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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The sending rate on the microcontroller is currently ~3 bytes/second. The latency is usually between 1 and 60 minutes.

That's not much, but it has value for industrial machine-to-machine communications. (That's IoT without the hype.) Like commercial air conditioning units. They can send in minimal data ("compressor 1 running, compressor 2 stopped, system OK") to a maintenance service without needing a cellular account or connection to the Internet.

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For critical data like that, it would make more sense to just have a modem on board. 5G should make this more possible with increased device limits.

Minimum cellular cost for very low data volumes is about $1.75/month.

5G is only useful if you need bandwith in an area with very high contention, like a stadium, or you're in an area remote enough that the lower frequencies work but the higher ones don't.

5G is notoriously known for smaller coverage area than LTE, it made IOT impossible instead of possible.

The main issue with IOT is not coverage but the massive number of connected devices. 5G is designed to support this.

4G might have a larger coverage per cell, but if it isn't able to handle all the devices trying to connect then that means nothing at all.

5G can have comparable coverage, by the way.

I believe the 5G standard also includes a low-band protocol as well, which to my understanding is strictly superior to 4G.

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