Comment by ksec
10 hours ago
It needs to work backwards, much like Video Codec and ask what do the stakeholders really want or need?
We are closing in to rolling out the last / final phase of 5G. And yet none of the Massive MIMO on FDD is happening. We are still stuck on 32T32R, hardly that impressive considering we have that in LTE already. Not to mention the insane complexity increase from 4G to 5G. And judging from the previews of 6G that seems to be event worst.
If you ask an average user, they will tell you they don't feel much different between 4G and 5G. Yes there are capacity increase and other things. But at this stage I don't think the benefits outweigh the cost of switching. That is both from MNOs and End user perspective.
Something I've noticed is that a phone is actually usable at a stadium or concert when 3g or 4g felt essentially useless at that density.
I've seen an interesting corollary: 4G on an airplane at the gate is much faster than the 5G microcells inside the terminal.
If I'm downloading podcasts for a flight, I do it on WiFi beforehand or on 4G on the plane. 5G in the terminal is really useful at getting you some service, but it's slow.
Probably a side effect of not enough backhaul speed.
That has not been my experience at all although that’s just another anecdote.
I thought that's why many large venues offer free WiFi.
5G outperforms wifi in crowded situations. With wifi you get increasing collisions and backoff intervals until everything stalls; with 5G you just get less bandwidth (time sliced) but no collisions, and its frequency spectrum is free of interference.
AT&T has figured out a way to monetize that. If you have a "Turbo" plan or add-on, your phone will work in crowded cells.
If you don't, good luck with that.
Net neutrality would have prevented this kind of pay to win
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you know AT&T will be there first in line with a plan.
and that has definitely improved everybody's experience at concerts /s
4G used clever ideas to get much better practical spectrum efficiency than people thought was possible... At the cost of very expensive infrastructure. The biggest selling point to carriers was standalone 5G networks that were cheaper to build but paradoxically carriers are prone to frame 5G as a feature customers pay more for.
The area where wireless networks fall short is coverage. Obviously many homes and businesses are difficult to cover with wireless technology. Also many "IoT" and public service situations need wide coverage, and a network that works in 92% of places is "close but not cigar." There are few obvious answers rather than "lots of fiber and very cheap small cells" and "satellite technology" but it's what it takes to address wireless use cases that currently aren't addressed.
This doesnt seem to match reality?
e.g. Notably several major carriers in India skipped 3G entirely and went to 4G directly because it was cheaper per subscriber. Which implies less expensive equipment per unit performance?
Most of what passes for 5G in the US is the same old but full duplex with wider channels.
Calling that 5G obscures the fact that millimeter wave 5G standalone is a totally different beast, and a huge network engineering challenge.
It may seem bureaucratic to regulate what people can call 5G, but US consumers get ripped off thinking they're on an advanced network when in fact you could call it the long-term evolution (see what I did there?) of the existing network.
5G mm is vaporware. Virtually no one uses it (especially globally) and it is expected to be stripped out within a generation or two.
sure but is anyone deploying mmwave outside of maybe sports stadiums? I'm not exactly going to get it on my commuter train or at work.
I get 5G mmWave in my home and around my neighborhood in Seattle. In fact sometimes at home I’ll turn off WiFi on my phone just because I’m sitting in a WiFi dead zone but the mmWave still works great.
This is on Mint Mobile, a budget MVNO now owned by T-Mobile. I pay $20/month for 15GB data.
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is anyone deploying mmwave outside of maybe sports stadiums?
I have it in my home, but I live in the center of a major city. It just speedtested at 476.64 Mbps down, though I think I've seen 650+ in the past, but I might be mis-remembering that.
However, I only get 5G mmwave (indicated as "5GuW" on the phone) on my work phone.
The carrier I use for my personal phone charges an extra $20/month for 5G, and I don't care that much, so I leave it at 4G LTE.
Edit: Just re-tested and got 767 Mbps.
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My phone clearly shows me when I'm on 5G vs 5G mmWave.
In Germany I notice a massive difference in 4G and 5G. If I see 4G on my phone and know I can put it away again if it's not some kind of an emergency because it's basically unusable. I am not sure what is going on here, probably the telcos that are limiting the bandwidth.
There’s always a gradual refarming of the spectrum into the next G. Usually the most penetrating frequencies (ie lowest) are kept on the lower G to maximize legacy support.
For a while I had my phone stick to 3G, which doesn’t support emergency alerts, because my jurisdiction kept sending them out for joint custody disputes at 3AM 1000km away. It was fine But the 3G became unbearable and they tightened up the alert criteria.
> There’s always a gradual refarming of the spectrum into the next G.
Not necessarily for 4G to 5G. 5G can run a 4G compatible control channel and timeslices can be 4G or 5G.
> Usually the most penetrating frequencies (ie lowest) are kept on the lower G to maximize legacy support.
Maybe, but at least in the US, 4G wad deployable on new lower frequency spectrum that had previously been used for TV. LTE 71, 600 Mhz is lower frequency but wouldn't have been usable for 3G because legacy phones didn't use those frequencies.
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The difference between 4G and (non-SA) 5G is fairly small compared to earlier generations. They use the same core network, and it’s actually quite possible to be connected to 4G and still see the 5G logo.
These tricks are less common in Germany though, as far as I’ve seen, so seeing 5G can serve as a weak proxy for “the carrier has at least touched this base station in the last few years”, which increases the chance they’ve upgraded its spectrum or backhaul a little bit.
Really depends on the concrete situation, though. Having a small 4G cell with 20 MHz of spectrum to yourself beats an overloaded large 5 MHz rural 5G site any day.
I’d you have a 5G phone and plan but see 4G, that usually means you are at the very edge of coverage. Thats not the experience 4G was or still is if you are in a well covered area (which would have 5G available as well)
Interesting; in Australia I'm using exclusively 4G with no problems
The thing that changed with 5G is that my iPhone 13 Pro‘s battery has been draining 30% faster. Enable the hotspot and it gets burning hot.
My pessimistic take is it’s being optimized for the “numbers” users benchmark with. The 5G repeater towers that display on your phone as full-bars but the tower itself is constrained, to juicing the speedtests. Apple even changed how the RSSI translates to the bars. There are engineers doing great work, and the marketing teams muddle the waters (like ATT’s “5Ge”).
ATT did a lot of this, android has a ‘feature’ they utilize to inflate the signal bar: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
I think it’s also because the best frequencies are already occupied by 2g/3g and 4g so it’s hard to provide good 5g coverage over large areas.
3G has been shut down in several countries to free up frequencies. 2G was also shut down in several countries, it seems to be still up in most european countries with shut downs being scheduled in the next few years up to 2030.
2G is hard to shut down, because it just works, and many of the core services and old phones rely on it. It will survive 5G, 6G, 7G an other Gs.
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'best' is relative here; lower bands travel further, which is great for maximizing coverage footprint, but not great for high-density. Each node can only handle so much traffic, and you can pack them in more densely with short-range spectrum. mmWave really is the best frequency for very high density, high capacity networks, but the bottleneck is you have to deploy all the extra nodes to get the coverage.
I’m not in the industry, so I can’t speak intelligently on this, but as a user, literally the only change I’ve actually noticed in my day-to-day is that when they removed 3G, I lost a shitload of connectivity. I live probably half a mile from the capital building in a greater metro region of over a million people and I still get shit connection at home on TMo. Maybe physics is the problem, but why waste time making things insanely fast in a lab setting? Work on making it fucking usable in the real world, like in a neighborhood with trees.
I do not give a shit if I can download at 500mbps while resting my phone on a wireless router. I need to be able to USE it.
More likely, data usage has increased greatly in your area since 3G was still available and your carriers spectrum or backhaul hasn’t caught up. 4G/5G make things more efficient but ultimately can’t fight physics.
Does this affect signal strength? I'm just annoyed I can't get more than two bars at home, or talk on the phone and take a shit at the same time.
Ive never heard a single person say they don't see a difference between 4G and 5G, atleast in the USA.
Ive switched my entire home internet setup to 5G and haven't had an outtage in two years. Whereas it was once a week with fiber. I also can fallback with duel sims.
5G has legitimately changed my quality of (digital) life.
That’s most likely because of the massive amounts of midband spectrum that became available for 5G use in the US and less so due to any inherent advantage of 5G.