> If someone was willing to pay for the hundreds of tiny cell sites required.

We are already doing that, it's called WiFi. 5G SA is nothing but a souped up WiFi signal, and it should be treated as such and not how we have been treating 4G up until this point. Telcos need to change their business model otherwise the tech giants might end up eating their lunch

The tech giants spy on us to sell advertising inside of their products. If Verizon starts listening into my calls to sell me products I would switch to any carrier who wasn’t doing that.

This sounds very familiar. I hope they get a hundred billion dollar fine and life in prison for the CEO and the board if they do this because they have already been fined before for this.

> Verizon is settling with the FCC over its use of an ad targeting technology known as a "supercookie," which tracks the websites visited by phones on its network. Supercookies allow websites to better target ads to visitors with Verizon cellphone service; but those visitors — for a period of time — weren't informed of the tracking or given the option to opt out. Because of that, Verizon will pay a fine of $1.35 million and will now have to receive customer permission before sharing tracking data with other companies or even within its organization, including with sites owned by AOL.

- The Verge

Underlying FTC press release

Full Title: FCC Settles Verizon "Supercookie" Probe, Requires Consumer Opt-In for Third Parties

https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-settles-verizon-supercookie...

> WASHINGTON, March 7, 2016 – The Federal Communications Commission today announced a settlement resolving an investigation into Verizon Wireless’s practice of inserting unique identifier headers or so-called “supercookies” into its customers’ mobile Internet traffic without their knowledge or consent. These unique, undeletable identifiers – referred to as UIDH – are inserted into web traffic and used to identify customers in order to deliver targeted ads from Verizon and other third parties. As a result of the investigation and settlement, Verizon Wireless is notifying consumers about its targeted advertising programs, will obtain customers’ opt-in consent before sharing UIDH with third parties, and will obtain customers’ opt-in or opt-out consent before sharing UIDH internally within the Verizon corporate family.

Verizon may not listen to your calls, but they do track the IP addresses your phone connects to and what you do on the internet to profile you.

Source: PII data request of my own Verizon account, containing detailed demographic data, intent/interest data, and IP addresses of websites I had visited.

Edit: Anyone interested in doing the same, here's the link: https://www.verizon.com/support/download-and-view-vpd-file/

WiFi is a 'simple' system designed for a few, static devices.

Cellular systems are designed for many more devices and, crucially, full mobility. These are orders of magnitude more complex than WiFi.

There's nothing within the 5G spec itself that commands that every single cell site needs to be a massive MIMO supporting 1000s of users at once. Making a micro cell supporting just a family home is enough, then something a bit higher for small businesses supporting 10-100 users, then the likes of Starbucks can deploy bigger ones and finally the Sports stadiums and Corporate offices gets the really high end stuff.

Companies like Rakuten have already shown it's cheap enough to distribute 4G femtocells for free [1] to your users while increasing your coverage

[1] - https://network.mobile.rakuten.co.jp/guide/rakuten-casa/conn...

Again, 4G/5G are not WiFi, they are much more complex and reliable systems and support mobility, even if of course they can now be used in the same way as WiFi ("he who can do more can do less").

T-Mobile continues to quietly make available their "CellSpot" femtocell for a US$25 deposit, which is good because it's the only way we would have actual cell service here in a rural part of New Mexico. It is doubly good because whatever server T-Mobile uses for their wifi calling service(s) is the biggest dumpster fire in their entire business.

I get fantastic wifi calling service with TMO. Maybe your home internet has latency issues?

Non-TMO VOIP and video calling works like a charm. By contrast, TMO Wifi calling can't deal with MMS SMS, drops calls and generally is flaky as shit. The cellspot makes all of that work just fine, and is better than driving 2 miles to get to a reception point.

> 5G SA is nothing but a souped up WiFi signal,

Let's not conflate too many things. Maybe current deployments are in that frequency band, but "5G SA" just means the connection is legitimately 5G.

In theory all 4G frequencies will get converted to 5G, and it will be a moderate improvement. Separately 5G is expanding into the wifi arena and the ultra fast near-line-of-sight arena. But "SA" is not how you tell the difference. It will all be SA eventually.

> Separately 5G is expanding into the wifi arena

On LTE this is called LAA. As far as I can tell, the term is being kept for 5G as well.

I worked on a team that prototyped the “watch the game on your phone at the game” using WiFi. Nobody used it. That isn’t going to be the killer app either.

I would expect that to work great for a F1 race.

It working great and people actually wanting to use it are two different things. In my experience people go to sports events to experience the atmosphere and enjoy themselves while having a beer, not to look into every minute detail of what's happening.

Exactly... the most fanatical football nuts I know are the ones watching the game on TV with the different angles and the slow-motions and the replays... the people going to the game are very tribal, they love painting their faces and shouting [CITY NAME] and they do genuinely get very happy when [TEAM] wins but they aren't the ones talking about the 0-technique of the defensive lineman and so on.

Of course, but having been to an F1 race recently, the tracks are so irregularly shaped and long that it's usually impossible to see the whole track (or even more than some small section of track) from the stands. And even the big screens can be sparse.

It's been tried, and the results depend on your definition of "works great".

F1 used to have a deal with "Kangaroo TV" [1], where people at the race could rent a small portable TV. When I went to the Shanghai GP years back (it was the one where Hamilton beached his car coming into the pits), I rented one. With racetracks that are miles long so nobody can see all the action - and certainly not when sitting at Turn 1 in Shanghai - it's definitely a boon. I was able to see what was happening, even listen to the commentators. I was telling everybody around me what was really going on.

The thing is, it was fairly expensive. I don't remember the actual number, but something that you probably wouldn't just do on a whim.

And history tells us that it didn't work out. The "kangaroo.tv" domain name is apparently available for purchase now.

Too bad, because my experience is that, without this, going to an F1 race is inferior to watching on TV in most respects.

[1] https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/fom-joins-forces-with-kang...

Livestream yourself watching the game / gig might be a thing though. I went to a Phoebe Bridgers gig in the summer and half the crowd seemed to be at it. Not very good for the atmosphere though.

What if players had first-person camera streams available, and you could choose which stream to watch on your phone?

Works great in F1, would be fun in soccer, football, or even basketball.

IoT is extra funny because the devices are so low-bandwidth.

The point of 5g for iot is a special mode with very low battery usage, and a way to connect without needing a SIM card or something similar.

There's value there, but not for consumers. It's large land monitoring where this gets value. Essentially competing with LoRaWan by building out a ubiquitous radio network any sensor can easily connect to.

I think the average person just doesn't realize how much remote sensor equipment infrastructure is out there. Some number of years ago I went out with a friend that worked at natural gas well facilities. I'm pretty sure it was all over lower bandwidth radio networks at that time, but it still transferred all the important data they needed. Such as waste water tank levels, average gas flow, and if any emergency or alarm conditions were occurring. More monitoring and data was always wanted but you had to keep it within particular power and bandwidth limits at the time.

5G highspeed signals are so high frequency that they penetrate no kind of matter anymore. Good luck. Only usecase maybe the stadium with a central antenna.

I live in a poured concrete house built in 1950s Ireland. My 2.4Ghz doorbell struggles to speak to an AP about 1 meter away from it through the external wall. I just did a 5G speedtest from my bed and got 250Mbps.

And which 5G it was? Because mmWave one won't really penetrate anything on 10GHz+

I don't personally get why mmWave part of 5G is talked so much about. 1st Google result gives less than 1% of time connected is to a mmWave network.

5G over the same cmWave frequencies 4G uses still has a benefit - but mainly for the operator! It allows them more users and throughput for the same amount of spectrum. So in a rational market, the operators should be giving you discounts for using 5G instead of charging more for it!

I just benchmarked from my suburban second floor bedroom in the US, and got mmWave (it says 5G UC which is apparently mmWave) and got 500mbit/sec

So I guess some people have it, and use it? It’s basically always on around my neighborhood, but I guess I live in a nice city and Sprint’s old HQ is down the street so that probably has a lot to do with it.

That is is T-Mobile “Ultra Capacity”, which is more like.y the midband spectrum they got from sprint.

You basically need line of sight for mmWave. Think of it like light. If you can’t see an access point, then you probably aren’t using mmWave.

Half a bit per second?

Only the US really uses mmWave.

~3.4GHz-4GHz (which is the 'primary' 5G band) in Europe can provide excellent speeds (2gbit/sec real world no problem to a phone) but without the terrible signal degrigation you get on mmWave.

mmWave will be used more in the future once the other bands get saturated, but it's a bit ahead of its time now.

It's probably coming through your window, not the walls. Try it from a bathroom.

Thankfully, I spend virtually all of my time indoors in rooms with windows.

I know people who are implementing server-based "responses" in cars (e.g. tyre slip control - similar contexts) and need the lowest possible latencies for that.

Of course, some of are of the position of "You try to place remote access, control and delegation to critical pieces of my vital infrastructure, expect the most violent level of personal reactions".

Source?

I mean. We’ve all heard the marketing bs from the telcos that 5g opens up these possibilities. No engineer, worth the title, would be naive enough to actually believe that and put tire slip control into an rpc call...going over wireless. For real, does anyone actually believe this is a good idea?

There are things worth putting on remote systems, but none of them need real time response or matter for safety.

I work for John Deere (of course do not speak for them), we want to analyze things 'on the cloud', but we are thinking about how to apply the results of data we gather latter. Already it is so the coop sprayer that comes in 2 months knows where the rows really are so it can figure out the most efficient path to drive their field and drive over the least crop. There are also what do I do in this field next year decisions that can be driven by data, and it is nice to not have to take some form of memory device to the tractor.

Companies with trucks are interested in things they can get from connected vehicles. Insurance also is interested to see if they can find the good drivers and give them better rates (governments probably want to force training on bad drivers or something). None of the above is real time critical.

> Source?

Impossible (unfortunately) for reasons of privacy.

> No engineer ... naive

Your mistake is to imply that the "drive" lies with engineers - instead of a perverse economy in which some try to promote unneeded novelties to "have something new to sell - to people who already have everything". This was directly admitted by the involved.

> a good idea

Given the above, some believe it a potentially good idea "for the stockholders" (not for "function", as you seem to assume as a perspective).

I thought the killer app would be to replace at home wired broadband with 5G wireless. I still think it looks compelling.

Maybe in the developing world but I'd imagine most of the developed world got rid of wired internet and replaced it with fibre years ago.

Where I live we have decent fiber penetration. In my appartment I can have a 1Gb/1Gb internet connection no problem.

However, I pay about 25 eur for my 5G telco (unlimited data), and 35 eur for my fiber connection (100mbit/100mbit). My telco allows dual SIM usage, so I am thinking about just cancelling my fiber connection and installing a 5G modem. The thing that is holding me back is that a good 5G modem is somewhere between 500 and 4000 eur, so it is quite an expensive experiment to do.

The irony in that is that it's probably the other way around but I'm too lazy to dig up data on that.

Outside cities, the network situation is pretty bad. I am in an affluent suburb and my only option is 4mb/200k. No that is not a typo. Broadband coverage is still pretty spotty in the usa.

Wow, we have fibre to about 90% of the population and ripped out copper a few years ago. In rural areas there is government subsidised 4g internet and in the most rural it's government subsidised satellite.

I was in Korea for work and it seemed the same there, I was even in eastern Europe visiting family and it was a pretty similar story. So I figured it was pretty universal. Although I know that Australia isn't in a good space with broadband simply because of politics and companies not wanting to work together, I'd assumed they were an outlier

You wrote:

    we have fibre to about 90% of the population

Australia? NBN (National Broadband Network) is the only one I can think of...

Real Question: On paper, NBN is an insane human development achievement. Why do so many non-urban Ozzies on HN complain about lousy Internet access? Honestly, I don't believe it. Send them to Germany for a year, and they will see how bad it can be. (HN is full of funny stories from Germans about how bad is their broadband.)

No, New Zealand with UFB which is fibre to the door for about 90% of the population with rural broadband initiatives for the remaining 10%.

Trouble is, as far as I can tell, at 5G frequencies you need micro stations all over the place. If your suburban street has 10 houses and needs 5 stations (with fiber runs to each) to offer mmWave to everyone, it’s basically just the same thing as home broadband yet more expensive.

Nope. There was a company about 20 years ago called WinStar that tried this. The reason it’s not “basically the same” is called “the last mile” problem. It’s vastly cheaper to install things on every block even than to every house especially when the utility poles and right of ways are already there.

At mmWave 5G frequencies. 5G also runs on 4G frequencies with the same propagation as 4G.

In something of a paradoxical curse, operating on 4G frequencies mean you share spectrum with a much larger land area, limiting possible bandwidth. You aren’t going to serve 1gbps of home internet to every house in reach.

I thought this, too, but it seems carriers in the USA are being /very/ selective about where they offer the service.

For example, my inlaws live in semi-rural South Carolina and a new cell tower was built about a mile away from their home ~2 years ago. T-Mobile's Home Internet product indicates there's no service at their address for even though I have what looks to be full signal strength indoors on their "5G UC" network (indicates mid-band & mmWave from what I can tell, but in this location it's likely just mid-band). Every speed test I've executed from my T-Mobile-connected phone (Galaxy S22) is in the 600-700Mbps range and it doesn't vary based on the time of day.

Verizon Wireless indicates that they're not in the service area either for their 5G home Internet product, although I don't have data points from any UE on their network in that area.