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?
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.