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Comment by notlukesky | Hacker News Reader

When 3G first came out it was a disaster for most carriers. The phones were buggy and hard to come by. More importantly there was no compelling reason to use data from your phone till the iPhone and then Android appeared. The previous generation of “smartphones” (like Symbian and NTT Docomo imode) tried to dumb and water down the Internet. 5G will present similar problems in the early stages. There are not enough compelling applications for the increase in bandwidth now, but there sure will be later on. So I don’t see a race to it now. It’s the next evolution in the cycle of faster speed.

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> but there sure will be later on

Like what? I remember having a 3G iPhone and actively looking forward to 4G because bandwidth actually limited certain tasks. Since 4G has become widespread, I've never felt that way. The only time I notice my phone's finite bandwidth is when buildings are blocking my signal, which will only be more prevalent with 5G because millimeter waves can't penetrate materials.

There is literally no media that my device makes use of that it can't download in a comfortable amount of time. With modern compression technology, even streaming HD video is basically seamless over cell towers. Years ago I was able to play online games by tethering my Xbox to my phone. I just don't have a use for more bandwidth.

I would honestly much rather have consistent 4g speeds than try to jump to something faster.

In the middle of Seattle there are still holes in coverage where I data speeds slow to a complete crawl.

Exactly. And of course the situation is much worse anywhere outside of a major city. Pushing a newer, faster, shorter-range technology is the opposite of what needs to be worked on.

Isn't this exactly what 5G offers? The mmWave stuff is largely a sideshow, but the big win was supposed to be allowing more people to share LTE frequencies without interfering with each other as much I thought?

Since these towers have shorter range and less penetration, worse coverage is next to certain.

Coverage holes are the real problem in American wireless.

It's awful in rural areas, and often still pretty bad around big cities.

When carriers claim they have coverage of 300 M pops, I wonder if it is more like 220 M pops. All the time I go to places that the carrier maps say have coverage and there is no signal.

Efforts to parcel out money to improve rural cell service fell through because there are no useful coverage maps.

I spent last weekend in a town with no cell service.

Amazingly, every person there didn't suddenly die. There weren't pedophiles crawling all over the place looking for children to snatch. The town didn't burn down. None of the fears that cell companies have put into us came to pass. People simply didn't have a phone stuck in their pockets everywhere they went.

When people wanted to communicate, they went to the little bar/restaurant next to the sheriff's office. Lots of people talking. Trading jokes. Watching sports on satellite TV. Kids outside playing whatever shouty games kids play.

Not one cell phone. And somehow the world didn't end.

Go figure.

Fears nobody except you brought up, so why are they relevant to a discussion if people would prefer more coverage to greater speeds?

I think it is just a factor that limits the business.

I don't own a smartphone or even a dumbphone. At times I had two prepaid phones, one on the Verizon network, one on the AT&T network. Neither one worked at my house. Between the two prepaid phones I could sometimes talk on the phone while traveling, whether that means driving around Upstate NY or visiting big cities.

At one point I was about to put another $100 on my Tracfone for a year's service and realized I'd accumulated 4500 minutes.

Given that I don't talk on the phone much and that the coverage is poor in places where I go, I don't even have a cheap phone plan, never mind an expensive phone plan.

So in my case, U.S. carriers could increase their revenue if they improved their coverage.

> In the middle of Seattle there are still holes in coverage where I data speeds slow to a complete crawl.

Ironically, this is the one situation where 5G is actually useful. The unambiguous benefit to 5G is that it increases the total load capacity of the cell network. People who live in areas where the network operates at capacity large amounts of the time (such as Seattle) will see an increase in reliability even if they don't see an increase in speed.

> The only time I notice my phone's finite bandwidth is when buildings are blocking my signal, which will only be more prevalent with 5G because millimeter waves can't penetrate materials.

I'm pretty bearish on 5g in the short/medium term, but if carriers do deploy 5g it should mean many more smaller cell base stations. These extra stations should help in cities.

Lots of little towers sounds logistically more challenging than a few big ones. And it's the sort of thing that requires constant reevaluation as new large buildings go up, shadowing regions that once had good coverage. Will carriers stay on top of the matter, or will coverage start to suffer? I'd bet on the later.

I agree. That’s why I said “if” and “should”. :)

Real time AR streaming. We likely can't get glasses with the necessary processor down to the right form factor, but they could offload that work to a server if you had 5g in place

I feel like the last few years have been a constant letdown when it comes to consumer AR or VR. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of appetite for it even if you look at more powerful home systems.

With Carmack leaving at Occulus and a lot of the startups not really amounting to anything I'm not so sure that this is just an issue of not enough mobile bandwidth.

I feel like you don't actually pay attention to VR and are just saying what you hear in the tech press.

that feels unreasonably abrasive. I know one or two people in the industry who have recently left VR firms and they painted a pretty pessimistic picture for me, so I'm not just going by what I read in the press.

> There just doesn't seem to be a lot of appetite for it even if you look at more powerful home systems.

Speaking for myself, I have no actual interest in AR/VR. It doesn't bring me anything that I need or would use for more than the novelty factor. I suspect that I'm in the majority here.

Where this tech shines is in niche markets -- gaming, industrial uses, and so forth.

> We likely can't get glasses with the necessary processor down to the right form factor

That's silly. We're already pretty close, and if they really had to offload some things then the powerful computer that's a couple feet away in your pocket would make much more sense. Plus, as I said we already stream HD video on 4G networks without much trouble.

Moreover we don't have to cram all the silicon and batteries into the glasses themselves. Some of it, especially an extended battery pack, wifi and storage hardware, can be stored in a small, lightweight, slim-profile backpack that's wired to the AR glasses. Probably the rendering silicon too if the short-distance bandwidth between backpack and glasses doesn't induce too much lag.

Wearing small backpacks and fanny packs while urban adventuring is not uncommon. AR companies could just bootstrap off that already existing "infrastructure" with small backs that can still carry stuff, but with AR tech also inside them.

I keep hearing VR and AR listed as reasons we need 5G, but literally no one I know in this industry is saying that. If anything, VR is going to reduce bandwidth requirements for things like teleconferencing.

You aren't going to stream anything to a headlocked headset over anything bigger than your LAN. Network latency will make you ill. And no, async timewarp is not the answer. That only gets you incidental movement from user to view. You still get massive latency in reactions to input, which can't be faked.

Oh, I suppose maybe someone is thinking of 360 video. Not anyone I know. But could be someone.

I think perhaps being able to replace cable is the biggest benefit. This will force prices down in certain markets and allow consumers to choose between more consumer friendly companies then comcast

Cable? As in....TV? At a risk of sounding dismissive - won't TV be dead by then? I'm 29 and I literally don't know anyone who watches actual live TV anymore. Well, no, that's not true, my grandparents do. But even my mum and my wife's parents have already switched to netflix-only situation, regular TV is just so full of ads and nonsense that it doesn't make any sense to pay for it.

I think the parent comment was referring to hard-line internet, i.e. fiber and coax ("cable").

I like TV because it tells me what to watch. I don’t have to choose. I think other people derive a lot of value from this as well. I don’t have TV but I’m at a hotel right now and watching TV while drinking beer (and typing this I guess) is pretty damn nice. It’s possible that feeling would wear off if I had it around regularly, though.

But I bet TV will still be a major thing, say, 30 years in the future. Right now 75% of households in the US pay for TV, so I think your comment is a little overblown.

> It’s possible that feeling would wear off if I had it around regularly, though.

Over Christmas/New Years I was at my parents place, and they have DirectTV. The first few days were nice. After that I realized I was just watching for the sake of watching just to see what came on next, and it was all reruns of stuff I've already seen.

I am a big fan of curation, but I much prefer the curation of seeing what the programmers put on in prime time and then watching it on demand, or Netflix's recommendations.

I only watch TV for sporting events. In my area, there’s currently a legal battle going on between the “regional sports network” that has negotiated broadcasting rights with certain major teams and Comcast, to whom the RSN sells the programming. Comcast declined to renew their contract, so games played by those teams are blacked out for Comcast customers. The RSN is arguing that Comcast has a monopsony on the purchase of programming from RSNs, and that their goal is to replace them with a subsidiary of their own. The original complaint and Comcast’s quick motion to dismiss show, if nothing else, that the RSN is legally out-gunned. It’s possible that 5G could provide an economically viable alternative distribution method—i.e., “over the top”—for the RSN.

If their target demographic all have Comcast internet, couldn't this RSN just start an internet streaming service and stream their content to those same customers without Comcast taking a cut?

If for some reason they couldn't do that, why would 5G change anything?

Since you used the word "mum," I'll assume that you're British. In which case, 67 million Britons disagree with you†: https://www.barb.co.uk/tv-landscape-reports/tracker-uk-house...

Perhaps you should meet more people?

(† There aren't 67 million Britons. But TV viewership in the UK is 28.1 million households, and the average household in the UK is 2.4 people, so we end up with an impossible number.)

BARB is talking about a potential audience. In my building, for example, it would consider that there are 12 households with Terrestrial TV as potential audience. There's an aerial on the roof, and in 2018 when I last checked, the routine job to fetch the TV listings out of the data stream was still working on a PC I had connected to the aerial socket. That job may still be working but I haven't checked - like most people in this building, and your comment's parent, I don't actually watch live TV so I don't need the listings data any more if it's still being collected.

So that's 12 households you're counting as "TV viewership" that don't watch live TV. They could watch any hypothetical TV show or advertisement, but they in fact will not. They would not disagree with your parent poster.

My mother (retired) is the only person I know who watches live TV. My Facebook is full of people chatting about TV shows (Sabrina, Doctor Who, etc.) but none of them watch it live. Some of them have paid subscriptions to various sources of TV, and many of the same people also have "pirate" hookups to get TV that isn't available in a timely fashion, as described many times they aren't unwilling to pay they're unwilling to be inconvenienced.

I use streaming services in combination with over the air TV. After cleaning out the foreign language channels, sales networks and religious channels I have 40 quality stations worth watching. I certainly agree that paying to watch commercials is insane and cable TV originally didn’t have commercials to move people over from antennas.

Competition for ISPs is definitely welcome (even if it's from the darn big telcos). I'm open to this idea even though it'll probably be worse latency.

This is more blurb ... you’re never going to beat wired. Simple physics. You can come up with more and more efficient ways to use spectrum but you’re always going to saturate the commons at some stage. With hard wires you can have as many spectrums to share out as you have wires .. running side by side if you like.

It's true that wired will always be faster than wireless, all things equal. But if you live in an area where there is a monopoly on wired internet, you would welcome competition from wireless players.

In the town where I live, in a very nice part of Silicon Valley, Comcast is the only option. Their pricing isn't horrendous if you hound them for discounts (I pay $30/mo for 20Mb service), but I'm sure their pricing would be better if they had more competition.

This is a policy problem as much as a technical one, and really spectrum is managed and licensed in much the same way so there's not much reason to believe you won’t get screwed that way too ...

Right. So why dish out spectrum and public space for cells to the same players without fixing the existing issues?

So yes, 5G will be slower then a wired but it will be much much cheaper to cover wider swaths of area because 5G doesnt need to dig up the ground to every house to install. For places where it is very difficult for broadband to reach, 5G speeds can be a suitable option.

At the very least, threats from telecom companies will force Comcast to compete

But 5G also has less range, and the tower doodads still require some flavor of backbone to be able to dish out internet. Generally that backbone is a wired connection, be that copper or fiber.

> I think perhaps being able to replace cable is the biggest benefit.

At a comparable cost? I don't think this is going to happen for a whole lot of reasons, including that a whole ton of infrastructure has to be built to support that use case (such as fiber running to all those cell base stations).

I think that it will be possible, but it's going to be very, very expensive for at least a few years, and then the price will fall to approximately what you pay for cable now.

I don't see the customer experience being any better (in the US, anyway) because the companies supplying 5G will be the telecoms, and their history of being "customer friendly" is already very well-known.

The price of cable is primarily based on # of competitors in the market, and the income of the neighborhood. Moving from SF to Oakland dropped my bill in half.

Verizon/ATT/etc are certainly not my favorite companies, but if they could potentially expand their customer based by offering home internet over 5G, they would operate very differently to try and gain marketshare (plus Comcast would need to respond).

Using cellular for home internet is what I hope 5G brings us.

5G is fast enough to the point where I could just ditch my cable internet line, assuming there's an adequate bandwidth cap.

I haven't had DSL for 4 years now. 4G rocks and is cheap, at least in France!

T-Mobile has launched 600mhz 5g which solves the 5g through buildings problem. Not as fast as millimeter-wave but will get 5g to everyone.

What's the difference to LTE+ though? You already get hundreds of megabits and a few ten ms of latency in the 600 MHz band right now.

Any idea what equipment provider built T-Mobile’s 600mhz 5G?

> I don’t see a race to it now

I think it would actually be better to slow-walk 5G and let other nations work through all of the inevitable problems the initial deployments will have.

This "race" to 5G has never made any sense to me at all. What is the advantage to being the first to roll this stuff out?

Selling very detailed location data.

Whoever gets it first will build apps for it first and have a head start.

I don't understand this argument.

First 5G is just a comms channel. What "apps" would be built for it? The only things I can think of that might be special are things that would require a large amount of bandwidth (that most people won't be getting anyway). You can easily write such apps without actually having 5G at your disposal.

Second, even if the first point is off the mark, why does it matter who builds it first? Everyone else can still write apps for that system, and those apps would then immediately work on the others as they come online.

> The only things I can think of that might be special are things that would require a large amount of bandwidth (that most people won't be getting anyway). You can easily write such apps without actually having 5G at your disposal.

one could even imagine prototyping these things on existing high bandwidth networks. or porting all the great apps and such that demand high bandwidth over to the new environment.

or maybe there'd be some papers or demos or conceptual whatevers about what these magical applications would be.

> there was no compelling reason to use data from your phone till the iPhone and then Android appeared.

> So I don’t see a race to it now.

I'm confused at your argument. The first part of your comment is "build it and they will come". That no one was able to take advantage of 3G until someone found new things to do with that data. Then your argument is "ehhhh... not that important because we don't have enough compelling applications."

You're saying that no one will be able to take advantage of the new badwidth because current apps aren't designed to use more bandwidth than the system they are running on can provide.

3G was particularly bad in dense urban areas such as Los Angeles and NYC. It wasn't so bad if you were in some heartland city like Rochester, NY. 4G increased the ability to handle high density to the point where NYC quit making excuses about how their infrastructure was wiped out by the flood.

It sucked battery life out of phones, carriers had to pay huge licensing fees for the spectrum and build the new infrastructure and the only promise that it kept was lower latencies and more bandwidth for people using 3G PCMCIA modems for laptops.

Most of the killer features only developed after UMTS with HSDPA.

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