When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers.
Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.
5G is a step on the way.
You can say "we don't need to frantically rush to deploy 5G" without also saying "nobody will ever benefit from 5G".
Sure. But that just means that the products exploiting this technology won't be developed in your neighbourhood but instead in Korea or China.
This is what the US did with 4G and is one of the main reasons for the US's web dominance in the past decade.
No. Itll help people watch someone on youtube play Fortnite.
This is the same argument badmouthing the Internet because of social media which ignores that the presocial media Internet is still there and just as vibrant.
And most are served perfectly by Bluetooth Low Energy, using a smartphone as local compute, storage and network uplink. The few cases where that's not ideal are so few that they may as well use a regular 4G uplink without much downside (it's not like they need the bandwidth or will create a high device density)
5G offers:-
- bigger numbers and promise of a brighter future for consumers that are impressed by that kind of thing and are happy to trade their privacy for perceived benefits / status.
- And probably some more tangible benefits for those who would attempt to track or advertise as much as possible to monetize the masses.
- And as you clearly understand, nothing particularly beneficial to the rest of us, but we'll join in when eventually forced to through one upgrade or another as usual.
I think you’re conflating a few things though.
1) 5G spec improvements which do exist and are measurable today 2) your perceived value of those improvements 3) the FCC mandates in the US, which is currently being challenged
You might not want the improvements. Others may. The real issue, IMHO, is the FCC mandates. Although the challenge has a risk for technology too. If the courts agree that there is a possible health risk to RF I have no idea what kind of pandora’s box that opens.
5G with traditional towers is completely different and not an issue.
Prove me wrong. That's the point to a discussion. You share points of view. But if I follow your path of discourse, I could just say you're a sheep that'll believe whatever silicon valley tells you.
However, I mostly argue that the taxpayer cost doesn't justify the gains. It's expensive and most counties and cities have to foot the bill or heavily subsidize it. If the telecom company wants to foot the bill. Good on them. No arguement here. If the city has to, go fuck yourselves. Its diminishing returns to a ridiculous level.
Really we have no idea of the the doors it could happen. In the 90s many people thought the internet was a gimmick or a fad. Today the most successful companies are built on it. It's very likely the same will be true for 5G enabled technologies and companies.
5G is not a revolutionary tech when we already have wifi and 4G.
20 years ago computers had 32 MB of RAM. So no, they won't run a modern website.
We've been at a plateau of roughly 1-2GB RAM for most of the past decade, masked by the fact that devices have been shrinking (phones replacing desktops) rather than resource allocations growing. Which is a fairly frequently-encountered trend in technology.
We create some design, it proves useful, and for a time, focus is on increasing size, power and performance. Then a shift occurs and the focus is on smaller, more distributed systems.
James Watt's steam engines typically produced 5-10 horsepower output, and he built 500 of these by 1800. Following expiration of his patents, and the adoption of high-pressure steam engines, a period of increasingly large and more powerful systems began ... until the realisation that mobile power was a thing, and electric generation, leading to steamships and locomotives.
With electrical power distribution, whole factories were transformed from shaft-and-belt distribution from a 10-20 hp prime mover to electrical power distribution to individual motors, some of which rivaled or exceeded earlier entire steam engines, but many of which operated with fractional horsepower, delivering motive force precisely where needed.
Locomotives grew more powerful and faster, until internal combustion engines allowed 10 horsepower cars to reach speeds of as much as 30 miles an hour on city streets or country roads, without rails or being bound to fixed routes.
Console radios became portable became handheld became a smudge of silicone you probably don't realise still exists within your phone (virtually all are FM receivers).
Warehouse-sized computers shrank to refrigerators, cabinets, towers, pizzaboxes, luggables, portables, laptops, notebooks, tablets, and phones. There's little reason for even a desktop computer to be much more than the size of a paperback beach read these days, other than port size.
The IoT (the "S" stands for "Safety") is the equivalent of putting compute power where it's needed (or not, as the case may be), but it's so cheap to do, and cheaper than equivalent non-compute-based means, that it's become increasingly difficult to buy silicone-free basic appliances and components.
Many of these small systems don't have huge resource allocations, but they're sufficient to the task. They're not end-user interactive devices ... except where they are, with the Twitter-enabled refrigerator (that's a Web browser running on the display).
Web designers have been buidling on the assumption of ample resources, or have used "requires recently-acquired hardware" as a market-segmentation technique (the poor won't buy your dosh but can't afford the kit required to run your website, so feature-block them out and pre-slim your conversion funnel -- I don't condone this at all, but it apparently works).
But there's no inherent need in transmitting a few kb worth of actual text and a few ten-thousand-word pictures to do so. 20-year-old kit should handle that fine, really.
Increasingly, consumers don’t even own a personal computer. (Unless we’re being pedantic and calling our phones PCs.)
Asking what a PC will do with faster mobile internet will be misleading.
But sometimes, some do. That margin is what describes new opportunity.
Somebody like you or I might frequently max our our cellular connections, but I wager most users never do. And how would they? Streaming 4k YouTube videos onto a screen smaller than a postcard? It just won't make a difference for them.
This is the 640kb argument.
Being able to download a move at the gate? Potentially game changing. Being able to stream video from a drone or car on the road to centralised servers? Potentially game changing.
People with capital are willing to bet this technology has legs. Your not being able to figure out why is not a good reason to block the investment.
G5 will also reduce latency a lot, which is another vector that will open new possibilities.
Even as a techie, at some point I want to draw the line.
For stationary objects like TVs and lights we already have wifi, and a range of simpler low-power options used by IoT basestations. What does 5G bring to the table here?
At least if enough people are willing to care about, advocate and pay for this feature.
I say this while also recognizing that most IoT stuff today is overhyped BS.
A refrigerator will still keep things cold. A stove will still heat things up. An AC will still AC. Other than home automation systems that go belly up when their servers go offline, most things do the same thing they did 50 years ago.
5g isn't revolutionary.
At every step, you could always say "it is just faster". Only in retrospect can you ever see how world changing "faster" was.
You don't need a SIM card or 5G for that. Technologies like 802.15.4, or even simpler, are more than enough.
But it won't be cheap for the consumer. At best, our data plans will stay the same price. But more likely they'll rise and, well, I just don't think people give a crap enough about having a sim card in their TV to pay the extra. Maybe if you make SF money, but most people don't.
I think, too, people are starting to get teched out. Just a little for now, but it's happening.
...for entirely political reasons. Here in the UK, you can get unlimited 4G data (with 5G in some areas) for $25 a month. If you pay through the nose for shitty service, take it up with Ajit Pai.
I would still need a wifi-router as my laptop and my tv does not support 4G. But my guess is eventually those devices will support xG mobile data and my wifi-router will be a thing of the past.
I went the Sprint 50GB (really 100GB) @ $60 per month.
How are you getting power to the light?
https://www.automation.com/products/enocean-announces-wirele...
For the record. I don't think that there will be a physical sim card in your bathroom light but I think that all these wireless communication standards (infrared remote controls, wifi, bluetooth, 4g mobile data ...) will converge into one and the use of that will be so cheap that it will be used everywhere.
Not that you'd ever use them for a light bulb.
It already is. I've got wireless light buttons in some rooms because it's too expensive to put new wires in the walls.
It doesn't require a lot of bandwidth, though.
Hopefully we don't get there before proper regulation of tech companies is put in place.
When you can have a smartbulb and a smartphone app, if you already have a smartphone and wifi access point?
When you can buy a wireless doorbell system for $12 which is a free-floating button and triggers a mains powered doorbell remotely? https://www.amazon.com/wireless-doorbell/s?k=wireless+doorbe...
All of that is cheaper than buying, and paying a qualified electrician to run, 10m of cable to a light switch and then plaster/box/paint over it.
I wonder over the long run which is better - hard wiring or using batteries?
Who doesn't want more options for home broadband?
I'll believe it when it happens.
DSL was going to break the chains of the dialup overlords.
Cable was going to break the chains of the DSL overlords.
Fiber was going to break the chains of the cable overlords.
Fixed wireless was going to break the chains of the fiber overlords.
My prediction: 5G data providers will pull the same tricks as what we have now. Pricing will be about the same as it is for legacy methods/speeds. You can only get the highest speeds and pay the highest prices even if you don't need all that bandwidth, unless you're part of a government poverty program. In which case, you'll get DSL speeds for cable prices. Signing up will be easy. Getting out of the contract will be hard. There will be mandatory fees for things you don't need or want.
It's the same group of companies. Why would we expect any different just because the delivery method has changed?
The market might not function as competitively as it should in the US, but it still functions - new, cheaper tech eventually results in lower prices for consumers.
I was going through some old papers a couple of weeks ago and found some bills. My cable ISP bill from 2002 that I found was $103/month after taxes and fees. Seventeen years later, I pay $106/month.
Back then, the only other choice I had for internet was dialup. Today my other choices include DSL, fiber, and fixed wireless. So, I have more competition now; but I don't have a lower bill.
I also think the current copyright system is insane, but streaming genuinely is more convenient than buying physical media. If anything, DRM makes media available through streaming _less_ convenient.
IF you have children, you're probably familiar with the concept of streaming Frozen for the 50th time. If you're using netflix or spotify or similar, you're probably also familiar with the concept of something that was previously available just vanishing because of circumstances outside of your control.
Streaming is mostly a DRM/copyright enforcement tool. The only time streaming is actually adding value is live streaming.
4G is perfectly fine for that, but if I Street watching a 40 minute video before I go on the tube, I can’t finish once underground
If it was line speed, a 40 minute episode would download with current 4g while I was waiting for the next train. On WiFi it would be down before I walked out of range.
That's like saying "people don't need to listen to the radio for the same pop songs, they can just play a CD with them"
Stuff being available exclusively through streaming is certainly a way to enforce DRM, but that doesn't mean people wouldn't still largely be streaming even if stuff was available for download without DRM too.
Streaming takes that choice away from the user in the first place. With nothing gained in exchange.
It would be way less convenient, though. So I don't. I don't know which device I'll end up watching on, and don't want to deal with syncing and all that shit.
Which is way more expensive than streaming services. Prohibitively so for wide swaths of the general population who don't have tech industry salaries. The cost of one TV show from iTunes can approach the price of several months of Netflix.
With copyright reform, that needn't be the case.
(Note that for many consumers, Netflix is already considered too expensive. Several people sharing the cost of one account is pretty common from what I've seen.)
Fact is that streaming is just convenient. Like really convenient. I wish there was more stuff that I could download and listen to offline, but it's naive to suggest that streaming has no advantages. We stream while data connected because we download things in an ordered manner (vs how normal downloading is done). That's nice that I don't have to wait for a full movie or song to be completely downloaded to listen to it.
Maybe you don't subscribe to channels and the system could never anticipate your whims and desires... but I wager it would work great for most users.
just give me the lower prices we were promised by the carrier oligopoly in exchange for all those governmental concessions (not holding my breath).
AR on the other hand has potential.
AR stands for Augmented reality, the overlay of information and artificial constructs over the real world in such a way as as one can both perceive the artificial constructs and interact with the real world simultaneously.
Nobody will view this by holding their phone up and looking at the world through their phone screen. Real products in development use glasses. Science fiction depicts contacts, currently impossible, or some sort of implant, even less realistic.
Remember we wrote about going to the moon prior to being able to actually go there.
It's a fun novelty, but it should not be conflated with VR. If you move your head forwards or backwards (as opposed to rotating your head), the environment does not adjust itself to match your new position, because it's just a prerecorded video. Without this ability, you can't trick your brain into believing it's in a real place.
I only brought up 360° video because the GP mentioned "livestreaming videos to VR headsets [at] 2x8k@120hz", and there's no other type of video you can stream to a VR headset†. Real VR, with positional tracking, needs a 3D modeled environment, like a video game. We may be on the cusp of being able to stream traditional video games, but VR needs much lower latency than that—around 30ms for absolutely everything in the chain.
I don't think AR is any different in this regard. If the processing is being done on-device the assets are small and you don't need 5G. If the processing is being done remotely, you've got that same latency problem.
How does 5G benefit AR?
---
† Well, okay, there have been some weird experiments, but they preclude standard resolution measurements. They also require an order of magnitude more data—5G won't cut it.
But in that case , downloading the data locally seems like a real option.
I think you underestimate image sizes for modern AR/VR applications. For example, good quality light-field can take few gigabytes for one image. Also there is a big UX difference between downloading full image ahead and downloading parts on-demand (similar to modern video streaming - today we never download full video ahead).
We’re only just starting to be able to do this with traditional video games (Stadia), where significantly higher latency is acceptible, and even that’s largely unproven.
If I’m wrong, well, I still think we should proove this tech over traditional cable + ethernet connections first, which already exist today.
We can already guess at some use cases. AR, VR, or other types of environment simulation. Data processing for vehicles: cars, trucks, drones. And I'm sure that people will figure out more things they can do. But the notion of "there isn't anything else" so why do we need more, is like saying 640K is all you'll ever need (I know he didn't actually say that, but the myth stands)
I'd posit that happens not because your connection is too slow per se, but because your Wifi/LTE coverage is spotty, and speeds on the margins of coverage can be very slow.
So the real problem is coverage, not speed.
But my point is that there's the consideration that it takes half a second to download 500Mb (roughly a 720p video). So if you have 0.5s uninterrupted that's pretty convenient. I'm also pretty positive that coverage will increase from current conditions (I don't see a reason why it wouldn't). So the speed helps with the spottines. Basically what I'm saying is you don't need as long of a connection to download the same amount. If your spottiness is the same then you get more on 5G. Alternatively since it is 10x the speed, that would be equivalent to 10x spottines (which were not considering a fallback to 4/3G).
Personally, I’d much appreciate full-coverage, limitless, unthrottled, can-be-tethered, cross-border, always available (unlike in Central London) 4G. If mobile network operators can’t even achieve that, maybe they’re not up to the job of setting up 5G.
5G may add IoT which can have value for everybody if done well (or not if it ends up as a sensation of being monitored 24/7 even without privacy issue)
I can see how all of these things might benefit from 5G's higher bandwidth and lower latency, but they should also be more than possible right now. So if there's some untapped audience for a communal online karaoke app, I really don't think 4G networks are what's holding them back.
This type of thing is where I get pretty frustrated with 5G talk. It's a lot easier to come up with ideas than it is to build them, so if we can't even come up with concrete ideas, I don't think 5G networks are going to make the difference.
All of the proposals I see either don't make any sense under scrutiny (live streamed AR), or could easily be accomplished in another way (smart light bulbs).
Faster mobile data is great. I'm just not expecting it to transform society.
It's usually a huge hassle to get stuff working on a phone, especially if it requires hardware support. It's not the greatest platform for innovations.
What are the legitimate new capabilities you're thinking of, which many people desire, but can't have primarily because of (mobile) internet speeds?
If I could pick up a 5g signal I could opt for that instead. It's like suddenly having an option for installing a dish instead of whatever the cable company serves you.
As far as speed, I'm not holding my breath. In a previous apartment I did actually have fiber but it wasn't the game changer I thought it would be. Downloads and streaming are capped at a point. The only way to actually use all of this horsepower I had was with bittorrent, and boy it downloaded stuff so fast that the write speed on my drive became a significant bottleneck. I even demoed Googles project stream and while that worked OK, I still got a lot of hickups and low quality stream moments that showed how far away the delivery technlogy was (AC:O was playable but there was way too much latency for a multiplayer game to stream with this technology), even if I had the very best internet on the market.
Not doing this for 5G will basically just hand hundreds of billions of dollars in jobs and growth to China.
The economic value of high resolution mobile streaming seems rather low, at best. Most likely negative, because most content is just time-wasting, and because content that actually matters tends to not depend so much on resolution beyond SD or basic HD (720p).
Other potential applications, as mentioned elsewhere, tend to run into 5G not being fast enough either (once you figure average speeds and not max theoretical speeds), or latency being too high, or the bottleneck being on the remote side.
4G, despite being ubiquitous, costs a lot for service and is power-hungry, not good qualities for most IoT-type applications. 5G might be better than 4G for mobile side energy use, but unless it's close to 802.11ax levels and mobile providers offer cheap bandwidth-limited service plans, I don't see why anyone would use it for IoT applications. That leaves mobile device applications, and people are already too glued to their mobile devices. I'm sure new businesses will capitalize on increased bandwidth from 5G, but I'm doubtful that it will benefit society.
5G antennas near the ground can be easily vandalized.
They really cannot, at least with quality levels that make people actually want to watch them.
> The economic value of high resolution mobile streaming seems rather low, at best.
Many multi-billion dollar companies and streaming services would disagree. As would many investors.
> Most likely negative, because most content is just time-wasting, and because content that actually matters tends to not depend so much on resolution beyond SD or basic HD (720p)
This is entirely your opinion about what content you prefer. Once again, there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars that says otherwise.
> 5G might be better than 4G for mobile side energy use, but unless it's close to 802.11ax levels and mobile providers offer cheap bandwidth-limited service plans, I don't see why anyone would use it for IoT applications.
This is not the problem 5G solves. It solves latency, availability and throughput.
> I'm sure new businesses will capitalize on increased bandwidth from 5G, but I'm doubtful that it will benefit society.
You are doubtful that the creation of numerous companies, highly paid jobs and adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the US economy won't benefit society?
However, like in Florida, telecom lobbied the fuck out of the state to cap the lease rate to $150 a box and a lot less out of pocket for the telecom. I'm a capitalist and a Republican. But that shit right there, can kiss my hairy butthole.
I guess what also angers me is the unicorn dreams and wishes people think 5g is. It's a business. Telecom gives zero shits about innovation or making the world a better place. They want their pound of flesh and will take the blood too. 4g payouts have slowed for them. That's why they want to suck more blood using 5g.
Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet.
There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Silicon Valley, that’s where resources should be allocated to explore that potential.
I’m not arguing for 5G. (I don’t know enough about it.) But “it’s just faster internet” is a facile counterargument.