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.