4G is fast enough for me right now. My problem is the ridiculous pricing of wireless data. In ideal circumstances, I can hit nearly 75mb/s over LTE... but that just means that I could burn up my entire 3GB allotment in under 6 minutes. At $15 for the next 3 gigs, my marginal cost is nearly $1/minute for full-speed 4G data.
Even between wifi at home and work, streaming Spotify while driving and miscellaneous app usage off wifi gets me to basically 4GB a month. I can keep downloading more songs since I'm on Premium, but I think even with that I still actively have to watch my data usage and make a conscious effort to conserve data. I dunno, it's just nuts to try to do anything online without breaking your data cap in the world of 1080p and high quality audio streams
Agreed. Don't need it, don't want it. Every new generation of wireless broadband has greater and greater spectral efficiency and yet none of that savings is ever passed on to the customer. The rates we pay to move bits over a radio interface is extortionate. The carrier will use 5G to sell phones and a largely uninformed public will line up to to buy them.
I doubt wireless data will get really cheap give than wireless bandwidth has a physical limit. There is only so much capacity and the infrastructure is not cheap so providers need enough customer to subscribe to pay for it. That means oversubscribing customers or throttling in some manner. Ask yourself if you would prefer 75mb/s for burst use vs 75kb/s sustained use?
Or maybe you'll want 200 GB plan in low density Sweden? 699 SEK/month (~$82), rather expensive as Nordic countries go, but at least no one can say I'm cherry picking. http://www.tele2.se/handla/mobilt-bredband-4g/.
Please don't buy the propaganda spread by the carriers. It's just full of excuses.
In their material you'll hear about how difficult it is to provide service for some unusual special case, like a stadium somewhere during a huge event and that's why. Stop asking, just buy our overpriced plan.
Wireless is much cheaper in other countries. In Austria I can get a LTE flatrate (no hidden data limits, tethering allowed) for around 20-30 Dollars a month (depending on the speed, see https://www.drei.at/portal/de/privat/tarife/internet-tarife/...). The wireless carriers there compete with the cable providers and market their product as cable replacement. In the US the cheapest flatrate costs around 100 Dollars, and even then the amount of included data for tethering is still limited to some ridiculously low amount (I think something like 16 GB for T-Mobile).
"For unlimited smartphone LTE data plan, full available speeds apply to 6 GB of hotspot data per payment cycle, then speeds slowed for remainder of payment cycle."
gst was talking about a mobile plan offering unlimited tethering/hotspot access. You're comparing that to a much more expensive plan with unlimited on-device LTE but limited hotspot access (8GB on Boost).
It's a bullshit argument that exists because the US has allowed the industry to rebuild Bell System style telcos, unlike those anti-business socialists in places like South Korea.
Without a strong regulatory hand, the carriers' incentive in the US to to provide the highest return for the spectrum they've acquired. That extracting the highest revenue for the smallest capital investment -- means fewer towers optimized for coverage vs speed. Performance optimization requires more smaller facilities, which is capital intensive and appears wasteful from a Verizon/AT&T POV.
The reality is the scarcity of bandwidth is minimal because the infrastructure itself gets cheaper the more customers you have. So adding a new tower or just adding more hardware to existing towers is a fixed cost which it's effects go down with the number of paying customers. This is classic economies of scale working in the favor of the Telcos they just don't want to admit it.
"Economies of scale" means that your per-customer costs go down as you get more customers.[1]
Cellular deployment has almost no economies of scale. Deploying a new cell tower costs the same whether you already have 10 towers or 100. Meanwhile, just a handful of users can saturate a tower and/or its backhaul, so more customers requires smaller cells and more towers.
Most towers peak below 50% utilization as bandwidth decreases with range. So, your average cost drops.
Put another way, to have good coverage and 1 customer would be ridiculously expensive. There are always going to be areas with few customers. You add towers in areas with lot's of customers.
Your average cost only drops over a relatively narrow range: from where N towers is enough to support your users to where N+1 towers are necessary. After N is big enough to cover your area, cost still goes up basically linearly with the number of users (just in a saw-tooth fashion rather than a straight line).
It's totally unlike the costs of any service with real economics of scale, such as software.
For vast swaths of the country, usage would be low enough that it doesn't even fully use one tower. For those areas, the marginal cost of adding a user is effectively zero.
All bandwidth has a physical limit. Without seeing the books on capacity planning for your average wireless provider it is impossible to know what the current situation really is but with what I know of telcos if they can get away with billing for 'air' they definitely will.
Note how it is just about impossible to get any usage statistics other than 'per person' from the various providers.
Everyone bills for what they can--that's why you pay $2/GB for more flash on an iPhone. The question is: why do data caps persist despite pretty much everyone having four different major carriers to choose from, plus often one or more MVNOs?
Not only is there no evidence of carrier collusion in the U.S. market, the idea doesn't even make logical sense. Cartels are inherently unstable.[1] Participants only have an incentive to continue colluding when everyone is making money. T-Mobile is barely breaking even, and Sprint is actively losing money. It's absurd to argue they are colluding to protect a status quo they don't benefit from.
T-Mobile and other wireless carries barely break even in the same sense that Amazon barely breaks even - They are reinvesting most of their profits to increase their profitability in the future. T-Mobile actually has one of the highest gross profit margins in the sector, along with Verizon[1]. Their net profit is indeed low, but again, mostly due to continually investing in infrastructure upgrades and spectrum purchases.
I don't think these types of businesses will ever be inherently extremely profitable, but Verizon was making a nice chunk of change from ~2009-2014 until T-Mobile basically defected from the dominate market pricing contract scheme.
And of course, in America there would never be such a thing as carrier collusion, that's totally unthinkable, so what those carriers in Europe were up to would not at all be done on other continents.
T-Mobile and Sprint might be evil companies, but what incentive do they have to collude to protect a status quo under which they don't make any money? You're not just accusing them of being "bad companies"--you're accusing them of being irrational.
In the case of TMUS and S, and any other publicly traded company the imperative is to maximize shareholder value. Sprint especially is on the ropes. Investors worry a lot about a bankruptcy in the next couple of years. It has every incentive to change the status quo, and is cutting rates across the board to bring in subscribers.
It's not irrational if T-Mobile and Sprint believe they can eventually turn a profit, and probably compress the margins of T and VZ due to greater competition.
Sprint hasn't invested in its network in part due to cost-cutting. All of the carriers have to market. They are retail consumer facing.
I am not saying we should feel sorry for them, merely that the likelihood of collusion from Sprint especially is very low.
On the contrary, it would seem that Sprint has more to gain from collusion in such a situation because it allows them to use their network for bigger margins even if they don't upgrade.
See, there is no downside to collusion for parties, only upside.
And it even 'maximizes shareholder value'.
Sprint cutting their rates is a bit like pissing in your pants, as the Finnish say, it will only keep you warm for so long.
In the meantime, all carriers not being created equal, there may be some re-shuffling of name-tags and call signs but as long as carriers can get away with charging for thin air (SMS, Air Time) they've always done so, I see absolutely no reason to assume goodwill on their part without some pretty strict oversight.
And of course they have to market, just like everybody else that wishes to sell a product. But just like everybody else that wishes to sell a product, if there is no margin there will be no marketing, and if there is a way to improve the margin then surely it will taken.
Maybe Sprint is the exception, and they are really doing as bad as you say (a bankruptcy in the next couple of years does not sound like a huge threat to me, usually a bankruptcy in the next 3 months is the kind of thing you'd worry about) then maybe Sprint will go under and its assets and subscribers will end up with one of the other parties.
Such is the nature of doing business. But that says absolutely nothing about whether or not there is a profit to be made for all players by placing caps on data plans and by colluding to keep prices for data plans artificially high.
> See, there is no downside to collusion for parties, only upside.
The downside is that collusion preserves market share status quo. For those hoping to gain market share (like Sprint and T-Mobile) collusion gets in the way of that goal.
You're missing the point. You are presuming the market is functioning, my point is that if it does not the only losers will be the consumers all else being equal.
It is perfectly possible to compete for market share while at the same time colluding on the price of a part of your offering. All the parties competing will come out ahead in that scheme at the expense of the consumers.
You can compete on the kind of handsets you offer, your marketing message and the various demographic selectors. You can compete on coverage of the market, availability of the service, quality and so on.
He's not. Economic theory tells us that in a market with multiple competitors, collusion is inherently unstable: while in the short run companies may be able to keep it up, in the long run there is a strong incentive to break the collusive pact because whichever company does so will rapidly gain market share at the expense of the others.
Your argument to the contrary is based on piling speculation on top of speculation. Not only are we to assume--without evidence--that the carriers are colluding, we must also ignore what we know about T-Mobile's and Sprint's incentives to break the collusion and grab market share because they are, in fact, making tons of money but hiding it through clever accounting.
It's not that collusion isn't a possibility in cellular markets in the abstract. It's that it's highly unlikely in a market where one of the alleged colluders is bleeding money and customers and faces bankruptcy.
You mean: 'without evidence that I'm willing to consider about these specific competitors in this particular market'. But you are willfully ignoring the evidence from all the other competitors in all the other markets doing exactly that.
In other words: you are establishing that the competition must be efficient in spite of the fact that the prices for data transfer in your neck of the woods happen to be the same as they are in areas where carriers have already been established to collude.
Now I'm really happy that that is the standard that you'd apply to find say a defendant guilty in some court of law, but this is not a court of law and circumstantial evidence is fine by me in the case of multinationals that refuse to open their books to the point where one could establish whether or not their margins are artificially inflated or arrived at in ways that are not kosher.
But, since you seem to be very much of the opinion that carriers are entities that deserve a lot of sympathy for their present day miserable situation (rather than that they offer vast amounts of money for spectrum and then overcharge consumers in order to make this money back) I hope you will decide to strike out for the underdog here and to offer your carrier an even larger premium than they are already extracting from you for the data that you use.
I find it interesting that you begin the whole discussion on a note of 'everybody will charge what they will' with Apple as the example (of clear graft) and end on the present one, the cognitive dissonance is so strong that I really wonder how carriers have managed to pull the wool so thoroughly over your eyes that you can't see what's going on. You have to commend them for managing this, it's a long time since the break-up of Bell in the US and all the ugliness that has come to light in countries all over the world but to see it so successfully papered over that they could essentially get away with it in broad daylight is interesting to me.
If there is one aspect of technology that is rotten to the core when it comes to extracting money for nothing from the populace it is telcos and the industry requires very careful monitoring and the occasional government intervention to stop them from their worst excesses. Any and all appearance to the contrary may safely be interpreted as successful marketing.
Note that since it requires a license to operate the market is far from efficient in the present and that in quite a few countries with so-called free markets when it comes to telecom the various governments still have a large chunk (if not an outright absolute majority) of stock in their former monopolist telcos. And that this is one reason why governments do not feel all that motivated to do something about this problem.
Yeah, and they actually aren't dropping all that much. T-Mobile's prices have gone up the past year or two for new single/two person accounts with the same amount of data. Family prices seem to have dropped slightly but not very much. Sprint's situation is similar.
> And you're assuming that T-Mobile and Sprint are incapable of hiring accountants capable of minimizing their profits for tax reasons.
I'm assuming their accountants aren't any better than AT&T's and Verizon's, which show substantial profits from wireless.
> Let's turn this around: if the market is so thin why are they still pursuing it?
To get a bigger piece of a large market and hopefully profit in the future, just like 90% of the companies we talk about here on HN. But that's precisely why they have no incentive to collude to maintain the status quo.
You are aware of the fact that 'To get a bigger piece of a large market and hopefully profit in the future' means that they are actually choosing not to profit today but to reinvest their profits?
This is a common strategy in a growth market, such as mobile. And of course they have every incentive to collude because it would increase substantially those profits that they can then re-invest.
In other words, there is no downside to such collusion, and lack of profits in the present does not count as evidence given that in other markets such collusion has already been widely documented.
Chances are they are just terrible companies or you're falling victim the infinite leeway public companies have in presenting their financials, certainly in regards to their various "divisions". You're basically trying to argue "cheap information exchange is impossible" on the basis that USPS isn't turning a profit.
Not giving a fuck what you charge customers from country X with provider Y that you can't sell to anyway? So you charge whatever, and provider Y does the same vice versa? I mean come on, "government intervention in Europe" was the hint here. Europe is all about turning all the countries into one market.
In any case, the fact that we have the internet as the perfect roaming network that all mobile carriers actively exploit yet absurd roaming charges persist is proof of market failure. There need be no more explanation.
It's true that it has limits but does a monthly quota make any sense as a way to prevent that? Right now, you pay the same for a photo upload during a 4am backup window as you do for uploading the same photo during e.g. a ballgame where 10,000 other people are doing the same thing.
If you were trying to run a network, wouldn't you instead have things like differential pricing based on traffic priority or payment plans which allow you to pay more for a greater share of the available capacity? That would directly align the users’ interests with the network operators’ and would provide a strong incentive for things like backup software to make sure they send traffic with a low QoS level and back off when the network indicates congestion. Most people aren't going to care if their phone waits until they leave the stadium to upload their photos but that'd make a huge different for the network operator having to handle 50,000 people in a small area.
I don't buy this hype about so much demand and applications. Why ?
1. It won't really reduce costs. Why? Because 3-5ghz 5G offer similar spectrum efficiency to current methods while on the other hand mmWave(20+ghz), which do offer tons of spectrum, don't penetrate building, and attenuate rapidly in air, so you'll need more base stations.
2. Users have shown they aren't willing to pay more wireless. And for most things consumers do like VR and 360 video etc, wifi is fine and cheaper.
3.There are other good methods for the internet of things, and 5G is too late for that anyway.
So that leaves the realistic use cases as cars(but isn't it too early? ). and maybe VR(although we're very far from appealing VR services which users will pay $60+/month for, and we probably need for wifi confined AR to be a thing first ).
And on top of that the question remains - could we improve 4G enough, without needing to deploy all new hardware?
On top of all of that 4G is still so data-restricted you cannot do anything with it that the speed was meant for. The cost of streaming a blu-ray quality film over 4G on many carriers can cost you tens of dollars alone.
I agree, and would rather see ubiquitous and cheap 4G before anyone talks about 5G. I think 4G already has the potential to eliminate the vast majority of wired to the home cable Internet service given its rates, the only downside is the extreme spectrum crunch and the lack of viable open bands to use to provide Internet to everyone.
> The cost of streaming a blu-ray quality film over 4G on many carriers can cost you tens of dollars alone.
In the UK this is simply not the case. I have unlimited 4g connection, and I had unlimited 3g before that. In fact, the 3g was my _only_ internet for a long time via tethering. It was good enough to play TF2, and could easily download 20gig games overnight via steam etc.
I assume somewhere there is a fair use policy - but if i've never hit it I reckon it's doing a pretty good job of only hitting abusive use.
5g isn't going to solve the problem of US pricing being shit.
> On top of all of that 4G is still so data-restricted you cannot do anything with it that the speed was meant for.
Please don't confuse profit-oriented carriers with what 4G is capable of. Or states which through legislation create high network construction and operating costs. For example by having laws enabling unreasonable profiteering for cell tower site real estate. Or by collecting high fees for radio spectrum. Or by failing to shut down spectrum squatters.
And states where carriers "co-operate" with government (= provide hooks to their network trunks) and are practically untouchable even though they practice rather obvious collusion.
In other words, please keep technology and societal issues separate.
5G or any other technology with a high barrier of entry is not going to change any of that.
4G works just fine where those societal issues don't exist. In states which have real competition between carriers and a low barrier of entry. Regardless of population density.
If those issues didn't exist in the U.S., truly unlimited data-only 4G would be about $15-$30 per month -- in a small Alaskan town or in the heart of New York and anything in between.
I believe they meant that 4G use is data-restricted because of carrier pricing.
I get fantastic 4G speeds on my iPhone, for quite a while it was faster than my home connection. But I could never use it that way due to the carrier pricing structure.
At least in Verizon's case, they're able to keep that pricing structure because they have the best network. They're able to keep the blazing fast speeds because nobody can afford to use the network they built.
Right. That was AT&T's issue with unlimited iPhone plans. They calculated they could offer it because no one used much data. As soon as people starting actually USING it AT&T's network collapsed in busy areas.
Monopolies, oligopolies, not enough regulation, and very high switching costs mean phone companies can charge crazy rates with near impunity.
To point: I was in Japan for several weeks at the end of 2015. The coverage (served by NTT Docomo) was very good, literally everywhere I tried. This includes the urban and transit corridors I visited, as well as in somewhat more rural areas in the mountains. My experience with similar areas in the US is that, even in major urban centers, there are black holes of poor service. Even a little bit outside of cities, coverage quickly gets very hit or miss here.
Even subway trains and stations had uniformly excellent service. A defining experience: exactly once did I note poor reception on my phone. Zero bars, 4G in a subway station. I was figuring I was SOL for a time. Nope! There wasn't even any additional load latency that I could tell -- web browsing was snappy as ever. I've lost track of the times in the US where I'm at one or two bars, LTE and I've just given up waiting for the bits.
This brought about a dawning realization that even the best covered areas in the US are practically rural backwaters compared to Japan's infrastructure, using the same wireless technology generation.
Thus I won't point any fingers at the technology. Instead I'll reserve that judgement for the US carriers. :-/
I'm blessed in living in a country with perfect 4G coverage and data plans that make it enjoyable. We have generally three sim car types: normal phone sim (roaming, voice and some limited data ~5-10GB but you can tether), tablet sims (around 20GB data only with roaming) and stationary internet sims (unlimited data, no roaming, no voice).
I have two of the latter and it boosted my happiness working from coffee places. I bought a good portable 4G router with 12 hours of battery and that worked out so well for me that I actually cancelled my wired home internet.
Pretty much all data plans in Japan since last year are data capped. Of course you get unlimited but the speed is capped to Excruciatingly Slow after 7GB (on the higher end plans).
EDIT: you can get unlimited WiMax boxes (capped at 3 GB/3 days), but that doesn't work in a lot of areas (Tokyo subways...). Some MVNOs seem to offer unlimited data but it's speed capped from the outset.
> On top of all of that 4G is still so data-restricted you cannot do anything with it that the speed was meant for. The cost of streaming a blu-ray quality film over 4G on many carriers can cost you tens of dollars alone.
Is this a technical limit of 4G, an infrastructure limitation of not having enough backhaul to the base station, or a business limitation of just wanting to make more money?
If it were merely carriers acting in parallel to keep up rates, then the whole thing would fall apart when Sprint and T-Mobile started offering unlimited LTE.
But the data cap regime didn't come crashing down when T-Mobile and Sprint started offering unlimited LTE. Why would you pay for Verizon with its data caps when you can get T-Mobile all you can eat for $70? The reason is because 4G is data constricted. T-Mobile in particular doesn't have enough backhaul, and it's cells cover too much area and get overloaded.
I have a different reason: Because a family won't pay to get 3-5 unlimited lines from T-Mobile. 4 unlimited lines on T-Mobile = $220/mo, unsubsidized. And sprint's data still isn't really to the speeds of T-Mobile or Verizon.
These plans aren't as amazing as people think, especially since they still limit tethering (and maybe maybe throttle data).
However, I think your conclusion is correct. If 4G was fine, the market value of cell tower time would be a lot lower.
This hasn't been my experience at all with T-Mobile in the Baltimore-Washington area. If anything the experience in terms of coverage and performance has been getting consistently better since Legere took over, even with the introduction of unlimited and music freedom/binge on(video).
It was fine when I lived in Baltimore. It's pretty spotty on the train between Baltimore and DC. It's potato out in the VA suburbs where my parents live. It was rocking in Philly. YMMV.
exactly. Here in Ontario i go without a data plan because of the extremely high costs. Every time a new low-cost provider comes along, they get bought by Rogers/bell/tellus.
But who is streaming Blu-Ray over their cellular connection? There is still a lot of room to grow with existing use cases. E.g. when I upload photos or videos of my toddler on Facebook, the picture quality is still potato. It could be better even without breaking my bandwidth budget.
I'm in Denmark and get 20GB/month. I'd stream a movie on Netflix while in a summer house or on holiday (my subscription covers most of Europe and some other countries)
Spectrum efficiency is only one dimension. Smaller cells increase spatial reuse and can dramatically increase network capacity.
Demand is also off the charts. Approximately nobody does VR. Growth is still in bread and butter things like mobile video. In the U.S. in just the last two years, cellular penetration grew from 105% to 115% (more cellular subscriptions than people) and monthly data usage tripled.
I don't buy this hype about so much demand and applications. Why ?
Don't tell Verizon or AT&T, both likely candidates for replacing their terrestrial services with 5G in the US as a way to compete nationally against Comcast.
There's a reason Verizon has been selling off chunks of their system to Frontier.
After all, why put wires in the ground if you can just attach a 5G modem to the side of a person's house?
> After all, why put wires in the ground if you can just attach a 5G modem to the side of a person's house?
Edited with the cynic filter:
After all, why pay unionized workers to provide all you can eat service through wires in the ground if you can sell metered service by just attaching a 5G modem to the side of a person's house?
They don't currently for their attached 4G services (up to 30GB for $120 a month) so there's clearly no reason to expect they would/will for 5G service.
1. No it won't reduce costs, but it offers a lot more bandwidth which is a consumer demand/necessity. If that need isn't met, people will jump carriers. Take Boston, SF, NYC or Chicago, where you can place femtocells, say, on the top of a building on every other street at every 3rd ave -- even with Siemens markup for the gear, plus city permits, plus installation and maintenance costs -- you're looking at 10-15k a base station (Verizon probably gets bulk discounts, I'm just going by old BS11 Siemens list MSRPs) then double it for the labor/permits/etc listed above along with annoying 'last mile' problems. (Alternatively, I'd imagine they could just offer the city X amount of dollars to mount them directly to municipal poles).
2. Consumers won't be paying more for wireless. You'll still be paying your $200 for an iPhone + $100/mo for internet with a 24 month lock-in. Those ~2k you pay over the course of your contract is what funds these upgrades. The functionality will be bundled with your iPhone $n+1 when the phone-renewal-cycle comes up. You'll have a 4G transceiver + pre-existing wifi tranceiver re-appropriated as Verizon-branded wifi as they negotiate their bluray content to transfer through their femtocells.
3. Internet of Things via mesh might be okay for torrents where latency doesn't matter, but no way for comms.
re: your 4g question (I'm assuming you're referring to LTE-A) - No. 4g is limited by spectrally very heavily re: the amount of content you can fit into each hz. Where Verizon is running into problems (NYC, SF, after sports events when everyones taking drunken selfies, etc) they're at saturation. In large cities, I'd imagine Verizon can't just do the ol' "drop more base stations in" because they'll just be spilling tones into their own, over-saturated chunk they bought from the FCC for a few billion. (In the case of 4G LTE-A, these operate at half-duplex within a 6 mhz band for tx and another 6 mhz band for rx, placed up or down 40mhz).
3. IoT has other non-mesh protocols like Lora which will work well.
1. Since spectrum efficiency is similar to 4G, to offer more bandwidth,you'll need to use mmWaves. But those don't penetrate buildings, and won't be everywhere and people like their cellular communications to be everywhere.
Also I read that base stations will be much more expensive, and it makes sense - the technology is harder to build.
Also with mmWaves there will be a lot of unlicensed spectrum and the way you buy spectrum will may be different - so and that could create a lot of business models that threaten carriers.
2. I didn't get the part about Verizon branded with, could you please explain?
``3'' : "Work well" for what? I was specifically addressing comms, as that's where the problem currently exists. There are too many concurrent protocols/specs for me to keep up with LoRA (I'm only familiar with the 3GPP standards i.e. the NarrowBand IOT analog to LoRA, for obvious reasons), but I did some reading[1]. It has some awesome features like low-power consumption that allows long range, but again, you're not going to be streaming Youtube videos via that protocol. Their site officially says[2] their solution "is a network ideal for Internet of Things (IoT), metering, security, asset tracking, and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications." So while a great solution for, say, plopping down a few thousand soil hydrometers, it's not going to help with the over-saturation of the 4G networks.
``1'': Spectrum efficiency varies as a function of carrier wave length[3 for a brief overview] There's an information theory limit as to how much data you can effectively transport (throughput, not latency) limited by the Shannon-Hartley limit. (Or maybe the Nyquist something-something...forgive my ignorance on the topic, I really should have went to grad school or at least taken more physics classes.) To offer more bandwidth you can do plenty of things without resorting to mmWave, i.e. picking up rights to a carrier wave when Auction 73 occurred, or use OFDM amongst the ISM bands
Which brings me to (``2''- at least, as I understand it). What providers are trying to do is use the standard UWB/OFDM that already has well established, cheap commodity hardware behind it (think: a Cisco Aironet equivalent). The poster at the start of the thread said >> 2. Users have shown they aren't willing to pay more wireless. And for most things consumers do like VR and 360 video etc, wifi is fine and cheaper.
I was simply saying that any new technology will be bundled into the next revision of phones. It's not going to cost the consumer any more than usual, because (at least in the US) the 24-month sign+subsidized phone practice is commonplace enough that the next-gen technologies will be bundled in at the same rate.
I'm right there with you on mmWave - if you're looking to replace 4G with that, well, probably not viable at the moment as people still tune transmission lines using machined components (expensive, can't really use powdered metal bulk solutions when you need .1 thou tolerances..) that are designed filter cavities like this[4] in one offs (even more expensive without economies of scale) by generally those with graduate degrees. I haven't heard any ballpark quotes for 5G pricing from the usual suppliers.. who's quoting what, and from where?
3. With regards to the IOT - most apps fits the LoRa capabilities. What's left is probably cameras(but for them WiFi mesh combined with backhaul/wired access would be fine, mostly. There's might be a place for drones, but i haven't though about that yet).
1. Auction 73 is just 100MHZ, not big enough to matter. Also how much bandwidth could you get from "OFDM amongst the ISM bands" , after discounting bands that are reserved due to politics,or for future use by government/military etc ? why aren't they being auctioned ?
2. Why would carriers bundle an expensive technology that doesn't promise them more money long term(after everybody deploys it, which will happen if someone does) ? they have simple ways to signal each other to do nothing. Also assuming this tech offers similar spectral efficiency, if all it buy is more bandwidth, by deploying more cells, just deploy more 4G cells - and save yourself money/risk/etc.
Can't find the quote for the 5G price, but i think it was in the context of mmWave, just some discussion, nothing formal. But why would 5G(non mmWave) be cheaper ? companies have to justify r&d, more newer patents, start from lower volumes, complexity will probably grow, etc.
Also a side question: is there a way to build around mmWave unlicensed bands to create noise floor similar to using it as a licensed band ? maybe with phase array antennas(assuming no other interfere but the network) ? or maybe a different legal regime that gives neighborhoods control of their spectrum ? because if so, and if we can solve the mmWave tech(big if), it would look like the future of wireless.
"the cloud infrastructure cannot be more than 100km from the end device consuming the application, due to the finite speed of light, which can only traverse ~100km (round trip) in the 1 ms that is available for the networking portion ..."
Since light would traverse ~299km in 1ms, would the max distance of the cloud architecture be ~149.9km - assuming we do not take into account any additional processing and response times?
Here are two sources, both of which have prop. velocities @ around .6c depending on the dialectric. Again ideal. I haven't architected any long-run infrastructure, but 1/3rd sounds pretty right to me.
"In conclusion, our analysis of past, current and future trends in technology and network evolution, suggests that the increased momentum we are seeing around 5G network deployments relative to prior eras is the result of a coincidence of prevailing winds of both technological and business (human) value, and is therefore a case of ‘rational exuberance’ about the future."
I have a 22.5 GB data plan and I burn through the whole thing every month on LTE, without really watching movies or anything over wireless data (I don't turn on WiFi at any time, because my LTE latency and bandwidth is better than my home and work WiFi). The speed of the network isn't my constraint.
3GPP (not to be confused with the old tech 3G, this is a consortium sort of like the W3C for the web or the ISO for ...tons of stuff) are the defacto group who meets up and agrees on what gets done. They meet up and agree upon standards every so often as described here[1] (release 8 and 9 delineating LTE, LTE-A, and the transitional 3G -> LTE stuff, along with tons of other stuff).
Releases 13 and 14 standardized 5G[2] earlier this year. Here's the set of documents that I'm pretty sure shouldn't be public (you typically have to be a member to get access). Bad sysadmins, disable DirectoryIndexes ! The R13 and R14 zips have quite a bit of descriptive content. Here's the marketing mumbojumbo stuff, for completeness[3].
At least in terms of its effects on network speed, latency and reliability to mobile devices, I don't expect 5G to deliver anything like the hype it's getting.
Having witnessed the roll-out of 2G, 3G and 4G over the last 15 years in the UK, with each one being as disappointing, over-promised and patchy as the one before it, I'm hoping to be surprised. But I'm not holding my breath.
I have a phone that has been downgraded to 3G only because my provider's 4G is actually slower.
UK is infamous for its overcrowded networks and sloppy telecoms, so that's not a problem of the technology itself. I have seen better Internet/cell networks in some 3rd world countries than UK.. In my country, there's a pretty big difference between 3G and 4G (and currently used 4.5G), where ~350 Mbps is an actual speed.
Akamai's State of the Internet, released yesterday, puts the UK in the lead for mobile data speeds with an average speed of 28Mb/s, followed by Belgium, with 19Mb/s.
"speeds can be altered by mobile networks' use of proxies, meaning that the speeds recorded will be between those proxies and Akamai's servers, rather than between the servers and the actual mobile devices themselves."
For users end mile usually matters the most and this table doesn't count for that, so it doesn't reflect the actual user experience. Sounds more like PR stuff than an actual test.
Outside of rural areas I have found 4G to be exceptional in the UK. It is true that I have lived and worked in Manchester and London since 4G came out but it is consistently faster than any wireless option going.
Which provider are you using? I've been on Orange then EE throughout the rollout
4G in my UK house goes from 8Mbps to 8bps. My provider has changed my tethering contract from 1000Gb to 4Gb per month for the same price - no options but take it or leave it. So now I "need" wired data to use my computer, which is 2x the price of my phone contract. sigh
You're thinking of traditional large satellites in geosynchronous orbit, which is 35 km above the surface (ping time of about 250 ms). SpaceX's plan is to put 4,000 small satellites in low-earth orbit, 625 km up. That gives a ping time of about 4 ms to the satellite.
SpaceX can do this far cheaper than others because they can launch the satellites for "free" as part of launches that are happening anyway.
Actually, they are planning on a low-Earth orbit at around 1100 km, which will require a constellation of satellites to maintain ubiquitous coverage. That will cut latency -- particularly on long routes since it will cut the number hops between hosts, see: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2014/11/elon-musk-and-greg-wylers...
As someone still only dreaming of gigabit speeds, I'm having a hard time conceptualizing what that kind of speed can enable. Higher resolution video/VR, sure, but is there more? Is there a game changing use case that opens up when that kind of speed is available everywhere?
When you have connectivity at home you can keep all of your data at your fingertips at all time. Even if it's more than you can feasibly store in consumer cloud services.
You can VPN home and use remote desktop at near local performance.
You don't need to plan your data usage. Worry whether you have the files with you.
I have fiber at home. About 50/50 Mbps goodput and 15 ms latency to home VPN using 4G. Remote desktop is pretty fluid. While I can notice the extra latency, it's not a problem in any way. For example Bluetooth mouse latency is worse.
Even full screen WebGL/CSS3/whatever web apps and full screen web video work well.
Some tips: Don't use any TCP based tunneling or VPN solution, like ssh or OpenVPN over TCP. They're bad for interactive use.
Measure, mobile devices have different 4G performance profiles, and that includes latency. You can have up to about 5 ms latency difference between a new flagship model and some low end 4G phone.
Desktop applications other than the browser tend to be less demanding.
Although games are not my thing, playing PS4 games remotely works also very nicely on a Macbook over 4G. Just need to have a PS4 controller and a USB cable. It just works. Very near to local performance. There's some kind of NAT traversal, so you don't necessarily even need to use VPN.
Which fiber only helps considering the speed of light. WiFi in my house is acting up right now, but even considering that I "only" have 1ms latency to my pfSense VM after traversing my layer 3 switch in my office, but from there it takes 2.5ms (up to 4ms) minimum to travel over copper to the head node with my cable company - from there it takes 1.5ms to reach zayo's fiber backbone, and then 5ms to reach all the way to Seattle from Boise, ID. Let that sink it, it takes as much time to hop from Boise, ID to Seattle, WA as it does for me to even get a packet to that link.
5ms shaved down to 1ms (one-way) with decent fiber could take my ping to Google DNS from 23ms to 15ms, that's going from Boise, ID through Seattle, WA all the way down to CA where the Google DNS server I am hitting is located - a rather considerable savings.
The current crop of mobile devices do have very nice performance.
However ergonomics is a different matter... Touch screen is pretty bad for desktop usage.
Android devices let you connect a USB or a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. You get even a mouse pointer last I tried. Although not using it like that in everyday life. It's more convenient to just use a small laptop.
With iOS Apple's Bluetooth keyboard works. Other input devices didn't work, or at least I couldn't figure out how.
I'd say that, in the US, exuberance for 5G is irrational since the pricing for cellular internet is ridiculous. In the mean time, we have T-Mobile's CEO calling his customers "data thieves" for rebelling against unfair rates.
Yep speeds on Cellphones can be crazy fast, I was testing a WIFI connection speed with a cellphone. Data was quite consistent ... until I noticed I was on 4G. Only to get lower results when I turned 4G off (the WIFI there is slower).
Same experience as well, 4G has consistently been better then my WiFi connection. And even if i had perfect WiFi Connection i was still limited by Internet connection speed. Which most WiFi Connection spot, even at home, are slower then 4G.
I must say I have had the opposite experience. My home wifi provides a consistent ~100Mbps unless I go to the other end of my apartment. 4G, where the signal is good, goes up to ~20Mbps.
What many people who criticize the high data fees that carriers charge often forget, esp. in Germany: in contrast to highly rural US (where you need LOTS of towers to serve few people) it's not about the infrastructure costs in Germany, and it's also not about the profits of shareholders, at least not much.
Problem was when former finance minister Hans Eichel decided to reduce the German state debts in 2000... he did so by auctioning off the UMTS frequencies, for in total 50.000.000.000 €. That's 625€ per German citizen that first have to be paid off before the network provider makes a profit on that user. Also, the provider has to pay interest on the debts (ECB interbank rate at the time was 4.5%), and the infrastructure had to be built, maintained and upgraded (electricity costs, networking termination fees, personnel, construction workers, materials, ...); this in turn moves the "profitability point" per customer waaay behind.
In essence, Eichel screwed over us Germans by selling us "reduced state debt" when all we got was a debt-shift from the state to private entities, and we still suffer to this day from the highest data prices in Europe.
There seems to be a growing movement of web designers/developers who think that their header is interesting enough to fill half the screen on mobile (in landscape).
Hey, they didn't immediately cover the article I came to read with a full-screen ad to get me to subscribe to something completely unrelated. On the modern web, that's deserves an award!
I am seriously thinking of making a small web that parses HN and shows the links in a decent way and when clicking something it opens it with automatic styles like Firefox reader mode. The % of decent (as in readable) articles / articles in HN is too low, and Firefox reader mode fixes them all (so far 100% correct for me after years).
I have noticed that some websites are actively obfuscating the content on their page to prevent it being loaded by content-viewers (like the website or the app).
I've had to email him to fix an issue in the app and he pushed a change to the Play store fairly quickly.
