5G doesnt seem like its enabling anything fundamentally new. The talk of any ”killer app” based on having more throughput or on these optimizations always feels like demand generation and slightly inauthentic.<p>Are there any technologies enabled by these techniques that are not possible today?
As I’ve learned more and more about 5G (which is a nebulous term, really, but what I mean specifically is the planned upcoming releases of LTE 16 and 17, as well as the features of LTE 14 and 15 that users have yet to take advantage of) I’ve become convinced that it’s going to transform how so much of the world is designed.<p>5G technologies allow for more devices to send more data using less power. This is achieved using a huge variety of new technologies. For instance, with beamforming, the tower sends a directional signal to your phone based on its location instead of broadcasting an omnidirectional signal. This uses less power and supports for more users.<p>What consumers see is much higher data rates for the same price, which doesn’t seem that important. But on the industrial side, there will be offerings that allow for low data rate, low power applications at cheaper and cheaper prices.
Not exactly on topic:<p>There have been a few HN submissions in the past linking to papers concerned with the effect of 5G on insects.<p>As a layperson I was not able to evaluate those papers. But if anyone knows if there was any kind of consensus reached about that, or even if this is something that anyone serious is concerned about, I would appreciate the pointer.
> In defining V2X for 5G, Seo says the most challenging thing was to provide high data throughput, reliability, and low latency, both of which are essential for anything beyond the most basic communications. Seo explains that earlier standards typically deal with messages with hundreds of bytes that are expected to reach 90 percent of receivers in a 300-meter radius within a few hundred milliseconds. The 3GPP standards bring those benchmarks into the realm of gigabytes per second, 99.999 percent reliability, and just a few milliseconds.<p>Did the previous standard lag behind or is this improvement truly this ridiculous?
>5G for cars to communicate with each other<p>That's pretty good news. Even a simple "sharp braking" type coms between cars has decent potential to save lives beyond what can be achieved with radar & the like.
Seems a poor taste title considering the conspiracy theories around 5G that have actually got engineers physically attacked and threatened.<p>Click bait is one thing but poor form in this context and publication.
Good article but I continue to feel like for whatever use cases 5g is fit to serve, it seems likely to be a limited technology, used only by heavyweight giant companies. Unlike other communications bands, there is no intent to make any of this at all consumerly accessible.
Wow, those are really cool technologies.<p>That said, the unlicensed spectrum thing sounds absolutely awful. Sorry your wifi will suck because your local telco decided to beam 5GHz to your neighbor, and your AP understands that as "collision" at best, and "weather radar" at worst.<p>I thought that was thrown out of the plan, with torches and pitchforks? With DFS wifi is already super crammed, and now "right of way" managed spectrum people want to land grab it for profit? That's so not cool.
The idea of vehicle to vehicle communication is a bit frightening. Imagine the obscenities and insults you yell at other drivers, are now able to be communicated directly to the object of ire.
There's so much messy stuff with 5G from nearly the very beginning. And I like it less and less.<p>I'm nobody in the domain of wireless physical protocols, so I wouldn't know, of course. But does it actually even make sense to mix up peer-to-peer and peer-to-tower communications within one protocol? Why would you even want that? To be able to do all this stuff on the same frequencies? Having (more-or-less) same chip for everything, regardless of if it needs close-range and/or global network communications not only disgusts me "politically" (privacy issues, totally absent transparency, you know all that stuff), but also means more complicated, more expensive tech where you could do with cheaper one. And doing everything there is to do wirelessly on the same frequencies means these frequencies busy as fuck. Wouldn't you actually want the opposite for the protocol you hope to become the ubiquitous high-throughput cellular network protocol? It seems like it would make more sense to send 2 identical messages (or even to use 2 chips, if need be) on different frequencies if you actually need both for some reason.
Reading through this, it doesn't sound like the people involved considered the amount of outright misuse some of these features are likely to enable.<p>Haven't we already seen bad actors <i>will</i> misuse mobile tech to track our movements, spy on people, (etc) on a wholesale scale?<p>This seems to be wilfully charging down the road of making it worse?
5G communication fine. But trust?
I don't want my car accepting information from untrusted cars or roadside infrastructure.<p>It will be interesting riding a motorbike through these years.
> Private Networks<p>> [...]At those scales, 5G could function essentially like Wi-Fi networks.<p>Now that's going to get interesting, I hope. Will we finally see a reliable alternative to 802.11?
> Millimeter waves means it will be possible to build a network just for an office building, factory, or stadium. At those scales, 5G could function essentially like Wi-Fi networks.<p>LTE was already using a whole lot of frequencies adjacent to Wi-FI, and I'm sure similar bands would be a critical part of making a private 5G network since you want to go through minor obstacles. Millimeter-wave on the other hand could be useful for speed but I bet it <i>wouldn't</i> be a critical part.
I expect and hope that 5G makes it possible to have virtual environments with many participants, very high resolution, low latency, and high frame rate.<p>While there is something human and nurturing about getting a hug or shaking someone’s hand, very high quality shared virtual spaces will open up many business and social opportunities. Endless possibilities...
Someone debunk this for me please: <a href="http://www.5gappeal.eu/about/" rel="nofollow">http://www.5gappeal.eu/about/</a><p>Edit: I'm legitimately looking for good sources on this. Not trolling.
Uhh, I'm not sure what that was but I tried to access that site via Tor and on the particular exit node I was on I got back a "418 I'm a teapot" response. Yeah, it got weird.