ea6e3e22634d1327de811b9bdb1b7af6745910f0

[Zucca]

1. Faster connectivity.
2. See above.
3. See above.
4. See above.
5. See above.
6. See above.

I am still laughing today... well done.

[IanB]

Thing is, I think for most people, they will not see the advertised significant speed improvement.  It has problem penetrating walls,  windows and even mere tree leaf.  So you are reduced to basically needing line-of-sight to the antenna.

...

So except for the limited few, they will be seeing 3G/4G/LTE probably for much of the life of "5G" deployment.  The improved efficiency is a good thing.  It helps hold cost down for the carriers and some saving would be passed along to the customers - or at least price increase will be tempered somewhat.

Sitting here at home, inside my four walls, behind my windows, I am getting 140 down, 28 up on 5G. I think that is pretty good. I never saw speeds like that with LTE.

[tooki]

Thing is, I think for most people, they will not see the advertised significant speed improvement.  It has problem penetrating walls,  windows and even mere tree leaf.  So you are reduced to basically needing line-of-sight to the antenna.

...

So except for the limited few, they will be seeing 3G/4G/LTE probably for much of the life of "5G" deployment.  The improved efficiency is a good thing.  It helps hold cost down for the carriers and some saving would be passed along to the customers - or at least price increase will be tempered somewhat.

Sitting here at home, inside my four walls, behind my windows, I am getting 140 down, 28 up on 5G. I think that is pretty good. I never saw speeds like that with LTE.

Inside my apartment, with only 2 bars of signal on my iPhone SE (2020), which does not support 5G, I just tested my LTE at 87Mbps down, 47Mbps up. 140 down is eminently possible with a stronger signal.

The upshot is, LTE done right performs very, very well. Unfortunately in your case, the US is, on average, pretty bad at cellular. :/ (I’ve often described cellular in USA as being somewhat third-world, but the analogy breaks down when one realizes that many third world countries actually do cellular quite well, often relying on it exclusively, with areas having never gotten landline service to begin with!)

[IanB]

Inside my apartment, with only 2 bars of signal on my iPhone SE (2020), which does not support 5G, I just tested my LTE at 87Mbps down, 47Mbps up. 140 down is eminently possible with a stronger signal.

The upshot is, LTE done right performs very, very well. Unfortunately in your case, the US is, on average, pretty bad at cellular. :/ (I’ve often described cellular in USA as being somewhat third-world, but the analogy breaks down when one realizes that many third world countries actually do cellular quite well, often relying on it exclusively, with areas having never gotten landline service to begin with!)

Interesting. On my other phone with a "5GE" plan I just measured 155 down, 12.6 up. So I guess the phone hardware plays a part, as well as the network.

I believe "5GE" is LTE, renamed.

[Someone]

People love to post how their "next" gen wireless connection is so much faster, forgetting that when its new the users/contention/congestion is so low that they are seeing abnormal performance.

[thm_w]

Code: [Select]

Network Type Download Speed Upload Speed
4G LTE              150Mbps 50Mbps
4G LTE-Advanced      300Mbps 150Mbps
Most phones support the LTE-A as well, just looks like networks were slow at implementing it, or never implemented it.

[tooki]

Inside my apartment, with only 2 bars of signal on my iPhone SE (2020), which does not support 5G, I just tested my LTE at 87Mbps down, 47Mbps up. 140 down is eminently possible with a stronger signal.

The upshot is, LTE done right performs very, very well. Unfortunately in your case, the US is, on average, pretty bad at cellular. :/ (I’ve often described cellular in USA as being somewhat third-world, but the analogy breaks down when one realizes that many third world countries actually do cellular quite well, often relying on it exclusively, with areas having never gotten landline service to begin with!)

Interesting. On my other phone with a "5GE" plan I just measured 155 down, 12.6 up. So I guess the phone hardware plays a part, as well as the network.

A huge part. LTE and 5G modems vary significantly in their capabilities, supported bands, etc.

I believe "5GE" is LTE, renamed.

Yeah that’s just AT&T’s marketing horseshit. (Which is that much more irritating insofar as LTE, especially LTE-A, has nothing to hide and performs very, very well if done right.)

[tooki]

Code: [Select]

Network Type Download Speed Upload Speed
4G LTE              150Mbps 50Mbps
4G LTE-Advanced      300Mbps 150Mbps
Most phones support the LTE-A as well, just looks like networks were slow at implementing it, or never implemented it.

As of two years ago, half of all LTE networks worldwide already supported LTE-A. I don’t think that’s too shabby.

[hagster]

5G can sustain those high data rates to lots of users simultaneously. If you happen to be close to a 4G base station in a location with relatively few users you will get great performance. But imagine being in a football stadium with 100k other users.

Is it worth paying a premium for? Probably not for most people, but if they can get a good bunch of early adopters to pay extra to pay for the technology they will.

Apparently latency is also a big thing for 5G. Gamers would appreciate that in locations where they can't get a wired connection.

[Vtile]

Actually I think it is about serving more customers. More customers = more bills. And more bills = more money.

The faster thing is just a way of accomplishing that.

nope, it's the increasing data volume... higher resolution of pictures,videos. more data on web  sites.. that's the reason why higher speeds are needed.

in 1993 i could get along with a 14400baud modem.. that's little over 1kByte/s... nowadays 10Mbit/s(~1Mbyte/s), approx 1000 times faster is considered kind of slow.

It is gone just ridiculuous, basic web page needs these days a huge computer to even load. I did try to use RaspberryZero a year ago for a web browsing and without any luck, even something like basic dry information portals like news papers etc. are so poorly done and optimised that you just can not. No wonder we are running out of power (sarcasm kind of). It seems every ie. picture optimisation technique is thrown out of window. I wonder when I did last time see interlaced jpg or png file on web, or color palette optimisation we keenly used in the late 90s yearly 00. Same with ie. Python applications everywhere on linux. Don't burn me Python is nice, but not outside small POC and scientific apps.

5G is needed for future dreams, advertisement of increased speed, 6-dimensional 8K porn and mind control in orwellian society. 'Roll eyes'

Panem et circenses.

It is also somewhat more less expensive way to provide (note on paper, they will over book and not deliver as always) 'fiber speed' without the cost of real fiber. While indeed the network itself will need more or equivalent amount of backplane fiber optic cables than what it would be needed to get it every house.

The health issues related is troubling me since it is not proven that a hotspot field due erratic reflection and unplanned changes will not occur, but technology have always collateral damage for creater good (what ever it is).

[tooki]

Actually I think it is about serving more customers. More customers = more bills. And more bills = more money.

The faster thing is just a way of accomplishing that.

nope, it's the increasing data volume... higher resolution of pictures,videos. more data on web  sites.. that's the reason why higher speeds are needed.

in 1993 i could get along with a 14400baud modem.. that's little over 1kByte/s... nowadays 10Mbit/s(~1Mbyte/s), approx 1000 times faster is considered kind of slow.

It is gone just ridiculuous, basic web page needs these days a huge computer to even load. I did try to use RaspberryZero a year ago for a web browsing and without any luck, even something like basic dry information portals like news papers etc. are so poorly done and optimised that you just can not. No wonder we are running out of power (sarcasm kind of). It seems every ie. picture optimisation technique is thrown out of window. I wonder when I did last time see interlaced jpg or png file on web, or color palette optimisation we keenly used in the late 90s yearly 00. Same with ie. Python applications everywhere on linux. Don't burn me Python is nice, but not outside small POC and scientific apps.

The amount of garbage JavaScript used on modern sites (mostly for ads, tracking, etc) is obscene. The actual file sizes, even of images, barely matter nowadays. But tons of JavaScript, much of which is loaded by other JavaScript as it runs, means page loading is delayed by the speed of code execution and the subsequent server responses.
It’s insane how big the difference is when using an ad blocker on typical sites like news sites: page loads go from 10 seconds to 1 second, commonly.

[daqq]

It’s insane how big the difference is when using an ad blocker on typical sites like news sites: page loads go from 10 seconds to 1 second, commonly.

Included is a screenshot from a Slovakian news site. The highlighted red area is the actual text. Okay, there's one more line of the text at the bottom. The rest is just ads. Moving ads.

[Vtile]

Indeed, it is kind of sad that one could run something like Lazarus (~1gb) full RAD environment and work with it, but can not use internet browser to read the fucking manual.   

[SiliconWizard]

5G can sustain those high data rates to lots of users simultaneously.

Uh, yeah. Except that comparing 5G to older tech using the same usage profiles is not relevant. It's highly likely that 5G will make data consumption "explode" compared to 4G and older - thus the overall user experience, when "lots of users" are using it, is probably going to be pretty similar.

It's like the computer hardware vs. software thing. The more powerful hardware is, the more bloated software becomes.

So what we can reasonably say is that 5G will make wireless data consumption increase a lot. Will it make it better from the average user's experience POV? Probably only at the very beginning.

[Bud]

Most of that lot of users is sitting at nome behind walls unpenetrable to 5G.

[tooki]

5G can sustain those high data rates to lots of users simultaneously.

Uh, yeah. Except that comparing 5G to older tech using the same usage profiles is not relevant. It's highly likely that 5G will make data consumption "explode" compared to 4G and older - thus the overall user experience, when "lots of users" are using it, is probably going to be pretty similar.

It's like the computer hardware vs. software thing. The more powerful hardware is, the more bloated software becomes.

So what we can reasonably say is that 5G will make wireless data consumption increase a lot. Will it make it better from the average user's experience POV? Probably only at the very beginning.

I disagree. 3G networks not only collapsed under heavy loads (i.e. large numbers of people), but it was easy to saturate a 3G link yourself — its bandwidth and latency presented a very real limitation to browsing speed (it wasn’t bad by any means, but it was noticeable compared to, say, cable). LTE has proven to be a great performer with resources to spare. I don’t think web resources have actually changed THAT much during the LTE era, as in, I think web pages became pigs during the late 3G era and haven’t changed that much since.

Bear in mind that, data caps notwithstanding, LTE is often good enough to be a viable alternative to terrestrial broadband internet. That certainly wasn’t the case with 3G. (Sure, 3G mobile hotspots existed, but using them was always a noticeable downgrade vs. terrestrial.)

In other words, my feeling is that with 3G, the network was still a bottleneck, so content had to be scaled down for it. (And thus with LTE content could be delivered uncompromised.) LTE hasn’t been a bottleneck, and thus content hasn’t been scaled down for it to begin with, and thus I don’t see it bloating up for 5G.

[mansaxel]

Bear in mind that, data caps notwithstanding, LTE is often good enough to be a viable alternative to terrestrial broadband internet. That certainly wasn’t the case with 3G. (Sure, 3G mobile hotspots existed, but using them was always a noticeable downgrade vs. terrestrial.)

In other words, my feeling is that with 3G, the network was still a bottleneck, so content had to be scaled down for it. (And thus with LTE content could be delivered uncompromised.) LTE hasn’t been a bottleneck, and thus content hasn’t been scaled down for it to begin with, and thus I don’t see it bloating up for 5G.

3G typically gives a RTT latency around the 150ms mark, where good 4G can go as low as 40ms.  Nowhere near as good as standard fibre broadband; I have around 4ms RTT over my tunneled network from home to the co-lo on the other side of town:

Success rate is 100 percent (100/100), round-trip min/avg/max = 1/3/4 ms


...and between 8 and 9 in the evening probably is close to max load on the network.

But, and this is an important BUT, 40ms is still bearable for terminal work and definitely web browsing, in a way that 150ms never will be.

[tooki]

3G typically gives a RTT latency around the 150ms mark, where good 4G can go as low as 40ms.  Nowhere near as good as standard fibre broadband; I have around 4ms RTT over my tunneled network from home to the co-lo on the other side of town:

Success rate is 100 percent (100/100), round-trip min/avg/max = 1/3/4 ms


...and between 8 and 9 in the evening probably is close to max load on the network.

But, and this is an important BUT, 40ms is still bearable for terminal work and definitely web browsing, in a way that 150ms never will be.

Those sound like really awful ping times for both 3G and LTE. Using the standard Speedtest by Ookla app on my iPhone, at 2 minutes to 9pm, the 2 bars of LTE in my bedroom just gave me a ping time of 14ms. 3G in the same location on the same device, 31ms. (My Wi-Fi, which is still old-school 802.11n backed by 600Mbps cable, pinged at 11ms.)

All the same, I completely concur with your conclusion that ping times are absolutely essential to web performance. I remember back in the late 90s when, like everyone else, I used dialup at home. Occasionally, a friend and I would go to his dad's printing shop and surf the web in their design studio, where they had ISDN "dialup". Even though the ISDN's 64Kbps doesn't sound like much more than the 56Kbps of a dialup modem, the 64Kbps were guaranteed by design, and didn't rely on compression as 56K modems did, so the latency was much lower, and browsing performance very noticeably better. In stark contrast, the very first mobile data I used (GPRS) also theoretically supported 56-114Kbps, but the massive latency (around 700ms typical) made it damned near unusable for anything except fetching POP email once in a while.

[hagster]

Another way to look at 5G is from the tech companies point of view. For instance Qualcom could take the view that LTE is good enough and just work on making it cheaper. But the older tech will slowly become commodatised and profit margins will drop. The only way to stay relevant in the tech industry is to aggressively invest in new and improved tech.