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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

I understand Apple’s approach to Verizon here.

Just like the initial iPhone needed one carrier to get things right, 5G infrastructure testing will be like that.

It is in Apple’s best interest if their users experience 5G as best as the current infrastructure allows (which isn’t great yet, because it will take a decade for a full rollout).

It makes sense to have the carriers bend over backwards to see who gets to be the main partner for Apple, because they wouldn’t be able to manage 4+ relationships simultaneously with something as complex as 5G/4G flipping (this has to happen on device, because 5G drains battery 10x faster than 4G, so the device has to use bursts of 5G. If it handles this incorrectly, millions of users will complain of horrible battery life and that would be a big black eye for Apple, something they don’t want to risk).

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Why? It's apple, they not only have the resources and expertise to manage multiple relationships, but they have the market power to drain HUGE number of subscribers from the company by announcing the iPhone wouldn't be available at Verizon if they didn't play along with apple's demands.

This dishonesty (plus the huge verizon plug in keynote) doesn't look like having carriers bend over, it looks more like apple bending over. Which makes no sense, apple could probably (almost) buy verizon in all cash if they wanted.

What's crazier, is that (in 2020) 5g is just not that important or valuable. So why is any company (except infrastructure companies) really putting in this much marketing effort?

Are end-users even going to have a "5G experience"? The average user isn't going to really notice faster downloads or lower latency relative to good LTE.

If anything it seems like Apple is doing the wireless carriers a favor by carrying the marketing water for 5G

> If anything it seems like Apple is doing the wireless carriers a favor by carrying the marketing water for 5G

The iPhone has been on a very incremental upgrade cycle for years now and people have been hanging on to their phones longer and longer. So the new iPhone's biggest competitor is the iPhone people have in their pocket. This is one of the few years where Apple gets to point to a big-obvious difference between the model years.

So the 5G dog-and-pony show serves Apple as much as it does the carriers.

I think netflix users might notice.

If they can push ‘download local’ and it takes 1 second to do so, that might be an interesting thing :)

Also, 1 GB games that take 1 second to update will be nice.

But you will realistically only get those speeds so close to the cellular antenna that you can feel it melting your brain.

but actually you do need to be within a few hundred feed of the antenna to get "impressive" 5G speeds. I heard reports that during the build out at NFL stadiums, the antenna coverage didn't even reach the field when placed at the top of the seating.

I would imagine that NFL stadiums are particularly bad RF environments because of interference due to reflection.

OTOH, lots of dense urban environments have similar issues.

With symmetric 1Gbit internet at home, I noticed that other parts of the system become a bottleneck. E.g. my laptop built in SSD simply cannot handle these speeds, something to do with the drivers. I assume phone users may see similar issues.

1Gb is 125MB/s... most SSDs benchmark at around 500MB/s... even with small files, it should be possible?

Likely your wifi, nic, or switching infra and even cables would be where I’d look other than your SSD.

At least when it comes to downloading/updating large games, they can get CPU bound when decompression and updates happen.

... and potentially anti-virus software also slows things down on the way to a file becoming fully usable

That’s what my SSD says on the tin, but in practice my PC completely freezes during multi GB downloads, and looking at the charts SSD or it’s drivers appear to be the bottleneck here

What speeds are you seeing? 1Gbit internet is sort of like having LAN speeds for internet access and most machines deal with that fine. 100ish megabytes/sec is something most old SATA SSD's can typically do. But that aside, if phones are fine on LANs, it seems they ought to be just fine on WANs running at LAN speeds.

I do see the 1Gbit speeds. But what I meant with my comment is to say that 5G May expose other issues with the H/W or software. It’s possible that iPhones would be tuned for it, but other manufacturers or maybe even other apps may hit the limits before fully profiting from the high speeds.

I'm not sure I see all that much difference between a phone that works with high-speed WiFi (most higher-end phones today) and 5g.

Be that as it may, though! My Steam client is configured with with a background download rate cap of 1 MB/sec, and just a few minutes ago I noticed it downloading something and looked at the disk write rate, which the client also reports. Much of the time it's around 2 MB/s, give or take, but it can jump up to 5x, sometimes almost 10x that.

So I think you're right, something like a network installer slurping down at 1 Gbps could write saturate an SSD, not necessarily even a particularly slowpoke one.

1 GB = 80 Gb. No one will be getting 80Gbps 5G speeds.

1 GB = 8 Gb, not 80 Gb

Ahh, dang it. You're correct of course. How in the world did I mess that up?

>The average user isn't going to really notice faster downloads or lower latency relative to good LTE.

I can assure you user will notice the lower latency even if 4G and 5G had the same download speed.

> Just like the initial iPhone needed one carrier to get things right

Except for the rest of the world, which did just fine.

Apple tried to do US-like deals with European carriers and it was just so fundamentally incompatible with the European mindset that many people simply did not understand what they were trying to sell or why.

It took a year or so before Apple realized Europeans buy phones and subscriptions separately and the iPhone-sales took off, because now people could actually buy a phone.

I am not sure what you mean by "Europeans", but Germany certainly was no stranger to buying phones together with a subscription.

But a German is aware that phones can also be bought without a subscription, and knows the full price of the phone, I think.

If you look at how USers talk, the price with a contract is the actual price of the phone for them.

It's a slap in the face to T-Mobile which has had nationwide 5G for a while.

The operators brought this on themselves. There is no standard definition of 5G, even though the industry knows the rollout of features will be in waves.

Does 5G for T-mobile technically mean exactly the same thing as for Verizon? Probably not.

Verizon is the only carrier with mmWave 5G / Ultrawide Band. Their "5G Nationwide" is what T-Mobile and AT&T have, while only AT&T has the "5GE" abomination which is just 4G LTE.

The standard definition of 5G is the New Radio (NR) protocol.

I have a way more simple explanation.

Verizon and AT&T offered Apple a lot of money and lower retailer margin.

There are only three cellular providers left and their networks are roughly the same.

Verizon most definitely paid for airtime on that keynote.

This is Apple so expect a lot of comments on why Apple is great and why this anti-consumer move isn't actually anti-consumer but pro-consumer.

I find it deeply fascinating that a certain percentage of Internet commenters feel compelled to make unprompted public predictions, rather than waiting for reality to unfold.

You want fast adoption? Drop the price 10-20% and roll it into a loss lead. This $30 knock off is a cash grab against the other customers.

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