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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> the authors recall being sold as an enabler of autonomous driving, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAM), extended reality (XR) and digital twins

I only ever saw 5G sold as a solution to cell towers being overwhelmed by dense crowds (e.g. at sporting events, music festivals, etc.). Has it succeeded at that?

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At my local stadium, which holds something like 40-50k people I have no issues with mobile throughput. However the whole stadium as of 4 years ago is now full of small cells with maybe a dozen or so in each "section" so I'd say that's a far bigger factor than 5G just by itself.

Many, small, cells _is_ 5G :)

My phone works great at sports events with tens of thousands of people in an outdoor environment. 4ish years ago it did not. This isn’t with Wi-Fi trickery, simply more capable networks!

For sports stadiums, it's normally solved by installing ~10 cell towers inside the stadium itself to cope with the load.

Cell networks are getting better at installing small mobile cells now, and some even have 'cell-in-a-truck' designs that can be driven to a busy beach or other place that is temporarily busy to give people service where otherwise the network would be overloaded.

My 5G still breaks down at every large event I go to, or even sometimes at a busy train station.

I'm assuming it's more to do with how it's deployed than the technology itself, but purely as an end-consumer, it feels like a dud.

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