South Korea now has 11M 5G subscribers
telecomlead.com
telecomlead.com
Does anyone have a strong reason they think that higher speeds and (I assume) low latencies would unlock something in the economy we're currently unable to achieve? I just don't see it.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-03-13/cristiano-am...
It seems like a gimmick, but how many times have you known the address and not known where the door was? It happens a lot in medical buildings.
If Qualcomm and the Carriers were not stuck in the 1940's with their utterly byzantine business models (remember 10-cents per WAP page on feature phones? They thought there were geniuses and were going to dominate with that Einstein business model) - then - the notion of 'your toaster on 5G' is a very material feasibility.
There is definitely the theoretical possibility for a 'true IoT revolution', but I think that the variety of ways they shoot themselves in the foot will keep any revolution at bay for a while.
Some 'dynamic' carrier in Japan, Korea or wherever could literally do something transformative and the rest wouldn't budge.
It took the creation of the iPhone (innovation + market power) to force a lot of theses parties to shift gears.
Startups, without power, won't be able to budge carriers, they have to be forced.
AKA: 5G
Replacing fiber, cable, or DSL with 5G in dense urban and suburban areas is definitely not what is currently under development.
It is actually very difficult to even send iMessages at those speeds, and forget about sending a photo to someone. If I'm not on my wifi at home, my phone is almost useless as anything but a phone.
Verizon's Nationwide 5G is slower than 4G: https://www.pcmag.com/news/heres-why-verizon-iphone-users-mu...
AT&T is in the same boat as Verizon: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/atts-...
T-Mobile is in a similar boat as they have a narrow chunk of 600Mhz dedicated to 5G service, but they own a bunch of spectrum right above 2.4Ghz WiFi (usable with much more powerful radios) that should enable 1100Mbps speeds and higher, but it will take another year or two to see it widely deployed.
Verizon is very wireless spectrum starved right now, AT&T is in a bit better position but still needs more sub-6Ghz spectrum, hence heavy spending to buy 3.5Ghz spectrum: https://www.lightreading.com/ossbss/will-c-band-auction-set-...?
T-Mobile has also been doing a big rural buildout, and even built a map to show coverage on all major carriers: https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/lte-comparison-map
Everyone in town just chalks it up to that is the way it goes, but worse than that, we only have one internet provider in our area, and from Christmas to New Year, we had a total of 50 hours without internet.
We live in a tiny tourist town that is a 45 minute express train ride to/from NYC, and while we may be close in travel, we are very distant in our available amenities.
In particular, are they using or not using Huawei? What’s their domestic security establishment’s take on it as a vendor?
So... Ericsson?
Edit: although it also returned https://www.thefastmode.com/technology-solutions/13349-sk-te...
Inquiring minds want to know.
I assume most of these people are using this speed for cell phones. 86 MB/s sounds really great for a phone, and better than a lot of people in the U.S. have in their homes. This should only get better as well.
Assuming the technology is safe, this will be a major game changer for society.
Will it really? 4G reaches 70 Mbps, how do you think that'll change society when we now can have a whole ~600 Mpbs? My guess is, people will stream videos faster, but that's about it.
But 5G will improve _total_ bandwidth I assume, which is in fact going to improve the situation for very congested areas.
I've been to music festivals in the centre of a city (Glasgow, Scotland, UK) where my phone usually works quite well, but at that festival I'd struggle to send a text.
That's when festivals are allowed again, mind you.
I’ve recently switched to using a 5G connection for home internet and whilst it’s very early days - a slight sacrifice in latency (ADSL isn’t great there either), and a daily modem restart, is a welcome price to pay for 250Mbps down/50Mbps up (at the same price point).
Also, 480p vs 1080p is not a major game changer for society, at least in the society I live in.
Virtual environment been possible to stream on the fly for a long time. Only thing that will change with going from 4G to 5G is that the quality will be higher, hardly a "major game changer for society" as liquidify put it.
I wondered what I could possibly do with 600Mb/s, but I noticed that Telenor isn't charging any extra for a 5G connection (my phone doesn't support it). Isn't the main feature that the speed is still high even when there are lots of people using it, rather than my test at midnight in a city centre?
Cloud gaming companies are going to benefit a lot from 5G I think. Also Machine Learning on remote GPUs.
I've also read that car manufacturers want to use 5G technology for cars to communicate with each other.
That sounds like a marketing statement from some car manufacturer who wants to sound like they on with the times. There are plenty of technologies and protocols they could deploy to allow cars to speak directly with each other (without any 3rd party infrastructure like antennas), no 5G needed here.
Whoever invented the 5G conspiracy theories is either having a laugh or is fundamentally disconnected from how radiation works. This pseudo-scientific nonsense has no place on HN.
One of the key design features of 5G is to drop transmit power (instead having more sites, with lower range per site).
Because signal strength drops off with the square of distance to the tower (technically the cube, but because they transmit a flat beam the relevant part of the graph is square), this results in dramatically less transmit radiation vs 4G.
However, all of this is moot, because the radio frequency used isn't a frequency that could ionize anything even if the transmit power weren't negligible.
This is absolutely true but fails to recognize that radio frequencies have harmful, non-ionizing effects on biological organisms.
What harmful effects are you referring to? Outside of intense heat or light, there shouldn't be any potential hazards to biological systems, since non-ionizing radiation by definition cannot remove electrons from atoms.
https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/nonionizing_radiation.htm...
Rant: Like many things that receive attention on popular and social media, agonizing over 5G distracts from issues that cause real provable widespread harm, such as UV radiation and air pollution. We rarely see articles rise to the top when they cover non-controversial points that would do well to be read by everybody, because how much buzz and discussion can you generate from "wear sunscreen", "don't drive while tired", and "get a prostate exam before you turn 50"?
I don't know for sure, but I'm setting up an experiment this year where I irradiate cells with UV and try to use 5G radiation to jam the BER mechanism, which is one of the DNA error correcting systems. BER uses the charge state of DNA (https://www.pnas.org/content/100/22/12543) to help find thymine dimers, and 5G radiation is in just about the right frequency range to excite nuclear DNA and induce a current in DNA. I would be looking for a higher rate of mutation in the UV + 5G case over UV control, and no effect in 5G / control without UV.
What is interesting about this experiment is that 1) it's easy. 2) you would never detect this using normal procedures to assess mutagenicity, because normal techniques assume that the harm comes from direct mutation effect of the radiation; in this case the harm (if it is there) would come as a secondary effect, by inhibitng proper repair in the presence of a previous insult. Moreover, typical lab experiments (rightly) attempt to reduce outside effects (especially mutagens), so it's less likely it would have been discovered by accident.
Incidentally I'm sick and tired of people saying "it's non-ionizing and therefore not dangerous". This is a very reductive statement that belies a complete lack of understanding of biophysical chemistry.
(I'm weird and people always ask if this creates focus issues, but personally I run about 6-8 video streams at once on the desktop, typically with only one stream given audio presence at a time. It's been great for extra energy and interest-deepening while working, which helps prevent burnout)
IMO distraction and healthy prospective activity (stimulation, personal interest, cool new stuff) have become tragically intertwined and confused.
To me, distraction in the negative sense is the byproduct of a lack of what I call the "three C's", comfort, clarity, and confidence. Once I'm sailing through the day productively, singleminded focus is now a problem that can easily turn into productivity exhaustion. The streams help prevent this with entertaining mood support based on my core interests. (I wish everything I had to do at work was based on my core interests!)
BTW I don't generally watch new material in this context. It's usually from my favorites I've already seen, unless I'm ready to take a break.
For example, the Test and Measurement industry (see eevblogs interview with John Kenny - a really good one, seems like a great boss to have and a great engineer to) is apparently really looking forward to being able to having very high throughput links between devices such that they can synthesize and fuse data without having a literal maze of wires - e.g. You have a signal generator and an oscilloscope, you should be able to make a (not very good) SpecAn from it.
https://www.microcenter.com/product/600420/inland-premium-51...
That said, almost all phones are not using such an interface or controller for their storage and I do largely agree having a phone with a >1Gbps link is a bit overkill for a handheld mobile devices. Ultimately though once there's a bunch of clients on it your actual throughput in practice will be much slower. The big win is that the overall channel (or channel grouping) can now handle a ton more aggregate throughput meaning higher realized speeds per customer for the same amount of spectrum. Being able to get your slice of data faster means you can quit talking or quit listening sooner and someone else can talk or hear something they care about.
Also, good point about why speed is important - it can certainly help serve more customers!
The future is coming...