g would be useful for improving user experience in the situation described. Most carriers already went through this with 3g and LTE.

You could invest in more 4g infrastructure in theory, that usually means adding more towers to shrink the cell size in congested areas; it's often the case that tower density is limited by municipal agencies rather than carrier budgets.

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by NikolaeVarius on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:28AM (#20787674)
Spectrum is too congested for more 4g infra to make sense in some cities.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/5g-needed-to-ease-4g-lte-conge...

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by cookie_monsta on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:38AM (#20787741)
I think imminent airlifting merits a phone call, even these days.