Comment by jayd16
8 hours ago
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.
8 hours ago
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
How would it have helped? Net neutrality doesn’t mean you can’t sell your customers different bandwidth guarantees.
Net neutrality is only about the connections between a provider and external networks, not about how a company handles bandwidth contention amongst its customers.
Net neutrality would fix a problem like “only Facebook is accessible inside crowded stadiums” not “AT&T customers who pay more get better connections in crowded stadiums”
Net neutrality as generally understood says nothing about being able to pay more for a higher service tier from your ISP.
It's entirely on the publisher side: net neutrality was an attempt to avoid ISPs getting paid extra---costs that would be passed onto you---in exchange for making your experience on site A be better than your experience with site B (or service, vs site).
Think: "Oh, yeah, Netflix 4k works great on your new Comcast plan! But if you want Hulu 4k, you're gonna need to pay us more, because Netflix pays us to make their shit work better than Hulu's if you don't!"
Net neutrality was just big companies like Google trying to get free bandwidth for things like YouTube which saturate all their peers.
Think about it, when’s the last time you saw a funded campaign for something that was actually good for us? When’s the last time you saw Google campaigning for privacy?
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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