Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by renaudg on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:22PM (#20788019)

Maybe you'll be interested to hear from actual 5G users before making uninformed claims. I have home wireless broadband in central London (no other good broadband offering in my street) and was upgraded from 4G to 5G last week. I went from an average of 5-10Mbps at peak times and 20Mbps max on 4G, to 150-250Mbps peak time and 350MBps max on 5G, on the same carrier (Three). Enough said.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by ilikehurdles on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:33PM (#20788091)

I have 150Mbps right now (checked on fast.com) with 4G in Central Denver. It’s not about the number before the G, but whether the carriers are building enough infrastructure to support it.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by jdietrich on Saturday August 24, 2019 @02:12PM (#20788701)

The population density in London is an order of magnitude higher than in Denver. That has an obvious impact on air congestion, which is one of the primary limiting factors on cellular network performance.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by nkurz on Saturday August 24, 2019 @05:46PM (#20789903)

That sounded high, so I checked:

London Density 14,670/sq mi (5,666/km2) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London)

Denver Density 4,519.94/sq mi (1,745.15/km2) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver)

London has a population density 3.25x that of Denver.

Why exaggerate when the facts are on your side? Or more specifically, why make an explicit numeric claim without confirming that it's correct?

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by jdietrich on Sunday August 25, 2019 @05:06PM (#20795593)

That depends very much on your definition of "London" and "Denver". Your first figure refers to the population density of Greater London, a vast area covering much of what used to be the Home Counties. Your second figure refers solely to Denver City rather than the broader Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metropolitan statistical area, much of which is functionally suburban Denver.

I don't think it's particularly useful to attempt to pin down a fixed definition of the boundaries of either city, particularly one as amorphous as London. Suffice it to say that London is densely populated, Inner London is even more densely populated and rush hour on the tube is genuinely insane; Londoners regularly encounter densities that simply don't occur in most US cities outside of a football stadium and have a subsequent need for far higher throughput than 4G can deliver.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by inimino on Sunday August 25, 2019 @01:10PM (#20794067)

"order of magnitude" is literally the least explicit you can be without just saying "lots bigger". Why be overly pedantic?

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by nkurz on Sunday August 25, 2019 @08:32PM (#20796637)

I think the problem may be that "order of magnitude more" means different things to different people. Colloquially, it does get used to mean "a lot more", and some people use it because it sounds more scientific. But in a more correct sense, it means "closer to 10x than 1x or 100x": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude#Definition.

I personally dislike the phrase and try to avoid it. But if one is going to use it, I think it should be used correctly.

(I agree with jdietrich that the definition of "city" matters)

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by renaudg on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:36PM (#20788109)

It is definitely about the number before the G. With perfect infrastructure investment like what your carrier seems to have done with 4G in Denver, 5G could reach 1-2GBps. In other words, real world imperfect 5G is ten times better than 4G with all stars aligned.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by kevin_thibedeau on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:47PM (#20788171)

It doesn't look like like your old "4G" was legitimate full performance LTE. Cell carriers lie and demur about what performance they actually provide. You can't trust the number to mean anything.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by soulofmischief on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:56PM (#20788231)

I don't know much about the specifics behind 5G but if asciident's claim is true then towers on every block should perform very well under high load. What kind of performance are you referring to? Throughput? Latency? Availability? Reliability?

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by renaudg on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:57PM (#20788234)

It was definitely a busy area and dozens of Mbps are more typical on 4G. My point is that real world 5G is an order of magnitude faster than real world 4G, much like 4G was in comparison to 3G.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by inimino on Sunday August 25, 2019 @01:13PM (#20794090)

Your 5G, and your 4G. That doesn't mean it is the 5G that is the difference, unless you did an exhaustive root cause investigation of the poor performance of the 4G.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by Spooky23 on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:50PM (#20791253)

Backhaul matters as well. If you do carrier comparisons at scale, it becomes obvious that the connectivity to the towers varies dramatically, as do network conditions, quality of proxies on the carrier network and other factors.

A fancy new 5G tower also has underutilized connectivity to it.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by asciident on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:48PM (#20788179)

I appreciate your perspective but I did base my comments on what actual 5G users told me. Here's a video review that captures about what I said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTUs_2hq6Y

But I will add your data point to my opinion of 5G.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by jhncls on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:28PM (#20788056)

Maybe it just works fast because there still are only a very limited number of users? And will speeds and latencies drop as the airspace gets more saturated?

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by apcragg on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:41PM (#20788135)

In short - some but not really. 5G NR allows for extremely efficient resource block allocation and can handle ~10x more concurrent users than 4G. The latency should not degrade as long as the carriers don't do weird things with traffic allocation - the standard allows for ~4ms worst case latency.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by renaudg on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:31PM (#20788078)

I believe 5G handles congestion much better. But even if the speed drops, it will still be an order of magnitude faster than 4G. Absolutely worth it.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by kube-system on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:29PM (#20788064)

How is real-world throughput across the internet?

I have a gigabit pipe that works just fine on a speed test, but most real-world usage doesn’t go that fast because of bottlenecks elsewhere.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by ptero on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:27PM (#20788048)

But does it matter for you? I know it would not for me. I can certainly find counterexamples, but for me the last leg bandwidth is seldom the bottleneck. My 2c.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by renaudg on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:34PM (#20788096)

Back in the day I didn't think upgrading from a 56K PSTN modem to DSL broadband would matter that much to me. I was naively thinking in terms of downloading things a bit faster, the classic futurologist mistake of seeing things through today's frame of reference.

What happened instead is that it enabled Youtube, Skype, Facetime, and that did change the world.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by jodrellblank on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:47PM (#20788173)

"Maybe you'll be interested to hear from actual 5G users instead making uninformed claims."

Claims from "what I've heard" /are/ informed claims; your anecdotal information doesn't automatically beat other people's anecdotal information.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by hyperbovine on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:25PM (#20788039)

Is it? I don’t really see how that contradicts what op was saying.

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by wikibob on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:25PM (#20788038)

How did you manage to get upgraded?

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Re:Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, ... by renaudg on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:29PM (#20788067)

It's available commercially. http://www.three.co.uk/5g

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