5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

I dunno, it makes conceptual sense. Networks infrastructure is largely commodity utilities where duplication is effectively a waste of resources. e.g. you wouldn't expect your home to have multiple natural gas connections from competing companies.

Regulators have other ways to incentivize quality/pricing and can mandate competition at levels of the stack other than the underlying infrastructure.

I wouldn't expect that "only a single network" is the right model for all locations, but it will be for some locations, so you need a regulatory framework that ensures quality/cost in the case of a single network anyway.

I think that it should be run as a public service like utilities and should be as cheap as humanly possible. Why not?

They should study Canada. We’re already running that experiment.

Clearly you did not like playing Monopoly as child.

I can pretty much guarantee you that your 5G connection has more bandwidth for upload than my residential ISP does

> The main challenge is the upload speed; pretty much all the ISPs allocate much more spectrum for download rather than upload.

For 5G, a lot of the spectrum is statically split into downstream and upstream in equal bandwidth. But equal radio bandwidth doesn't mean equal data rates. Downstream speeds are typically higher because multiplexing happens at one fixed point, instead of over multiple, potentially moving transmitters.

You identified the problem in your statement: “the ISPs allocate…”. The provider gets to choose this, and if more bandwidth is available from a newer technology, they’re incentive is to allocate it to downloads so they can advertise faster speeds. It’s not a technology issue.

How many people consuming these services are doing so over a mobile network?

For my area all the mobile network home internet options offer plenty of speed, but the bandwidth limitations are a dealbreaker.

Everyone I know still uses their cable/FTTH as their main internet, and mobile network as a hotspot if their main ISP goes down.

Few people play games built for mobiles, let alone looking to play GTA6 on an iPhone

What's any of that have to do with 5G? On 2 bars of 5G right now and I get 650Mbit download speed, it's significantly faster than 4G.

It spies on you a lot more effectively :)

https://www.fastcompany.com/90314058/5g-means-youll-have-to-...

https://venturebeat.com/mobile/sk-telecom-will-use-5g-to-bui...

https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2020/12/5g-positioning--wha...

I've found 1-bar 4G LTE to actually be enough to do work on at home, to my surprise (in the occasions that my in-the-ground cable connection up and dies on me). Only thing I don't get is Zoom with that, but it's nice to have a good excuse not to be in a meeting.

There seem to be some integration issues in 5G Non-Standalone equipment and existing network. Standalone or not, 5G outside of millimeter wavelength bands("mmWave") should behave like an all-around pure upgrade compared to 4G with no downsides, in theory.

In my part of the world 5g actually is rolled out on lower frequencies than 4g so I actually get better coverage.

5G can also use the same frequency bands as 4G, and when it does, apparently gets slightly increased range over 4G.

I just leave mine in LTE and upgrade to 5G only when I know i'm gonna DL something big.

> Transmitting high-end 4K video today requires 15 Mb/s, according to Netflix.

It doesn't really change their argument, but to be fair, Netflix has some of the lowest picture quality of any major streaming service on the market, their version of "high-end 4K" is so heavily compressed, it routinely looks worse than a 15 year old 1080p Blu-Ray.

"High-end" 4K video (assuming HEVC) should really be targeting 30 Mb/s average, with peaks up to 50 Mb/s. Not "15 Mb/s".

On one hand it's nice that the option for that fast wireless connection is available. But on the other hand it sucks that having it means the motivation for ISPs to run fiber to homes in sparse towns goes from low down to none, since they can just point people to the wireless options. Wireless doesn't beat the reliability, latency, and consistent speeds of a fiber connection.

Verizon Fios sells gigabit in NYC for $80/mo.

They're constantly running promotions "get free smartglases/video game systems/etc if you sign up for gigabit." Turns out that gigabit is still way more than most people need, even if it's 2025 and you spend hours per day online.

5G can be extremely fast. I get 600 MBit over cellular at home.

…and we only pay for 500 MBit for my home fiber. (Granted, also 500 Mbit upload.)

(T-Mobile, Southern California)

I have 1Gbps down, and the only application I've found to saturate it is downloads from USENET (and with that I need quite a few connections downloading different chunks simultaneously to achieve it).

I have never come remotely close to downloading anything else -- including games -- at 1Gbps.

The source side certainly has the available pipe, but most (all?) providers see little upside to allowing one client/connection to use that much bandwidth.

LTE latency is 20-50ms, 5G is 1ms, Gigabit Ethernet is less than 1ms, Wifi is 2-3ms. Overall latency is more about distance, 300km is 1ms, number of hops, and response times.

With mobile, I bet contention and poor signal are more of an issue. 5G is a noticeable improvement over LTE, and I am not sure they can do much better.

I thought they were going to mention L4S or low latency low loss, over 5G which seems to be in the latest 3GPP 5G-Advanced Release 18 (2024) but I have no idea what the rollout of that is.

One of the issues with this 5g vs 6g is the long-term-evolution of it all -- I have no idea when/where/if-at-all I will see improvements on my mobile devices for all the sub-improvements of 5g or if it's only reserved for certain use cases

I was hoping to see any mention of large file downloads and uploads. Nevermind the article’s ponderous “I can’t imagine any use case for more than 5GB/s”, that’s a use case today where higher speeds above 5GB/s would be helpful. For example, a lot of AAA games are above 100GB, with the largest game in my steam library being over half a terabyte (DCS World). Ideally I wouldn’t have to store these games locally, but I do if I want to have access to them in any reasonable amount of time.

It also takes ages to back up my computer. 18 terabytes of data in my case, and that’s after pruning another 30 terabytes of data as “unnecessary” to back up.

> Have we already reached the physical limits of the amount of data the can be encoded at a particular frequency?

Basically, yes (if you take into account other consideration like radiated power, transmitter consumed power, multipath tolerance, Doppler shift tolerance and so on). Everything is a tradeoff. We could e. g. use higher-order modulation, but that would result in higher peak-to-average power ratio, meaning less efficient transmitter. We could reduce cyclic prefix length, but that would reduce multipath tolerance. And so on.

Another important reason why higher frequencies are preferred is frequency reuse. Longer distance and penetration is not always an advantage for a mobile network. A lot of radio space is wasted in areas where the signal is too weak to be usable but strong enough to interfere with useful signals at the same frequency. In denser areas you want to cram in more base stations, and if the radiation is attenuated quickly with distance, you would need less spectrum space overall.

We don’t move to higher frequencies just because we’ve run out of ways to pack more data into lower bands. The main reason is that higher frequencies offer much wider chunks of spectrum, which directly leads to higher potential data rates. Advanced modulation/coding techniques can squeeze more capacity out of lower bands, but there are fundamental physical and regulatory limits, like Shannon’s limit and the crowded/heavily licensed spectrum below 6 GHz that make it harder to keep increasing speeds at those lower frequencies.

In addition to what others have said, Often from a network perspective you want smaller range.

At the end of the day, there is a total speed limit of Mb/s/Hz.

For example, in cities, with a high population density, you could theoretically have a single cell tower providing data for everyone.

However, the speed would be slow, as for a given bandwidth six the data is shared between everyone in the city.

Alternatively, one could have 100 towers, and then the data would only have to be shared by those within range. But for this to work, one of the design constraints is that a smaller range is beneficial, so that multiple towers do not interfere with each other.

5G can operate at the same low frequencies as 2G/3G/4G. It's not inherently a higher frequency standard.

It just also supports other bands as well.