Not for surgery per se (which is too high of a risk), but in my country people did manage to find a similar, reasonable use case. They equipped ambulances with high-res cameras and cellular network for senior medical technicians in hospitals to give advices to medical technicians on the ambulance in real-time, which seems like a nice addition.

Very nice

ps: reminds me that emergency team came with a broken 2G portable EKG that couldn't transmit data to the cardiologist when my mother had a spasm.. driver told me that the device was around 10000 euros, it was quite shocking.

4G can comfortably stream 1080p video with low latency. What does 5G being to this scenario?

Nothing really special for 5G. The governmental bodies (and the tech firms involved) use the term "5G" just to gain visibility.

I did see some of those ambulances running multiple streams from different perspectives, though. Is the bandwidth of 4G networks capable of doing that?

Wider bands, lower latency, less congestion, the promise of switching off legacy in the future (with SA)

Network slicing allows critical bandwidth usage to be prioritized absolutely. Can’t do that with LTE.

Not to mention the sheer density of connections that can be serviced by a 5G radio over an LTE radio.

> I never, ever understood that argument; I simply can't imagine a hospital relying on a cellular network for such sensitive work.

Maybe the argument was more for government officials, not for people like you.

What does this tell us about government officials?

That they deal exclusively in propaganda, with no regard to the real world.

No, we already knew that.

That the majority are career politicians, not domain experts.

I expect those politicians should have advisory staff exactly for handling such cases, as there's never a domain expert in the lead (and there are different opinions also in every field). Now if that advisory works as expected, that's another story - maybe the politicians won't ask, maybe the advisors would represent some interests, maybe...

And couldn’t they already do it over the internet?

Presumably they mean doctors can have an internet connection in remote places. But that’s not the same as being far from their patient.

Not in remote unwired terrain.

Examples for "wireless" (roadless) transport of physical packets

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_comp....

In remote areas, Starlink is probably a better bet than 5G to allow for low latency, high bandwidth use cases.

This arbitrary web site disagrees: 25ms vs 1ms latency.

https://history-computer.com/starlink-vs-5g-which-is-better

but which really remote area gives you 5G with 1ms latency? If it's worth to have that infrastructure you might as well have fiber at home.

It's not an argument, it's marketing to non-techies.

Put it simply you have to sell more phones than you did last year (selling less, or even the same amount, isn't enough). If you don't have features to justify that (which you don't, as the very fast smartphone evolution has mostly stagnated), you make them up. 5G being one of them.

Because it’s not a real argument, it’s marketing fluff. “Oh, look how futuristic it is! If you (the government) approve all our demands for reduced regulation and subsidize our installation costs, you’ll get re-elected by your people who now live like the Jetsons!”

They’ve been saying the same exact thing since cellular data was starting to be deployed 30 years ago. Search for the AT&T “you will” campaign from the 90s to see.