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What is the point of 5G?

SoundLad

SoundLad

Member
Oct 30, 2017
2,249
First off, I don't believe in any of the conspiracy theories that are being circulated around.

Now that that's out of the way, I've been trying to research and think of practical applications that the increased speeds could provide but I'm drawing a blank.
I watched Marques Brownlee's 5G video from last year to try understand it more, but the only things I took away from it was that it's fast but unreliable unless in direct line of sight of one of the nodes.

I just don't understand why anyone outside of a tiny niche of content creators would need download speeds of 1,500+ Mbps on their mobile device. As I see it, 4G speeds are plenty to consume any currently available online media, including 4K streaming video. Maques was comparing download speeds of apps like Fortnite and PUBG and granted it's much faster than 4G, it's still not something that's of any real importance - installing apps is generally a one-time endeavor that's not repeated on a daily basis.

So my questions still is, what is the point of 5G? Is it there to give more bandwidth headroom to service providers (ie. are 4G networks currently working at max capacity) or are there some things that simply cannot be done without 5G infrastructure and speeds? I just hope that 5G isn't here only so that people can download Fortnite on their phone quicker than before. I want to hear about the real-life benefits that I must be overlooking.

Thanks to anyone that can shed some light on this for me!
 
excelsiorlef

excelsiorlef

Bad Praxis
Member
Oct 25, 2017
73,316
If it can penetrate rural areas it opens up high speed for those areas where high speed is tough to come by
 
smurfx

smurfx

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
10,578
5g also possibly means more competitors to cable companies who pretty much have a monopoly on high speed internet.
 
JeffGubb

JeffGubb

Giant Bomb
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
842
Running fiberoptic cables is expensive. It's not about mobile devices. It's about giving low-latency high throughput internet to more people than ever before. And yeah, 5G has limitations with range, but overcoming that is probably still more affordable than running copper or fiberoptics to each and every user.
 
uzipukki

uzipukki

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
5,722
IoT seems to be a good application for 5G.
 
linkboy

linkboy

Member
Oct 26, 2017
13,688
Reno
Capacity is a big one. Right now, cellular networks are being congested, hard (especially in major cities). As more and more people get mobile devices, and as more and more devices get connected, you're going to need more powerful networks that had hold more connections.

Speed isn't the only improvement.
 
OP
OP
SoundLad

SoundLad

Member
Oct 30, 2017
2,249
JEFFREY GRUBB said:
Running fiberoptic cables is expensive. It's not about mobile devices. It's about giving low-latency high throughput internet to more people than ever before. And yeah, 5G has limitations with range, but overcoming that is probably still more affordable than running copper or fiberoptics to each and every user.
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Ah, this makes a lot of sense. Much appreciated!
 
Carn

Carn

Member
Oct 27, 2017
11,911
The Netherlands
I believe that the much lower latency and much higher traffic capacity are the biggest improvements. If IoT ever takes off (or more stuff like self-driving cars), or -whatever-smart-appliance- that is not connected to a home network.

Also, I believe 4G was specified in.. 2008? By the time 5G will be common for most countries it will probably be 2025. It wouldnt surprise me if the first specifications for 6G are already being worked on.
 
FliX

FliX

Master of the Reality Stone
Moderator
Oct 25, 2017
9,863
Metro Detroit
Beyond speed 5G has two major advantages
  • Significantly smaller latency
  • Significantly more nodes per cell

1 is critical for things like autonomous driving
2 is critical for IOT where every device is connected and for large crowds of people in a small area, think concert or stadium.

Everything will be 5G soon, it really is a game changing technology.
The higher frequency comes with tones of engineering challenges, but all these upsides make all that investment worth it, easily.
 
Tacitus

Tacitus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,030
JEFFREY GRUBB said:
Running fiberoptic cables is expensive. It's not about mobile devices. It's about giving low-latency high throughput internet to more people than ever before. And yeah, 5G has limitations with range, but overcoming that is probably still more affordable than running copper or fiberoptics to each and every user.
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You need to run fibre for the towers anyway and with how short ranged 5G is, I really don't think that it's the solution for that.
 
FLEABttn

FLEABttn

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,007
excelsiorlef said:
If it can penetrate rural areas it opens up high speed for those areas where high speed is tough to come by
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If you're rural and not getting fast LTE now, 5G isn't going to help that. 5G at 600MHz and the like is about as fast and far reaching as LTE. The really fast 5G would require rural tower buildout.
 
Yerffej

Yerffej

Prophet of Regret
Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,496
Tacitus said:
You need to run fibre for the towers anyway and with how short ranged 5G is, I really don't think that it's the solution for that.
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I was thinking the same thing. I'm in a very rural area. I don't think 5g will be the answer anytime soon. Starlink or something like it sounds closer to a reality.
 
Lumination

Lumination

Member
Oct 26, 2017
12,464
There are good examples in the thread already, but in general, don't think of why we need it now and instead think about why we need to lay the foundation now for future applications.
 
Armadilo

Armadilo

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
9,877
So I can ditch my internet provider and just have one bill a month that provides me with everything that I need
 
nsilvias

nsilvias

Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,714
the only worthwhile thing i can see coming from 5g from a consumer standpoint is it forcinng cable companies to lower their prices to compete with it since 5g will most likely be pushed hard as a home internet service like those mobile hotspots from the early days of 4g that were kinda shit.
 
Carn

Carn

Member
Oct 27, 2017
11,911
The Netherlands
Tacitus said:
You need to run fibre for the towers anyway and with how short ranged 5G is, I really don't think that it's the solution for that.
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lowband and midband 5G will pretty much have the same range as 4G tho. With lowband probably performing in the range of LTE-advanced. Low/midband 5G can also work from the current towers; its mostly the super-fast mmWave that needs additional nodes.
 
Semfry

Semfry

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,952
I'm on 4G in a shitty rural area, and, while it's an infinite improvement on what my old internet was it could still be much faster, which 5G will hopefully provide.
 
Deimos

Deimos

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,765
Faster speeds is a practical application. Just because something is "fast enough" doesn't mean we should stop making progress.
 
Rellodex

Rellodex

Member
Oct 29, 2017
2,160
It'd be sweet to see home internet connections/wifi/routers go away eventually.

It'd also be sweet if all this stuff was essentially a public utility.
 
Border

Border

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
14,859
It might be nice to see cable internet providers (most of whom hold a monopoly on high speed internet) actually have some competition.
 
Jonnax

Jonnax

Member
Oct 26, 2017
4,920
o here's the thing.
People are using their phones more and more.
For example: https://www.statista.com/statistics/750757/mobile-data-consumption-sim-card-month-france/
Data usage is increasing every year.

However imagine the spectrum like a radio station.
You know how you tune your FM radio to a specific station.
The only thing that you can hear is that radio station because there's only space there for that.

Now mobile phone frequencies are like that. These are split into channels which are either based on time or frequency.
When someone is using that then they're taking up the airwaves.

In a crowded place such as a train station at peak time. You may have full signal., but the airwaves are full so you can barely, if at all, use mobile data.

So what 5G brings to the table is that it's more efficient. Consider it like rather than transfering a ZIP file you're using a RAR or 7ZIP file, the encoding algorithm gives a smaller file.

This means that you download your data and you're not consuming the airwaves as much. This is the same for the super high bandwidth numbers.
It's not to download Fortnite 20 times. It's so that when you load up your web page, youtube, netflix whatever, it buffers super fast and you're making the airwaves available for other people to use.

The high speeds are mostly advertising. To get enthusiasts to switch or be early adopters.

There's high frequency 5G which will be deployed in very dense areas where the frequencies are called mmWave 24–100GHz. These waves get you crazy high speeds but they are stopped by a sheet of paper.

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Now other features of 5G is that it reduces latency. "ping" if you're familiar with online games is the time it takes to send a packet of data to another machine and for it to come back to you.

The mobile network is a separate network to the internet. So you need to breakout to it.
There's latency on the radio site and there's latency breaking out to the internet.

"5G New Radio" reduces the latency of of the radio portion compared to LTE

In some countries they break out to the internet in a single place. Which means that people far away from that point have higher latency.

5G allows this to be broken out to more areas due to how the core of the network is designed with virtualisation of components in mind.

As part of this low latency stuff, I've seen the mobile phone companies talk about use cases such as Augmented Reality and autonomous vehicle to autonomous vehicle communication.

Here's some slides:

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Also as part of this idea of low latency, there's the concept of a network slice.
This is like a guaranteed slice of the network given to a company across the airwaves.
It'd be very expensive but it can enable things like the remote precision control of machinery by a skilled operator.

Consider 5G to be an enabler. It makes the connectivity more like a fixed line connection. And that opens up the door for innovation.
A better internet connection means that businesses, startups, etc will think of new and interesting ways to use the technology.

Or of course it'll enhance the surveillance state. haha 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀
 
OP
OP
SoundLad

SoundLad

Member
Oct 30, 2017
2,249
Deimos said:
Faster speeds is a practical application. Just because something is "fast enough" doesn't mean we should stop making progress.
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Good point! I guess I'm just curious what applications or use-cases in the future would make use of these high speeds. And I guess the answer is that we don't fully know yet.

Thanks everyone for responding so far, didn't think my first thread would get so many replies.
 
The Albatross

The Albatross

Member
Oct 25, 2017
38,959
5G is the industry nickname for a handful of improvements in wireless connectivity, largely around lower latency, faster communication times. 5G will enable more connected devices to communicate with each other much more quickly, as well as normal improvements that consumers expect with new technology, like going from "3G" to "4G LTE," or from 10mb internet to 100mb or 1gigabit internet connections. The biggest change will likely be in connected devices, and a lot of this is theoretical from consumer-product point of view.

We might not have a lot of consumer products that make obvious use of 5G right away, but the lower latency and support for more devices is likely one of those things like with Wifi ... Before wifi, imagining smart phones capable of what the iPhone and Android could deliver in your pocket was very difficult, conceptually. The idea that you'd use your cell phone for turn-by-turn GPS that used your phone's data connection fro updating the map was not conceptually possibly prior to fast wireless, maybe a few tech enthusiasts had the idea, but most people didn't. You had this concept of a GPS in your car that had a ... 100mb SD card in it that you took to your computer and "updated" once in a while (or more likely, you paid for your GPS company, Garmin or whoever, to send you an updated card; or even more likely, you just got "used" to your GPS having information on it that was 5 years out of date and routinely put you driving in the middle of the ocean if you were on a bridge that the GPS didn't have data for). Using your phone for turn by turn GPS navigation is something that basically no consumers/normal people imagined in ... ~2000. But you had this confluence of technology: high performance internet, wifi, 3G wireless, huge data servers in the cloud from Google, mapping technology, the democratization of GPS, HTML and Javascript, and all of these other technologies that really didn't functionally exist just a few years earlier, coming together to make something that now, today, most people can't imagine living without. And if you told someone in ... 1998 or in 2005 ... about how they'd be using their phone for turn-by-turn nav, you'd get aggressive "What's the point?" replies... "My phone...? What...? The screen is tiny...? The battery life sucks...? What will they text me the turn by turn...? Will someone call me...? Why not use a road atlas? I can already print out MapQuest directions what's the point? The data price will be ridiculous! I only get 100 call minutes a month!" When new technology emerges and is timed right it has a tendancy to create products in 5 years that you couldn't imagine 5 years prior.

The point of 5G is the same point of any advancement in technology, like going from Standard Definition to High Definition TV, or from HD to 4K. Do you need 4K? Do you need HD? You're watching the same movie, the same show, you can still watch sports in standard definition, the game still happens. You watching the Super Bowl in 4K doesn't change the way the game is played. What's the point? Well, people want it. Similarly, as more features of 5G become ubiquitous, it'll be harder to accept non-5G. It'll be like going from watching the Super Bowl in UltraHD to watching it in Standard Def.
 
Enkidu

Enkidu

Member
Oct 27, 2017
186
Aquavelvaman said:
Yes, 5G is a lot more than mmwave. There is also mid-band and low-band that have good range.
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There's not really much of a speed benefit to the FR1 stuff compared to LTE though. Theoretically it allows for 100MHz bandwidth instead of 20MHz with LTE, which should allow for 5 times the throughput, but it's quite tough to find 100MHz of uninterrupted spectrum as is, and the same effect can be achieved using CA for LTE anyway. FR1 5G should be mostly about lowering latency and hopefully simplifying the standard a bit compared to all the bolted on additions to the LTE standard.

It's interesting to note that the 4G specification mandated 1Gbps back in 2008. Maybe 5G will finally be able to reliably get there.
 
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