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tooki:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on January 31, 2022, 06:10:03 pm ---
--- Quote from: hagster on January 29, 2022, 06:24:28 pm ---5G can sustain those high data rates to lots of users simultaneously.

--- End quote ---

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.

--- End quote ---
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:

--- Quote from: tooki on January 31, 2022, 06:29:46 pm ---
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.

--- End quote ---

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:

--- Quote from: mansaxel on January 31, 2022, 07:47:19 pm ---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.

--- End quote ---
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.

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