Ask HN: What would you do with 5G?

Get rid of my cable internet for starters, that's what I'd do.

For work I have a bunch of fielded 3g devices. I don’t know of many “interesting” use cases are both inherently mobile and hamstrung by 4g. Most have (much) lower data demand than IRL streaming, which is already a thing that exists with 4g.

Coverage, network cost and hardware cost are the interesting factors. We’ll see how 5g actually effects those once the shine of the hot new tech wears off.

The real, actionable, answer is boring: I’d upgrade my hotspot and If the price is reasonable, I’d replace my household ISP.

Depends on the price!

I’m assuming the main mobile/IoT use case will be persistent video. Real-time streaming for facial recognition, event detection, survey, etc.

It will replace most of the MPLS and similar tech for field offices. Better mousetrap.

Personally, I’m more interested in low bandwidth (3G-like), high penetration technology for IoT.. metering, telemetry, etc. In the long run, I think hardware will get cheaper and faster at lower power, and streaming everything to cloud will always be less reliable and higher opex.

Move to a remote mountain, that 5G radiation is dangerous to health.

>-1Gbit/s data rate

>-1ms latency

So better than current top of the line 1Gbit stationary fiber? 20 people maxing single base station, and dont forget the xx GB/month data cap. What you describe is maybe 7-8G.

But just for fun: phones will become thin clients if/when we eventually reach ~100Mbit _unmetered standard data plans_ as a baseline. The idea of phone OS might vanish, handsets will be treated as fancy skins for your cloud data instance. Commodity hardware, no more $1K smartphones.

5G is almost completely useless for most people. It's actually very useful for governments to spy and for big corps to market and embed more in our capitalist societies. So of course they're going to shove it down our throats as the "next big thing."

Get ear cancer from the stronger radiation levels.

More internet controlled robots!