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Comment by jankyxenon | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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