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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Every previous "G" was a big deal in terms of opening up new applications and business opportunities by significantly improving latency, bandwidth, and power efficiency. Going from 4G to 5G will eventually have just as huge an impact as going from 3G to 4G did, although rolling out the technology worldwide will be a slow gradual process.

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Will it though?

The frequencies are so easily blocked by anything that you need transmitters everywhere and receivers everywhere - literally 5G phones will have to have 3+ separate 5G antennaes in different locations to avoid the signal being outright blocked by your hand.

5G devices will practically need line of sight to a transmitter.

There is 5G and there is 5G mmWave. They are two separate parts of "5G". There are still advantages to sub 6GHz standard cell phone frequencies such as lower latency and higher throughput.

The disadvantages you mention only apply to 5G mmWave.

I doubt it. Based on home internet soultions, going from <1Mbps speed to 10 makes a difference, going to 100 not so much, and gigabit range is useful for bragging rights only. 95% of end users do not have such bandwidth needs.

You get diminishing returns even on exponential scaling.

Ofc some possibilities do open, like cloud backup, or even personal data servers, but they are laregly unexplored as of today.

I cant imagine what would 5G bring practical to the phone, bandwidth doesnt seem a killer. Latency is probably acceptable as well. Maybe im too limited.

The latency reduction will deliver a major improvement in user experience, even if throughput doesn't increase much.

LTE already has good latency. IIRC at about ~5ms on the last hop.

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