Hacker News Reader

Comment by taobility | Hacker News Reader

without 4G, there is no Uber/Lyft, Instagram, whatsapp, cashless etc mobile revolution. So, don't stay in your cave.

Uber/Lyft, whatsapp, cashless payment apps all work reasonably on 2G and fine on 3G. Real time video calling works great for me over 4G/LTE, in the US, China, Argentina, everywhere I’ve tried it.

I’m all for faster/better mobile Internet, but I keep seeing these claims that there’s going to be entirely new business models because of 5G and I just don’t get it. Better coverage for 4G/LTE seems like it would do a lot more good for businesses.

They can’t trick you into upgrading your phone with 5g dreams that way. 5g is what a new version of Windows used to be for computer manufacturers.

None of the things you mention require 4G. Heck, we were doing social media and messaging before 3G even existed...

Uber and Lyft exploit drivers and are only around because they can finance their losses through venture capital. Which they only get because the promise autonomous cars that will never come and because the taxi industry was broken due to lack of working regulation.

All instagram does is enable influencer and bullying.

Whatsapp is just another way for facebook to hover up all data about you and intrude on private conversation to rent out your eyeballs to advertisers.

Cashless is not a desirable state. And is much more driven by credit card companies that hope you overspent once you don't handle physical money and that hope to make a side profit by profiling the hell out of you.

So if that was the only thing that 4G provided I would be happy without it in my cave.

all concepts you mention aren’t conceptual problems. the world is better with the concepts of technology-assisted taxi hailing, and not having to carry cash (i think you’re basically alone on this one; this is the biggest and best technology change in my life in years)

regardless of your opinions of the specific problems with the current platforms, they’re not problems with the concepts... and those concepts are enabled or improved by high bandwidth mobile internet

and regardless, you’re kinda missing the point: 5g will absolutely enable new businesses (and more importantly new concepts), because it’s happened with every single bandwidth upgrade we have ever been through! you can’t conceptualise them now, because nobody has yet! if you could, you’d have started uber before uber, google before google, etc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com