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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

A headline with 5G but not a single mention of it in the article.

If any insider from Verizon may be could help explain why their insistence on mmWave 5G for Phones. ( And Phone only, not fixed Wireless internet access ) It doesn't make sense to me when the spec (3GPP) were announced, doesn't make sense when Verizon actually announced it, and still doesn't make any sense when they are now up and running. Both from a technical and Economical perspective. It still baffles me.

Or are they only doing it for the marketing? ( Which is worst because Apple have to specifically make mmWave antenna for iPhone. Although I would not be surprised if they have something like 802.11ay planned using the same antenna R&D. )

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The reason why they are heavily marketing their mmWave 5G is because they are charging an additional $10/mo/line for access and implying (falsely) that most folks with a modern phone will experience a much faster and lower latency connection at most times. In truth, consumers will only be able to connect to the mmWave network on a handful of outdoor street corners in a few metros - the frequency band (60GHz) does not effectively penetrate walls so you're not going to get it indoors.

"Oh, I like mobile gaming, I guess I'll upgrade" - and just like that someone is locked into an additional $120/line/year of spend for a service they will almost never use or benefit from.

So - mostly it's fraud.

They have deployed a bunch of mm towers in the metros. LA went from a few blocks to having widespread coverage since last summer. Still not worth the extra $10 a month and the reduction on battery life. I have my 5G disabled. 5G ultra wide is only useful for home internet as a replacement for cable based internet.

I got the impression the primary use case for 60GHz was large sports stadia.

Yes - dense environments with good line-of-sight should work well for 60GHz (train stations, airports, concerts). Enormous channel capacity for a short, straight hop.

5G allows for mmWave but does not require it. I have 5G in my area for Verizon but its mostly low band normal 4G frequencies. I have seen mmWave once at the fair grounds and it was nice hitting 1200MBps with tons of people streaming videos etc. otherwise it seems similar to 4G on low band.

The mmWave really shines in crowed areas like the fairground, stadiums, busy downtowns, shopping centers etc. but has poor penetration and range. Verizon looks to be wanting to use is for home broadband use as well with base stations mounted all around neighborhoods. I would imagine they see it replacing WiFi with easily provisioned access points in commercial business etc.

My understanding on low band is its a overlay on their 4G network for now so it works but has almost no benefit. There supposedly is benefits to the low band side such as lower latency and better spectrum sharing over 4G but it's unclear if that applies in an overlay scenario. Moving forward they will probably bring more low /medium bands on as 5G only, perhaps finally sunsetting their 3g network and refarming as 5g only.

>mmWave really shines in crowed areas like the fairground

Well it really doesn't. mmWave requires line of sight, get blocked by even a pcs of paper or your hand ( if you are actually blocking the antenna ).

It works in shopping centre in some cases, but that is only assuming shopping centre are actually willing to pay and built those out. Every additional cell, big or small requires additional maintenance and that is part of the reason why SmallCell in 4G never really took off. Its idea is nice ,implementation being ironed thought out in 4G and now even in 5G. But never really worked due to the business incentives. ( LTE-LAA or NR-U is a different story )

That is why, no Carrier in Asia and Europe actually plan to have mmWave for mobile. You may read some report on mmWave from certain countries, but all of them are for fixed wireless Internet. No carriers, in any of the industry forum or investor notes has actually put out a timeline for mmWave. EU put out mmWave Spectrum for auction and no one was interested.

So unless there are something specific to Verizon, may be it owns more property in US where mmWave unit economics woks out better for them, or something I oversee. I dont understand why they ran with it. ( Other than some mentioned, being able to charge additional $10/m for some small benefits )

Each G is supposed to be 10x faster and it needs to be at least 2x for customers to care and sub-6 just can't deliver that.

As with many things, 5g will be worth it once they stop marketing it.

A useful 5G network is much broader than what VZ currently has set up in the mmWave range (high-band, >6GHz, high-speed, low propagation)

Verizon's next 5G investment is to build out the mid-band portion of its 5G network, in the C-Band (mid-band, 3.7-3.98 GHz, good speed, good propagation)

VZ spent $54B on C-Band spectrum in March, then committed to spend an additional $10B over the next 3 years to deploy towers to use that spectrum, and that's above the $18B they had already planned on mid-band 5G CAPEX

VZ is taking on a lot of debt to build out the mid-band portion of its 5G network, and this sale will help them chip away at that huge mountain of debt

For the same reason Sprint went all in on WiMAX "4G" about ten years back: they think it gives them a value-add.

FWIW I'm bummed it didn't work out. I had a WiMax phone and even with the spotty coverage, back then (~2012?) my speeds were as good as my current broadband speeds (>200 Mbps) which was phenomenal for sprint. I even considered getting a dedicated WiMax internet provider at the time. Amazing how fast that came and went!

I had one too and the enormous drawbacks of WiMAX became apparent: go deep enough into a building and the signal gets spotty fast. WiMAX may work well for fast wireless internet to thin-walled homes, but it just doesn't work as well as a mobile technology.

Makes sense. I only went into buildings with wifi so that may be why it always felt perfect for me.

I had WiMax from Clearwire. It was really epic. The dongle on my laptop delivered speeds that weren't even available wired at the time. I used it in Seattle, Phoenix, Chicago, Newark, and a few other cities, and coverage wasn't bad at all.

The only difficulty was that it had a hard time penetrating buildings. In my apartments, I could get 1-2 Mbps anywhere. But if I moved the modem into a window it was more like 25-75 Mbps.

I hope that some day 5G will be as good as WiMax was.

The tech wasn't that bad. I mean WiMax is something like 80% if not 90% of what is TD-LTE today. Which Sprint is still using right now.

You can only blame Intel for WiMax Failure. Over Confidence, Over Hyped, poor delivery and at the time, nobody like them. I think it was 2008/9?

>A headline with 5G but not a single mention of it in the article.

There is.

>He added that Apollo would allow the business to grow, a more difficult prospect when it was operating within Verizon, which was planning to spend even more money to expand its next-generation 5G wireless network.

mmWave doesn’t penetrate glass or brick making it pretty useless as a wireline replacement. Unless you want to go through the trouble of mounting an antenna outside, assuming of course that you access to wall with direct line of sight to a 5G tower.

If this is true, how am I able to get 5G UW inside my car with the windows closed?

Its not true. Glass does attenuate mmWave frequencies, but doesnt "block" them.

https://esprtk.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/2004.12568.pdf

> A headline with 5G but not a single mention of it in the article.

Because: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035599

mmWave is a tool to cope with network capacity concerns far into the future. It's in its infancy right now but the ability to provide multiple gigabits over the air in certain high-traffic locations can help greatly. We're running out of midband spectrum that can provide good indoor/outdoor coverage and so it's best to look to much higher frequencies that don't have any major incumbent users to satisfy those capacity needs.

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