It's not just about what exists today, but what we want to be able to do in the future.
First, there are situations where it's hard to get "awesome LTE" because there's a lot of usage. Getting more bandwidth is important to handle situations like that.
Beyond that, we don't know what the future will offer if we build greater capacity. When Apple launched the iPhone, we didn't know that we'd be changing the way we live our lives. Things like TikTok wouldn't exist without the abundant bandwidth offered by LTE. We don't always know what greater bandwidth and capacity will offer.
We are seeing some things already. We're seeing wireless home internet become available to a lot of people. For cell carriers, this is a new stream of revenue. For customers, this can be increase home broadband competition and for many rural customers the first chance at broadband.
We're seeing things like Nvidia's GeForce NOW allow you to play games that are being run on the cloud rather than your local device. Lower latency and greater bandwidth/capacity means a better experience. Nvidia recommends 50Mbps which LTE can do, but won't have as much capacity to support as many simultaneous users. 5G will also drive down latencies which are important for gaming.
It's possible that self-driving technology might take advantage of this in the future. I'm not someone that promotes self-driving tech, but one can see how lower latency and higher bandwidth/capacity could mean being able to send more data to the cloud both for computation and also for storage/learning.
A lot of people are talking about VR and meta-verses. Again, I'm not necessarily buying into this yet, but it seems like greater bandwidth and lower latency could make things better.
Heck, even video-conferencing on mobile can benefit from more bandwidth and lower latency. While LTE can accommodate it, there are times when networks get congested and less congestion is a good thing. Lower latency also offers a better experience.
Do you need it? No. But you don't need a smartphone. At the same time, it's possible that someone will create something that you won't know how you lived without that's made possible by more bandwidth/capacity and lower latency.
Totally agree. Should consumers get costly highend phones in 2020-2021 with degraded battery life due to 5G is different story, but maybe we should be sacrificed to build futureproof 5G infra by buying phones with unnecessary 5G.
I think whether it's currently unnecessary might depend on where you are and what network you're on. T-Mobile has mid-band spectrum that isn't C-Band spectrum and they've been able to deploy it sooner. They're seeing 300Mbps+ speeds on a lot of their network already. We're also seeing battery life get better fast. X50 phones were problematic. X55 phones had some degraded battery life. X60 phones seem to be doing pretty well.
I think it's easy to forget that LTE wasn't as big a jump initially as we see today. Back in 2012, T-Mobile's HSPA network scored 5.5Mbps in PC World's testing against 7.4Mbps for Verizon's LTE and 9.1Mbps for AT&T's LTE. In PCMag's 2013 testing, T-Mobile's HSPA got a similar 7.7Mbps while the 4 LTE networks got 5.1Mbps, 10.3Mbps, 13.1Mbps, and 16.0Mbps. Again, LTE networks were seeing marginal improvements. Over time as network deployments matured and new LTE releases came out, LTE's improvements went way beyond HSPA.
But the first round of LTE phones on Verizon were terrible - way worse than any 5G device we saw. Some people wanted to be a first adopter. I think waiting a generation or two gives you better results, but some people always want to be first.
I actually think the reason the US pushed LTE so quickly is simply because Verizon didn't have an upgrade path for their 3G network which was stuck in the 1Mbps range while HSPA-based competitors were pushing into the 4-8Mbps range. In Europe, carriers could delay a year and offer dual-channel HSPA service in the meantime.
LTE was still better even in the early days, but the fact that CDMA didn't have an upgrade path put Verizon in a tough place. They could either watch AT&T offer 5x faster speeds than their HSPA network (at a time when AT&T had an exclusive on the iPhone) or they could be an LTE early adopter. I think AT&T would have liked to milk their HSPA investment a bit longer (as many carriers did around the world), but once Verizon started marketing LTE they had to follow.
And you're saying that the upgrade was huge - and it certainly has been. However, it was more marginal at the start. That's not to say it wasn't a good upgrade even initially, but it wasn't anywhere near the 40-50Mbps that LTE averages today in the US. If 5G can follow a similar trajectory, we'll be able to support a lot of things we can't today.
There are plenty of cheap Android phones with 5G now. E.g. there are a few nice Nokia ones. I wouldn't buy a phone without support for that right now. This stuff was standardized and agreed years ago and it's just the rollout that is going very slowly. The same happened with 4G. That took many years.
The point of 5G is better quality of service. Marketing people of course dumb down the improvements to "it's faster" but throughput is actually the least important thing. Though of course a better QoS means that operators can guarantee a bit better throughput as well.
Better latency, improved scaling for operators (more connected devices in an area), lower power usage, and more reliable connections. That is a big issue for me with 4G. Coverage here in Germany is not great and even in areas that are covered, the quality of service is pretty bad and I often struggle to get it to work at all even in places that are supposedly well covered. E.g. the are around the TV tower in Berlin (i.e. the largest FFing antenna in the wider area) is pretty bad because the area is full of tourists usually and the local base station ins hopelessly oversubscribed.
That's the kind of stuff you could reasonably expect to improve with 5G.
Wifi isn't really set up for authentication through carrier. It also doesn't seamlessly transition between short-range high-bandwidth and more traditional longer-range lower-bandwidth
Not really. Just a prediction about the future and as the infrastructure takes years to build out better to start early than late.
Bandwidth usage globally has been growing at around 30% per year for a long time now with nothing showing it would slow down (obviously not all of this is wireless). LTE will sooner or later run out of bandwidth and thus 5G basically allowing more mpbs on the same radio spectrum (and also rolling in new frequencies)
Even today in relatively low population density country like Finland (where I live) LTE connections in cities are slower during peak hours due to the radio frequencies just being full. (In general most plans have unlimited data so people use them a lot)
It sounds like you just made the case for 4k TV, where LTE is analogous to 1080p.
The long overdue update came and went. There just isn't the pressure built up for the next one.
I get the idea of incremental capacity and quality updates. But it's drudge work. What business models are people contemplating that has them so horny for 5g?
Yeah I feel like that's an important aspect. We never are able to imagine at the time completely what's possible. It's only in hindsight the new thing seems obvious
> Things like TikTok wouldn't exist without the abundant bandwidth offered by LTE.
And this is valuable? If you dig a big hole in a public space people will fill it with garbage before long.
Technology should be driven by need. Building bigger pipes, bigger roads and bigger holes is just asking for more garbage to fill it with. Let's start with problems that are worth solving.
Entertainment is many people's primary use for their phone. You might not agree that it's worthwhile, but then that's often touted as a strength of the internet -- new and creative applications can spring up based on anybody's wacky idea, and either flourish or die. There's no need to justify their importance to anyone.
LTE was not invented to create TikTok, it was created for other reasons, it just happens that TikTok could fill LTE with garbage.
Just all tech that depends on other tech does this.
First, there are situations where it's hard to get "awesome LTE" because there's a lot of usage. Getting more bandwidth is important to handle situations like that.
Beyond that, we don't know what the future will offer if we build greater capacity. When Apple launched the iPhone, we didn't know that we'd be changing the way we live our lives. Things like TikTok wouldn't exist without the abundant bandwidth offered by LTE. We don't always know what greater bandwidth and capacity will offer.
We are seeing some things already. We're seeing wireless home internet become available to a lot of people. For cell carriers, this is a new stream of revenue. For customers, this can be increase home broadband competition and for many rural customers the first chance at broadband.
We're seeing things like Nvidia's GeForce NOW allow you to play games that are being run on the cloud rather than your local device. Lower latency and greater bandwidth/capacity means a better experience. Nvidia recommends 50Mbps which LTE can do, but won't have as much capacity to support as many simultaneous users. 5G will also drive down latencies which are important for gaming.
It's possible that self-driving technology might take advantage of this in the future. I'm not someone that promotes self-driving tech, but one can see how lower latency and higher bandwidth/capacity could mean being able to send more data to the cloud both for computation and also for storage/learning.
A lot of people are talking about VR and meta-verses. Again, I'm not necessarily buying into this yet, but it seems like greater bandwidth and lower latency could make things better.
Heck, even video-conferencing on mobile can benefit from more bandwidth and lower latency. While LTE can accommodate it, there are times when networks get congested and less congestion is a good thing. Lower latency also offers a better experience.
Do you need it? No. But you don't need a smartphone. At the same time, it's possible that someone will create something that you won't know how you lived without that's made possible by more bandwidth/capacity and lower latency.