5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos
Or companies that want to break the residential broadband monopoly in a local area. Personally, I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town. 5G would be a complete success if that happens.
Muni/coop internet providers? Should be low if they can keep lease costs down for 5G base stations colocating with existing muni real estate, and use existing fiber for backhaul (or new fiber laid as part of Dig Once guidelines).
This is the key. Look at the roadblocks Google Fiber has hit in their own fiber deployments, pivoting to wireless to bypass the resistance they're getting from incumbents.
I'm interested to see how this plays out. When I looked into it, it seemed hard to compete with wired broadband internet. I think wireless has the best chance in areas where people's only option is satellite or dial-up.
Because there's only so much wireless spectrum and at some point you saturate the link. Plus interference from other carriers reduces the capacity of the link.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's also not obvious to me that wireless is better in dense areas, especially since the main cost in wired internet is laying the cable in the first place, which is easier to do cost effectively when you have an urban market to offer service to.
It depends on whether it is licensed or unlicensed spectrum. Some of the technology is in ISM bands that anyone can use.
In either case, the channels still have capacity limits. I'm not saying it's impossible, which is partly why I brought it up in the first place. I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in. The main advantage wires have is you can just run more of them when you reach your capacity (or in some cases you can just change the hardware at either end of the wire to newer technology).
Are there any US carriers that are using unlicensed / shares spectrum?
The bandwidth is only limited per tower, you can easily double the throughput of a given area by doubling the number of cell towers (and reducing power to avoid interference). It’s a lot cheaper to build a new tower than to run new wires to 200 homes (permits and all). On top of that 5g gives 10x bandwidth over 4g in the same band.
You can have 1,000 wires in a bit of pipe, effectively 1,000 "spectrums." The air will always only be a single spectrum.
Cell division does not scale infinitely, and becomes more and more complex to manage.
Running cable you do once, then you can benefit for a long time. Wired will always be the better technical solution, and more economic one, in built up areas.
I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town
Is Comcast really that bad? In my admittedly European experience all the service providers are (dis)functional and greedy pretty much to the same degree, none of them are good guys.
Comcast and Countrywide were in the running for the Consumerists 2008 worst company of the year. Countrywide won but had to help nuke the economy. Comcast had a real shot at winning for being such a malignant organization.
Why? Are they significantly more hated than any big co? Like Uber and Facebook received quite a lot of bad press lately. Is this just perception or are they really that bad/evil?
TMO (yeah Austria, not US but still) were bragging about not hashing passwords on twitter just a couple of weeks ago. Not exactly professional.
In the US they are. Comcast has rather notorious Customer Retention policies and frequent abuse of their position as monopolies in many cities, whether it's a matter of the prices, the data caps, the script injections, the promises made to cities that never materialize, and so on.
It's basically like comic book villainy, the only thing missing is photos of Comcast Executives cackling over the complaints from customers. And I say that as someone who was overall okay with Comcast's service the one time I had them. The behavior of Comcast defines the perception most of the US has with them.
It can be. I've so far had only good experiences. My service is fast and reliable, and the other day when I called them up to activate a new modem, they cut my cost to $35/month as a customer appreciation move with barely any strings attached (only that I commit to staying with them a year ... I've been with them for 6 already and there is no viable competitor here).
There are plenty of horror stories, however. I may just be lucky so far.
Comcast is the only broadband provider in my town that can deliver a service greater than 2 mbit/sec.
AT&T has U-Verse DSLAMS in some corners, but gave up on covering the entire town and the copper network is old and crumbling. There is zero hope of any kind of fiber service showing up.
In my personal experience Comcast's service isn't bad, but their rates are tied to the fact that there is no competition. My belief is that prices would drop about 50% and speeds would jump up 20% if another company could get into the space.
And that's just for IP service. Video service is another story altogether. TMO's purchase of Layer3 gives me some hope that maybe there will be a decent streaming service they will bundle with it.
> In my personal experience Comcast's service isn't bad, but their rates are tied to the fact that there is no competition.
Yep. My town has exactly one provider: Comcast. They even negotiated a 50-year exclusive right of way back in the 80s by lining some local politician pockets.
I pay $250/month for internet, landline phone, and basic cable bundle.
This includes about $50 worth of bullshit “copper recovery fees” and the like which are designed to sound like taxes but are really just pure profit for Comcast.
I was a Comcast customer for years. The service was unreliable. The phone support was useless and would, for example, ask me to reboot my computer when my modem was clearly failing to communicate with their equipment. Their techs would routinely arrive an hour or two late when they already had a four-hour window to hit, and not even call to tell me they would be late. One of them replaced something in an outside box and then just left, leaving two equipment boxes hanging open and scraps of cable lying on the ground.
I now have Verizon and the difference is vast. The service has gone down twice in five years. When I called it in, I was immediately connected to someone who knew what DHCP meant. They’re not perfect but they’re a lot better.
Ha, I had the same problem with Time Warner re: leaving boxes open and cables laying around. In that case, they never told me they had come and I waited nearly a week (they said they had to come put more cable down to the end of my street [I lived on the end] or something) before calling to see when they were going to come. Come to find, they had come days prior and never finished the job, leaving the box open and the work unfinished. I had to finish it myself.
All of these traditional telcos are garbage and their ratings in multiple arenas showcase that very clearly.
5G would need to increase capacity by at least 2 orders of magnitude over 4G to compete with wireline service. That's not going happen, radio spectrum is a finite resource.
I've heard that 5G will be especially beneficial to rural areas, where it will have the bandwidth, speed, and coverage capability to replace broadband, DSL, and satellite. Can someone with industry knowledge confirm whether this is true?
I'm not in the industry, but I've done some research on this and looked into setting up an ISP in a rural area near me (got far enough to where I was talking to fiber providers). For really rural areas it doesn't seem feasible because the radios essentially need line of sight, so in order to serve enough customers to be profitable you need several towers that have a wireless backhaul to some fiber line that you have a connection to.
All of those towers cost money to install and maintain, which adds to your expense, so for low enough population densities, it's not economical. For small towns it can be economical, but it depends on the geography. If it's very hilly or there are lots of tall trees you will have a hard time getting line of sight to potential customers.
I have a buddy running a Wisp as a side gig out in rural Michigan. I think he got 10M fiber ran for a couple thousand a month. Then maybe 10-20 people have wireless access setup with ubiquity gear to beam them internet. I think it breaks even or is just pocket money as the main business’s internet needs are subsidized by the neighbors.
It’s really a tough situation in the rural areas. To run last mile cable costs thousands of dollars per house with houses quarter to half mile apart. and at $50-100/mo, it doesnt make sense to serve those customers.
With next gent Wifi/5G that's actually a great distance.
The big problem for rural deployment is that the backhaul was/is too expensive, but with wireless advances a mesh is the optimal (cheap and simple) way to go.
Those numbers sound about right to me. If I lived out in the area I was thinking of serving it might have been doable, but I figured with the low potential for profit and the amount of time it would take to deal with customers, install equipment, etc., it wasn't really worth it.
It's not true. Wireless spectrum can only be used once. Wires and fiber optics can use the same spectrum over and over and over.
Additionally, wireless telcos have already gotten used to not providing real internet access to their customers. Instead they provide a proxied, nat'd, no-ports, almost web only service.
I am ashamed of my country (America) that we as a nation, federally speaking, don't provide the funding needed to empower everyone in rural areas with high speed internet as a right. The Internet powers so many important things today and if we're talking about "thousands of dollars per household" it is totally doable.
Why should those of us who don't choose to live in the country have to subsidize the lifestyle choices of those that do choose to live in the country?
And, before you go thinking I'm just the radical conservative, recognize that this cuts both ways. I'm also of the opinion that we shouldn't be subsidizing people's high-carbon lifestyles by making roads free, for example.
I agree with your statement, but I worry that not everyone has the ability to move to less rural area even if they wanted to. How do we avoid punishing the people who are not choosing to live in middle-of-nowhere versus those who make that choice?
Accelerate the deployment of Starlink and OneWeb. Save hundreds of billions of dollars over 20 years in building unnecessary FTTH all over shrinking, uneconomical rural America.
We didn't have a landline in rural US until I was 14. We had point-to-point long distance maser and WISP by the time I was 21. If anyone wants it, they can get it, of they pay for it. If somebody doesn't want to pay for it, why should the despits of various people's urban states compel their denizens to do so?
Author here.
Wish it were good for rural but 98% of experts think 5G millimeter wave will mostly be urban and suburban. Millimeter wave has short reach, hence not good for rural.
More antennas, MIMO and Massive MIMO, is the way to go for rural. Some people call that 5G, some don't.
During the 2G, 3G and 4G frequency auctions in Germany the prices went extremely high. As result carriers charge massive prices for data, and there’s few carriers in the market.
Hmmm, that's an interesting problem I hadn't thought of with the auctions. People are going to pay for data pretty much regardless of what it costs (within reason), so it's economical to buy part of the spectrum assuming you can pass on the high price to consumers. Typically you think of competition benefiting consumers, but that's obviously not true in this case.
For the original UMTS 2100 auction in Sweden, instead of having an auction, the regulator gave away the spectrum for free to the bidder who could show a plan for the best coverage in the shortest rollout time in a "beauty contest". This left the operators with more money to build the actual networks in a sparse country with a low population. Of course everyone totally failed to achieve the plans they submitted, and one carrier that one dropped out completely (Orange) because they thought a buildout would still be too expensive. But Sweden still ended up with some of the best mobile networks (speed/coverage) in Europe at the time.
Exactly, and that's how you end up with paying either 16€/mo for absolutely unlimited traffic, SMS and voice (plus 50GB tethering), as in Denmark, or 180€/mo for the cheapest contract with unlimited data, as in Germany.
You can now get unlimited data for 80€ in Germany (Telekom Magenta Mobil XL) which is still expensive. If you can live with 1 MBit/s you can use O2 Free for about 20€.
When "4G" was initially commercialized, one could have claimed it has No "Material Difference Between 3G and 4G". HSPA(+) was just faster 3G, already reaching lower end of 4G bandwidth requirement, minimally qualifiable as 4G. But has 4G/LTE eventually turned out to be "one generation" better than 3G? Hell yeah.
Same thing here for 4G-5G transition. The real deal is when milimeter wave got massively deployed and commercialized.
Is the coverage/range and rate of speed at range much better for 5G vs. 4G/LTE? I don't think most people need (much) more speed over wireless so much as better/more coverage and better speed at lower signal.
Also, it's about relative cost... what about data caps? If they intend to compete with wired in home connections for things like set top (online streaming), they'll need a compelling story, and not running out of your allotment or being throttled after watching a couple 4K movies in the evening less than a week into your billing cycle.
The coverage/range of 5G depends on the scale of deployment, and the environment of the deployment (e.g. urban with lots of tall buildings, vs rural), assuming we are talking about mmw type of 5G not LTE+ type of 5G.
Due to higher frequency, 5G might actually have a disadvantage in range for a single tower, in dense urban environment due to weaker penetration. But it could be compensated by deploying more towers, at more strategic locations. The value proposition is that the gain in speed and delay would be well worth it.
Weak penetration is still a problem for long range open field 5G communication, but due to different factors like fog, weather conditions, etc.
Regarding data caps, I view it as more of a business model question, less related to the technical capabilities of 4G vs 5G.
There is a material difference between UMTS and LTE, UMTS is using CDMA which comes with some practically unfortunate tradeoffs like the "breathing cell" and inheriting the old GSM style slow system design.
Sure, CDMA vs OFDM, definitely they can be regarded as "material difference" But that's not the logic/argument the original article made. They only used bandwidth and delay to quantify "material difference". Following their logic, they can make the same argument for 3G vs 4G back in the day.
LTE is materially different from 3G, because the protocols are different AND the radios are different. For example, you can make an all-IP network with LTE. You can't do that with 3G. Ironically, though, most phone calls, even on LTE networks, are still 3G circuit-switched phone calls.
Also, this article is correct that there is no similar difference in "5G." There is really no such thing, outside of carrier marketing, as "5G." One could try retrofitting meaning to "5G," like "OK now we'll really do packet switched phone calls" or something like that. But almost all the technologies that come under the heading 5G were foreseen and often standardized when LTE standards were first written.
LTE stands for Long Term Evolution. It's meant to be a durable, evolving set of standards for wireless communication.
> 5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos
This is important for consumers. When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G? In real world scenarios, the number of people in a cell (due to limited spectrum bandwidth) limits 4G speeds, not protocol maximums. My understanding of 5G is that bandwidth can be used much more efficiently (both by being able to allocate less in idle situations and by spatial multiplexing), benefitting telcos and customers both.
The lower speed on 4G is mostly due to the number of devices on it.
5G will be no different in that way. At first, the few people with 5G devices and networks will have very fast speeds (mostly), but once everyone in 4G moves to 5G, we’re back to how it is today.
I’m also curious what the effect of all the WiFi networks will have in regards to interference with 5G bands.
I would imagine there are fundamental limitations on the available bandwidth that splitting the traffic across multiple frequencies would alleviate...but that's just speculation.
LTE Advanced already supports a feature called carrier aggregation where your phone can transfer data on multiple different frequencies at the same time to boost its aggregate throughput:
This doesn't seem to contradict the point. There is a fixed capacity that the network can handle. For 5G, this appears to be a higher capacity than for 4G.
So, yes, more devices will mean less speed for everyone. However, there is more speed to go around, so the same number of devices in a 4G setting will get less speed than the same number in a 5G.
>The lower speed on 4G is mostly due to the number of devices on it.
Is that the sole reason 5G is faster, or will being able to allocate less in idle situations and utilize spatial multiplexing support faster speeds even with a comparable number of devices?
Allocating less in idle situations sounds dangerous. What do you do when there is a real world event and everyone rushes to their device, pulling them out of idle?
(I'm assuming this problem is already considered. Genuinely asking, in case someone has a good link to read on it.)
It's straightforward QoS management. Public service users get absolute priority, even if that means kicking everyone else off the network. After that, voice and SMS get priority, because they're important to users and have very low data rates. IP traffic can have whatever's left on a fair queuing basis. Most operators use deep packet inspection and can perform fairly sophisticated traffic shaping.
That makes some sense. But "kicking people off" is a crappy answer. Especially since you are setting up a constant storm of users trying to reconnect. Easy to see how that will not play well with idle connections.
>Especially since you are setting up a constant storm of users trying to reconnect.
The network isn't that dumb. The technical details are far beyond the scope of a HN comment, but the network can gracefully deny service to users. Think about what happens if you run out of data allowance or prepaid credit - your phone doesn't frantically spam the network, it just asks for service and is politely told to try again later. If all else fails, you can just de-register all the devices connected to a given cell site and revert them to emergency calls only.
Right, that was why I was asking if someone had a good link to read on. :)
And, honestly, from the way I've seen phones behave on older wifi networks, I would be surprised if some aren't actually spamming the network. Unnecessarily fast. Worse, I would hope the network has some protection built in for the bad actors that do.
> the network has some protection built in for the bad actors that do.
They don't. It's extremely easy to DoS an off-the-shelf (Ericsson, etc) mobile network if you know what to do. All it takes is one packet per minute or so. ;)
The point of the article isn't that 5G won't improve throughput, but that improvements of the existing LTE network will provide similar improvements.
This is really a corporate squabblefest over branding, control of standards and intellectual property. There are misaligned incentives between IP holders like Qualcomm, equipment manufacturers and network operators.
The networks want the 5G brand so they can sell the image of an "all-new superfast network", but they want to spend as little as possible on new infrastructure. IP holders want to ensure that any future development is tied to licensing their technology. Equipment manufacturers want to sidestep those license costs, either by avoiding new technologies with freshly-minted patents or by moving to technologies with fewer dependencies on proprietary IP. US cable operators want access to millimetre bands to expand their fixed broadband network, while European landline broadband operators don't want new competition.
Nobody is being honest about those clashing incentives, so we're seeing huge amounts of babble and FUD from all sides.
So what do you think will be the end result of 5G ? same as William Webb says, that most likely, nothing will come out of it - because consumers are happy with current speed, and they're only interest is paying less, which doesn't fit with investing billions in 5G ?
They have the capability, but this intersects with local building codes, zoning laws, and safety standards. It also carries increased costs over time.
What's being said here is, "We don't foresee any problems with having our current level of capacity provisioning, and we're fine with the level of service we provide."
It's going to be even worse with 5g. 5g is just a spec and the current most likely way to meet that spec is with micro-cells operating at higher frequencies.
They will require line of site because higher frequencies can't penetrate obstacles. To get 5g speeds and capacities, you're going to need to put towers everywhere.
This matches what has been said about the planned rollout of 5G in the UK: more use of higher frequency bands and cells sites possibly sited at every road junction (intersection).
The impact of land topology is seen as so important that the UK Ordnance Survey have got involved with simulating 5G coverage:
In many cases it's not that simple. Local governments are often in control of permitting for cell tower sites. The telcos can't just plop down new towers wherever they want and call it a day.
And societies have the ability to add more capacity by realizing by having privately owned radio spectrum the advancement and adoption of wireless data transfer has been stunted for decades.
Everyone likes to argue that you can't have an all wireless society because there is limited bandwidth available, but as it is we are only using about 10% of the usable spectrum (from about 200MHZ to 8GHZ) for network data connectivity, and even then most of it is still privately controlled - if an area has too many AT&T subscribers and not enough Verizon customers, the Verizon spectrums go to waste while the AT&T ones are oversaturated.
There are a few things I could name off the top of my head that would overnight dramatically improve technology, but nationalizing back light for the people to use and then having this entire range opened up to generic data transfer with the same congestion rules and regulations used on currently open bandwidth rings would go a long way to improving most of our lives dramatically.
You need to have someone coordinate frequency use or else you'll get tons of interference. At least by making people pay for it you incentize them to actually use the part of the spectrum they've purchased.
Private companies don't own spectrum, they lease it. They pay the government substantial sums of money for the temporary, revocable right to use a chunk of spectrum. Light is already nationalised, the government just chooses to rent it out, partly on the basis of need and partly on a market basis. That allocation system isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than declaring everything from DC to daylight an ISM band and letting the users have at it.
Of those middle-ground options, I can't think of any that don't involve revoking a lot of licenses and rendering a lot of expensive equipment useless. It's theoretically possible to manage spectrum dynamically, but you need a clear channel and smart devices.
Consider the digital television transition - it freed up a substantial amount of spectrum for other users, but it took many years and cost billions of dollars. Broadcast TV and radio is less significant today than it was in 2009, but there are thousands of spectrum user groups who would find it difficult to switch to dynamically managed spectrum, not to mention the potential safety issues.
The RF spectrum is a busy old place. We can carve out little bits here and there, but there just aren't many useful blocks left that aren't already being used by something quite important. Most of those allocations involve co-ordination with the ITU and couldn't be significantly altered without international agreement.
> ...having this entire range opened up to generic data transfer with the same congestion rules and regulations used on currently open bandwidth rings...
Kinda like how 2.4 GHz is damn near useless for many people?
> Wembley stadium in the UK is used as technology showcase for one of our mobile providers
Except they're more interested in pitching their bullshit iBeacon-based "SmartGuide" tracking technology or light show than network access. This is one of the major problems I see with mobile telcos; they seem to get sidetracked on everything but the mobile network which should be their top priority.
No, I don't give a shit about kids programming the light shows or iBeacons, I need fast, rock-solid network access; leave the rest to other companies that have the resources and focus do it better.
Author here. Density is one way to add capacity but adding more spectrum or more antennas turns out to be cheaper most place today. (Carrier aggregation and MIMO.) Millimeter wave is essentially adding more spectrum.
In a real world scenario, I would max out my data cap in 5 minutes.. Telcos will never give up their guaranteed profits by throttling speeds even with unlimited speed/capacity.
Counterargument: there are fundamental reasons for data caps. To provide service at a high speed to lots of people at a reasonable price, edge-case data users must be throttled. Increasing capacity reduces the number of users who must be throttled.
Then they should apply caps or throttling during hours when capacity is a concern and let me download 100 GB of games from Steam between 4 and 7 AM when the Netflix watchers have gone to bed.
They do, or at least T-Mobile does: their unlimited plan throttles you once you exceed X gigabytes in a month (I believe X is 25), but only when the cell is congested.
That's a bit like how T-Mobile does it. You get 50GB/month that is always at full speed, and then after that you get deprioritized if you're on a busy tower.
So it doesn't depend on time of day, but how many other customers are sharing your tower.
> Data prioritization will only be noticeable when you access a congested tower and have used over 50GB of data in a particular billing cycle. You will continue to get unlimited high speed data on your smartphone when you aren’t accessing a congested tower. In that way it’s different from data throttling, which slows you down for the remainder of your bill cycle regardless of network conditions, all the time.
I’m paying $100 flat rate for 3 lines. About $33/line for unlimited calls, text and data.
T-mobile doesn’t even charge for roaming on a whole bunch of countries. In my Australia vacation I didn’t even need to buy a new SIM card. Whatsapp and google maps all the way.
Their speeds also beat Sprint and AT&T. It’s the only carrier I have faith that screws it’s consumers the least.
AT&T has my blood on its hands by charging me $500 for roaming in Canada when I didn’t even cross the border.
The problem is that T-Mobile has poor coverage. Enticing me to switch away from my cheap pre-paid T-Mobile plan actually works against them, because at that point I'll absolutely switch to another carrier.
Yeah, there are two aspects that keep me from ditching Comcast at my apartment. Burning through the data limit on bulk downloads that I'm happy to run overnight when it's not congested, and ping, which is the harder one to fix. But it's not _that_ bad on T-mobile, so if it weren't for the data allowance problem I might be willing to suck it up.
Counter - counter argument: data caps fundamentally help segment users and make more $$$ from those who value more data. This doesn’t directly relate to capping download rate.
Related:
Growth on total users and downloads is far far greater than improved spectral capacity in 5G and hence more cells are needed to improve capacity. So costs not only to refresh, but to build more cells are significant.
If you were going to make bandwidth costs actually based on costs to provide service, you would probably end up with something similar to the way that electricity is priced. A connection fee plus a metered rate that varies to be higher during periods of high demand and lower during periods of low demand. The data cap model is pretty clearly designed just to extract extra money from customers, not as a genuine way of fairly allocating costs.
This can be solved by selling plans by speed instead of data caps; ie, you pay for a guaranteed speed (like 1Mbps) and can use it as much as you want. The more speed you buy the more expensive it gets, with the full LTE speed being crazy expensive as you'd essentially be buying out the entire tower in that case (but then again, who needs 150Mbps+? I'd be happy with a stable 10Mbps to be honest, for mobile there is rarely a need for more).
What are you suggesting? If it's that there's some market-wide conspiracy to provide worse service for the sake of long-term profits, there's zero evidence to back that. Cell phone plans have gotten significantly better in the past decades, and most people are able to pay less and get a better level of service. Things have gotten better and cheaper, because there is competition, and there is always going to be market pressure that pushes them to provide better service at lower costs than their competitors. Or are you suggesting that you think there is going to be a new development of a price-fixing conspiracy among telecoms in the next few years?
Alternatively, are you suggesting (on a website that is ostensibly about venture capitalism) that the entire foundation of economics and markets is shakey?
I hate when these anti-market socialist/communist type comments pop up. Everyone hates their ISP/cellular provider and mindlessly upvotes nonsense like this. There's zero truth to what you're saying!
I had a thought that the left tries to divvy up what value already exists, and the right tries to create an environment where new value can be created.
In order for the left to justify their agenda, they try to make it seem that it's pointless to try to create new value because of things like cartels, monopolies, etc. They then present the conclusion that the only way for a person to improve their financial position is to take from others.
Author here. There's no conspiracy, just an incredible amount of 5G hype.
Note that the source of the comment is the CEO of the largest manufacturer, and I have similar from CTOs of Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica.
This claim just seems ... unlikely and counter to economics. Prices dropping isn't about business owners deciding they feel nice, it is about the fact that consumers reward cheap producers. If the producers refuse to drop prices when thy can, then the first person to break into the market doing something different will get crazy profits.
I would liken the situation to 2007 in Australia. Sending instant messages was basically free from the telco's perspectives - but they charged 20c or something to the sender. Insane margins.
The first company that I remember challenging that was Apple, who bypassed the whole business and enabled essentially free text messages with iMessage. 10 years later, the markup on using text messages seems to have been completely wiped out. Apple also happened to be the most profitable company in the world through that period.
Sure, iMessage isn't linked directly to the profits, yet somehow the invisible hand seems to have been working.
If the producers refuse to drop prices when thy can, then the first person to break into the market doing something different will get crazy profits
Market entry is difficult because it's gated by spectrum availability. It's hard for new competitors to offer wireless services. The market for wireless services in most countries is very cozy - it's usually one or two incumbent carriers that are about the same size, own about the same amount of spectrum, and don't work very hard to take market share from each other. I would argue that in a lot of cases, wireless services markets are stuck in a Nash equilibrium.
Smart regulation that might fix this would be to outlaw service contracts and cancellation fees to allow consumers to exploit pricing 'mistakes' (which is how you'd break a Nash equilibrium), and maybe force the carriers to re-bid on their spectrum every 5 years. Unfortunately another common problem with wireless services is regulatory capture - in my country, all the regulators who watch the wireless industry also end up working for it.
My dream startup is a next generation telco (without the usual data cap bullshit) but I have yet to crack the spectrum problem. Spectrum is auctioned off by the government and it's hard to compete with the existing players; we're talking amounts close to billions here, and that kind of money is not easy to come by, even from VCs.
isn't it capacity as in more devices to the same transmitter.
The problem today is already too many devices for the transmitter internet pipe. 5G will make this worse (or better, if you are a Telco overselling data without consequences)
It's not that easy. 5G uses spatial multiplexing so multiple devices can send/receive on the same frequency bands at the same time without interfering with each other (4G also supports this to a lesser extent already).
Any time I'm not over the 5GB data limit on my plan, really. I can speed test and get values like 102 Mbps down / 35Mbps up on TMobile US, on an old device (iPhone 6). Newer devices have better radios/basebands that support fancier air interface features and thus get even faster speeds.
I regularly see 150-200 Mbps (testing with fast.com in London on EE) but it can drop to 50-odd even with a good signal (I'm guessing due to contention) and the drop off with a low signal (1/2 bars) is dramatic.
If 5G gives 100+ on two bars and increases capacity enough to keep the speeds up at busy times, it's worth it.
Dang, that's good. I've only ever once seen anything over 100 and that was when LTE was brand new. Now I tend to average between 15-50.
(This is in West Michigan)
Author here. Actually, the LTE being installed today will give 100-300 megabits to most users, except at the edge of the cell or behind a building, etc. The "usually less than 100 megabits" is equipment from more than a year ago. The right comparison is 2019 equipment against 2019 equipment.
I was a little disappointed after looking at the NR spec, it looks like 5G is mostly a sample rate multiplier on the 30.72MHz clock. It's still OFDM 8x8 MIMO. I'm sure there is some other additions that take advantage/optimize that additional bandwidth, but it doesn't have the same excitement as going from CDMA to OFDM did.
Innovation is great. But with more carriers throttling after a few GBs, there's no customer value yet.
What's the value in getting 1Gbs when my plan throttles after 5GB. That's 40 seconds before I'd be throttled for the rest of the month.
Your TCP traffic is encapsulated in a GTP tunnel from the head end to the local tower / aggregation point. The network looks after moving / switching the endpoint of the tunnel as you move from cell to cell.
Basically all the hard stuff is done to make the tunnel endpoint roam from cell to cell. Your TCP stream, inside the tunnel, doesn't realise anything is happening and doesn't need to change in any way to keep working.
> The primary technologies include: Millimeter wave bands (26, 28, 38, and 60 GHz) offer performance as high as 20 gigabits per second ... "Low-band 5G" and "Mid-band 5G" use frequencies from 600 MHz to 6 GHz, especially 3.5-4.2 GHz. [0]
It's excepted for South Korea, Japan and China take the lead in adoption and applications. US customers might not be not priority, because US consumers have have very low bandwidth caps, lets wait and see.
I think many people underestimate the ambition of 5G and assume that 5G is just 4G with more bandwidth.
Big advantage of 5G over 4G is that it can _also_ use unlicensed spectrum. This enables more use cases like enhanced mobile broadbands, device-to-device mesh networks, private 5G networks, etc.
5G is designed to use wifi when available. It's more than just new cellular radio interface and antennas (NR part). 5G connection can use 5G/LTE/WiFi simultaneously. Gibabit LTE can be used as an anchor for 5G functionality even when 5G network is not available.
In this sense 5G NR is not a priority. 5G NR first arrives in the most congested areas to increase the bandwidth. If you have only LTE, you may not get as much as those with 5G phones in some concerts and crowded events.
Among the first uses of 5G NG are base stations companies build for themselves. Like networks in factories and other locations using unlicensed 60 GHz band. It looks like Chinese are jumping into industrial use of 5G very rapidly. They are already ahead of the schedule. Consumer applications will follow.
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I was kind of expecting someone will trim in with proper information and Engineering prospective. But nearly 150 Comments into it it seems there are lots of misinformation.
Yes, 5G, which includes 4.9G, or 3GPP Rel 13, 14, 15, will provides lots more Capacity. I see many saying this is only good for telcos, and 5G will be the same once everyone moved over. Which is so far from truth.
Your current LTE speed is limited by Telcos capacity. So if you have less people in your area sharing your bandwith, you are likely to get much higher speed. So If Telcos improves its capacity, it also means you get higher speed when you use it since it is less contention. This is of course assuming the demand stay constant.
And some comments refer to less congested in 5G being the reason, once everyone moves to 5G it will be the same. This is again false. 5G is more like an 4G extension, you really dont switch to 5G, at least not in the 3G to 4G way.
In many developed countries, Smartphone Users has already hit a plateau. Growth is going to be slow. Massive MIMO, in 4.9G or what ever they decide to call it, ( likely 5G ) already provides 3x capacity in FDD-LTE environment, and up to 10x in TDD-LTE. So the network, all of a sudden is capable of supporting 3x to 10x more users. As we have stated before there aren't that much user growth anymore, so as a user you now get 3x speed up when Massive MIMO is deployed in Handset and Cell tower. ( Actually this is over simplify and it is more then that )
So you ask but that is assuming user are using the same amount of Data. Most of the Data we use are actually Video, this is especially true on Mobile. We have HEVC, I doubt it will cut the Data required, but you will have a much better quality streaming.
All this is 4.9G with Massive MIMO, This is excluding additional capacity with Small Cell, LTE- LAA. And 5G is actually designed with Massive MIMO in mind, even more efficient, additional spectrum, even more antenna in Massive MIMO. It is not too hard to imagine by 2025 we have at least 20x the Capacity then we have today.
Now can you imagine you spend 20x the time then today watching Video content in 2025?
Which is one reason why many telcos around the world are already switching to unlimited*, or priority based access after certain amount of data. And assuming no additional killer apps for Data usage, Telcos will likely have to consolidate even further to may be only 3 per region.
Author Here to clarify
The article is comparing today's LTE and 5G, deploying in 2018-2019. Is there really a big difference to the consumer between 100-400 meg real speeds (LTE) and 5G at 200 -600 meg mostly? In what application?
Latency in today's equipment from Ericsson and Huawei for either is 5-15 milliseconds.
Only 10-20% of the "5G" will be the 1 gig millimeter wave until after 2020. Even then, what's the practical difference for most people between 150 megabits and 900 megabits?
Some details:
Most LTE going in today is 100-400 meg real with a decent connection, 600-900 meg peak. (3 or 4 CA, 4x4 MIMO.)
2) 80-90% of the "5G" in the world through 2020 will be midband 3.5 GHz 200-600 meg. Only a small fraction will be the true 1 gig millimeter wave.
3) Latency on either most likely 5-15 milliseconds. (The difference in Ericsson equipment is 1-2 ms.)
email me, daveb@dslprime.com for references to primary sources. Don't believe the hype.
5G millimeter wave is planned for 1-4 ms URLLC, but not until 2022-2025. It can go 10-20 gigabits in the lab today, but I don't know any carrier designing for more than 1 gig to a user in the next 5 years.
> Connected cars are already on the road, using lidar & radar, not the phone network. Xu points out, “even today we have the technology that can support autonomous driving”.
This point is silly.
Lidar and radar don't replace high bandwidth internet on a self-driving car. The beefy super computer in the trunk is trying to replace the cloud compute processing that is inaccessible because there's not enough low latency, reliable bandwidth available to stream a dozen camera, lidar, radar, and IR feeds over the internet for remote processing.
Self driving right now requires either precision 3D mapping and local processing of a huge amount of data from multiple sources OR highway-only limitations where there are fewer objects to track that all move in predictable ways. Both of these would be easier and produce better results with more bandwidth and lower latency.
5G may not be mature enough to make a difference today, but that doesn't mean connected and self-driving cars aren't a legitimate use case for the technology and its stated goals.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadOr companies that want to break the residential broadband monopoly in a local area. Personally, I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town. 5G would be a complete success if that happens.
I'm curious as to how expensive implementation will be for municipal providers.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's also not obvious to me that wireless is better in dense areas, especially since the main cost in wired internet is laying the cable in the first place, which is easier to do cost effectively when you have an urban market to offer service to.
In either case, the channels still have capacity limits. I'm not saying it's impossible, which is partly why I brought it up in the first place. I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in. The main advantage wires have is you can just run more of them when you reach your capacity (or in some cases you can just change the hardware at either end of the wire to newer technology).
The bandwidth is only limited per tower, you can easily double the throughput of a given area by doubling the number of cell towers (and reducing power to avoid interference). It’s a lot cheaper to build a new tower than to run new wires to 200 homes (permits and all). On top of that 5g gives 10x bandwidth over 4g in the same band.
You can have 1,000 wires in a bit of pipe, effectively 1,000 "spectrums." The air will always only be a single spectrum.
Cell division does not scale infinitely, and becomes more and more complex to manage.
Running cable you do once, then you can benefit for a long time. Wired will always be the better technical solution, and more economic one, in built up areas.
Yeah... about that: https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-reiterates-...
Is Comcast really that bad? In my admittedly European experience all the service providers are (dis)functional and greedy pretty much to the same degree, none of them are good guys.
The rebrand to Xfinity is a joke.
TMO (yeah Austria, not US but still) were bragging about not hashing passwords on twitter just a couple of weeks ago. Not exactly professional.
It's basically like comic book villainy, the only thing missing is photos of Comcast Executives cackling over the complaints from customers. And I say that as someone who was overall okay with Comcast's service the one time I had them. The behavior of Comcast defines the perception most of the US has with them.
There are plenty of horror stories, however. I may just be lucky so far.
AT&T has U-Verse DSLAMS in some corners, but gave up on covering the entire town and the copper network is old and crumbling. There is zero hope of any kind of fiber service showing up.
In my personal experience Comcast's service isn't bad, but their rates are tied to the fact that there is no competition. My belief is that prices would drop about 50% and speeds would jump up 20% if another company could get into the space.
And that's just for IP service. Video service is another story altogether. TMO's purchase of Layer3 gives me some hope that maybe there will be a decent streaming service they will bundle with it.
Yep. My town has exactly one provider: Comcast. They even negotiated a 50-year exclusive right of way back in the 80s by lining some local politician pockets.
I pay $250/month for internet, landline phone, and basic cable bundle.
This includes about $50 worth of bullshit “copper recovery fees” and the like which are designed to sound like taxes but are really just pure profit for Comcast.
I now have Verizon and the difference is vast. The service has gone down twice in five years. When I called it in, I was immediately connected to someone who knew what DHCP meant. They’re not perfect but they’re a lot better.
All of these traditional telcos are garbage and their ratings in multiple arenas showcase that very clearly.
All of those towers cost money to install and maintain, which adds to your expense, so for low enough population densities, it's not economical. For small towns it can be economical, but it depends on the geography. If it's very hilly or there are lots of tall trees you will have a hard time getting line of sight to potential customers.
It’s really a tough situation in the rural areas. To run last mile cable costs thousands of dollars per house with houses quarter to half mile apart. and at $50-100/mo, it doesnt make sense to serve those customers.
With next gent Wifi/5G that's actually a great distance.
The big problem for rural deployment is that the backhaul was/is too expensive, but with wireless advances a mesh is the optimal (cheap and simple) way to go.
Additionally, wireless telcos have already gotten used to not providing real internet access to their customers. Instead they provide a proxied, nat'd, no-ports, almost web only service.
And, before you go thinking I'm just the radical conservative, recognize that this cuts both ways. I'm also of the opinion that we shouldn't be subsidizing people's high-carbon lifestyles by making roads free, for example.
"Who cares if the govt wastes more money because they already waste money?"
It's a nice thought, but where in the budget do you propose we find several tens of billions of dollars?
Also, it's about relative cost... what about data caps? If they intend to compete with wired in home connections for things like set top (online streaming), they'll need a compelling story, and not running out of your allotment or being throttled after watching a couple 4K movies in the evening less than a week into your billing cycle.
Due to higher frequency, 5G might actually have a disadvantage in range for a single tower, in dense urban environment due to weaker penetration. But it could be compensated by deploying more towers, at more strategic locations. The value proposition is that the gain in speed and delay would be well worth it.
Weak penetration is still a problem for long range open field 5G communication, but due to different factors like fog, weather conditions, etc.
Regarding data caps, I view it as more of a business model question, less related to the technical capabilities of 4G vs 5G.
Also, this article is correct that there is no similar difference in "5G." There is really no such thing, outside of carrier marketing, as "5G." One could try retrofitting meaning to "5G," like "OK now we'll really do packet switched phone calls" or something like that. But almost all the technologies that come under the heading 5G were foreseen and often standardized when LTE standards were first written.
LTE stands for Long Term Evolution. It's meant to be a durable, evolving set of standards for wireless communication.
Wouldn't have been much of a thought out framework for "long-term evolution" if it was scrapped within 10 years!
This is important for consumers. When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G? In real world scenarios, the number of people in a cell (due to limited spectrum bandwidth) limits 4G speeds, not protocol maximums. My understanding of 5G is that bandwidth can be used much more efficiently (both by being able to allocate less in idle situations and by spatial multiplexing), benefitting telcos and customers both.
5G will be no different in that way. At first, the few people with 5G devices and networks will have very fast speeds (mostly), but once everyone in 4G moves to 5G, we’re back to how it is today.
I’m also curious what the effect of all the WiFi networks will have in regards to interference with 5G bands.
Would there be a benefit to split 50:50 between 4G and 5G?
http://www.3gpp.org/technologies/keywords-acronyms/101-carri...
Unfortunately that does not boost the overall capacity available so the higher peaks speeds may not improve the average experience.
So, yes, more devices will mean less speed for everyone. However, there is more speed to go around, so the same number of devices in a 4G setting will get less speed than the same number in a 5G.
Or is that not the GP's point?
Is that the sole reason 5G is faster, or will being able to allocate less in idle situations and utilize spatial multiplexing support faster speeds even with a comparable number of devices?
(I'm assuming this problem is already considered. Genuinely asking, in case someone has a good link to read on it.)
The network isn't that dumb. The technical details are far beyond the scope of a HN comment, but the network can gracefully deny service to users. Think about what happens if you run out of data allowance or prepaid credit - your phone doesn't frantically spam the network, it just asks for service and is politely told to try again later. If all else fails, you can just de-register all the devices connected to a given cell site and revert them to emergency calls only.
And, honestly, from the way I've seen phones behave on older wifi networks, I would be surprised if some aren't actually spamming the network. Unnecessarily fast. Worse, I would hope the network has some protection built in for the bad actors that do.
They don't. It's extremely easy to DoS an off-the-shelf (Ericsson, etc) mobile network if you know what to do. All it takes is one packet per minute or so. ;)
is that why some budget MVNOs only offer 2g/3g access when their parent network has lte?
This is really a corporate squabblefest over branding, control of standards and intellectual property. There are misaligned incentives between IP holders like Qualcomm, equipment manufacturers and network operators.
The networks want the 5G brand so they can sell the image of an "all-new superfast network", but they want to spend as little as possible on new infrastructure. IP holders want to ensure that any future development is tied to licensing their technology. Equipment manufacturers want to sidestep those license costs, either by avoiding new technologies with freshly-minted patents or by moving to technologies with fewer dependencies on proprietary IP. US cable operators want access to millimetre bands to expand their fixed broadband network, while European landline broadband operators don't want new competition.
Nobody is being honest about those clashing incentives, so we're seeing huge amounts of babble and FUD from all sides.
What's being said here is, "We don't foresee any problems with having our current level of capacity provisioning, and we're fine with the level of service we provide."
They will require line of site because higher frequencies can't penetrate obstacles. To get 5g speeds and capacities, you're going to need to put towers everywhere.
Smaller towers yes, but many many more of them.
The impact of land topology is seen as so important that the UK Ordnance Survey have got involved with simulating 5G coverage:
http://os.uk/5g
https://5g.co.uk/
Everyone likes to argue that you can't have an all wireless society because there is limited bandwidth available, but as it is we are only using about 10% of the usable spectrum (from about 200MHZ to 8GHZ) for network data connectivity, and even then most of it is still privately controlled - if an area has too many AT&T subscribers and not enough Verizon customers, the Verizon spectrums go to waste while the AT&T ones are oversaturated.
There are a few things I could name off the top of my head that would overnight dramatically improve technology, but nationalizing back light for the people to use and then having this entire range opened up to generic data transfer with the same congestion rules and regulations used on currently open bandwidth rings would go a long way to improving most of our lives dramatically.
Could you name a few? This is HN after all, we like to get technical.
Consider the digital television transition - it freed up a substantial amount of spectrum for other users, but it took many years and cost billions of dollars. Broadcast TV and radio is less significant today than it was in 2009, but there are thousands of spectrum user groups who would find it difficult to switch to dynamically managed spectrum, not to mention the potential safety issues.
The RF spectrum is a busy old place. We can carve out little bits here and there, but there just aren't many useful blocks left that aren't already being used by something quite important. Most of those allocations involve co-ordination with the ITU and couldn't be significantly altered without international agreement.
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/january_201...
Kinda like how 2.4 GHz is damn near useless for many people?
But the fault doesn't completely lie with the telcos. Getting permission to build a tower can take years.
https://wembley.ee.co.uk/
For more dynamic situations (think Glastonbury music festival) the telcos have been deploying mobile cell towers from the back of trucks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_cell_sites
These don't just get used for pop concerts in stadiums but also for disaster response:
http://about.att.com/inside_connections_blog/hurricane_maria
Except they're more interested in pitching their bullshit iBeacon-based "SmartGuide" tracking technology or light show than network access. This is one of the major problems I see with mobile telcos; they seem to get sidetracked on everything but the mobile network which should be their top priority.
No, I don't give a shit about kids programming the light shows or iBeacons, I need fast, rock-solid network access; leave the rest to other companies that have the resources and focus do it better.
Counterargument: there are fundamental reasons for data caps. To provide service at a high speed to lots of people at a reasonable price, edge-case data users must be throttled. Increasing capacity reduces the number of users who must be throttled.
So it doesn't depend on time of day, but how many other customers are sharing your tower.
https://www.t-mobile.com/customer/mydatausage.html
> Data prioritization will only be noticeable when you access a congested tower and have used over 50GB of data in a particular billing cycle. You will continue to get unlimited high speed data on your smartphone when you aren’t accessing a congested tower. In that way it’s different from data throttling, which slows you down for the remainder of your bill cycle regardless of network conditions, all the time.
Tmobile does have some prepaid plans and older grandfathered plans, but the ONE plan is pretty good, especially at the multi-line rates.
So yes, I’d expect cell service to get either cheaper or better over time instead of more expensive and worse.
It looks like MintSIM is the cheap option now, they do 5GB for $30 or 10GB for $38.
T-mobile doesn’t even charge for roaming on a whole bunch of countries. In my Australia vacation I didn’t even need to buy a new SIM card. Whatsapp and google maps all the way.
Their speeds also beat Sprint and AT&T. It’s the only carrier I have faith that screws it’s consumers the least.
AT&T has my blood on its hands by charging me $500 for roaming in Canada when I didn’t even cross the border.
T-mobile is a night and day difference.
Alternatively, are you suggesting (on a website that is ostensibly about venture capitalism) that the entire foundation of economics and markets is shakey?
I hate when these anti-market socialist/communist type comments pop up. Everyone hates their ISP/cellular provider and mindlessly upvotes nonsense like this. There's zero truth to what you're saying!
In order for the left to justify their agenda, they try to make it seem that it's pointless to try to create new value because of things like cartels, monopolies, etc. They then present the conclusion that the only way for a person to improve their financial position is to take from others.
I would liken the situation to 2007 in Australia. Sending instant messages was basically free from the telco's perspectives - but they charged 20c or something to the sender. Insane margins.
The first company that I remember challenging that was Apple, who bypassed the whole business and enabled essentially free text messages with iMessage. 10 years later, the markup on using text messages seems to have been completely wiped out. Apple also happened to be the most profitable company in the world through that period.
Sure, iMessage isn't linked directly to the profits, yet somehow the invisible hand seems to have been working.
Market entry is difficult because it's gated by spectrum availability. It's hard for new competitors to offer wireless services. The market for wireless services in most countries is very cozy - it's usually one or two incumbent carriers that are about the same size, own about the same amount of spectrum, and don't work very hard to take market share from each other. I would argue that in a lot of cases, wireless services markets are stuck in a Nash equilibrium.
Smart regulation that might fix this would be to outlaw service contracts and cancellation fees to allow consumers to exploit pricing 'mistakes' (which is how you'd break a Nash equilibrium), and maybe force the carriers to re-bid on their spectrum every 5 years. Unfortunately another common problem with wireless services is regulatory capture - in my country, all the regulators who watch the wireless industry also end up working for it.
There’s a reason it got bought for 22 billion. The telcos were digging their own walled garden grave.
It is important to note that data is not consumed at the same speed it is downloaded at.
The problem today is already too many devices for the transmitter internet pipe. 5G will make this worse (or better, if you are a Telco overselling data without consequences)
Any time I'm not over the 5GB data limit on my plan, really. I can speed test and get values like 102 Mbps down / 35Mbps up on TMobile US, on an old device (iPhone 6). Newer devices have better radios/basebands that support fancier air interface features and thus get even faster speeds.
If 5G gives 100+ on two bars and increases capacity enough to keep the speeds up at busy times, it's worth it.
I used to have the same on ATT, but recently got T Mobile:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/wngQxpA5nqL27ikI3
112 down, 14 up. Unlimited, for less than 3 GB cost at ATT.
Honestly don't know why I still give Comcast $25/mo.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16334690/t-mobile-unlimit...
5G is basically a marketing term for a global population used to cell networks changing "generation" every few years.
5G improves and augments the existing LTE standards, it doesn't throw them all out and start from scratch.
This reminds me this famous quote by Bill Gates: "640 kB ought to be enough for anybody"
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2863/did-bill-g...
Cameras sometimes do. I can't think of a second one.
The main focus of IoT is tiny embedded devices. The biggest use is very likely to always be data-light.
Do we need a better protocol for cell data and would this improve throughput and latency?
Your TCP traffic is encapsulated in a GTP tunnel from the head end to the local tower / aggregation point. The network looks after moving / switching the endpoint of the tunnel as you move from cell to cell.
Basically all the hard stuff is done to make the tunnel endpoint roam from cell to cell. Your TCP stream, inside the tunnel, doesn't realise anything is happening and doesn't need to change in any way to keep working.
See also "5G NR frequency bands" [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands
I think many people underestimate the ambition of 5G and assume that 5G is just 4G with more bandwidth.
Big advantage of 5G over 4G is that it can _also_ use unlicensed spectrum. This enables more use cases like enhanced mobile broadbands, device-to-device mesh networks, private 5G networks, etc.
5G is designed to use wifi when available. It's more than just new cellular radio interface and antennas (NR part). 5G connection can use 5G/LTE/WiFi simultaneously. Gibabit LTE can be used as an anchor for 5G functionality even when 5G network is not available. In this sense 5G NR is not a priority. 5G NR first arrives in the most congested areas to increase the bandwidth. If you have only LTE, you may not get as much as those with 5G phones in some concerts and crowded events.
Among the first uses of 5G NG are base stations companies build for themselves. Like networks in factories and other locations using unlicensed 60 GHz band. It looks like Chinese are jumping into industrial use of 5G very rapidly. They are already ahead of the schedule. Consumer applications will follow.
Seems to be there is a whole lot more complexity doing 5G, would 802.1ax with OFDMA sub-channels not be a better way to use that spectrum?
Yes, 5G, which includes 4.9G, or 3GPP Rel 13, 14, 15, will provides lots more Capacity. I see many saying this is only good for telcos, and 5G will be the same once everyone moved over. Which is so far from truth.
Your current LTE speed is limited by Telcos capacity. So if you have less people in your area sharing your bandwith, you are likely to get much higher speed. So If Telcos improves its capacity, it also means you get higher speed when you use it since it is less contention. This is of course assuming the demand stay constant.
And some comments refer to less congested in 5G being the reason, once everyone moves to 5G it will be the same. This is again false. 5G is more like an 4G extension, you really dont switch to 5G, at least not in the 3G to 4G way.
In many developed countries, Smartphone Users has already hit a plateau. Growth is going to be slow. Massive MIMO, in 4.9G or what ever they decide to call it, ( likely 5G ) already provides 3x capacity in FDD-LTE environment, and up to 10x in TDD-LTE. So the network, all of a sudden is capable of supporting 3x to 10x more users. As we have stated before there aren't that much user growth anymore, so as a user you now get 3x speed up when Massive MIMO is deployed in Handset and Cell tower. ( Actually this is over simplify and it is more then that )
So you ask but that is assuming user are using the same amount of Data. Most of the Data we use are actually Video, this is especially true on Mobile. We have HEVC, I doubt it will cut the Data required, but you will have a much better quality streaming.
All this is 4.9G with Massive MIMO, This is excluding additional capacity with Small Cell, LTE- LAA. And 5G is actually designed with Massive MIMO in mind, even more efficient, additional spectrum, even more antenna in Massive MIMO. It is not too hard to imagine by 2025 we have at least 20x the Capacity then we have today.
Now can you imagine you spend 20x the time then today watching Video content in 2025?
Which is one reason why many telcos around the world are already switching to unlimited*, or priority based access after certain amount of data. And assuming no additional killer apps for Data usage, Telcos will likely have to consolidate even further to may be only 3 per region.
Only 10-20% of the "5G" will be the 1 gig millimeter wave until after 2020. Even then, what's the practical difference for most people between 150 megabits and 900 megabits?
Some details: Most LTE going in today is 100-400 meg real with a decent connection, 600-900 meg peak. (3 or 4 CA, 4x4 MIMO.) 2) 80-90% of the "5G" in the world through 2020 will be midband 3.5 GHz 200-600 meg. Only a small fraction will be the true 1 gig millimeter wave. 3) Latency on either most likely 5-15 milliseconds. (The difference in Ericsson equipment is 1-2 ms.)
email me, daveb@dslprime.com for references to primary sources. Don't believe the hype. 5G millimeter wave is planned for 1-4 ms URLLC, but not until 2022-2025. It can go 10-20 gigabits in the lab today, but I don't know any carrier designing for more than 1 gig to a user in the next 5 years.
This point is silly.
Lidar and radar don't replace high bandwidth internet on a self-driving car. The beefy super computer in the trunk is trying to replace the cloud compute processing that is inaccessible because there's not enough low latency, reliable bandwidth available to stream a dozen camera, lidar, radar, and IR feeds over the internet for remote processing.
Self driving right now requires either precision 3D mapping and local processing of a huge amount of data from multiple sources OR highway-only limitations where there are fewer objects to track that all move in predictable ways. Both of these would be easier and produce better results with more bandwidth and lower latency.
5G may not be mature enough to make a difference today, but that doesn't mean connected and self-driving cars aren't a legitimate use case for the technology and its stated goals.