I haven’t even bought a 5G phone yet. My carrier keeps threatening to cut 4G coverage in various areas, and has already axed 3G entirely, rendering large swathes of otherwise perfectly functional devices useless. So far my 4G Moto Z still works. For now.
At this point my conspiracy opinion that the constant “generation” changes are mostly to just force people to buy/lease new phones and devices. Even pokey old 4G has always been more than fast enough for all of my mobile internet activities. Hell, even 3G was.
I have no less than four otherwise flawlessly functional phones in a desk drawer that just won’t work with my cell carrier because they’ve either turned off 3G or discontinued the specific 4G bands those devices need.
I live in a medium size city with extensive Verizon coverage. 5g here is still dogshit. It’s always slower than LTE and even though towers are everywhere, my phone is constantly switching back and forth.
mmwave 5g or “5g”? On T-Mobile near me I get anywhere from 200Mbps down to over gigabit down depending on the location.
A few areas are the shitty 5g that’s essentially 4g+. But most areas around me have really good coverage with pretty insane speeds.
How would anyone know? Why is it even possible to “fake” 5G? Just makes everyone that doesn’t know about it to just complain and think it sucks.
On T-Mobile shitty 5g is just called 5g in the top next to your signal strength. The mmwave 5g is called 5g uc. Every carrier does something different.
What percentage of people use 3g only phones? If it’s 1%, does it make sense to keep those services running just for those people?
It’s not necessarily phones. It’s trackers, monitoring devices, laptops, access points, and tablets that all run over 3G bands.
Great! You can get 4g/5g versions of those devices because, again, the world doesn’t owe the 1% of users services
Older Kindles. Cars
It’s still a small number of users no matter how many use cases you list. There are newer Kindles and newer cars. 3g being turned off is inevitable no matter how many old devices are in existence.
It’s not just for that. 3G isn’t that overloaded. In my area I get 1-3Mbps on 4G LTE but around 20Mbps on 3G HSPA+.
It’s not overloaded because fewer people use it, so it costs more to run those services for less benefit
In the US almost none, the networks are being shut down.
I totally agree with you that generation changes are either currently or going to be used as a form of planned obsolescence. I reckon that within 10 years or so we’ll have sub generation types (things 6.5G) that will force people to buy new devices.
I was forced to upgrade since i was still rocking a 3g phone and my area switched to 5g. The phone company gave me a free Pixel6 since it wasnt my choice to upgrade. Maybe if you hold out long enough you’ll just get a free upgrade. Though it was a double edge sword, since they tried to up my monthly bill since i was “upgraded” to “premium data”. I had to fight that and still ended up paying a few bucks more than previously, but better than what they tried to charge me.
As a person living in a densely populated city of London, I don’t want 6G, I need 10G and I need it yesterday. There’s no conspiracy, there’s an obvious and objective reality.
5G was made for your usecase…
5G is not enough. It was too late to arrive. And I can’t imagine how bad it is in cities in Asia, where density is even higher.
No, i mean, it was made to better handle 100s of concurrent streams to the same tower.
I know, but it’s not enough these days.
4G, 5G and now 6G are worthless if cell providers don’t provide enough bandwidth to the towers. The range also keeps decreasing as the generations increase, so now there are these big gaps that 3G used to cover.
In my area, 5G is slower than 4G and both have lower signal and slower speeds than 3G used to have. I need a dual SIM phone and to constantly switch my phone between AT&T and T-Mobile, and both are crap. I only use about 1GB in total too, and I’m lucky if I can pull more than 1 megabit on either service. I miss 3G speeds, coverage, and competition.
Worst of all, AT&T is forcing home users to switch to a 5G hotspot from DSL. It’s probably a big part of why the cell towers are always overloaded too. Imagine running your home internet on 1 megabit with constant drops…
That thing with 3G sounds right. I usually switch to 3G when I want faster speeds than 4G, which gets me only around 1-3Mbps during the day in my location*. If I do want even faster speeds, I have to use the internet between 1-4am when I can reach pretty nice 40Mbps.
Unfortunately, when connected to 3G of Orange in national roaming, I can only use 20GB as stated in the FUP (my carrier doesn’t offer 3G). However the carrier has confirmed they unofficially allow up to 40GB for some reason.
But that’s not enough for me. I use around 80GB per month on mobile data, but sometimes I reach up to 150GB.*In some areas with lower population (typically small villages), I get almost the maximum theoretical speeds of 75Mbps.
Yeah but eventually they upgrade plus lots of them want to remove copper if they haven’t yet and switch towers to fiber so I feel eventually it improves but yeah slower than expected.
slower speeds than 3g
wtf that’s not even possible where even country how
The infrastructure is newer, more people are switching to 5G out of necessity, and the influx of newer users is straining that infrastructure which is not prepared for it.
5G is supposed to have taken over the network frequencies of 3G (15MHz to 20MHz) from 800 MHz, 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1,700 MHz, 1,900 MHz and 2,100 MHz bands. The problem with that is the higher the frequency used, the farther it travels through unimpeded space, but the lower it penetrates in impeeded space. 5G (1GHz to 6GHz) on the same frequency bands won’t penetrate as far in dense urban population centers with large buildings.
So yes, 5G can send more data at a faster rate. But don’t confuse bandwidth with signal clarity or penetration. Because higher frequency doesn’t always mean better operation or even better transmission. The receiver also figures into what is being transmitted. You can have the biggest array with the highest UHF and if the receiver isn’t in a place with optimal reception, or it’s not built for that input it will mean nothing. That’s the difference between Bandwidth and Frequency. https://www.pcmag.com/news/5g-is-here-but-how-it-performs-varies-widely-depending-on-where-you-live
Pay attention to what corps oppose things like
5g home internet is not “1 megabit with constant drops” in my experience. I live in a large city in the US and on Verizon I get several hundreds down and 40-70 up depending on the time. I used to have T-Mobile which was worse, but still typically 200mbps down. There is packet loss but it is very low and not an issue. Upload is not great but much better than what the cable company offers. My parents out in the middle of nowhere were still able to get ~50-100 based on conditions. Even then, that’s a huge upgrade over most DSL services.
"This is an important research question because we can see mobile traffic going up over the next decade by a factor of 10 or even a factor of 20. "
Wtf are they going to do with that? Always-on video from wireless devices everywhere? Holographic movies on every web page? It sounds terrible. I remember having to make phone calls for basic communication. These days you send a text or email, except now and then you want the higher bandwidth of a voice call. That is, we have been moving toward LESS bandwidth rather than more.
Whatever is imagined being done with all the new bandwidth can’t be good.
Your personal usage does not align with the majority. Look at tiktok, it’s social media based around endless video files. It’s not an occasional text or email, it’s hundreds of videos that your constantly scrolling through.
The carriers love to brag about high capacity and fast speeds but they’re still unwilling to deliver the bandwidth. They’re all advertising “unlimited” data but if you scroll TikTok for a while they’ll block your line for “excessive” data usage or throttle you down to 256kb/s.
I’ve only had this happen when using my phone as a hotspot
OK, good point. Are people using mobile data for that? Yes you’re right I’m not on social media etc. Also I’m on a super cheap mobile plan with enough monthly data to check email and look at some occasional web pages, but if I want to watch a video I almost always use home internet for that. I guess if this super high bandwidth mobile stuff kills Comcast though, some good will have come out of it. The Register article talks mostly about IoT and “AI/ML” rather than social media though.
Is 5g mobile data cheaper for the end user than 4g in practice? The sticker prices and advertised data caps for monthly plans look to me to be about the same as before, but maybe more of the data cap is usable in practice.
OK, good point. Are people using mobile data for that?
Unlimited data. You do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want.
I haven’t seen any carriers charging extra for 5g but I don’t see why it would be more expensive since the quicker you’re done using the data the quicker the tower can serve someone else.
That’s what I mean, it seems to cost as much as before. I was hoping to hear that it had gotten a lot cheaper, not stayed the same. Ideally, it should be pervasive and free, but I don’t mind in that case if it is relatively slow.
Every “unlimited” mobile plan I’ve heard of has fine print that says it slows to a crawl after some amount. I don’t know if the real limits are different in practice, so I was asking about that.
Every “unlimited” mobile plan I’ve heard of has fine print that says it slows to a crawl after some amount. I don’t know if the real limits are different in practice, so I was asking about that.
These days you just get “deprioritized” instead of a hard throttle on most unlimited plans after reaching the amount. Deprioritized means the network treats your data as less important so if the tower gets congested it’ll slow down otherwise it’s still full speed.
At work we have phones that are web crawlers and they each use 50+ gigs of data per month so they’re well within the deprioritized zone. But even then they still get really good speeds unless the network is super congested for some reason.
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The real problem is that people are too lazy to read. Endless video, who is tiktok targeted to? This is bad news for attention spans and your ability to work. Just try to look at how much information you can retain from a video compared to a paragraph of text.
Wtf are they going to do with that?
Show more ads
They’re making the data faster, but most plans are still limited to something ridiculous like 20G/month. What’s the point of being able to stream 4K video or whatever if that’s going to burn through your data allowance in seconds?
A huge part of newer mobile network generations is the increased capacity. Faster speeds is effectively the same as more capacity in the towers.
This means that companies could actually afford to start offering unlimited data caps, there just has to be the push to do so. But I do genuinely believe that within a decade there will be no more datacaps for mobile data in cities, at least (or at least plenty of plans with unlimited and no throttling). Well, idk about the US considering you got data caps on broadband, but, I’m sure Europe will get it.
And nobody will ever need more than 640K of memory, so the fact that even your cell phone carries vastly more than that must mean you yourself are up to no good, right?
Even if you’re not dealing with a constant video stream, the power of the internet lies in moving vast amounts of data around. Yeah a lot of that information is based of corporate privacy invasion, but you also have things like medical databases or performing jobs remotely. I had gigabit routers in my home at a time when 10/100 routers were still typically used even in businesses. If you have a capability, someone will find a way to make use of it and new innovations will pop up that we hadn’t even considered before. Imagine where we would be at if Xerox hadn’t invented the mouse and GUI desktop years before personal home computers were even available.
All the examples you mention work fine with wired internet. No need to let the carriers keep gobbling RF spectrum for mobile.
someone will find a way to make use of it and new innovations will pop up
Nah, it’s all surveillance dystopia from here on out.
There will be plenty of uses for high speed wireless connections once the new mobile networks with big capacities come online. There’s pleeeenty of research on the applications.
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Don’t you watch HDR movies in 4K on the go? Ok, not 4K, but people stream a lot of HD videos all the time. As well as stream from their phone cameras to Facebook and Twitch. Another issue is that high density cities have way too many people trying to do all this high bandwidth stuff at once.
And video calls. Don’t forget video calls.
How much extra do I have to pay to not be in video calls? I almost never watch videos while mobile but I guess some people do. I doubt if I could tell the difference between SD and HD on a phone screen though.
If you personally don’t do something it doesn’t mean that the majority of the population is like you. Worldwide traffic use average is 20GB per person. What’s even more interesting, is that US number is lower than average in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. And guess what? More than half of the world’s population lives in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. So if you live in US, it’s not just you, but also people around you who are not representative of mobile internet use.
Always-on video from wireless devices everywhere?
They can’t even give me more than 20GB a month without forking over more than I pay for my home internet, never happening in my lifetime.
Just make a nationwide 10gb fiber optic service it’s like 5 times cheaper.
I guess it’s for streaming?
I’m not into any of that livestream stuff and I cannot believe that people stream their lives and other people want to watch it.
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That’s for local networks right? That can moved to 5ghz wifi or whatever. No need to use spectrum controlled by mobile carriers.
Ok. But that’s all local traffic within your home network, and has nothing to do with 5G or 6G.
Even if your smart devices are connecting to cloud servers and streaming all your data over, it still has nothing to do with 5G or 6G.
Most want ubiquitous and affordable/cheap mobile internet without the hassle of signing contracts. Moving tech tiers past 4G isn’t relevant for consumers as of now.
Said the Phone/ISPs top earning guys while looking at their bank accounts extracts.
I need some stocks for 6g developing/manufacturing corps.
Samsung probably
Don’t ask me no clue 😅
Why don’t we just skip 6G and just go straight to 7G
If they’re going to skip anything, it’s going to be 8… Because 7, 8, 9!
I mean, you might have a point there.
If seven ate nine, but you skip eight, it’s all OK! Seven nine.
But… But… Seven ate nine.
You ate eight!
Seven nine!
Waaaahhh!
Nah dude… That’s why they skipped 9 because 7 ate it. 9 was never a viable option
They’ll skip 9 as that seems to be Kryptonite to tech. Both Microsoft and Apple decided to skip straight from 8 to 10 with Windows and iPhone respectively.
If 5g makes the frog gay would 6g negate it?
Nah this will be something related with Satan and 666 and hell and so on.
The 6 Gs of the apocalypse. G G G G G G
Gluttony, Gargoyle, Gollum, Ganesha, Gabriel, Gesus…
gg wp
It makes them trans
Nah dude, this time it’ll make the snakes gay. 7g will affect even more species, where the end goal is 10g: make the planet gay!
Well yes, since it makes the frog trans so it goes from gay to straight
yep
Silicon Valley really wants to make XR a thing.
Current tech does not need 5G and the shit that they think will need 6G is just needless XR systems that will be steaming an unjustifiable amount of data from the “cloud”.
The enshittification continues. Happy 2024 folks
When I had a Pixel 6, there was a bug that caused awful battery drain when on 5G, so I changed the preferred network setting to LTE for like a month while waiting for them to fix the issue.
It had NO effect on my regular use at all. Running speed tests showed that my max download speed was significantly slower while using LTE, but that’s obviously not indicative of real world usage. If there was any difference between LTE and 5G in terms of page loading, media streaming, etc during regular daily activities, it wasn’t perceptible.
I honestly don’t think I’d notice a real world difference between 4G and H+ in most scenarios except for, maybe, video. I never understood the hype for 5G, especially considering the horrendous frequency limitations that imply line of sight AND very small coverage radii.
With 4G covering all my needs flawlessly, idk if I’d need a new gen. With a laptop, probably, but a smartphone, or even tablet? Ping across the globe is a bigger offender than speeds. Having a 2-3 sec delay when calling anyone, even though having a smooth detailed picture, is more annoying than having a 480p and an instant response. Cloud gaming suffers from it too. But that’s on ISPs, international lines, and that’s harder to change than introducing the 6G in phones and local towers.
mmwave 5g has some incredibly low latency compared to 4g. You’d be surprised how much of your latency is just from you to the tower.
Right now when it’s not busy mmwave 5g doing a speed test I have 45ms latency and 3ms of jitter. 4g is 54ms with 12ms of jitter. When the network is loaded there’s a HUGE difference. 5g can handle so many more people at once so your latency is never really that high. But when 4g is loaded down latency gets huge fast.
Ping from china to me in the US is sub 250ms on my wired internet connection so that’s not really the problem. The rest is whoever is doing your phone call.
mmWave is fine when you are out in the open but anything blocking your view basically kills the signal strength. So things like stadiums and highly trafficked streets are great for it but definitely not in a building.
The mid band 5g I’m on (Mint aka T-Mobile) has little issue hitting 500Mbps here in my house.
US2CHN? 250? Wow.
My shithole has sub 100 playing local servers when wired, and moreso when playing on EU servers, something like 2-4 whole seconds when I accidentially lobbied with people writing in hieroglyphics. All these crappy old wires from early two thousands and a lack of maintainance.
But I guess, that isn’t a problem elsewhere, and we’d both benefit from 5G based on your observation.
Where was 5g ?
Obviously being remotely planted in your brain with radio waves to control your mind and actions, like voting for [OPPOSITE POLITICAL PARTY] or making you throb and drip for [OPPOSITE PREFERRED GENDER]. Wake up sheeple!!!11!
Canine be upgraded. I didn’t vote and I’m happily in a relationship.
Can I get faster speeds. Maybe an upgrade to sight or faster walking speed
I can hear the conspiracies already!
The wave forms of 6G will physically break the ankles of birds in flight and neuter your dog through the roof of the house. Yoghurt will never taste the same and your feet will go up two sizes forcing you to buy new shoes. The writing is clearly on the wall.
It’s not even out yet and it’s making my back hurt!
username checks out
We Moroccans don’t even have 5G countrywide yet, and yet you guys are already prepping for 6G? At least wait for everyone to catch up.
No, most of us don’t have 5G.
Att for instance has been telling their custumers for.2 years they were 5G but if you download a network scanner you will discover that 4G LTE is the Max that most Americans outside financial hubs have gotten.
If this doesn’t fit into the definition of “scam”, then idk what does.
If we did that, nothing new would ever happen. A lot of third world nations have yet to industrialize ffs
Oh.
I have no 5G where I live. Maybe it’s time to wait??
Does this mean we can do proper voice over 4G already? Last time I heard it was just for the selected phone models with specific software.
WE DIDN’T NEED 5G
