So now you can blow through your data cap twice as fast?

To me the whole angle of this seems wrong. Who out there has a solid LTE signal and is going “oh if only this were faster”.

On the other hand when I have 1 bar I might has well have nothing at all. Shortening the range of the base stations doesn’t seem like it would help this.

But keep in mind, that data caps exist to limit the impact of single users to the overall capacity. With 5G capacity everywhere, the will look different (way higher).

>With 5G capacity everywhere, the will look different (way higher).

In the US I went from unlimited data 3G to 10gb during the 4G LTE days, down to eventually 5gb (Verizon).

There are many I know with the same personal experience.

I have no doubt that big data plans will one day be ubiquitous -- but I have much more doubt that mobile providers are actually trying to provide me with a better experience and more freedom to do what I want.

They care about profit, and that's about it.

They gave away big data plans when few people cared about actually using them, and now that the phones and the userbase has caught up to those numbers the providers pull the rug from under them in order to secure further profits -- god forbid the user demand forces upgrades, that'd ruin the profits even further.

You can see this where I live - all the main carrier 5G data plans are unlimited data, whereas they never offered any unlimited LTE plans (the last time there was an unlimited plan was on the original WiMAX)

That's what they said about 4G, and 3G. We've seen this movie before.

And your 4G cap is what you had with 3G?

When 4G came online, yes it was.

My SIM only contract has no data limit, for £37pm. I have replaced fibre broadband with a 5G router. I've been using this set up since September and have hardly had any connectivity issues (vpn, ssh, video conferencing, netflix etc). Pings are a bit higher for gaming though.

Me. I frequently have LTE in places I use the internet, and miss the gigabit connection I have at home.

10Gbps would, of course, be even better, at home and mobile.

In what scenario can you tell the difference between 40 Mbps and 1000 Mbps on a mobile phone?

20-40 Mbps is more than enough for streaming. So I suppose you’re regularly downloading very large files or something?

Genuinely curious what use cases you notice a difference.

Or maybe it’s the better latency of your gigabit that you notice more so than the throughput?

Oh, I don't use LTE on a mobile phone. All of my devices (phones included) connect to a router with LTE uplink that runs VPN 24/7; the mobile carriers can't be trusted with any unencrypted data any longer, as T-Mobile is happily publicizing. None of my phones get sim cards.

I was referring to a laptop in my original statement. I usually plug it into the LTE router directly with a gigabit cable, or use Wi-Fi which generally exceeds the uplink capacity. 5G fixes that, for a wireless LAN.

As for why you'd need higher bandwidth on a mobile device, it is simple: to live-stream the 2160p@60fps captured from the device's sensors. Another good reason is app updates: doing app updates on a mobile device frequently includes a few gigabytes of downloads. Same with laptops, of course, which are increasingly connected via mobile data. Many AAA games have updates in the 20-200GB range.

A lot of this kind of stuff assumes that someone is on mobile temporarily until they get back to a "real" wifi connection (iOS didn't let you download any apps over 2GB on mobile data for a long while). For some of us, or all of us at some times, there isn't a "real" connection to go back to.

> For some of us

I suspect it's a small enough minority nobody is too worried about it from a policy point of view.

Long-haul truckers are 1% of the US population, which is something like 3 or 4 million people.

I'm sure that number pales in comparison to the number of truckers, oil workers, and construction types globally that spend weeks or months on the road at a time. It's probably easily 100 million people that will immediately directly benefit from increased mobile bandwidth.

That's not even counting the dozens of developing countries where they just skipped cabling altogether and mobile data is the only internet access available. That probably boops the figure up to a billion or more.

Sure, and internationally I think it's a big deal. I'm certainly not going to argue that people wouldn't benefit from increased mobile bandwidth.

However, huge chunk of those people you mention are nothing like mobile only, and for many the model of heavier downloads on wifi works just fine.

My point was particularly about catering to the mobile only crowd, which is pretty small (US/ EU etc., anyway).

Data caps are a rarity in many countries.