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ksec 1 days 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.
jayd16 1 days 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.
devilbunny 1 days ago [-]
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.
7 hours ago [-]
Grombobulous 22 hours ago [-]
That has not been my experience at all although that’s just another anecdote.
devilbunny 3 hours ago [-]
Seen it at several, though DFW has been the worst.
DFW is generally a terribly-run airport, though.
seb1204 1 days ago [-]
I thought that's why many large venues offer free WiFi.
ricardobeat 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
LeoPanthera 1 days ago [-]
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.
Atotalnoob 1 days ago [-]
Net neutrality would have prevented this kind of pay to win
cortesoft 1 days ago [-]
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”
4 hours ago [-]
majormajor 1 days ago [-]
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!"
GuB-42 11 hours ago [-]
Net neutrality means that providers don't discriminate based on the kind of traffic, that you get internet access, not just access to particular services.
They can absolutely meter and limit your connection as long as one byte is one byte, no matter its origin. They can also discriminate based on the technology they provide (4G, 5G, fiber...). Net neutrality is not about preventing "pay to win", obviously, you can get a better connection if you pay more. It is about fair competition between online services.
MisterMunchkin 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
chowells 1 days ago [-]
People still believe this? Google pays their ISP. I pay my ISP. Google does not pay my ISP. Why is my ISP's response to the amount of traffic I use demanding to bill someone other than me?
To be clear, Google was doing this out of self-interest. Paying user ISPs for access to those users is not a cost they want to pay. But it's the same as any other protection racket. A local shopkeeper has personal reasons to not want to pay off the mob, but that doesn't mean their position is wrong.
majormajor 1 days ago [-]
ISP's spent $$$$$ against net-neutrality cause they wanted to get paid twice (Google already was paying for their side of the bandwidth as the source).
When you add the second line---pretending that that nobody funding all the anti-net-neutrality let-big-ISPs-do-what-they-want stories that pro-legacy-company Republicans ate up---it makes me think this is some astroturfing, since it goes from "maybe this person fell for the ISP claims" to straight-up dishonest intentionally-misleading-fallacy.
Google was obviously on the side of "don't get charged twice" but ultimately net-neutrality was a tech enthusiast consumer position that came out of a desire to avoid getting charged more on the basis of what sites you did or didn't want to watch, and ISP's trying to influence where you visited by cutting deals to get paid to prioritize A vs B.
(Hell, ISPs were already getting paid "twice" for the bandwidth in some ways, e.g. when your "100Mb" plan only works at that speeds if your neighbors aren't using it much. That's a different sort of incomplete-advertising trickery that helped create the whole "too many people using Youtube are saturating the network!" "problem" in the first place.)
(And high-bandwidth publishers already were making private peering/colo-of-servers deals with ISPs and CDNs that I don't believe would've been prohibited by net neutrality, so the 'protection racket' aspect of the ISP's game was maybe more arguably wanting to be paid thrice? Or wanting to be paid without providing that colo service?)
Founderarcstone 1 days ago [-]
you know AT&T will be there first in line with a plan.
sandworm101 12 hours ago [-]
That is a very effective use case, but until we live in hive cities, stadium-level device densities are an edge case. Developing a new generation to service the 0.01% of time phones spend inside stadiums seems inefficient.
magarnicle 6 minutes ago [-]
If you have a season ticket to a Premier League team you're going to be in that density once a week or once a fortnight. Whatever the percentage of time that might be, that seems frequent enough to not be an edge case.
tim333 7 hours ago [-]
They struggle a bit on Oxford Street which as stadium like densities much of the time. I changed networks to O2 as Three became pretty much unusable in that area. Three sell a lot of unlimited data packages which their hardware seems inadequate to serve.
carlob 1 days ago [-]
and that has definitely improved everybody's experience at concerts /s
PaulHoule 1 days ago [-]
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.
MichaelZuo 1 days ago [-]
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?
ksec 6 hours ago [-]
3G to 4G was a giant leap forward and it makes perfect sense. Your parent is specifically comparing 4G against 5G.
cindyllm 17 hours ago [-]
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Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
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.
jorvi 1 days ago [-]
5G mm is vaporware. Virtually no one uses it (especially globally) and it is expected to be stripped out within a generation or two.
HeatrayEnjoyer 2 minutes ago [-]
I see the mm indicator on my phone in most cities.
Why would it be ripped out?
Melatonic 12 hours ago [-]
Isn't mm5g basically similar to microwave point to point ?
Had no idea about full duplex though - that's huge
nemomarx 1 days ago [-]
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.
aaronbrethorst 1 days ago [-]
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.
mdasen 24 hours ago [-]
You're probably not getting mm wave with Mint. T-Mobile hasn't deployed mm wave much. They have deployed a lot of 2.5GHz spectrum which will be very fast (faster than most people's home internet connections). If you're seeing 5GUC, that's probably not mm wave.
I think a lot of people are attributing speeds of 200-700Mbps to mm wave when it's actually pretty ordinary speeds for 2.5-5GHz coverage today now that carriers have decent capacity there. If you're getting below 144Mbps, you're in the bottom 25% of T-Mobile's network experience. Over the past 6 years, speeds have gotten a ton faster, mostly from 2.5-5GHz spectrum. Verizon is the only carrier that put much effort into mm wave and it still covers basically nothing.
Ignoring latency, you're likely to get speeds similar to wifi from today's mobile networks without mm wave - unless you have a really great home internet connection and a good wifi setup. I have a MacBook Pro, but it only has wifi 6 and I can get 700-800Mbps out of my wifi, but I'm not getting 2Gbps from it.
aaronbrethorst 16 hours ago [-]
Interesting. Thanks for the detailed information and texture.
dakolli 1 days ago [-]
You're ripping yourself off, you can get 1TB of 5G from tmobile for $50-60
majormajor 1 days ago [-]
How is paying $20 instead of $50-60 ripping themselves off? Have you considered that the extra 985GB might be useless to them?
dakolli 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
vel0city 22 hours ago [-]
I'm paying $15/mo. To pay $50/mo for in the end the same thing (I'm going to use the same amount of data regardless) just means I'm spending $420 a year more for the same outcome.
How is it a better deal to spend more money for essentially the same thing?
Imagine you're buying food that will go bad tomorrow. You can't keep it. You can't share it. You can buy enough food to fill you up today for $5, or enough food to fill you up 50x for $20. You will still eat that one unit of food, the other 49 units will just go to waste. Which do you buy?
For all the time I've had Mint, I've saved nearly $3,000 compared to your $50/mo plan. I've never felt the urge to really need more data personally, and it's worked well for me on my international travels around North America. If the outcome was the same, wouldn't you rather keep $3k in your pocket?
dakolli 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
olivermuty 16 hours ago [-]
Did you have a bad day outside of the internet today? These three thread posts come off as you being a bit of an asshole for no reason. Why wouldnt the guy put financial context on your claim he should go for a three times more expensive sub?
15 hours ago [-]
dakolli 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
reaperducer 1 days ago [-]
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.
mdasen 24 hours ago [-]
5GUW on Verizon isn't necessarily mm wave. Originally, it meant mm wave, but that hasn't been the case since 2022. Now it means the 3-5GHz C-Band spectrum or the 20-50GHz mm wave. If you're seeing 5GUW on your phone, it's going to be C-Band a lot more than mm wave.
C-Band spectrum also makes sense given a speed test of 400-800Mbps. That's fast, but not hugely faster than what you should expect with really good coverage today. T-Mobile experiences speeds above 560Mbps 25% of the time. Verizon's 5GUW (which is mostly C-Band) experiences speeds above 620Mbps 25% of the time. You ran two speed tests and got 477Mbps and 767Mbps. One of those is pretty average for C-Band and one of those is quite good for C-Band (25% faster than the 75th percentile), but nothing too out of the ordinary.
Those are speeds that are relatively common when carriers have around 150MHz of 2.5-5GHz spectrum deployed in your area and you have good signal and not too much congestion.
mm wave does exist, but the coverage is often a block or two with indoor coverage being really spotty. C-band coverage will be measured in square miles. C-Band won't have the coverage that lower frequencies have, but it's a lot more practical to deploy than mm wave. mm wave shines when you have a small, high-value area where you want to deploy 1,000MHz+ of capacity. Carriers might have 50MHz of capacity around 800MHz, 90MHz of capacity around 1.9GHz, 150MHz of capacity around 4GHz, and 1,000MHz of capacity around 30GHz. That really high frequency mm wave won't cover a large area, but there's a lot of it. If you're looking to cover a sports stadium, it makes sense. If you're looking to cover people's homes (even in major cities), C-Band is going to get you really good speeds with coverage that will be a lot more usable.
It's possible that you're getting mm wave, but those speeds are pretty normal for good C-Band coverage. The first test is pretty average and the second test is quite good, but nothing extraordinary.
Zigurd 23 hours ago [-]
Everyone uses the example of stadiums, but the occupancy rate of stadiums makes the economics of the network and backhaul iffy. I would guess only the biggest NFL stadiums get it as a showcase. Maybe parts of Manhattan, too.
Chinese cities, especially at train stations and the surrounding area get really impressive flows of people every day. But even in China I would expect that while they might have a lot more 5G SA when in the US, that the radios are actually mid band and not millimeter wave for most coverage. You still get higher capacity and low latency, but most people probably don't notice the low latency, except maybe Chinese autonomous taxis faking it till they make it.
mod50ack 19 hours ago [-]
I've gotten mmWave on Verizon in certain spots in Midtown Manhattan. But it doesn't really give me a lot of practical benefits over non-mmWave 5G.
In general, putting aside the bandwidth/crowding concerns (which are real, of course), I don't find 5G that much of a step above LTE - it's nothing compared to the jump from 3G to LTE. LTE changed how I used my phone in a big way (e.g., I could now watch video or download something on my phone practically). LTE got pretty fast over time anyway.
krapcys 19 hours ago [-]
Same here. 5G mostly feels like a refinement of LTE, not a generational leap.
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
My phone clearly shows me when I'm on 5G vs 5G mmWave.
_ink_ 1 days ago [-]
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.
Scoundreller 1 days ago [-]
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.
toast0 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
wolrah 8 hours ago [-]
> Not necessarily for 4G to 5G. 5G can run a 4G compatible control channel and timeslices can be 4G or 5G.
And for those playing at home, WiFi 7 devices aren't held back by coexisting with WiFi 6 devices, for the same reason (the use of OFDMA), at least on the 6 GHz band. Legacy clients of course muddy the waters on the other bands when they're in use.
Scoundreller 19 hours ago [-]
that's why I said "kept on the lower G". If a new lower one pops up, that's a different story.
Gigachad 1 days ago [-]
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)
lxgr 24 hours ago [-]
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.
askvictor 1 days ago [-]
Interesting; in Australia I'm using exclusively 4G with no problems
wingworks 10 hours ago [-]
Same in NZ. I don't need the extra speed of 5G if it's even available and would rather have the extra battery life.
herbst 13 hours ago [-]
> If I see anyG on my phone anywhere that isn't a city in Germany and know I can put it away again if it's not some kind of an emergency because it's basically unusable
Ftfy
manmal 1 days ago [-]
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.
wffurr 11 hours ago [-]
That seems to be exactly what the post is doing?
I guess there aren't enough network engineers or RF experts here to have a real conversation about it though. All the comments are just anecdotal discussions of phone bars and reception.
TheJoeMan 23 hours ago [-]
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”).
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.
b3orn 1 days ago [-]
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.
abroszka33 1 days ago [-]
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.
CorrectHorseBat 1 days ago [-]
2G is being shutdown (or already has) in many countries and those old phones and core services will need to be replaced.
ChocolateGod 1 days ago [-]
4G is becoming the "baseline" and replacing 2G in many of those services, especially the "low energy" IoT implementations of LTE.
inkyoto 22 hours ago [-]
Australia (2018), New Zealand (2018), US (2017), Iceland (2025), Switzerland have shut down 2G networks.
In Norway, Telia shut down 2G in 2025, but Telenor is holding out until the end of 2027.
In Sweden, Telia is holding until 2027, and all other telcos have already switched it off.
France is shutting down 2G this year.
So the 2G shutdown is a real thing.
wingworks 9 hours ago [-]
At least in NZ around when they closed 2G the govt created a group of some kind which went around and put up a bunch of 4G towers in more remote areas, the key thing was the towers went owned on xyz company, so everyone who visits the area regardless of the telco they use get the same great signal.
*having said that, it's still sad 2G was closed, it had truly impressive coverage, with few cell towered required.
Is how it should be country wide in my opinion. Way too many towers up everywhere just so xyz company can get coverage there. Leaving no 1 company to have the "best" coverage.
arcfour 20 hours ago [-]
We don't have it in the US, I remember being annoyed that there were no more cheap cellular modules for microcontrollers for a while.
userbinator 24 hours ago [-]
2G also needs a tiny amount of spectrum in contrast to the newer standards, as it was designed almost exclusively for voice calls, where a few Kbps is sufficient for good quality speech. (And 64kbps, which is only 8KB/s, is considered "toll quality".)
userbinator 2 hours ago [-]
For those who don't believe me, look up the standards yourself.
grahamburger 1 days ago [-]
'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.
msh 17 hours ago [-]
But 5g can handle more calls and data compared to 2g and 3g with the same spectrum as it’s more efficient.
kulahan 1 days ago [-]
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.
lxgr 24 hours ago [-]
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.
kulahan 21 hours ago [-]
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.
dakolli 1 days ago [-]
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.
lxgr 24 hours ago [-]
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.
23 hours ago [-]
walrus01 1 days ago [-]
Note that "G" generally is a marketing term for consumers, the actual tech is 3GPP rev-whatever
Like 3GPP release 15 or 16 is what we currently know as a lot of in production LTE/LTE-Advanced stuff.
quietsignal 1 days ago [-]
Exactly. This is far outside my professional field, but lately I've found that one of the better ways to read the tea leaves of the next decade is to look at the boring 3GPP/ETSI material rather than the consumer-facing "6G/7G" discussion.
The interesting part of 6G doesn't seem to be faster downloads so much as sensing. ISAC is basically about making the network capable of sensing the physical environment as well as communicating.
Some of the current work is already discussing the "six sensing modes", involving different combinations of the network and UEs transmitting and receiving signals reflected from objects, and even how users might be incentivized to let their devices participate
That feels potentially much more consequential than another speed bump. 3G/4G didn't just make phones faster; they enabled an entire ecosystem that was hard to predict beforehand. My guess is that sensing could be a similar pivot for 6G.
walrus01 1 days ago [-]
Also if I had a dollar for every end user residential consumer (as a person who runs ISPs) that confuses "5G" with "5 GHz wifi". Like, when your install techs have to explain to a customer why they're getting shit performance in the default 20MHz wide 2.4 GHz channel, and to reconfigure all their devices in a house to talk to a 802.11ax/802.11be 3x3 or 4x4 80 MHz channel AP in the 5.x GHz band.
Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
> Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.
Why would they know the difference? They don't have any technical appreciation of what either term means or its implication for what the hardware actually does; the terms sound similar; and they've been trained by decades of marketing to choose bigger numbers[1].
Over 5G you need specialized suits, like fighter pilots have.
osockwkckwk 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mytailorisrich 1 days ago [-]
No it is not. 2G->3G->4G->5G refer to real changes in technology and system architecture, as detailed in the Wikipedia page you linked to.
3GPP releases are more fine-grained than that. E.g. rel. 99 introduced 3G/WCDMA, rel. 8 introduced 4G/LTE, etc. Other releases only add features.
In the industry Gs are used all the time to refer to the technology/architecture, then releases are used to refer to specific features, though generally noone supports all the features of a release.
walrus01 1 days ago [-]
Tell that to the cellular industry marketing people who decided to put "4.5G" on things. Also not everything that is marketed "5G" is equal in capability, there's a myriad of different bands in different regulatory regimes in the world, some of which go through material like brick/concrete much better than others. You'll see "5G" connections that have speed tests in an urban area that top out at 50 Mbps downstream and others where you'll have 850 Mbps.
Even within a category such as "4G" there have been significant advances in some radio capabilities since it was introduced, like MU-MIMO, vs early "4G".
There's a very large number of different things that are all being marketed as "5G" now, so it's really a drastic oversimplification to try to say that all 5G is the same thing. Do you not remember the very early days of "3G" when cellular carriers were trying to market EDGE/GPRS as if it was 3G?
ryandrake 1 days ago [-]
"G" is becoming about as useful for identifying differences in mobile performance as "X" was for identifying CDROM speeds. As soon as marketers realized they could put any number they wanted before the X and outcompete their competitors, the number became useless.
mytailorisrich 1 days ago [-]
Gs may be used and possibly overused in marketing but that doesn't mean that they are meaningless terms and "mostly marketing" as per my previous comment. Again, the terms are heavily used in the industry in technical and engineering circles.
"Even within a category such as "4G" there have been significant advances in some radio capabilities since it was introduced".
Yes but this is as I explained in my previous comment. There have been new features and new capabilities but on the same technology and system architecture. Think of improving internal combustion engines over time vs. switching to electric motors. That's how Gs broadly work on the technical side.
Perhaps the issue is marketing overusing a technical term that does not lend itself to it super well, especially when comparing 4G and 5G, from a smartphone consumer standpoint.
lxgr 23 hours ago [-]
Increasingly less so. 2G to 3G was a very clear cut on the radio side (TDMA to CDMA); 4G changed both the radio side (OFDMA) and the core (no more circuit switching, more Internet-standards-like).
5G is already much less clear: 5G non-SA literally depends on 4G for signaling and uses 5G-NR (which itself is still OFDMA) only for user data. 5G SA changes the core network again, but isn’t even supported in many networks worldwide.
There are huge jumps in bandwidth within a generation too. 3G started out with circuit-switched-ish 384 kbit/s and ended with 40+ Mbit/s on HSPA+. The jump from that to early LTE was much smaller in comparison.
So in a way, the model of “every once in a while, the carriers and manufacturers bundle up a bunch of optional extensions and call it (n+1)” seems to be coming for 3GPP just like it already has for e.g. 802.11.
walrus01 13 hours ago [-]
The jump from what we now retrospectively call "1G" or original analog cellular to 2G GSM was also similarly huge. We went from things like AMPS analog networks that people could listen to with a hacked Oki 900 phone, broadcasting audio calls in the clear as analog radio, to actual GSM.
mytailorisrich 12 hours ago [-]
5G is a big change from 4G including on the radio side (although overall the physical layer is indeed quite sinilar). The thing is that many new 5G features have not gained tractions in the marketplace, or are happening very slowly because of absence of commercial use cases or clear benefits to customers.
kalleboo 23 hours ago [-]
The "G" marketing gets especially confused in the US where carriers branded EDGE as "3G" and HSPA+ as "4G"
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
There will always be new Gs...marketing teams require it.
I hope they go into the direction wifi is taking though - stability rather than speed.
I never think about cell speeds being slow anymore but irritation at lack of coverage is still frequent. Esp in urban jungles where buildings block it
wolvoleo 1 days ago [-]
That's more of a physics thing.
For building penetration you need low frequencies but those low frequencies have less bandwidth available because the bands are smaller. At the same time bandwidth needs rapidly go up, making those low bands fuller. Because there's a limit to how many bits per second you can get out of a Hz of spectrum.
What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters. A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally. This could be incorporated into the standard. Then establishments could easily include a booster just like many of them offer free WiFi now.
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
>A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally.
They're still readily available.
But yeah think this would need a legislative push to solve. Force high rises to host multi provider relays as you say and hook it into their fiber links.
tliltocatl 1 days ago [-]
> What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters.
But that's also a physics thing. Plain same-frequency boosters hamper frequency reuse on neighbor cells, so less bandwidth for you. And if boosters run on a separate band, you'd need to do frequency planning for them just like it's done for cells now.
Wireless is finicky, we should really avoid using it everywhere wired can be used instead.
wolvoleo 20 hours ago [-]
Well yes but once you transmit from inside the building you can use the higher frequencies which are much more plentiful. And use many low power nodes similar to the way we deploy WiFi in offices, with one every 15 metres or so.
The bandwidth available at 26Ghz is huge and the low penetration means you dont need to have as much distance before you can reuse them again. A simple wall is already enough.
But no I didn't mean those old style signal boosters that basically just retransmit the analog signal.
xattt 1 days ago [-]
Hopefully, they’ll move to reporting versioning as an explicit value rather than tying it to a constant that the general population might not know about. (I.e. 6g = 58.86; 7g = 68.67).
/s
fc417fc802 1 days ago [-]
I think we should use hex for brevity since consumers get confused by long numbers. We should also add adjective noun pairs to make them more memorable. And we can also add a paid sponsorship slot.
Ex 6G = 8B.9 verizon cool blue and 7G = A0.D costco ultra red or similar.
(/s)
BlackRabbit1 1 days ago [-]
5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?
I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM.
Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
These industries are pipelined. When generation N is in operation, N+1 hardware and software must be in development, N+2 specifications must be in endless committee discussions phase, and N+3 techs must be worked on in labs, etc.
throwaway2037 1 days ago [-]
This is an underrated point. PCIe, DRAM, and WiFi standards are similar. I watched a YouTube video about how PCIe 6.0 was developed, and, damn, the pipeline is long and very complex. Even test equipment has a separate/parallel pipeline.
codethief 14 hours ago [-]
> I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free.
I'm in Slovakia. We have 4 networks here and they basically have hidden non-compete agreements where no-one launches new tech for masses without at least one other providing it launching it too, sometimes they even coordinate the launch so that all 4 of them launch at the same time...
This same shit happened with launches of 5G NSA, eSIM, Apple Watch eSIM, RCS, and lots of other telco technologies...
At this point all the operators have 5G SA networks up and running for parts of Slovakia (Telekom even claims it covers 99% of Slovak population with 5G SA), but it's only available for business customers in private networks...
They all claim the same stupid reason for this - "most customer phones don't support it, and there are additional benefits for businesses"...
And there are rumors from all of them that they plan to launch it for regular customers by the end of this year...
I mean come on... In a fair market competition the first one to upgrade its network would launch first and heavily claim that they're the fastest innovator in marketing...
And when the network is up and running, why not open it up to regular people? And why it's always the same bullshit type of excuse that's basically trying to say "people don't want/need this"?
esperent 1 days ago [-]
I'm not sure what the "SA" part means but my phone says it's on 5g right now and has done most of the time for a couple of years now.
eightysixfour 1 days ago [-]
The 5G standard is a bit of a mess. In the US we heavily rolled out 5G NSA, which means you still have a 4G network core with both 4G and 5G radios at the edge. You get a chunk of the performance benefits without having to replace the network core first.
This usually has similar (in practice) performance characteristics to LTE Advanced.
5G SA is an actual, end to end 5G network. The two biggest wins here for an end user are reduced latency (a big focus in 5G) and reduced power usage (the phone doesn’t need a simultaneous 4G connection).
majormajor 1 days ago [-]
Hah, I was aware of 5G vs 5G mm-wave, didn't realize there was another way in which most 5G was "kinda fake" too.
Yeah. In india jio was SA from the start. Airtel began NSA then I think now they have mostly moved to SA.
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
5G SA means real 5G. 5G NSA means 4G over 5G NR.
They created an option to use just the 5G radio modem parts with 4G tower equipment to run them in the "Non-StandAlone" mode, so that telcos can start deploying 5G before even it matures. And the modem parts and their specs are called "5G New Radio", which is one of names of all time.
wolvoleo 1 days ago [-]
SA means standalone meaning real 5G.
NSA is non stand alone meaning basically 4G with some 5G backwards compatible improvements.
BlackRabbit1 1 days ago [-]
Just because your phone shows 5G doesn't mean it's connected to a 5G station. It also can only be a signaled flag from a 4G station.
1 days ago [-]
tomasGiden 1 days ago [-]
And companies are selling electric cars even though not everyone has a petrol car…
I remember people saying the same thing about 4G relative 3G and 5G relative 4G.
klrefg 1 days ago [-]
2G -> 3G -> 4G were all massive jumps that all enabled new use cases.
I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.
tomasGiden 1 days ago [-]
It's either that or people complaining about "Now I can run out of data much faster". But what people forget is that not all the new tech is to improve it for a single subscriber. A lot of it is to utilize the spectrum better and in that way get more capacity for everyone. Basically, if everyone was on 4G, it would be clogged and slow for everyone.
BlackRabbit1 1 days ago [-]
In Germany telcos using 700MHz for 5G a lot (also for LTE in non-5G regions and sometimes with DSS). So they can create a lot of coverage on rural areas or building penetration.
Telefonica didn't set their signallevel-to-bars-parameters on their SIMs correctly yet. Even directly next to a antenna you only see 1-2 bar although the signal level is maxing out.
Scoundreller 1 days ago [-]
700MHz is a mixed bag for rural coverage. Great for punching through trees, but need very tall towers to overcome destructive fresnel lens losses. Higher frequencies are usually better here + more gain!
inkyoto 14 hours ago [-]
For rural areas, lower frequencies are better because they mean longer distances ↝ fewer cell towers but also less density.
Conversely, higher frequencies mean more density, shorter distances and more cell towers. The ROI in the rural scenario in this case is lower.
dnautics 1 days ago [-]
I feel like 5g is worse
BlackRabbit1 1 days ago [-]
In terms of signal level?
Well.. that amount of bars you can see depending on the real signal level is just a SIM configuration. In the "newer" networks they aren't configured properly yet.
parineum 1 days ago [-]
> 5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?
Talking is one of the steps towards making things available to the broad masses. You have to start these things ahead of time so they are ready to deploy when the time comes.
Well, I suppose the rolling out of 5G must happen at some point, but otherwise his/her take in Section III.A is spot on and the most important takeaway.
VorpalWay 1 days ago [-]
5G seems pretty widly available here in Sweden in my experience, even in the countryside. Not that the speeds are actually better than 4G, but the indicator say 5G as I'm writing this in a tent in the middle of nowhere. :)
I guess other countries are further behind?
tvink 1 days ago [-]
On raw coverage of 5g, only a few much denser countries are better. You live in basically the best 4g and 5g covered, sparsely populated country on earth :) most countries are not just further behind.
vlovich123 1 days ago [-]
American cities also generally seem to have good 5G coverage with 4G frequencies being repurposed for 5G and 4G overall being put on life support as it’s phased out
jruohonen 1 days ago [-]
> I guess other countries are further behind?
Yes, and even in Europe. The demand-led need was badly misunderstood or anticipated in my opinion as operators were hesitant to invest (and some big ones still are). In this sense, 7G is a pipe dream (but of course worth researching as such).
kergonath 1 days ago [-]
Lucky you. On some parts of my commute, in an urban area of 10M people, I am happy if I get some 3G.
wolvoleo 1 days ago [-]
Don't just look at the indicator on your phone though. Providers are free to scheme with those. Some honestly show the icon when you are on 5G. Others use the option of showing it when you are on 4G (not even 5G NSA) but the network offers 5G on the cell.
The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
I've been away from Twitter phone nerds scene for quite a while, what do they use now for those details? Is it still ##service## or something else entirely?
wolvoleo 1 days ago [-]
There's apps for that but yes the built in one is also still there.
I think it's not so much a nerd thing rather than a false advertising one though.
VorpalWay 1 days ago [-]
It has been going between 4G and 5G today while hiking, so if they lie it isn't all the time at least.
But what do you suggest instead (on Android, a Pixel specifically)?
wolvoleo 1 days ago [-]
It depends on the provider. They can choose what the logo means.
Ps I looked it up, it can show it if the cell has 5G even if you're not connected to that at the moment, not if the network has it somewhere.
But each provider makes different choices. They have like 4 options to choose from.
You can use a network monitor app (or the built in one but it's a bit technical) to see what you're really connected to.
prmoustache 1 days ago [-]
Isn't the icon decided by the operating system?
kccqzy 21 hours ago [-]
The operating system vendor can be bribed. AT&T for example asked Apple to show a 5GE icon when an “advanced” LTE network is in use.
prmoustache 14 hours ago [-]
That must be a US specific thing. Most phones here in europe aren't bound to a specific provider.
As a matter of fact, the only phone I ever got with a mobile plan was my first mobile phone, a Motorola RAZR flip phone more than 2 decades ago.
hn_throwaway_99 1 days ago [-]
With 5G in particular I think it's important that people talk about which specific technologies they're referring to.
In the US at least, low-band or extended range 5G is widely available and has been for some time (and I'm talking about the "real" 5G low-band, not the BS marketing speak AT&T used for a while). Mid and high band 5G, or 5G ultra capacity, is much less available but if course it only really makes sense in dense cities.
I'm surprised that low band 5G isn't widely available in most 1st world countries, as again it's been here in the US for many years now.
shawn_w 1 days ago [-]
7G? Man I hope not. I watched a fine documentary a few years ago about what happens when they try rolling 7G out...
When has technology ever stopped? I remember being told copper wires would never go above 2400 bps. I see people here saying 4G is all they need, sounds an awful lot like "640k is all you need". You have no idea what the future holds and how much bandwidth it will need but there's still tons of ideas what could happen with faster connections.
ande-mnoc 1 days ago [-]
Both the abstract and the introduction score a 100% on Pangram. What’s going on there?
On 5g, I’ll say this. I’m on a Verizon MVNO with a fairly recent iPhone Pro model in a major metro area.
I frequently have to disable 5g and switch data to LTE to get any actual service, even when I have full bars of service. It’s highly annoying phones don’t do this by default
wartywhoa23 1 days ago [-]
Yes, there will be, to deliver two minute hates to the telescreens.
0utcast 1 days ago [-]
Ironically for mobile data, I've liked and found 4G to be more consistent. Not always as fast, but it never drops for me or fails to load.
suncore 1 days ago [-]
Working on everything from 1G to 6G, I can tell you for sure there will be a 7G whether we need it or not...
lukeschlather 1 days ago [-]
We really need a hybrid short-haul standard designed for short-range transmission. Something that uses low-frequency spectrum currently allocated to 5G but isn't locked to a single carrier and the protocol can be shared between WiFi and Cellular. Staking out some new frequencies would be great too.
miovoid 23 hours ago [-]
WiFi Passpoint (Hotspot 2.0)
tolugenius 1 days ago [-]
Could there come a limit to the G-cycle? Like either a) marginal gains slow/stall progress or b) more connectivity simply not being better? Curious to hear from folks in this field if this question has been raised.
londons_explore 1 days ago [-]
Not soon there won't be.
There is no reason you can't have phased array antennas of tens of elements on the handset and thousands on the masts, to give a massive bandwidth increase.
It will take a lot of generations to get to the limit physics sets.
daft_pink 8 hours ago [-]
there will obviously be a 7g, the real question is whether carriers would adopt it.
prism56 1 days ago [-]
Can't answer this question as I know basically nothing.
I'd be perfectly happy with less headline speed increases and just a real world busy tower speed improvement. That or efficiency gains.
ortusdux 1 days ago [-]
I'm surprised that Starlink didn't try and steal the branding. If anything would count as a new Generation in radio communication...
npilk 23 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of a sign I saw advertising "GLP-2s". Twice as good as GLP-1s!
stuaxo 1 days ago [-]
What would RF native computing involve ?
karim79 1 days ago [-]
I'm still waiting for faster SMS. SMPP needs a performance update. This is important everyone.
initramfs 1 days ago [-]
Only if enough people don't get cancer from 6G.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
This is the first I've heard of any plan for 6G….
Founderarcstone 1 days ago [-]
I sure hope we see 7G one day soon!
hulitu 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, unless a major economic crysis comes, which disrupts this cycle, we will see a lot of this 7G, 8G, 9G, Wifi7, Wifi8, Wifi9 and so on and so forth. It seems the virus of "evergreen automatic update" has encompased everything.
loeg 1 days ago [-]
We've already got the G7.
respectattentio 1 days ago [-]
The right question:
Will 7G be needed?
I say no for the next 15 years.
Because there are 1425235 other things that are way much important than this.
someguynamedq 1 days ago [-]
Right and society only works on one thing at a time
respectattentio 1 days ago [-]
Yes, why working on something that "may" be beneficial in the far future?
This is like inventing a 128-bit CPU architecture. Nobody would be able to utilize like even 1% of that, even with AI.
Dylan16807 1 days ago [-]
I'm not sure what performance improvements you're expecting with cell phone generations but most of it's pretty incremental. I don't think 7G is going to be even twice as fast as 5G on the same frequencies. It should be more stable, maybe millimeter wave will get deployed more, but it won't be wasted at all, lots of towers are going to be running at 100% utilization.
JW_00000 1 days ago [-]
Research on 5G started ~2012 to be deployed since 2019 (7 years), research on 4G started maybe around 2000 for rollout in 2009 (9 years later). For 6G, research started around 2018 for an expected rollout around 2030 (12 years). These timelines are pretty typical in the telecom field.
JW_00000 1 days ago [-]
The paper lists the "earliest plausible" deployment of 7G as 2039-40, so only 1-2 years off your estimate...
alt227 1 days ago [-]
It may not be needed, but it will certainly be rolled out.
general1465 1 days ago [-]
Unlikely. 5G hit the wall on UWB (Ultra Wide Band; 10-100GHz) because geniuses who were doing marketing for its transfer speeds did not realized that such high frequencies are disrupted with minimal amount conductive material in the air - so surprise surprise, 5G UWB does not work when you are behind a wall, it does not work when your big head full of water is in the way of BTS and most perplexing for common folk, it does not work behind a glass because regular glass is full of iron - so forget on 5G UWB on a train, tram or bus, unless somebody put mini BTS inside the vehicle.
So 5G for most folks is just marginally better LTE and that's about it. Any higher frequencies like 6G (30GHZ~3THz) or 7G (???) won't achieve much of anything outside of laboratory, because they will hit exactly same walls like 5G UWB.
wolvoleo 1 days ago [-]
Well mmWave was never for large areas. It's for ultra high density like in stadiums with 100k people. You know those cases where current networks are completely unusable because they saturate.
Its extremely limited range and penetration is a benefit there because you can put up thousands of cells without them interfering with each other.
It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
The speeds thing was just marketing BS as usual but mmWave did have benefits in niche scenarios.
general1465 1 days ago [-]
> It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
It did not took off because the whole sales pitch was utter nonsense. Why would anyone put 3rd party 5G BTS inside their buildings and then pay for data, when they can use WiFi for free + they control the network so they can decide how data are shared between stations and which stations are allowed to be logged in.
I can see that 6G is pitching... exactly same thing. Which predictably is going to fail... on exactly same issue.
wolvoleo 20 hours ago [-]
Data would have been unlimited at the company's own locations of course.
And it would have worked similarly to managed WiFi. Lots of companies outsource their WiFi and network. Many don't want to have that knowledge in house. Basically the provider would play the role of network outsourcing party inside the office and the outdoor connectivity would be more of a value-add.
The benefit would have been much higher speeds due to much more available bandwidth (way more than even 6Ghz WiFi), more security (people can't just poke at it with some packet injectors), less interference due to managed spectrum, higher density due to the beamforming and low penetration. Oh and it would have improved phone connectivity inside those buildings to boot. It could be combined with VPN/MPLS like connectivity so that laptops would always be behind the firewall even outdoors without having to run a VPN client.
This was also the pitch that led to those laptops with 5G built in that intel and Qualcomm were on about (Qualcomm was heavily trying to get into the laptop market back then). But it kinda stalled. I don't think it was a bad pitch though. It also came at a time when people weren't actually working in the office due to the pandemic and it lost momentum, beside the chicken and egg problem.
I could really see this taking off under the right conditions. But the whole laptop with mmWave isn't a thing anymore now. Perhaps 6G will bring a renewed push with it. Personally I don't think it's a bad pitch at all.
general1465 17 hours ago [-]
The problem is control of the network. If you don't control your network, then you don't know if network provider will go from "unlimited data" to "I am changing the deal now it is 1USD/GB" and you can either take it or be without connection which would likely collapse your operations. So the only logical step is to use network which you have full control over, like WiFi.
The much higher speed also does not hold together when you will look at it. When you have a device which is generating or processing a lot of data (GB/s ~ TB/s) such device needs substantial computational power to pull it off, so it is likely a stationary device connected to 230V. So why won't you drag a fiber there?
ianburrell 24 hours ago [-]
Ultra Wide Band (UWB) has nothing to do with Extremely High Frequency (mmWave). UWB is usually in the 6-8.5 GHz band but with 500 MHz wide frequency, while mmWave is above 24 GHz.
porridgeraisin 1 days ago [-]
There was full team that found out that did the test that 26ghz doesn't work IRL. It didn't even work across a street corner. But they were ignored in favour of some well, career pushers.
In india, jio is using 26ghz for wifi now instead. It's a service called airfiber. This don't even use any 5G. It's a weird custom hybrid solution where all the frames are wifi. Density here means that it's feasible to put the receiver on the rooftop of apartment buildings wherever you can get LoS. So in some sense it's been salvaged and those bands are actually being used. It's a fairly popular service.
URLL failed because it's main immediate usecase was supposed to be vehicle to vehicle comms. And auto didn't want telcos middlemanning there. But there is still hope here.
drob518 1 days ago [-]
Do we even need 6G?
superloika 1 days ago [-]
4G just works.
x0x7 18 hours ago [-]
Prepare conspiracy theories that the government just wants to image our bones.
For traceable biomarkers and other reasons.
Freedom2 1 days ago [-]
I'm concerned because my 5G microchip is still going strong. Will the next advances be compatible?
JW_00000 1 days ago [-]
According to the paper, 6G deployment is planned for 2030 and the "earliest plausible" deployment of 7G is listed as 2039-40. You'll have plenty of time to upgrade.
j45 1 days ago [-]
There will always be a faster technology, regardless of what it's called.
fedpost 10 hours ago [-]
The headline is somewhat detached from the article BUT
Of course there will fucking be a 7G. Capitalism doesn't just demand it, capitalism literally needs it to continue working.
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.
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.
DFW is generally a terribly-run airport, though.
If you don't, good luck with that.
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”
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!"
They can absolutely meter and limit your connection as long as one byte is one byte, no matter its origin. They can also discriminate based on the technology they provide (4G, 5G, fiber...). Net neutrality is not about preventing "pay to win", obviously, you can get a better connection if you pay more. It is about fair competition between online services.
To be clear, Google was doing this out of self-interest. Paying user ISPs for access to those users is not a cost they want to pay. But it's the same as any other protection racket. A local shopkeeper has personal reasons to not want to pay off the mob, but that doesn't mean their position is wrong.
When you add the second line---pretending that that nobody funding all the anti-net-neutrality let-big-ISPs-do-what-they-want stories that pro-legacy-company Republicans ate up---it makes me think this is some astroturfing, since it goes from "maybe this person fell for the ISP claims" to straight-up dishonest intentionally-misleading-fallacy.
Google was obviously on the side of "don't get charged twice" but ultimately net-neutrality was a tech enthusiast consumer position that came out of a desire to avoid getting charged more on the basis of what sites you did or didn't want to watch, and ISP's trying to influence where you visited by cutting deals to get paid to prioritize A vs B.
(Hell, ISPs were already getting paid "twice" for the bandwidth in some ways, e.g. when your "100Mb" plan only works at that speeds if your neighbors aren't using it much. That's a different sort of incomplete-advertising trickery that helped create the whole "too many people using Youtube are saturating the network!" "problem" in the first place.)
(And high-bandwidth publishers already were making private peering/colo-of-servers deals with ISPs and CDNs that I don't believe would've been prohibited by net neutrality, so the 'protection racket' aspect of the ISP's game was maybe more arguably wanting to be paid thrice? Or wanting to be paid without providing that colo service?)
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.
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?
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.
Why would it be ripped out?
Had no idea about full duplex though - that's huge
This is on Mint Mobile, a budget MVNO now owned by T-Mobile. I pay $20/month for 15GB data.
I think a lot of people are attributing speeds of 200-700Mbps to mm wave when it's actually pretty ordinary speeds for 2.5-5GHz coverage today now that carriers have decent capacity there. If you're getting below 144Mbps, you're in the bottom 25% of T-Mobile's network experience. Over the past 6 years, speeds have gotten a ton faster, mostly from 2.5-5GHz spectrum. Verizon is the only carrier that put much effort into mm wave and it still covers basically nothing.
Ignoring latency, you're likely to get speeds similar to wifi from today's mobile networks without mm wave - unless you have a really great home internet connection and a good wifi setup. I have a MacBook Pro, but it only has wifi 6 and I can get 700-800Mbps out of my wifi, but I'm not getting 2Gbps from it.
How is it a better deal to spend more money for essentially the same thing?
Imagine you're buying food that will go bad tomorrow. You can't keep it. You can't share it. You can buy enough food to fill you up today for $5, or enough food to fill you up 50x for $20. You will still eat that one unit of food, the other 49 units will just go to waste. Which do you buy?
For all the time I've had Mint, I've saved nearly $3,000 compared to your $50/mo plan. I've never felt the urge to really need more data personally, and it's worked well for me on my international travels around North America. If the outcome was the same, wouldn't you rather keep $3k in your pocket?
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.
C-Band spectrum also makes sense given a speed test of 400-800Mbps. That's fast, but not hugely faster than what you should expect with really good coverage today. T-Mobile experiences speeds above 560Mbps 25% of the time. Verizon's 5GUW (which is mostly C-Band) experiences speeds above 620Mbps 25% of the time. You ran two speed tests and got 477Mbps and 767Mbps. One of those is pretty average for C-Band and one of those is quite good for C-Band (25% faster than the 75th percentile), but nothing too out of the ordinary.
Those are speeds that are relatively common when carriers have around 150MHz of 2.5-5GHz spectrum deployed in your area and you have good signal and not too much congestion.
mm wave does exist, but the coverage is often a block or two with indoor coverage being really spotty. C-band coverage will be measured in square miles. C-Band won't have the coverage that lower frequencies have, but it's a lot more practical to deploy than mm wave. mm wave shines when you have a small, high-value area where you want to deploy 1,000MHz+ of capacity. Carriers might have 50MHz of capacity around 800MHz, 90MHz of capacity around 1.9GHz, 150MHz of capacity around 4GHz, and 1,000MHz of capacity around 30GHz. That really high frequency mm wave won't cover a large area, but there's a lot of it. If you're looking to cover a sports stadium, it makes sense. If you're looking to cover people's homes (even in major cities), C-Band is going to get you really good speeds with coverage that will be a lot more usable.
It's possible that you're getting mm wave, but those speeds are pretty normal for good C-Band coverage. The first test is pretty average and the second test is quite good, but nothing extraordinary.
Chinese cities, especially at train stations and the surrounding area get really impressive flows of people every day. But even in China I would expect that while they might have a lot more 5G SA when in the US, that the radios are actually mid band and not millimeter wave for most coverage. You still get higher capacity and low latency, but most people probably don't notice the low latency, except maybe Chinese autonomous taxis faking it till they make it.
In general, putting aside the bandwidth/crowding concerns (which are real, of course), I don't find 5G that much of a step above LTE - it's nothing compared to the jump from 3G to LTE. LTE changed how I used my phone in a big way (e.g., I could now watch video or download something on my phone practically). LTE got pretty fast over time anyway.
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.
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.
And for those playing at home, WiFi 7 devices aren't held back by coexisting with WiFi 6 devices, for the same reason (the use of OFDMA), at least on the 6 GHz band. Legacy clients of course muddy the waters on the other bands when they're in use.
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.
Ftfy
I guess there aren't enough network engineers or RF experts here to have a real conversation about it though. All the comments are just anecdotal discussions of phone bars and reception.
In Norway, Telia shut down 2G in 2025, but Telenor is holding out until the end of 2027.
In Sweden, Telia is holding until 2027, and all other telcos have already switched it off.
France is shutting down 2G this year.
So the 2G shutdown is a real thing.
Is how it should be country wide in my opinion. Way too many towers up everywhere just so xyz company can get coverage there. Leaving no 1 company to have the "best" coverage.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP
Like 3GPP release 15 or 16 is what we currently know as a lot of in production LTE/LTE-Advanced stuff.
The interesting part of 6G doesn't seem to be faster downloads so much as sensing. ISAC is basically about making the network capable of sensing the physical environment as well as communicating.
Some of the current work is already discussing the "six sensing modes", involving different combinations of the network and UEs transmitting and receiving signals reflected from objects, and even how users might be incentivized to let their devices participate
That feels potentially much more consequential than another speed bump. 3G/4G didn't just make phones faster; they enabled an entire ecosystem that was hard to predict beforehand. My guess is that sensing could be a similar pivot for 6G.
Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.
Why would they know the difference? They don't have any technical appreciation of what either term means or its implication for what the hardware actually does; the terms sound similar; and they've been trained by decades of marketing to choose bigger numbers[1].
[1]: And many of them apparently didn't even know that "one third" is bigger than "one quarter", as A&W found out the hard way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger
3GPP releases are more fine-grained than that. E.g. rel. 99 introduced 3G/WCDMA, rel. 8 introduced 4G/LTE, etc. Other releases only add features.
In the industry Gs are used all the time to refer to the technology/architecture, then releases are used to refer to specific features, though generally noone supports all the features of a release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands
Even within a category such as "4G" there have been significant advances in some radio capabilities since it was introduced, like MU-MIMO, vs early "4G".
There's a very large number of different things that are all being marketed as "5G" now, so it's really a drastic oversimplification to try to say that all 5G is the same thing. Do you not remember the very early days of "3G" when cellular carriers were trying to market EDGE/GPRS as if it was 3G?
"Even within a category such as "4G" there have been significant advances in some radio capabilities since it was introduced".
Yes but this is as I explained in my previous comment. There have been new features and new capabilities but on the same technology and system architecture. Think of improving internal combustion engines over time vs. switching to electric motors. That's how Gs broadly work on the technical side.
Perhaps the issue is marketing overusing a technical term that does not lend itself to it super well, especially when comparing 4G and 5G, from a smartphone consumer standpoint.
5G is already much less clear: 5G non-SA literally depends on 4G for signaling and uses 5G-NR (which itself is still OFDMA) only for user data. 5G SA changes the core network again, but isn’t even supported in many networks worldwide.
There are huge jumps in bandwidth within a generation too. 3G started out with circuit-switched-ish 384 kbit/s and ended with 40+ Mbit/s on HSPA+. The jump from that to early LTE was much smaller in comparison.
So in a way, the model of “every once in a while, the carriers and manufacturers bundle up a bunch of optional extensions and call it (n+1)” seems to be coming for 3GPP just like it already has for e.g. 802.11.
I hope they go into the direction wifi is taking though - stability rather than speed.
I never think about cell speeds being slow anymore but irritation at lack of coverage is still frequent. Esp in urban jungles where buildings block it
For building penetration you need low frequencies but those low frequencies have less bandwidth available because the bands are smaller. At the same time bandwidth needs rapidly go up, making those low bands fuller. Because there's a limit to how many bits per second you can get out of a Hz of spectrum.
What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters. A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally. This could be incorporated into the standard. Then establishments could easily include a booster just like many of them offer free WiFi now.
They're still readily available.
But yeah think this would need a legislative push to solve. Force high rises to host multi provider relays as you say and hook it into their fiber links.
But that's also a physics thing. Plain same-frequency boosters hamper frequency reuse on neighbor cells, so less bandwidth for you. And if boosters run on a separate band, you'd need to do frequency planning for them just like it's done for cells now.
Wireless is finicky, we should really avoid using it everywhere wired can be used instead.
The bandwidth available at 26Ghz is huge and the low penetration means you dont need to have as much distance before you can reuse them again. A simple wall is already enough.
But no I didn't mean those old style signal boosters that basically just retransmit the analog signal.
/s
Ex 6G = 8B.9 verizon cool blue and 7G = A0.D costco ultra red or similar.
(/s)
I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM.
Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.
Interesting, where can I learn more about that?
EDIT: This looks promising: https://hilfe.o2online.de/o2-mobilfunknetz-einstellungen-zur...
This same shit happened with launches of 5G NSA, eSIM, Apple Watch eSIM, RCS, and lots of other telco technologies...
At this point all the operators have 5G SA networks up and running for parts of Slovakia (Telekom even claims it covers 99% of Slovak population with 5G SA), but it's only available for business customers in private networks...
They all claim the same stupid reason for this - "most customer phones don't support it, and there are additional benefits for businesses"...
And there are rumors from all of them that they plan to launch it for regular customers by the end of this year...
I mean come on... In a fair market competition the first one to upgrade its network would launch first and heavily claim that they're the fastest innovator in marketing...
And when the network is up and running, why not open it up to regular people? And why it's always the same bullshit type of excuse that's basically trying to say "people don't want/need this"?
This usually has similar (in practice) performance characteristics to LTE Advanced.
5G SA is an actual, end to end 5G network. The two biggest wins here for an end user are reduced latency (a big focus in 5G) and reduced power usage (the phone doesn’t need a simultaneous 4G connection).
They created an option to use just the 5G radio modem parts with 4G tower equipment to run them in the "Non-StandAlone" mode, so that telcos can start deploying 5G before even it matures. And the modem parts and their specs are called "5G New Radio", which is one of names of all time.
NSA is non stand alone meaning basically 4G with some 5G backwards compatible improvements.
I remember people saying the same thing about 4G relative 3G and 5G relative 4G.
I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.
Telefonica didn't set their signallevel-to-bars-parameters on their SIMs correctly yet. Even directly next to a antenna you only see 1-2 bar although the signal level is maxing out.
Conversely, higher frequencies mean more density, shorter distances and more cell towers. The ROI in the rural scenario in this case is lower.
Well.. that amount of bars you can see depending on the real signal level is just a SIM configuration. In the "newer" networks they aren't configured properly yet.
Talking is one of the steps towards making things available to the broad masses. You have to start these things ahead of time so they are ready to deploy when the time comes.
I guess other countries are further behind?
Yes, and even in Europe. The demand-led need was badly misunderstood or anticipated in my opinion as operators were hesitant to invest (and some big ones still are). In this sense, 7G is a pipe dream (but of course worth researching as such).
The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.
I think it's not so much a nerd thing rather than a false advertising one though.
But what do you suggest instead (on Android, a Pixel specifically)?
Ps I looked it up, it can show it if the cell has 5G even if you're not connected to that at the moment, not if the network has it somewhere.
But each provider makes different choices. They have like 4 options to choose from.
You can use a network monitor app (or the built in one but it's a bit technical) to see what you're really connected to.
As a matter of fact, the only phone I ever got with a mobile plan was my first mobile phone, a Motorola RAZR flip phone more than 2 decades ago.
In the US at least, low-band or extended range 5G is widely available and has been for some time (and I'm talking about the "real" 5G low-band, not the BS marketing speak AT&T used for a while). Mid and high band 5G, or 5G ultra capacity, is much less available but if course it only really makes sense in dense cities.
I'm surprised that low band 5G isn't widely available in most 1st world countries, as again it's been here in the US for many years now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World
I frequently have to disable 5g and switch data to LTE to get any actual service, even when I have full bars of service. It’s highly annoying phones don’t do this by default
There is no reason you can't have phased array antennas of tens of elements on the handset and thousands on the masts, to give a massive bandwidth increase.
It will take a lot of generations to get to the limit physics sets.
I'd be perfectly happy with less headline speed increases and just a real world busy tower speed improvement. That or efficiency gains.
Will 7G be needed?
I say no for the next 15 years. Because there are 1425235 other things that are way much important than this.
So 5G for most folks is just marginally better LTE and that's about it. Any higher frequencies like 6G (30GHZ~3THz) or 7G (???) won't achieve much of anything outside of laboratory, because they will hit exactly same walls like 5G UWB.
Its extremely limited range and penetration is a benefit there because you can put up thousands of cells without them interfering with each other.
It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
The speeds thing was just marketing BS as usual but mmWave did have benefits in niche scenarios.
It did not took off because the whole sales pitch was utter nonsense. Why would anyone put 3rd party 5G BTS inside their buildings and then pay for data, when they can use WiFi for free + they control the network so they can decide how data are shared between stations and which stations are allowed to be logged in.
I can see that 6G is pitching... exactly same thing. Which predictably is going to fail... on exactly same issue.
And it would have worked similarly to managed WiFi. Lots of companies outsource their WiFi and network. Many don't want to have that knowledge in house. Basically the provider would play the role of network outsourcing party inside the office and the outdoor connectivity would be more of a value-add.
The benefit would have been much higher speeds due to much more available bandwidth (way more than even 6Ghz WiFi), more security (people can't just poke at it with some packet injectors), less interference due to managed spectrum, higher density due to the beamforming and low penetration. Oh and it would have improved phone connectivity inside those buildings to boot. It could be combined with VPN/MPLS like connectivity so that laptops would always be behind the firewall even outdoors without having to run a VPN client.
This was also the pitch that led to those laptops with 5G built in that intel and Qualcomm were on about (Qualcomm was heavily trying to get into the laptop market back then). But it kinda stalled. I don't think it was a bad pitch though. It also came at a time when people weren't actually working in the office due to the pandemic and it lost momentum, beside the chicken and egg problem.
I could really see this taking off under the right conditions. But the whole laptop with mmWave isn't a thing anymore now. Perhaps 6G will bring a renewed push with it. Personally I don't think it's a bad pitch at all.
The much higher speed also does not hold together when you will look at it. When you have a device which is generating or processing a lot of data (GB/s ~ TB/s) such device needs substantial computational power to pull it off, so it is likely a stationary device connected to 230V. So why won't you drag a fiber there?
In india, jio is using 26ghz for wifi now instead. It's a service called airfiber. This don't even use any 5G. It's a weird custom hybrid solution where all the frames are wifi. Density here means that it's feasible to put the receiver on the rooftop of apartment buildings wherever you can get LoS. So in some sense it's been salvaged and those bands are actually being used. It's a fairly popular service.
URLL failed because it's main immediate usecase was supposed to be vehicle to vehicle comms. And auto didn't want telcos middlemanning there. But there is still hope here.
For traceable biomarkers and other reasons.
Of course there will fucking be a 7G. Capitalism doesn't just demand it, capitalism literally needs it to continue working.
well if they ever get the lander upright, you'd think they'd learn to put crashbags that self-inflate to upright landers by now
* https://www.wired.com/story/nokia-4g-network-on-the-moon/