5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

Which could be written as 15Mbps with no doubt whatsoever.

15 Mb·s⁻¹

Old habit from where? Is this a personal preference or a lesser known convention?

Mbone.

I agree for video + audio calls, but I’m not sure for gaming.

Usually multiplayer games have some correction and if you have really stable latency it can work pretty well (of course never as well as 0 latency). But usually, the jitter is the killer because it makes actions delayed AND unpredictable.

On that note, the BBC deployed a temporary 5G SA non-public-network to broadcast King Charles' Coronation, giving over 1Gbps uplink over 1km of the procession route. More details are in the award-winning white paper linked from this[0] blog post.

[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-05-5g-non-public-network-...

Although the deployments are very limited, wouldn't the 5G mmWave coverage, in NFL stadiums for example, need to have both New Radio (NR) and Stand Alone (SA)? Or is there some bodge for down-rating your mmWave experience to a non-Stand Alone network? I understand you won't get SA end-to-end calling an endpoint on an LTE network, but, with 5G FWA also needing SA to achieve full performance, SA should be pretty widespread in the US, or is it?

Cellular technologies can be configured to degrade differently to WiFi. The device gets fewer assigned slices, so the bandwidth reduces, but latency should remain static.

See my comments about L4S.

It may have been decades ago, but there was a time when it did not seem awkward or even unusual to just...call someone's house, or to simply stop by.

There was usually a purpose in this that was more profound than just being bored or lonely or something, but none was really required.

And maybe the person they were trying to find wasn't home right now, but that was OK. It was not weird to talk to whoever for a minute, or to hang out for awhile.

Nowadays, the ubiquity of personal pocket supercomputers means that the closest most people ever get to that kind of generally-welcome (if unexpected) interaction is a text message.

"Hey, I'm in front of your house. Are you home?"

And maybe that works more efficiently between two individuals than knocking on the door did, but otherwise this present way of doing things mostly just serves to further increase our social isolation.

Sometimes it seems that the closer it is that our technology allows us to be, the further it is that we actually become.

My siblings are much older than I am and when I was 10 my sister was starting her relationship with now-husband. One time he called our house phone, I picked up, and said "yeah sister is home but she's busy at the moment so you can spend five minutes talking to me instead"

I set up an old rotary phone via twilio as a house phone for our kids. They just dial 1-9, each number is programmed to a different family member. Their cousins also have one, so they can call each other whenever they want. It’s great to also have a phone that just rings in the house, for when you don’t care about getting a specific person.

That's a facinating obsevation! I hadn't consider the side effects of calling a common phone and interacting with other people rather than exclusively the one person you wanted to talk/text with. Probably distances you from (or never allows you to know) those adjacent to the person you already know.

I can vouch that pass the phone around is still a thing in southern Europe, or being sundenly dropped into a group video call where everyone gathers around the phone to be in view.

I’m looking to set up an Asterisk server that takes calls over Bluetooth on any paired cell phones inside the house, or falls back to a VoIP line if no phones are at home.

Similarly, I find that it’s hard to catch family on their cell and much easier when I call their home.

does that not still happen for you?

passing cell phones around still happens for my family

That's not a bad idea, thank you! I always hate having to retire perfectly good working hardware just because a spec requirement change.

Or just port the number to Magic Jack for $20 and get a cordless phone $20 at Target that you have to charge once per week if you don’t just keep it on the dock, and pay like $5/mo or less for service. And you can make/receive calls from that number on a mobile phone using their app.

And obsolescence via “TPM2”!

I’m all for advancements in the size of various models able to be loaded onto devices, and the amount of fast ram available for them

For a short while Verizon enabled this on our super grandfathered plan. Well not exactly this, it was some more modern codec dubbed HD and it sounded so good it was freaky and unnerving

You can't ask someone today to see what they're not used to see.

I expect a future of screens that are natively subtly 3D and where you could see someone's nose hair without focusing. Only then they will notice "why do they look blurry and flat" when comparing it to an old TV.

Today if you get closer to a TV you will see blur. Tomorrow you will see the bird's individual strands of feathers.

"Good enough" is temporary.

>Streaming video gets compressed to crap.

That's because your source video is crap.

I'm not sure if you realize it, but all forms of digital media playback are streaming. Yes, even that MP4 stored locally on your SSD. There is literally no difference between "playing" that MP4 and "streaming" a Youtube or Netflix video.

Yes, even playing an 8K Blu-Ray video is still streaming.

Yeah, I've noticed the same things with roads. They are common carriers owned mostly by the government, so they never get upgraded. That freeway near my house is always clogged.

Oh wait ... the reason that freeway is always clogged is they are ripping it up, doubling it's width. And now I think about it, hasn't the NBN recently upgraded their max speeds from 100 Mb/s, to 250Mb/s, and now to 1Gb/s. And isn't the NBN currently ripping out the FttN, replacing it woth FttP, at no cost to the cusytomer? Sounds like a major upgrade to me. And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?

If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra. In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers. That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition. But when the Libs sold Telstra it was a monopoly. Telstra just refused to upgrade the copper. The Libs thought they could fix that though legislation, but what happened instead is Telstra fought the legalisation tooth and nail and we ended up in the absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access. In the end Tesltra did give permission to change the equipment at the ends of the wires. But replacing the wires themselves - never. That was their golden goose. No one was permitted to replace them with a new technology.

Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.

Sorry, what was your point again? Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.

The companies on top provide end user customer support, varied pricing models ("unlimited" data vs pay by the GB, etc), and so on. It allows the common carrier to focus solely on the network hardware.

They add value by producing complicated and convoluted contracts which cannot be compared easily full of gotchas.

This was a common way to do things before the telcos in the USA were deregulated in the 2000s and 2010s. At the time it was both internet and telephone but due to the timing of de regulation, it never really took off with real high speed internet, only dsl and dialup.

I used to work at a place that did both on top of the various telcos. We offered ‘premium service’ with 24 hour customer support and a low customer to modem and bandwidth ratio.

Most of our competitors beat us in price but would only offer customers support 9-5 and you may get a busy signal/ lower bandwidth in the back haul during peak hours.

There was a single company that owned the wires and poles, because it’s expensive and complex to build physical infrastructure and hard to compete, but they were bared from selling actual services or undercutting providers because of their position. (Which depended on jurisdiction).

It solved the problem we have now of everyone complaining about their ISP but only having one option in their area.

We have that problem now specifically because we deregulated common carriers for internet right as it took over the role of telephone service.

the in world practice seems to have this worked out. I am working for such provider right now and it is neither cash starved not suffocating under undue bureaucracy

And private companies don't even have to be vulnerable, they can just do nasty things nilly willy, because it might be profitable and they might get away with it. Yeah, there could be ones that don't suck, and then customers could pick those, but when there aren't, when they all collude to be equally shitty and raise prices whenever they can -- which they do -- people have no recourse. They do have recourse when it comes to the government.

And for some things it's just too much duplicated effort and wasted resources, T-shirts are one thing, because we don't really need those, but train lines and utilities etc. are another. I can't tell you where the "boundary" is, but if every electric company had to lay their own cables, there would only be one or two.

And in the opinion of many including mine, for example the Deutsche Bundesbahn got worse when it got privatized. They kinda exploited the fact that after reunification, there were two state railroad systems obviously, and instead of merging them into one state railroad system, it was privatized, but because it made more money for some, but not because it benefits the public, the customers. Of course the reasoning was the usual neoliberal spiel, "saving money" and "smaller government" but then that money just ends up not really making things better to the degree privatization made them worse.

Obviously not everything should be state run, far from it. But privatizing everything is a cure actually even worse than the disease, since state-run sinks and swims with how much say the people have, whereas a 100% privatized world just sinks into the abyss.

Ironically, often you get way faster speeds out on a RCG tower too. (probably due to few users), vs when in the city, where I often get pretty average speeds be it 4g or 5g.

> it has literally zero incentive to be cheap

Do private utilities have any incentive to be cheap?

The reason we have utility regulations in the first place is because utilities are natural monopolies with literally zero incentive to be cheap. On the contrary, they are highly incentivized to push up prices as much as possible because they have their customers over a barrel.

I believe the idea is that you shouldn't have a corporation provide the utility if there's only going to be one.

"public utility" implies it's owned by the public not a profit seeking group of shareholders.

A private electric grid is a nightmare. Look at Texas. People pay more, and they get less coverage. It's worse by every metric. The conversation should revolve around, how can we fix the government so that it isn't 5 corporations in a trench coat who systematically defund public utilities and social safety nets in hopes of breaking it so they can privatize it and make billions sucking up tax payer money while doing no work. See the billions in tax funding to ATT, Google, etc... to put in fiber internet that they just pocketed the cash and did nothing.

Well, 5G is unlikely to be built in my area for the next decade, meanwhile 3 operators are building networks in the slightly more populated areas.

Competition drives innovation, but also, we've generally seen that things like municipal broadband are _more_ innovative than an incumbent monopoly carrier. Large chunks of the US don't have much competition at all in wired services, and if we approach that in wireless, we are likely to see the same effects starting where the local monopoly tries to extract maximum dollars out of an aging infrastructure. Lookin' at you, Comcast, lookin' at you.

The T-Mobile 5G Rely fixed-wireless home internet plan offers no caps and no throttling plans.

How come it's failed to provide cost effective internet in the US then?

Seems damn expensive. In the UK you can get a SIM card for £20 with unlimited data & calls which is run on one of the larger 5G networks. I usually have the opposite problem though, I barely use 5GBs on a given month.

In downtown Columbus Ohio the only internet provider (Spectrum) maxes out at maybe 5 mbps up (down 50-100x that), it's not just a rural issue, non-competitive ISPs even in urban cities want you to pay for business accounts to get any kind of upload whatsoever

Yes, many residential broadband ISPs top out at 1/10th that.

I'm in NYC, Spectrum is my ISP. 500mb/s down, 10mb/s up. I used to live in a building with symmetric 1G fiber from Verizon, but they don't serve my building.

Why? The conclusion that "somewhere between 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s marks the approximate saturation point" wouldn't be any different.

Audio doesn't require high data rates. 6 streams of uncompressed 16-bit 48 kHz PCM is 4.6 Mb/s. Compression knocks that down into insignificance.

Very few people have home equipment that can do anything close to 10Gbps, of course; this is all largely future proofing.

Years back, when FTTH started rolling out in Ireland, some of the CPE for the earliest rollouts only had 100Mbit/sec ethernet (on a 1Gbit/sec service)...

The reliability is definitely a bigger question, jitter a bit more questionable, but as far as latency goes 5G fixed wireless can be just fine. YMMV, but on a lot of spots around my town it's pretty comparable latency/jitter-wise as my home fiber connection to similar hosts. And connecting home is often <5ms throughout the city.

Probably. My area used to be a T-Mobile dead zone 5 years ago.

I also have Verizon.

Choice of service varies based on location heavily from my experience. I’m a long time big time camper and I’ve driven through most corners of most Western states:

- 1/3 will have NO cellular service

- 1/3 will have ONLY Verizon. If T-Mobile comes up, it’s unusable

- 1/3 remaining will have both T-Mobile and Verizon

My Verizon is speed capped so I can’t compare that. T-Mobile works better in more urban areas for me, but it’s unpredictable. In a medium sized costal town in Oregon, Verizon might be better but I will then get half gigabit T-Mobile in a different coastal town in California.

One thing I have learned is that those coverage maps are quite accurate.

Same here. My ISP recently did a promo to try out 1G/1G for free for a few months. I decided not to buy it after the free trial and went back to my old 500/200 line instead of paying 40% more. Yeah, it takes a minute longer downloading the latest LLM from huggingface, so what.

Steam can fill up much more

I'm getting my Steam games at 2Gbps, and I am suspecting that my aging ISP's "box" is to blame for the cap (didn't want to pay my ISP for the new box that officially supports 8Gbps symmetrical, and just got a SFP+ adapter for the old one). I pay 39€/M for what is supposed to go "up to" 8Gbps/500Mbps on that old box.

Games from Google Drive mirrors are coming at full speed too. Nice when dling that new Skyrim VR 90GB mod pack refresh

Steam used to max out my internet, but now its smarter about it and starts to decrypt/expand the download as its going instead of doing it in phases. This quickly maxes out my IOPS on even NVMe drives at only several hundred megabits for most games I've tried recently.

> I have just never had need of any significant internet speed on my phone. I don't download things, and only sometimes stream video.

But other people do.

And the main resource that is limited with cell service is air time: there are only so many frequencies, and only so many people can send/receive at the same time.

So if someone wants to watch a video video, and a particular segment is (say) 100M, then if a device can do 100M/s, it will take 1s to do that operation: that's a time period when other people may not be able to do anything. But if the device can do 500M/s, then that segment can come down in 0.2s, which means there's now 0.8s worth of time for other people to do other things.

You're not going to see any difference if you're watching the video (or streaming music, or check mail), but collectively everyone can get their 'share' of the resource much more quickly.

Faster speeds allow better resource utilization because devices can get on and off the air in a shorter amount of time.

If 5G lived up to everything it was touted to do, you could use a 5G hotspot for your home internet would could be a huge positive in areas that only have one ISP available. However, 5G does not live up to the promises, and your traffic is much more heavily shaped than non-wireless ISPs.

It would matter more if you were in a crowded place, with more users taking up the spectrum. But yeah, as with computer speed, ordinary applications maxed out a while back.

In a similar manner, I got 5G recently and used it as my main link, and i'm still at 150GB downloaded (multiple persons, multiple laptops, regular OS updates, docker pull etc). I'm not even smart about this .. Without constant 4K streaming I realized that my needs will rarely exceed 200GB.

5G allowed me to avoid having to get fibre.

That's completely a false sense of security with 5G systems, because the way it achieves that high bandwidth is by literally “steering the beam” to follow you, i.e. precise location surveillance is an implicit part of using it: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.13390

“The initial access period includes the transmission of beamformed SSBs that provide the UEs with a basic synchronization signal and demodulation reference signals. This allows for UEs to save power by going inactive and rejoining the network at a later initial access period. At the physical layer, the UE will receive the SSBs from a single antenna or using one or more spatial filters, such as a multi-panel handset used to overcome hand blockage. The UE will use the received SSB for synchronization and determining the control information. The beam reporting stage includes one or more possible SSB CSI reports which are transmitted in the random access channel. The report includes information for the strongest serving cell and may include a set of the next strongest cells within the same band to assist with load balancing. The number of reported additional cells depends on the carrier frequency, the previous state of the UE in the net- work, and the bands being monitored. In a newly-active state, the UE reports the top 6–16 additional cells across each active frequency range. This reporting helps to manage handover and mitigate cell-edge interference. In the final steps, the UE has connected to a serving cell and is ready to start receiving data. Further beam refinement and channel estimation can occur by transmitting reference signals with more precise beams. Although not specified in the standard, a typical CSI-RS would cover smaller portions of the reported SSBs’ directions or combine coherently across a multipath channel. Using more directional or precise beams can increase the SNR–thereby improving the channel estimates and beam alignment. Beam refinement can also be used to adjust the beamforming slightly to track highly mobile UEs.”

Your linked article even agrees: “Carriers can still see which cell towers your device connects to, use the strength and angle of your device’s signal to the tower, and then look up your device’s unique cellular identifier to determine your general location. Your location may never be private when you’re connected to a cellular network”

Fun fact: modern Wi-Fi standards do this too and it's possible to use the backscattered emissions to see through your walls lol https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a425750...