Re:Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?
by PaulHoule on Sunday January 29, 2023 @09:35AM
(#34568466)
There are two kinds of 5G.
One of them is the mm wave which is very high performance over line of site, makes the most of diffraction so it often does well near-line-of-site, then quits working. It is particularly unsuited for handsets because your hand and other body parts can block the antenna. This is a great answer for FWA in favorable geography.
The other 5G is similar to 4G but a bit better performing and my understanding it is actually a bit cheaper for the carrier. 4G infrastructure manages a higher level of spectral efficiency than people thought possible before because of the very close coordination between towers, they actually pipe the baseband signal (around 100 MHz bandwidth) by fiber optic to a central location and process the signals collectively. My understanding is that 5G has a system for coordinating the towers that is still efficient, but not so crazy expensive. So it is ironic that carriers market 5G as something that costs consumers more money because the real driver for it, from the telco perspective, is lower costs.
One of them is the mm wave which is very high performance over line of site, makes the most of diffraction so it often does well near-line-of-site, then quits working. It is particularly unsuited for handsets because your hand and other body parts can block the antenna. This is a great answer for FWA in favorable geography.
The other 5G is similar to 4G but a bit better performing and my understanding it is actually a bit cheaper for the carrier. 4G infrastructure manages a higher level of spectral efficiency than people thought possible before because of the very close coordination between towers, they actually pipe the baseband signal (around 100 MHz bandwidth) by fiber optic to a central location and process the signals collectively. My understanding is that 5G has a system for coordinating the towers that is still efficient, but not so crazy expensive. So it is ironic that carriers market 5G as something that costs consumers more money because the real driver for it, from the telco perspective, is lower costs.