The Disappointment of 5G

Ignoring all the hype and BS, all the cell infrastructure really comes down to a battle between user bandwidth needs and available spectrum (multiplied by spectral efficiency and density of towers). Get this wrong and customer service tanks as cell sites get congestied.<p>There are virtually no new applications enabled IMO with 5G speeds vs LTE speeds&#x2F;latency, assuming they are both not congested. 100mbit&#x2F;sec LTE with 20-30ms latency is fine for nearly everything; gigabit with 5ms latency on 5G doesn&#x27;t really change much, at least for the next few years.<p>5G NR (the access layer of 5G) isn&#x27;t hugely more spectrum efficient than LTE on a bitz&#x2F;hz basis, at least on a downstream basis where the most demand is (upstream is really important too though, especially for TCP, I&#x27;m not discounting that). [1].<p>We are getting diminishing returns on spectrum efficiency. Which means more and more spectrum required to keep up with demands, which is really what 5G enables (more channel bonding, much wider channels). However, we are totally running out of spectrum to allocate to mobile services. The spectrum that is available in large quantities is extremely high frequency and can&#x27;t really penetrate walls (it will even struggle with rain).<p>So long term the only thing that carriers can do is densify their cell sites, which is extremely expensive from a capex perspective. Some carriers have realised this, some haven&#x27;t (or don&#x27;t have the funds to do it). In the UK 3UK is doing it; with thousands of planning applications to add new sites (with huge NIMBY backlash everywhere).<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.5g-networks.net&#x2F;5g-technology&#x2F;spectral-efficiency-5g-nr-and-4g-lte-compared&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.5g-networks.net&#x2F;5g-technology&#x2F;spectral-efficienc...</a>

&gt;5G would enable doctors to perform surgery remotely from across the country<p>I never, ever understood that argument; I simply can&#x27;t imagine a hospital relying on a cellular network for such sensitive work.

I think one of the biggest improvement points of 5G, which most people don&#x27;t notice, is that it improves the number of devices that can connect to the local cell tower.<p>With 4G, you get 100k device connections per 1 sq kilometer.<p>With 5G, this number becomes 1 million connections per square kilometer.<p>This is a very big deal if you are in a heavily congested area (big cities, major league sporting events). Also a very big deal to high priority services (like police radios, emergency services, etc), as it goes a long way to ensuring connections are available.<p>Also goes a long way to delivering on the promise of IoT... with 1 million connections a lot more things become possible.<p>It&#x27;s more of an evolutionary tech, than revolutionary. Then again, 5G means means 5th generation... implying the evolutionary process. The average user won&#x27;t notice it, but its still important nonetheless.

If tech hype is more or less marketing + effective PR (tons of articles and blog post written about said tech), I&#x27;ve felt this author&#x27;s sentiment toward the hype viz. reality of 5G with AR&#x2F;VR, blockchain, and the current wave of AI as well.<p>So much of the 2010&#x27;s internet UX is fully baked. We can communicate with voice, audio and video with the world from anywhere on cheap pocket devices. It would be harder to make this any more frictionless without some sort of new HCI paradigm. We&#x27;ve got wireless comms going wherever it made commercial sense, &quot;enabling&quot; workers to get directives and do business from their morning commutes. You can shop from the toilet.<p>You can also make original music in the palm of your hand for the cost of a used iPhone.<p>What I&#x27;m getting at is the digital revolution is here if not already over. We&#x27;re in our cyberpunk future already, but surprise humans don&#x27;t need too much to be absolutely sated if not overwhelmed by technology and I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re itching for more of it. The business of selling tech right now is hard because so many of the jobs are _done_. All that you can do is generate hype.<p>I don&#x27;t doubt I&#x27;m missing some of the forest through the hype trees here, but tech in the 2020&#x27;s has a lot to prove to me.

&gt; <i>No wireless technology has been a bigger flop than 5G when comparing the hype to the eventual reality.</i><p>Well that’s obviously not true. I was at the launch event for WiMAX which had huge hype and now you’ve probably never heard of it.<p>5G actually exists and works. In my home (admittedly near a tower) it’s faster than my gigabit Fios over wifi.

It&#x27;s curious how telcos&#x27; incessant blabbering about 5G ended up getting so deep into people&#x27;s heads that they began thinking it was something that would make every interaction on their smartphones instantaneous. 5G was never about the individual user. It was always about the grid; the ability to provide expected bandwidth&#x2F;connectivity to more users at the same time.

It&#x27;s pretty funny how T-Mobile has rolled out 5G in my small town (with a single cell tower), but have not bothered to upgrade the connection to the tower so we still only get about 2mbps on a good day.<p>Even better is the local ISP offers 10gbps fiber service and has lines directly next to the tower, but the cell tower doesn&#x27;t use that, and instead has some long range microwave backhaul.<p>I always wonder what the point of spending the money to upgrade the tower to 5G was.

5G gave me an incredible, almost magical, connection for in my home that&#x27;s located 30km from the nearest city. On a good day, I&#x27;m getting 600&#x2F;50Mbps with ~20ms latencies which is about 10-100 times better than the previous connection was giving me. It made my family&#x27;s life possible in the lockdown times of Covid-19.<p>Fiber will be soon available here, though, and I&#x27;ll be replacing 5G with it, to get a more stable, less energy-hungry connection that is less tied to chinese suppliers of networking hardware and software.<p><i>edit</i> perhaps what I have is only some ultimate final form of 4G, I don&#x27;t know nor care really.

Looking back I realized it felt similar hearing about 5G all the time just as it feels hearing about AI now.

In Germany you can pay 35€&#x2F;mo for 5GB of data traffic (t-mobile) and then enjoy the bandwidth of 5G for a full 40 seconds. It&#x27;s a total joke.

I have good experience with 5G.<p>The speeds are great. On 4G and 4G+ I&#x27;ve been getting speeds of 20-30mbps even though ISP&#x27;s were advertising 200+mbps speeds (theoretical maximums)<p>On 5G I easily get 100+mbps, majority of times around 500mbps.<p>Where I live we get unlimited usage 5G for around $25-30

All the BS hype about 5G was a red flag for me. They were always showing how doctors could operate on people in far away places (never mentioning the fact that the people in the far away places probably have no health care) and it is also all supposed to lead to everything from energy efficiency to higher efficiency.<p>But all I get is a higher phone bill and no option to opt out of a 5G plan even though I turn it off on my phone.<p>And what did we probably really get? More surveillance. You do know, don&#x27;t you, that these mmWave can pinpoint you and your activity with an ever increasing exactness that should concern all of us.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ieeexplore.ieee.org&#x2F;abstract&#x2F;document&#x2F;8804831" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ieeexplore.ieee.org&#x2F;abstract&#x2F;document&#x2F;8804831</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hindawi.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;js&#x2F;2021&#x2F;6657709&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hindawi.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;js&#x2F;2021&#x2F;6657709&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ieeexplore.ieee.org&#x2F;abstract&#x2F;document&#x2F;8645553" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ieeexplore.ieee.org&#x2F;abstract&#x2F;document&#x2F;8645553</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&#x2F;90314058&#x2F;5g-means-youll-have-to-say-goodbye-to-your-location-privacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&#x2F;90314058&#x2F;5g-means-youll-have-to-...</a>

The worst thing the Australian government has done in recent years is backflip on the onus being on them to connect you to fibre via their National Broadband Network (NBN) programme, now the onus is on the consumer to spend thousands to connect to 5G instead.<p>I&#x27;ve been doing up my mother&#x27;s connection 25 mins away from a city CBD (I live in another state). I have had to purchase a $1,000 5G modem, 2x2 MIMO directional antennae, rewired the property myself with Cat6 and an old Cisco switch and waps.<p>I got a 22-26x increase in download off peak and 30x increase in upload (up to about 600-700mb&#x2F;s off peak)<p>Would&#x27;ve been wonderful if they just gave them the fibre they promised, though<p>Fixed wireless 5G is definitely faster but the medium&#x27;s line of sight requirement means I&#x27;d really prefer slow 250mb&#x2F;s fibre to volatile 100-750mb&#x2F;s 5G<p>I&#x27;ve worked out I could hit about 2.5-3gb&#x2F;s if I went 4x4 MIMO with a 10m mast and aimed it perfectly (tower is 300m away) - but there&#x27;s no way to control who else is connected and taking the bandwidth - so I&#x27;m not investing anymore in her property

&gt; The big winner from the marketing hype has been the handset manufacturers, which have convinced customers that they must have 5G phones - without really telling them why<p>Its is a fact that much of recent tech development has been skewed by the explosion of mobile. It also feels as if this era is finally saturating and that might not be a bad thing. Mobile computing is obviously an amazing new dimension but it is also intrinsically a dumbed-down version of what fixed lines and more serious hardware (desktops etc) can offer.<p>Visions of a what a good digital society looks like vary, but resilient, high capacity fiber networks combined with a shift to more client-heavy computing would my preference. Imagine upgrading homes to be real digital hubs (e.g. supporting self-hosted clouds) offering a stark alternative to the remote mega datacenter plus puny touch screens.

The way 5G is implemented by carriers&#x2F;devices is such garbage. Unless I disable 5G entirely, my phone will refuse to switch to 4G even when 5G is so weak my speed is under 2mbit and 4G is testing at 45+mbit. It even takes over a minute of no connection at all before it will connect to 4G.

I’m in Sydney and the 5G is pretty good. Definitely better than or at least similar to the terrible internet options Verizon and other providers ever had back in the US (ignoring FIOS if you’re lucky enough to get it.

In my city 5G at the current provider is almost useless since it covers only the city center. At least, my 5G plan also allows using 4G.

It was the same with the initial rollout of 3G. There were all kind of crazy ideas for what this would enable, strange form factors of phones and so on. It usually takes a decade and turns out more boring, but in the end it _will be_ a better network. Nobody wants to go back to EDGE and many application now do rely on robust LTE.

I for one am enjoying 500 mbit service at my rural home for $30&#x2F;month with T-Mobile 5g home internet.

Counter point: 5G has been the most important technological innovation for my family in a decade. We live in the US but our home had no unmetered broadband access prior to 5G rollout. (No DSL (for BS &quot;technical line reasons) and no StarLink or cable video)

Speeds don&#x27;t matter when your data caps are ridiculously low. Can&#x27;t use 5G for anything without zapping that up.<p>The other half of the equation is now in rural areas I notice way less coverage area. They seem to have shut off 4G towers in favor of &quot;5G&quot; and now there are several places I used to get strong 4G coverage that I get 1 bar strength of 5G that is basically non-functional. In those areas my phone shows connected but won&#x27;t load anything. One of the main ones I notice it is within my local walmart. Used to have full 4G LTE there but now that 5G is &quot;available&quot; I can barely load websites while inside.<p>5G wasn&#x27;t worth the hype.

5g is a name for a collection of hundreds of improvements to the cellular network I have been told, yes by people wanting us to make applications where you needed low latency for marketing purpose. In the end they made something that bragged about low latency that actually did not even need low latency.<p>They know themselves there is no such thing as &quot;5g&quot; but try to explain that to the public. They said the low latency and the high bandwidth is also possible with 4g but they&#x27;re just upgrading a lot of stuff.<p>I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re selling a lie, they&#x27;re just upgrading a network and have some breaking changes.

I don&#x27;t think OP is <i>wrong</i>, but it more of a rambling comment than an article.<p>To understand what&#x27;s going on, we need equivalent of table of 5G spec features, with columns for:<p>* what use case the feature enables for users * how widely the feature is implemented, * what extra cost it would could incur to include the feature in a device or connection.<p>The article says that &quot;extra speed is wasted&quot; but also says that it &quot;enables watching video&quot; (and I presume sending video too).<p>That&#x27;s a huge win, isn&#x27;t it?<p>OP also forgot to mention, in the complaint about 8G, that we already have Fake G in &quot;4G LTE&quot; which isn&#x27;t full 4G.

&gt; The introduction of the new spectrum has relieved the pressure on overloaded cell sites<p>That&#x27;s all I expected from 5G. 4G is more than good enough for what I do with it, in fact, I can easily watch HD video and burn through my data plan at 3G (H+) speeds, I don&#x27;t really need more.<p>The only thing is that I assume great signal and no congestion, which is far from what we get in practice. The only reason I want 5G, and even 4G is that I can get the equivalent of full 3G speed in places where I couldn&#x27;t before.<p>Hopefully, it will also mean bigger data plans at an equivalent price with the extra bandwidth operators get.

5G is being rolled out little by little. If it&#x27;s disappointing, its because it&#x27;s not actually all delivered yet. It also has benefits that go beyond just Download speeds, like much better power efficiency.

&gt; It seems like the industry has embarked on subdividing what was originally considered as 5G spectrum into small chunks so that the carriers roll out subsequent generations of 6G, 7G, and 8G—all of which were supposedly part of the original 5G revolution.<p>4G proved too hard, so the industry instead adopted what they called 4G Long Term Evolution, or LTE for short, where they&#x27;d start with a minor improvement over 3G and keep improving over time. Then they forgot to improve over time. 5G was transparently just 4G again. Then it proved too hard, so etc etc. Sigh

5G was <i>really</i> all about software-defined cell sites, reconfigurable remotely.<p>It was designed to save costs for network operators. Of course they couldn&#x27;t market <i>that</i>: customers would expect cheaper plans.<p>Hence the hype cycle.

In the UK whenever I go to some public event - e.g. some of the anti-Brexit marches or something like the Fully Charged EV show or any other big event I start to have trouble connecting and when I am able to move away from the crowd far enough I can use my phone again.<p>This is dangerous - when you&#x27;re in a crowd you need your phone more to be able to find out what&#x27;s happening and where your friends or family are if you get separated.<p>So if 5G started to fix <i>that</i> I&#x27;d say it was an excellent thing.

I never bought into most of the hype and sci-fi applications pitched for 5G, but from my (German) perspective, 5G has delivered a lot. For me it mostly behaves close to WIFI performance. 4G often had way worse latency and the data speed has gone up too. On top of that, contracts with reasonable amount of data (50G&#x2F;month in my case) have become available. This is quite some benefit. 5G basically enables me to treat mobile data like I used to use land line based data.

IMHO - from business perspective 5G is just a feature gate to extract more value out of consumers through price discrimination. Both from oem and carrier perspective

Was it really the carrier generating those hype?<p>My biggest problem is Tech &#x2F; Media &#x2F; people who believed in those hype and continue to spread it, plenty of them on HN saying &quot;true&quot; 5G is mmWave. Or 5G is all about capacity ( that was my tagline ) which they used but then suggest the capacity is all because of mmWave ( no it is not ). And people became disappointed because mmWave never came.

5G has been great for me (UK), although I am fortunate enough to be close to a mast.<p>- at the time I moved to it, it gave higher speeds than fibre<p>- I have a 30-day rolling contract instead of a year-long one<p>- It&#x27;s cheaper than fibre<p>- No data limits<p>- I can take it with me if I move<p>The only thing it&#x27;s not great for is gaming.<p>Also, the only home routers you easily get are Chinese. The Nokia LastMile seems to be invitation-only.

Don’t know about 5G, haven’t experienced a personal need for it, but in contrast to the position taken in the articles the 3G to 4G upgrade has been huge where it’s reliably available. Can now easily web conf while commuting, whereas with 3G would be waiting tens of seconds for web pages to load.

Does anyone here have any hands-on experience and can tell me if the claimed 5ms latency for 5G is anyhwere close to reality? As in, can it reach the 5ms only if you&#x27;re next to the tower, are they not including processing time at the tower and modem etc.

5G is really rebranded 4G LTE Advanced +++++++++++ and a plot twist with Chinese teleco vendors.

The most depressing part of it for me was all the people pushing the lies and getting a big bonus&#x2F;promoted. There has been zero downside for them. We really need government to get involved and stop the blatant fraud in marketing.

I was on 3G until a couple of years ago, currently on 4G. Limited to 14 megabit per second (but no datacap). 3G to 4G was a big step. But I don&#x27;t have a need for 5G. I guess more people are in that position.

I don&#x27;t know how it is in other countries. But in congested areas like London my girlfriend often gets faster speeds than me on her iphone 11 switching to 3G than I do on 5G.

Meanwhile, in this suburb of a modest city, I&#x27;m wondering if I&#x27;ll ever see more than one bar of LTE. Thank goodness for Wi-Fi calling.

It&#x27;s interesting that the hypeness of 5G varies greatly depending on the country.<p>In the US, where carriers have a say in what phones people use on their networks, the 5G hype seems to have been through the roof.<p>In UAE where I visit sometimes, both carriers did buy some billboards to advertise their 5G service, and that&#x27;s it. I have no idea what it&#x27;s like because I don&#x27;t have a compatible phone.<p>In Russia though, where I live most of the time, 5G has never launched and none of the four carriers have any plans to launch it (especially now with all those sanctions). Everyone seems fine with LTE.

My phone has measured 2 gbps in very rare locations on earth. As they say, the future is now but it is sparsely distributed.<p>5G has only arrived in the minds of marketers.

As someone in Canada the only thing 5G lets me do is use up my incredibly expensive bandwidth limit in seconds instead of minutes.

for about 2 days I was using it in 5G, thinking... this is cool. Then my phone started to get very hot and shut itself down. Battery life became ridiculously bad. This was on a pixel 6a. back on 4g and not really noticing any difference.

I find 5G to be pointless personally, the speeds and latency I get on 4G is already good enough, 166mbps down, 30mbps up, all the operators here cap the speeds of 5G or just don&#x27;t offer it unless you pay for unlimited data

I used get high enough speeds from Tmobile that I didn’t bother with home internet.<p>Then again, I was literally living across the street from the AT&amp;T world hq in Dallas. Coincedence?<p>Then again, that was only until I hit my GB cap.

We can crank it up all the way 11G.

It&#x27;s a bit of a myth of the modern age that desire is unlimited. I think this is wrong. At some point our desire can be sated.<p>Eg, I&#x27;m pretty sure Bill Gates or Elon Musk don&#x27;t buy the newest, latest phone that comes out every single time. Because at some point you find something that works well enough, and just thinking of using something else involves effort. Even if V2 is theoretically faster or has more RAM, maybe you have no need for that yet.<p>As tech improves, this happens more and more often. Back in the time of 4MB RAM, memory was an ever constant worry and constraint. Today I&#x27;m at the point where I only think about RAM or disk space is when something goes nuts and fills up the available space, otherwise it&#x27;s just not an issue, and I just don&#x27;t think of upgrading.<p>I think 5G is pretty much there. After having smooth, quality playback on youtube on my phone, my needs are fully sated. There&#x27;s just nothing I need that requires downloading stuff to my phone any faster, and in fact it&#x27;s been a long time since I last thought about how quickly my phone downloads stuff.