How Bad Europe’s Energy Crisis Is

Re:How Bad Europe’s Energy Crisis Is by scottLobster on Wednesday August 31, 2022 @01:10PM (#32665246)

It's not so much about consumers as businesses and infrastructure. 5G speed and device capacity increases have the capability to truly bring about pure wireless communication infrastructure that's cheap, efficient, reliable and performant enough that we could actually get some legit cyberpunk-ish tech built on top of it. Comparing 4G LTE to 5G is like comparing traditional oil wells to shale. Your gasoline may not change except perhaps in price, but the business and geopolitical side is completely transformed and there's a new surge in economic growth.

https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/networking/articles/lte-vs-f...

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Re:How Bad Europe’s Energy Crisis Is by causi on Wednesday August 31, 2022 @01:54PM (#32665879)

5G speed and device capacity increases have the capability to truly bring about pure wireless communication infrastructure that's cheap, efficient, reliable and performant enough that we could actually get some legit cyberpunk-ish tech built on top of it.

What? Multiplayer VR does not require that much bandwidth.

efficient, reliable

To me this is where 5G is worse than useless. The advent of 5G means companies have effectively stopped expanding 4G networks. The places I go with no data connectivity are exactly the same as they were five years ago and ten years ago. Where does 5G exist that 4G didn't exist beforehand?

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Re:How Bad Europe’s Energy Crisis Is by scottLobster on Wednesday August 31, 2022 @02:48PM (#32666649)

4G LTE can support around 4000 devices per square km, 5G can support around a million, all with faster speeds and far reduced latency. You want cars that can talk to each other? Stoplights that can talk to cars in real-time? Wireless cellular internet so you have an alternative to whatever your apartment complex provides, or whatever ISP decided it was worth it to wire your street 20 years ago? 4G was incapable of that with any real population density due to congestion. 5G, fully realized, handles it easily. Now apply those types of communications to literally every sector in range of a 5G cell tower. Forget the stupid VR headsets, look into the stuff in the walls, underground and along streets and inside office buildings/hospitals/factories.

Part of the reason the Internet of Things sucks so hard is that 4G communications are insufficient to reach the scales/speeds/latency required to do anything at scale or requiring low-latency communications with it. You've likely experienced this while trying to browse the internet on your data plan in a crowded area, where you then switch to an unsecured public wifi hotspot out of frustration. That's why we've largely seen the sector stick to overpriced consumer toys and other non-critical applications.

At any rate the rollout is just beginning, to the point where 5G is still more of a marketing term (I think T-Mobile was selling 5G capable phones before it even rolled out any hardware), and supply chain issues are biting everything. But the business incentives are there, give it a few years.

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