I'd say it's impossible to know what super-high bandwidth and low-latency will bring to the table as the next killer app. It's going to be something we don't expect.
The tower still has to ping the rest of the network to find the service you were requesting to in the first place.
If total latency ~ 500 ms, phone-to-tower is maybe 50ms of that in 4G. Even if it's down to ~1ms, total latency is only down 10%.
Not a networking expert so maybe I'm missing something here. Perhaps better use of CDNs could make this much faster?
E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/, but if you’re big enough I’m sure you can make more interesting deals.
How did you come up with 500ms for comparison? A fast-paced videogame with that sort of latency would be unplayable. 100ms is still considered bad and 50ms is considered acceptable.
Each individual network call is faster tho, good point.
Maybe 50 microseconds, not 50 milliseconds. 1/1000th of what you assumed.
Towers are typically up to a few miles away in dense areas; they don't work well beyond 15-20 miles from the cell phone.
Waves go 186,000 miles (or 300,000 km) per second. Assuming a 10 miles distance from phone to station, it takes ~25 microseconds to do the trip, which is ~50 roundtrip.
So, in other words: latency is NOT affected by 5G much.
What new market is 5g enabling?
AR glasses for example, could totally upend all of this and require 5G low latency, and fast accurate positioning. Yes, 5g when it arrives next year, won't change anything. However, 7 years from now, it may be the enabling platform for AR glasses the way 4g LTE was the enabling platform for smartphones.
Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection?
5G "low latency": I'm not impressed with "1-2 ms" first hop latency; 0.1 ms should be achievable by now, surely.
AR over networks: Maybe. But I think having more compute out on the edge nodes is going to deliver more for us in the long term than faster comms.
Every extra millisecond in the rendering pipeline decreases the usability of AR significantly.
Let's say you walk up to a restaurant. As you look at it, you see a virtual waitress outside. The you can see the menu floating there, interact with virtual food models, interact with a fully animated and articulated intelligent agent. This all has to load dynamically in a an "AR Web"-like environment (no way you're going to download and install an APP per local brick and mortar).
For this to scale, and not have hideous load times, there's got to be some kind of quad-tree/oct-tree like index (or other spatial acceleration structure) that's streams in, LOD streaming, and for this to work, the "sidelinking" stuff they talk about will be a huge boon.
Because the "internet of things" in an AR world isn't an "internet of PHYSICAL things" like door locks and web cams, but also an "internet of VIRTUAL things" to control, like virtual vending machines to order food. That means somewhere nearby, there's a next-gen router-like device, that offers side-linking, and has an IP service in it serving up assets to you. Now, it could go up through your phone carrier, through the internet backbone, into a cloud provider, or it could avoid that round trip and talk directly to the restaurant's "virtual POS" 5g device.
Point is, we don't know how this is all going to work yet, and it's very premature for people to pooh pooh the use cases for higher bandwidth or lower latency.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but this all sounds tedious and cumbersome compared to just having a menu stuck to the front window.
But the genesis is always a bit counter-intuitive, because people don't build things for which there's no use case.
E.g. Machine agent consumable mobile services were created because people had mobile devices capable of consuming them. Nobody would have wasted time porting physical data into machine-readable format before the devices / use cases existed.
So the killer app, in this case, would be having your phone auto-filter / -alert you if for menu item(s) that match your preferences. Or create an ecosystem where menu costs are negligible, and restaurants are free to pivot to ingredients-of-the-day.
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fa....
I don’t think even 5G is low latency enough for what you’re describing—not even close. Stadia works because it’s not VR, so they have some latency headroom. For good VR (Valve Index, etc), you get around 20ms for the entire rendering chain.
And the local device will just have a 2D image. Even within a single, local PC, multi-GPU rendering is basically dead for video games because no one has been able to get them working reliably. And that is with the full bandwidth and latency of PCIe.
Graphics hardware keeps getting more powerful and cheaper though, I don't think cloud rendering is going to get more useful over time compared to just rendering on the phone and using cloud streaming for big assets.
These are the services that Sprint offered over 3G on feature phones.
https://www.sprint.com/cdma/assets/pdfs/services_guides/pers...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobiTV
On my first phone with Sprint Vision, it did 1 FPS.
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-sph-a840-sprint-review/
Very. Lots of sites had mobile versions of pages by the iPhone's release. These were originally intended for Blazor and pocket IE but they worked fine for an iPhone on EDGE. I could do e-mail just fine on EDGE as well.
I used to joke that slapping Gopher or a libcurses based apps on these phones would be superior (IMHO, the experience was inferior to an Amiga on a v34 modem dial to Unix)
Mobile Web apps are not really functional at EDGE speeds. And certainly todays' media, which is rich with imagery, would be completely overwhelmed at EDGE/3g speeds, even if you remove the overhead of HTML and JS bundles.
Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, all of these apps would be terrible on EDGE.
The thing is, we are so used to high bandwidth now and its availability, we seldom realize how dependent we are on it until we lose it.
I went through just about every family of PDA and smartphone before the iPhone came out. Their web browsing universally sucked. The iPhone was a huge leap beyond other mobile browsers. The whole idea of clicking links being agonizing is either fiction or hyperbole.
It's funny you claim YouTube and Facebook would be terrible on EDGE when both services had mobile apps in the days of EDGE, YouTube even shipped on the iPhone. That isn't to say they aren't better served by higher bandwidth cellular service but they existed and functioned in the past.
High bandwidth connections are expected today and plenty of services would be unworkable without them. At the same time many web services are downright wasteful in their design and implementation.
Increased end-user bandwidth has just been eaten up by lazier or stupider designs and implementations. I fully expect these trends to continue as 5G rolls out. No one will actually do anything interesting because sites will load twice the ads (in 4K) and quadruple the size of their JavaScript bundles.
>clicking links being agonizing is either fiction or hyperbole.
Web 1.0 over EDGE is agonizing in latency. Without Javascript, every action that isn't a #anchor in the same page becomes a round trip. If your radio has gone to sleep, it takes even longer. And I was being charitable giving you EDGE, in 2007, many people were still on GPRS.
It's absolutely self evident that faster networks enable entirely new applications, just like increased memory beyond the 640k limit enabled new apps.
5g may makes Unity and Flutter "acceptable" for webapp on smart watch that was pre-installed.
It was sufficient to do most things, even streaming online radio. The biggest downsides were that latency was high and the annoying speaker buzz problem. 3G was a big step up. I never felt like LTE came as much of an upgrade over 3G, from there user point of view, so I question it being the defining technology for smartphones.
On a webpage without 80mb of javascript, it's quite useful.
The more interesting feature in 5G is the signalling for IoT devices, those that wake up infrequently. Metering devices, handheld payment devices, patient home monitors, security systems, Airton, etc.
5G isn't really about more bandwidth but always on and more efficient use. This will enable more than just phones and a few tablets.
That is, 5G isn't just mmwave; it's also getting more out of existing low and mid band spectrum. (And mmwave, of course, will unload the other spectrum too somewhat in the densest areas).
Most other applications don’t really care about latency. If anything, we’ve used software to move lower latency applications like voice to crowded, latent and unreliable networks.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/5g-as...
>Noting the dense deployment of cell sites that millimeter-wave spectrum requires, he commented: "This means that a wireless company almost needs to become a cable company to make it work."
I worked on a pilot project with a state government group that wanted remote monitoring of water levels in wetlands and ponds spread across a few hundred square miles of mostly-rural area. wi-fi obviously wasn't an option and getting a WAN mesh setup was a huge pain in the ass and had its own limitations. We ended up testing with 3G, switching on twice a day to report, but the power consumption and data costs were too prohibitive to be practical long-term. 5G power use per bit is supposedly going to be far lower than 3G/4G. Jury is still out on data cost.
I now work in the automotive industry where vehicle logistics can be an interesting challenge. Parking lots for completed vehicles awaiting transport outside factories can be spread across a square mile of land (more if remote overflow lots are used), with multiple locations. There are multiple use cases for inspecting, tagging, remote driving, etc. these vehicles using aerial or ground-based drones and teleoperation to significantly cut down on costs. However, those use cases depend on high bandwidth, low-latency connections and extending effective wi-fi to lots would be massively expensive. 5G is a pretty interesting option here.
As others have mentioned, vehicle-centric use cases abound, but there are some additional ones for industries like oil & gas as well.
For shorter ranges because higher frequency.
For average per-bit cost, because more bits/sec in the higher frequency encoding.
But, for IoT there is the burden of turning the RF segment on, finding lock, sending. So, for small 'grams' of message it won't necessarily be as good as the per-bit cost for streaming data or long lived associations. And, shorter ranges: You will be deploying more base stations. Albiet with lower power budget too, but .. Nothing is free.
From what I understand, the range of a single 5G base station is significantly lower than 2/3/4G so they are having to install new cell sites in major towns and cities just for 5G coverage.
The focus on millimeter wave is large part due to existing capacity problems in high density areas, or for high bandwidth applications.
However I've seen that there is proprietary protocol symphonylink from LinkLabs, that uses LoRa. They claim that it allows for having every frame ACKed, even bulk data uplink (OTA firmware upgrades). If so, I would tend to pick such technology for pond water telemetry.
But wouldn’t it work for this use case he had?
I believe that in the long term and as the number of devices per unit of area increases, licensed technologies will be the only viable option.
A solar powered system out in the open should, theoretically solve the power issue.
In The Diamond Age, if I'm remembering it right, Neal Stephenson has a character describe how the in-world ubiquitous network works, and it's basically exactly that: high reliability through ubiquity of peers, any of which can relay your packets.
We've had mesh networks before, but they've always needed special hardware, distinct from "it's just a router".
And on the other side, it should be helpful for very dense urban usage. Try using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how you get on.
But yeah, not revolutionary, but should make existing LTE applications less awful in some scenarios where they struggle.
I was under the impression that 5G has shorter range and requires smaller cells. That's exactly the opposite of being better for rural areas.
It's the last mile that's the issue.
You can find gigabit business internet basically anywhere.
I have a friend whose parents live in rural Kansas who to this day can't get more than dialup or satellite, even though they've called up every single semi-local ISP (way more than once) and said they'd be willing to pay for installation. At this point, they have more than $20K saved for the chance that some company says maybe.
It's simply way more complicated than you're making it out to be.
Found it: https://www.compareandconnectk12.org/
So your friend's parents' $20K gets them a kilometre of dark fibre. Maybe.
Edit to add: point-to-point wireless links might work better, but there again for a reliable wireless repeater you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars minimum in a rural environment. And in Kansas you're going to get bad Fresnel occlusion, so you need really big towers.
Further, it's theoretically possible to combine 5G and satellite internet where Starlink or similar serves as the connection to the internet backbone for a device broadcasting a 5G network. Connectivity isn't an all or nothing game and 5G is protocol that the SpaceX internet service business can leverage.
A fifth of the US population lives outside of big cities. That's not a big fraction, but it's a small fraction of a very big number. Being able to capture that market even for a decade would basically bankroll SpaceX's Mars goal by itself. And that's not even looking at other countries.
That's about 25 million households, or about $150 billion gross revenue (not profit) over a decade at the price assumptions you give.
If SpaceX’s public estimate of total Mars program cost of $10 billion was reasonable, that might plausibly fund the program. But it's highly dubious that that is even on the right order of magnitude.
Sure, but “rich people's vanity may help finance the program” (and NASA will help finance the program, etc.) doesn’t anything to support “satellite internet will finance the program by itself”.
I doubt it. There are a surprising number of satellite internet customers in completely illogical places, like in the middle of major US cities. A lot of this probably has to do with the abysmal state of broadband options in the US -- many customers are served by a single wired broadband provider; when they lose faith in that provider (or are denied service), satellite may be their next best option.
And there are people living rurally outside of the USA, too.
Starlink could bring rural Asia and Africa into the 21st century with one terminal per village.
A lot of times it’s run by the electric companies (coops). They already have the right of way, pole access, and customer relationships.
There are dozens of utilities pursuing this, haven’t heard of any working with 5g.
There was a recent executive order restricting foreign equipment on the grid, and I suspect that’s going to make things harder for 5g.
I’m not saying 5g can’t be used in rural applications, just that it looks like fiber has a big head start. Now that there’s also more LEO satellite internet companies coming in with decent latency and bandwidth, that’s going to be another competitor to 5g in rural areas.
Technology isn't a solution for graft.
There was some ad campaign in Helsinki about two or three years ago telling people to do just this to compare carriers. Telia, Dna, and all the others worked just fine at rush hour at the central station with 50mbps+
It’s well worth trying but WiMAX tried the same so not novel
> Try using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how you get on.
uh, um, I thought LTE is already at least okay as it is for Shinjuku morning/Comiket queue problem
Technically it is more much interesting from a Carrier / Backend perspective. Where there are huge unit cost optimisation and ease of management. But for consumers it really is just a faster 4G.
Hahah
No company has ever defined unlimited to be, "really fast for a little bit, then really slow."
Imagine all your wireless IoT except you can't block them or filter from the wifi network, they are always connected and you can't see what data they're sending.
Tech doesn't work like that. Good look buying a high end "dumb" tv or a high end smartphone with a jack 3.5. It always starts with "don't buy them" until there is no choice anymore.
No, it's a low maintenance, low latency horse. The start-up time of cars is a few orders of magnitude faster than horses. And they can be housed in very little space and basically ignored when not needed.
5G’s actual advantages will be more prosaic which Ironically will lead to them being more profound. It’s not really clear which they will be though.
The idea is that with 5G you can combine your function generate with your oscilloscope to form a basic network analyser with the data travelling wireless between themselves and your computer. The throughput is high enough, and there wouldn't be any wires.
I think the idea is that they have identified it as an area where they can make productivity gains. If the throughput is there it has obvious in-the-field applications i.e. Who actually enjoys fucking around with cables before you even wire up the DUT - if you want to automatically (say) measure the efficiency of a power supply over some parameter you have to do it by hand (SCPI takes too much time)
5G with low latency and unlimited data could be a game changer (pardon the pun) for mobile gaming. It works on 4G. I've tested. But you definitely run into latency issues.
Of course, it's not just games that might be streamed this way. Any computing device could be.
The geek can groove on turning cities into the holodeck on the Enterprise.
But one surmises that the appeal of gadget-free living in the country will grow, also.
Seems hard to derive a good balance point with "enough" technology for optimal enjoyment without begetting Big Brother along the way.
(To clarify: He's also claimed that if Biden wins the election, Republicans will literally be hunted in the streets, and I think regardless of your political views that is pretty clearly not actually going to happen, so his ability to predict future events with any accuracy isn't something I'd trust. Source: https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/127831632504405606...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...
Edit: Not to say that it is good or appropriate now, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, at least for a couple years.
He has stated this in his Periscopes.
That's just the manipulative narrative to make the highly toxic and divisive racist drivel he is peddling more palatable to the more moderate of his fans, who typically fail to see who he really is because their perception of him is framed by Dilbert comics.
I am not American, I have no stake in American elections whatsoever, but people like Adams make me question humanity. The guy makes me sick.
For the unfamiliar (contains NSFW language)
I don't see what 5g brings to this application. This could be a offline application with a one time face/profile database. More probably it would be released as offline face detection, upload face images to the cloud to match and get profiles. 5G has better dataspeeds, but uploading cropped faces over LTE would be fine.
Maybe you could use it more reliably at the ballpark where there's enough density to justify deploying base stations in the new high frequency / low range spectrum.
That could make face identification a lot easier and more reliable. Instead of matching against a database of everyone in the cell tower’s range, it could match against faces known to be in sight.
And yes, the thought of phone providers knowing the fairly precise location of all their subscribers’ phones (and smart watches, and cars, and smart TVs, and fridges, etc) all the time scares me, too.
I think the question is not “technologies enabled” but rather “useful applications enabled”. We’ll find out, I wouldn’t count it out. I would expect it to be enormously expensive if it hits, get people s/addicted/accustomed to it and they’ll pay $500/month.
The marketing around it is incredible, though. Every undefined or hypothetical market is being tied to 5g. There's pretty much a new version of Betteridge's Law of Headlines - any future product that will "drive 5g" or "needs 5g" doesn't.
Are there any technologies enabled by these techniques that are not possible today?