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Comment by Mo3 | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, that's just super opinionated and short sighted. I have countrywide 5G here, and the difference in latency on voice or video calls is super notable and nice.

Obviously it doesn't make sense to run on 5G permanently because energy consumption is still comparably higher, just like it was the case with 4G in its beginning, but the automatic switching does a somewhat good job at it.

5G also has a ton of other benefits such as being able to support a multitude more clients and being able to prioritize traffic (like for emergency services) and handle slicing/QoS much better.

Not to mention stuff like e.g. active beamforming capabilities reducing power consumption and lowering emission levels for the general environment SIGNIFICANTLY.

All of the amazon internals and obvious marketing/hype around 5G aside: Author is a good example of naysaying - Saying no to obviously better technology because it doesnt fit their reality and/or knowledge.

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being able to prioritize traffic for emergency services etc.

Emergency priority been in every mobile system since AMPS.

5G has a few use cases. In very high user density areas, such as stadiums, it's possible to have a huge number of short range connections in the 24-40GHz band. This allows people at the game to watch the game on their phones. Many major stadiums installed this back in 2020.

If you want huge bandwidth, you're going to need near line of sight to the base station. The high band won't go through much. Stadiums and entertainment venues are the ideal case, because they're designed to let a large number of people have line of sight to something. So they were done first.

Worst case is a subway or complex building interior. Samsung has little brick-sized beam-forming units.[1] It takes a base station every 150-200m or so to provide good coverage in the high bands. AT&T is integrating them into street lights.[2] Not clear how they backhaul.

[1] https://www.samsung.com/global/business/networks/products/ra...

[2] https://5ginsider.com/carriers/att-rolling-out-5g-powered-st...

> This allows people at the game to watch the game on their phones.

I'm not a sports person, but I'm having a difficult time understanding why someone would want to do this. Even with the very best e2e latency, there's probably going to be one or two seconds of latency between real life and what's on your phone. Sports is very much a real time experience, and that sounds lame.

I am a baseball fan, so maybe other sports are different, but from my perspective: When I go to the stadium, I have a single vantage point. Oftentimes I'll have a low resolution stream going of the game where a few-second delay is optimal because I'll get to see a replay of something that happened out of my view or that I just missed. Plus, for all but the biggest plays, a replay of a close call isn't usually shown on the scoreboard.

This is not conclusively true. 5G also uses sub-1GHz bands for long-range connections and these will also support a multitude more connections per tower and provide lower latency.

Please refer to [1] to understand how much more advanced traffic prioritization is implemented in this protocol.

[1] https://nms.kcl.ac.uk/toktam.mahmoodi/files/EW16.pdf

What kind of latency are you seeing? I see 4G latency around 30±10ms so I could believe that's an area for improvement but also one which wouldn't be transformative for many applications.

From my perspective, the big change we need in the U.S. is getting away from tiny data plans — most of the interesting 5G applications also use a ton of data and when 1GB is concerned a princely amount it's hard to care much about video calls.

I get ±40-60ms on 4G legacy and ±5-10ms on 5G. Which no matter what people try to claim here is a great and very notable improvement in latency on voice calls.

Another benefit I have noticed is that latency seems to be much more stable in all kinds of conditions - stationary, in trains, in the car. I believe this is one of the key factors in what makes the experience so much nicer.

I have no idea about US cell plans, here in NL it's included in afaik all new contracts. I have unlimited data + 5G for 40€/month

That does sound like a nice improvement. We’re held back by the pricing model so most people I know have treated 5G as something they’ll get eventually but won’t really change what they do.

Reminds me of the folks on my neighborhood's Nextdoor that claim that their Hughes Net connection (1s+ ping, tiny data caps) is just as good as Wave cable (xxms ping, relatively huge data caps, lower price).

> Obviously it doesn't make sense to run on 5G permanently

I've never used 5G (it isn't available in my country) so this isn't obvious at all. Care to explain that doesn't make sense?

If your phone is just sitting on your desk with its screen off there is little to zero benefit to having it run on 5G, I mean. As of right now, 5G is still somewhat more energy consuming than 4G, just like 4G consumed more energy in its early stages.

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