Hacker News Reader

Comment by iagovar | Hacker News Reader

Well I work for a telco and I really don't see anyone excited for 5G. If anything it looks like a bad idea to everyone.

Exactly, it's not that different from 4G and is going to perform pretty much the same, but it will require new phones and will provide an excuse to increase prices for mobile internet plans.

If you are a business, and a buildout to get fiber is in the thousands, and a 5G contract is the same monthly rate as a wire, maybe you want the flexibility to switch carriers more often without additional fiber buildouts.

A better use case is SD-WAN. You already have fiber to your building, and you want a supplementary connection in the event the fiber line gets severed, to ensure business continuity and no outages. At the right price its a no brainier to replace SD-WAN 4G modems with 5G modems.

5G is coming for dsl/cable/fiber, not to get everyone to replace their phone.

this. i‘d call it a ponzi scheme and would love to see telco ceos and politicians in prison.

Correct me if I'm wrong: what annoys me about 5G is that, if I understood it correctly, it cannot share the radio channel with 4G. That is, all telcos will have to buy new bandwidth (or repurpose old allocations like 3G) to be able to offer 5G, and the split between 4G and 5G bandwidth in a given area is fixed. Which means LTE wasn't that much of a "long term" evolution: if I bought a 4G phone, now I have to buy a 5G phone, or deal with a continuously shrinking allocation for 4G.

Contrast that with WiFi, where the very first 802.11 standard for a given frequency range can still share the radio channel with the newest 802.11 standard for that frequency range, and the same WiFi AP can service both 802.11a and 801.11ax clients at the same time in a single radio channel.

This is already happening in Spain, and it's a headache because we already planned mobile coverage around the current bandwidth, and I really can't see how are we going to do without installing more BTs.

There are plans to replace copper with wireless connections in very dispersed areas. In most of this areas we already have posts, so I don't really understand what's the logic behind it, because at the end of the day you're replacing capex with opex. I may be wrong, but laying fiber, if you don't dig it, isn't that expensive, specially if you already own the infrastructure and it's easy to re-purpose.

As always, we won't be able to avoid shades and typical wireless problems, so IMO people will call helpdesk more frequently, and the tooling for diagnosing problems is nowhere close to fiber/dsl.

I read an article that claiming the push for 5G comes from SoC and device vendors, not telcos etc. The followup article was interesting.

https://www.rhizomatica.org/talkin-bout-my-5th-generation/ https://www.rhizomatica.org/5g-wont-reduce-the-digital-divid...

Because it will be expensive, and IMO is way ahead of the consumer needs. And I'm talking about a country (Spain) that already has symmetric 1gbps commercially available, and the common connection is in the bracket of 100-600mbps.

Replacing copper with fiber in remote areas is cheapish if you repurpose copper posts instead of digging, and the opex of fiber is even lower than copper.

For those areas that are disconnected and don't even have DSL a few more BTs and 4G are waaay cheaper than putting 5G everywhere.

And I'm not even mentioning the clusterfuck that is being changing all the bands and retool many stuff.

5G has really no upsides now, at least from my pov.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com