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When I was working at AWS, around 2017 we started getting excited pitches from companies who wanted to be part of the 5G build-out, saying that obviously there’d be lots of opportunities for public-cloud providers. But I never walked away convinced. Either I didn’t believe the supposed customers really needed what 5G offered, or I didn’t believe the opportunity was anywhere near big enough to justify the trillion-dollar build-out investment. Six years later, I still don’t. This is a report on a little online survey I ran, looking for actual real-world 5G impact to see if I was wrong.
[Note: When I say “G” or “M” I’m talking about Gbits or Mbits/second.]
Why 5G? · Here’s why the 5G vendors say we need their product:
Faster connections — there is talk of 10G!
More bandwidth, so you can provide data in crowded places like sports stadiums.
Lower latency, because you can put servers in base stations, which in particular could be useful for self-driven vehicles. AWS offers infrastructure: see AWS Wavelength.
Why not? · Disclosure: I’m affected by my personal experience. My home office is on our boat, anchored in central Vancouver. I pay my mobile provider more for extra data and do all my work via a hotspot on my aging Pixel 4. The phone calls what it sees “LTE+” (I don’t claim to understand what that means) which de facto gives me lots of tens of Mbits/sec, plenty enough for heavy Internet geeking with streamed background music, and watching ball games (remember, I’m semi-retired). Interestingly, the Marina also provides a WiFi signal which is pathetically slow and unreliable compared to the 4G data; the notion that WiFi is the gold standard for wireless Internet is pretty well over.
Our family has a cabin an hour’s boat-ride from Vancouver on the shores of Howe Sound. We have “Smart Hub Rural Internet”, which delivers a solid 15-25M down and 10+ up. Plenty enough for four people.
So, I’m having trouble seeing what problem I have that 5G will solve.
Speed? · Granted: Like many people, at home we have “fiber” Internet which offers hundreds of M so that our family of four can all stream and game at the same time, no problem.
Question: How often do you need more than the 50M or so LTE offers in a situation where it’s cheaper to provide it with 5G than with a wired connection?
Bandwidth · This is one that I can sort of believe in. In a football stadium or a big conference keynote, it is possible to provide decent WiFi coverage (I’ve experienced it). Is 5G a cheaper or better way to do that? I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound crazy.
Latency · Obviously, this would be a big deal for online PvP gaming, although rollback netcode is producing remarkably good results these days. And then there’s the autonomous-vehicle space. So, once again, doesn’t sound crazy.
The gaming angle sounds more plausible than self-driving, which (I think) would need reliable 5G along the whole route — nobody wants a self-driving feature that randomly cuts in and out as you zip down the road.
The whole low-latency thing is based on co-locating compute in the (many, many) 5G base stations. Note the reference to AWS Wavelength above; having a public-cloud provider run the compute makes all sorts of sense to me. But still, I do wonder about the economics; all that compute is going to add up.
The real question · 5G started rolling out in the spring of 2019, so it’s had three years to make a difference. I don’t personally know anyone whose life has been changed by 5G. Yes, family members with newer phones occasionally report that the status bar says “5G”, but I don’t hear that they’re having a different experience.
But I don’t know that many people. So I asked the Internet.
Last time I checked that tweet had around 52,000 impressions, people who had a chance to pipe up and relate their personal or professional experience of 5G. Lots did, so I’ll use a few of the more clueful responses to support this narrative.
Also, note that my readership includes a whole lot of professional software developers. So, let’s see what they say about new kinds of applications and services that 5G has brought to the table.
Theme: 5G vs wired · Does it make sense to replace your existing wired Internet with 5G? As always, the answer is “it depends” but one common theme emerges: If your wired connection is lousy, 5G might be a win.
Or maybe 5G is just better?
Others disagree, but point out that fiber may not be an option.
· · ·
· · ·
I wonder about the economics of deploying 5G vs fiber. It’s worth considering that 5G replaces the last mile and reduces the on-prem installation work to zero.
Theme: Better coverage · Some report generally better coverage on 5G. Seems a little strange given the early stage of the build-out, but here they are.
· · ·
Theme: Hotspotting · Here are claims that hotspotting is better on 5G.
· · ·
Not everyone agrees.
The link in his tweet goes here.
I’m dubious too, probably because I live (and wrote this essay, including gathering and editing all the screenshots) on a 4G hotspot.
Theme: Rural coverage · As a special case, I got multiple reports of better rural coverage. Which, once again, is surprising — I thought 5G’s sweet spot was short-range applications.
· · ·
Theme: Crowded places · There is personal experience of Internet-in-a-crowded-place. There was another, mentioning rugby, but I seem to have lost it.
Theme: Skeptics · Some people share my general skepticism.
· · ·
· · ·
· · ·
Now the developers · My online following isn’t huge, but it contains quite a few senior software developers, people who build high-impact applications and services for Big Tech corporations and who work on foundational open-source projects. So, let’s hear about what they’re building that’s enabled by 5G technology.
Exactly one such developer weighed in on the subject.
I had to go look up what “ATSSS” is. Here you go: “3GPP has started to standardize the Access Traffic Steering, Switching & Splitting (ATSSS) function to enable 5G devices to use different types of access networks, including Wi-Fi. The ATSSS service leverages the Multipath TCP protocol to enable 5G devices to simultaneously utilize different access networks.”
Doesn’t sound terrible. Life-changing? Your call. Um, any other developers out there working on things that will move the needle?
Then there’s this · John Gruber links to and expands on a WSJ report on how 5G burns your mobile’s battery faster than LTE, and offers advice for how to disable it, because: There is nothing I do with my iPhone — nothing — where I find LTE even just a little bit “too slow”.
Me too.
What I think · Well, they built 4G and it worked pretty well. So they had to build 5G, didn’t they? It’s perfectly possible that, ten years from now, we’ll look in the rear-view and say “That was a good investment.” I wouldn’t bet on it, but it’s possible.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Andrew Reilly (Mar 26 2022, at 23:38)
I'm not on 5G yet, myself. Came close, recently, but in the end the HFC modem supply resumed and was able to get a pretty decent connection that way. I was surprised by the cost of the 5G offer: about the same as wired, although capped vs uncapped data limit. Glad that HFC became available in time because at about the same time the Telco admitted that although the address was nominally in a 5G footprint, our actual house didn't have good enough reception to meet their standards and so they wouldn't supply it. As you say, that sort of thing is likely to improve as the rollout progresses.
Personally, I think that the low-latency claim is extremely unlikely to be a thing, even for gamers. Speed of light/cable/switches says that unless all participants are using the same base station, there won't be a difference. Mobile IP is carrier-NATed through a backbone switch, so even same-city connections are going to have the same 10ms ping as every other mechanism. Need to do anything that crosses the Pacific, then hello 170ms my old friend.
One thing that could be holding 5G back at the moment is that apparently most telcos are deploying it in a 4G-compatible way, which prevents some of the special 5G goodness from working. (I watched a presentation that said that, but I didn't follow it all.) It could be that existing 5G will get better as/if the Telcos put in the investment to fully separate the networks.
Makes you wonder how enthusiastic the venture capital money behind the on-going "6G" project is. I'd be nervous, if I were them.
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From: Chris Swan (Mar 26 2022, at 23:58)
Since the first presentation I saw about 5G it's all been about China for me. China took the lead in developing the standards, China has the dense urban environment with buildings and planning regulations that facilitate conformal tiled antennae arrays, and China treats bandwidth as a public good underlying services that will propel the rest of the economy. The point of 5G is the make the mobile internet work well in Chinese cities.
Like every G before it, there's no killer app, just bandwidth, the internet, and everything that enables.
The flip side of the coin is that I've always expected Western implementations to be faux 5G. There just aren't many places where the full tech stack makes sense and can be deployed as intended. So we get 5G in name only, and perhaps some extra battery drain to go with that. Of course if you get a shiny new 5G mast in what was previously a 'notspot' then that's a leap forward.
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From: Yannis (Mar 27 2022, at 00:22)
My first introduction to this hype was from a business rather than technical angle. In fact, I really haven't seen technical people excited about 5G at all, aside from YouTube smartphone reviewers saying it's a good feature to have.
That introduction was on BBC Radio 4's bottom line (not sure if you can access outside of Britain): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b48yxs
The title is 'Will 5G Revolutionise Our Lives', which sets the tone you expect. The podcast gives a good sense of the hype businesspeople have been exposed to since that's its focus, and Evan Davis, the host, is notoriously non-technical.
He is a very forthright and sceptical interviewer though, and he asks point-blank how this innovation will help the end-user. After a pause, the network executive at the other side of the table *genuinely* replies 'I will never have to go to the doctor in person again'. And I'm just thinking - Evan is taking this at face value because he doesn't know that telehealth has been around for years and years! Anyway, it will give a nice picture of the woo laypeople and businesspeople especially have been exposed to.
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From: Mike Loukides (Mar 27 2022, at 05:57)
I'm largely in agreement with you. I'm a 5G skeptic; I don't think it changes much. It might be a viable replacement for wired home networking. I get a solid non-fiber 50Mb from COMCAST. I used a Pixel 2 with LTE as a wireless hub for several days when COMCAST was out; it worked flawlessly. I'd like COMCAST to have some viable competition, but that's not going to change my world.
I can see 5G having a role in large-scale (e.g. factory) automation/edge computing, which you don't address (thousands of chatty devices), though this requires solving a different set of problems.
I'm more skeptical than you about latency. Nobody cares about latency between the device and the cell tower; end-to-end application latency has much more to do with routing than with RF protocols. If you can put all of AWS and Google into every cell, you would have something. That won't happen.
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From: Ian McKellar (Mar 27 2022, at 11:13)
In the US (and maybe Canada) lack of local loop unbundling makes 5G appealing for the last mile, but the way spectrum is managed means it's still in the hands of a small cartel.
It's really all about the spectrum. Unlicensed bands (60, 5.2, 2.4) are unlicensed because they're not that valuable. They're absorbed by water - useful in a microwave oven, not when you're trying to provide internet in a rainstorm. It would have been nice to see the spectrum given to 5G licensed liberally so that we could see what evolved rather than it being used just by another iteration of GSM.
Copper & fiber are always going to be better when it's practical because they're point to point where each pair of peers have their own medium rather than everyone sharing a medium.
(Disclaimer: I dropped out of EE but have had the chance to work near smart people in the ensuing 25yrs)
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From: Dustin Quasar Sacks (Mar 27 2022, at 11:27)
Thanks for polling the net about this. It's definitely interesting to hear the responses. Seems like a lot of people are unhappy with their wired options, and 5G provides a new option. Is another option ever bad? I guess it's a matter of whether the build out cost is worth it or not. It would be cool if there was a carrier that ignored 5G and doubled down on their 4G service with a lower cost. Hard to make it work long term as the low cost option tho, I can understand carriers desire to try and differentiate with better/faster service, even if i's mostly for marketing speak.
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From: Nelson (Mar 27 2022, at 12:49)
The best I can get at home on a wired connection is 45Mbps. There's 4 of us, we all watch video content (1080-1440p YouTube, Twitch, etc), not to mention the system and app updates, video calls, etc, which may all happen at the same time. I also have to download heavy (5-20GB) files multiple times a week for work.
My carrier is a bit behind on 5G deployment, so I got a SIM card from another provider (rolling 30 day contract, unlimited traffic). I'm using it on a phone + wifi hotspot, so it's not as good as a dedicated 5G modem/router, but it's cheaper than my wired connection, averages 300Mbps during peak hours and maxes out at 600-700Mbps. The only downside is latency... it's fine most of the times, but it's not as stable as my wired connection.
Now, do I need 500Mbps+ all the time? No, but it's very useful when I need to download something. Do I need those speeds on a phone? No, but I also use my phone as hotspot at lot and in that case, it can be useful. I'm aware that LTE is capable of reaching the same speeds, but I've never seen that in the real world.
5G has been an improvement for me, but I've been using it as my main internet connection. I'm also in Europe where plans and prices are a bit different from North America, and use a lot of data (around 800GB last month for 4 people). There's a lot of BS around 5G, but I'm not going to blame the tech for what some CEO or click bait news sites claim it can do.
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From: Jay Goldberg (Mar 27 2022, at 13:38)
100% agree
The main benefit of 5G is for operators there is very little in the standard for consumers to care about.
Given all the people talking about 5G networks and big spend on deploying then - ask those people what applications they are going to use all that 5G for - very few people have a good answer.
In the operators’ core network there are some big gains - but only in a way that makes their networks look a lot more like the way everyone else has been building networks for a decade+ (virtualization, containers, hardware abstraction). Important for the operators, essentially meaningless for users.
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From: i336_ (Mar 28 2022, at 06:29)
Responding to Yannis from a couple days ago, I was curious about the 5G story on BBC Radio 4, found it played just fine (even without an account) from Australia.
As you noted it the presentation was a heavily-laden hype-train:
12:18 [Evan Davis] I want to know now about the applications. What excites you Carl about the applications for 5G?
[Kyle Brown] I think it's about creating a new experience for a customer. So, 5G would enable someone in-- in a sports stadium to be able to have a live stream of-- by the pitch, if it was football. Where you can see things from--
[Evan Davis] --Can do that now.
[Carl] But not at a really high level where you could choose multiple different angles all at the same time, and choose which view you wanted to see, just at a touch of a button. So if you imagine there's 50,000 people in the stadium, at the moment everyone couldn't connect to that infrastructure, it's just not there. Whereas with 5G will be able to connect up to a thousand times more people straight away with a customer's experience.
[Evan Davis] What excites you Derek?
[Derek McManus] Imagine a world where you don't have to go and visit your GP if you're ill.
[Evan Davis] Right. ...Now g-- that's a really, really interesting one. Why do I visit my GP now? Cuz I could... talk to them over the internet. I could talk to them, I can have a video call with them and all of that's... commonplace.
[Derek McManus] And that's where the real time technology can help because it can do more invasive, uh, diagnostics as opposed to just "how are you feeling." Because you can do that today, but technology can allow you to do a degree of medical tests and medical analysis. So it can either be a new illness or an ongoing illness within you. You're in a treatment or care, and analysis can be done in real time, over a 5G connection. So you can have tests run that are then connected over the network, so you can see real-time results. Or you can do a better diagnostic.
So what sort of test you talking about?
[Derek McManus] It can be anything from fever tests, blood tests, heart rate tests, uh-- all sorts of things, can be connected through probes that you on and then connect to a machine. You can imagine, you can have them at home and then connect them.
[Evan Davis] So you would have a kit that you would have home, which maybe can do a quick blood test or something.
[Derek McManus] Yeah.
[Professor Dimitra Simeonidu] So it's it's a matter of scale. What Derek is saying, is that what stop us at the moment is that you cannot really give 10 sensors for, actually personal health monitoring to everybody across the UK. 5G's going to give the ability to do that and therefore that would translate to everybody though ??? test in the future.
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From: Robert Sayre (Mar 29 2022, at 13:07)
Crowded spaces are a big problem that 5G does solve well, especially the mmWave flavor, which iiuc only works well outdoors. This can happen in Manhattan at rush hour, or at concerts that are not big enough to set up extra cell towers (they do this for big festivals like Coachella).
I've had cell coverage drop many times at the Greek Theater In Berkeley.
I'm generally optimistic about the technology, from a perspective of improved reliability.
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From: Glenn Fleishman (Mar 31 2022, at 14:06)
I'm glad to hear from somebody who had much more access to the inside details and pitches confirm what it really seemed like to the outside. LTE seemed worthwhile because 3G wasn't fast enough in most cases to meet needs and was inefficient for bandwidth. It also didn't support integrated voice across all standards (like VoLTE does). 5G, though, seemed to be all about carriers dealing with internal capacity issues, needing more options for fragments of spectrum, and even more efficient usage—not a new bathroom for the user, but more about new sewer and water pipes in the street that they wanted us to pay for.
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From: David Pugsley (Mar 31 2022, at 22:56)
I went to a conference this week in the UK and saw a presentation from Liverpool City Council. The benefit for the council was using 5G as a private network. The council are investing in putting 5G on lampposts in the city to provide council services. Benefit they don’t have a mobile bill to pay as they provide the 5G service themselves. https://uk5g.org/5g-updates/read-articles/liverpool-5g-creates-ground-breaking-public-sector-5g-network-provides-real-investment-in-peoples-futures-and-the-chance-to-digitally-level-up/
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From: Calu (Apr 01 2022, at 00:38)
I mean, I don't disagree with your take, but the wording of your survey tweet was hardly going to solicit a balanced range of opinions.
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From: Dan (Apr 01 2022, at 12:08)
rural south of MSP along Hwy 35. Fibre 1/2 mile to the east of me and west of me with no fibre for me.
Currently spending to much $ for 2 services: rural broad band LTE using TMobile and 5G TMobile.
LTE service reliable but not very fast esp in the evening. Was able to stream in the evening for a year or so but unlikely to be good enough now. Expensive!
TMobile 5g, probably same towers, is not reliable and speed unlikely good enough in the evening to stream. Even during the day, it regularly just stops and I switch to the LTE service. Speed can go over 50 mb but can't rely on it. The big difference for me is that I have a chance to down load multi GB S/W updates.
Verizon phone shows 150mb LTE service in the little town 2 miles south of me.
I've considered starling as though I'm hundreds of miles from civilization.
The difference is in $'s. I pay half the $ for the 5G. My best bet seems to be Verizon 5g home service with better prices replacing the rural BB and hope that at least one of the carriers chooses to put enough capacity near me, at least for a while.
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From: Erik (Apr 01 2022, at 13:45)
I'm actually seeing good results with mint 5g. Part of why I chose mint is they say they're using the 5g frequency that is best for increased coverage (https://www.mintmobile.com/5g/). It seems like most people talk about 5g as the mmwave bs. My iphone is in 5g auto mode, which is only supposed to kick into 5g if it's going to be faster, and i do see it kick into 5g often. Anecdotally it has felt like an improvement over verizon, so i just did a quick test with speedtest on 5g vs lte to see if it was for real. I'm in a cabin in the mountains of colorado right now, and 5g is faster than the wifi my airbnb host has.
speedtest results:
lte: 3.99 down/ 1.55 up / 120ms ping
5g: 17.5 down / 5.43 up / 130ms ping
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From: David W. (Apr 01 2022, at 14:25)
I noticed getting 5G on my phone when I got my iPhone 12. I was surprised because I was told that 5G buildout was years away. However, the speed wasn’t that different than LTE.
About four or five months ago, I was downloading a 2Gb database update on my cellphone and it finished a few seconds later. A speed check showed that my phone was downloading over 300Mbps. I realized that T-Mobile had just deployed their 2.4Ghz band in our area.
Mobile difference? Not that much. I don’t generally download large updates while on mobile. Where it really makes a difference is home Internet which is what I believe was the goal all along. High speed mobile is nice, but far from necessary. Dropping your cable company that’s charging you $120 per month for an equivalent speed T-Mobile for $50 per month? That’s nice.
I now see Verizon is deploying their C-Band in our area too. In places where they’re offering home Internet, they’re charging $60 to $75 per month, but it drops down to $40 per month if you have a premium Verizon plan.
Finally, the end of the cable monopoly is upon us. That’s worth the whole 5G saga.
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From: MICHAEL M DURRANT (Apr 01 2022, at 15:09)
This was posted on slashdot and I'm here to tell you that you suck at thinking. After 5G, there's going to be another generation of RF technology and your moronic "skepticism" is going to be just as ridiculous.
Come on man, gain a kindergarten-level understanding of this stuff before opining on it. Not because it annoys me but so you don't look so DUMB.
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From: Shay (Apr 01 2022, at 15:19)
By virtue of having additional home-broadband competition, one would hope prices for consumers may go down, especially in all the areas currently with a broadband-monopoly (like my apartment building in NYC).
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From: Peter from Europe (Apr 01 2022, at 15:23)
You should move to Europe. Over here, cable, DSL and fiber are great at much lower prices than in North America. We get 5G for $10/month/50GB. I understand your 5G skepticism given the high prices and crappy services in your nick of the woods. But in Europe 5G is the real deal as advertised and not an empty promise. My guess is that the strong regulation in Europe of the telco/internet space has kept things consumer friendly.
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From: Trip (Apr 01 2022, at 16:47)
I think a lot of the problem is that the term "5G" doesn't actually mean anything, at least as it's typically used. People conflate mmWave spectrum with 5G, but no, they're different things. Others conflate wide-band spectrum like C-band with 5G, but that's just new spectrum like mmWave. Others who previously had devices that didn't support T-Mobile's Band 71 on LTE bought a 5G-capable device and now conflate the Band 71 coverage with 5G just because there's 5G on Band 71.
There's the "5G New Radio" standard that replaces LTE, but on the same spectrum, you get something like a 20% boost in capacity, which isn't terrible but isn't revolutionary. But essentially nobody who says "5G" means this.
Until you can agree on a definition, the question is meaningless.
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From: Gabe (Apr 01 2022, at 16:51)
I haven't been in a stadium, but I've undoubtedly experienced "when faster internet is better" when working out of the house. In the past there were definitely things that didn't make much sense when tethered over 4G, I would usually just close the laptop and do it at home. Things like: Uploading a large video file, large downloads (Xcode update, Android studio update, Android SDK/NDK downloads, etc). These are things where 40-50Mbps on 4G vs 800-1900Mbps on 5G makes a big difference.
The other nice-to-have I've found is I work on projects where the output binaries are rather large, 100MB+. I've found doin builds on cloud machines is nice because it's faster than doing it on my laptop, and lets me run much longer on batteries. Having fast download of the binaries really reduces the code/compile/debug cycle here.
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From: Joe M (Apr 01 2022, at 17:14)
Your needs are met. Great. Not everyone can do what you do, today, for the money you spend. Adding capacity means more people could for less infrastructure costs (wiring, cabinets, etc for fiber).
You don't game. Low latency matters there. And they download 100's of GB updates sometimes, and want it to happen as fast as possible.
5G cell networks are very different from WiFi using 5GHz, and if 5Gbps is mentioned it's a coincidence. WiFi works for 100-300ft (indoor/outdoor) typically. Cellular is for a much wider area, and expected to go through buildings well (for certain "bands" aka frequencies).
Line of sight matters for both (less obstructions the better it works). WiFi works well for 3-5 low usage people or 1 high usage. I'll bet more people in your marina try to use the free wifi than that. "Quality of Service" that tries to force users to share a connection is a high end hardware feature (at least the good ones are).
Most users won't look at their phone to know how often they're on 5G cell service or not. Nor will they look at their wifi to know if it's using 2.4GHz, 5GHz, or the new 6GHz. And they can't know how much usage from other people are happening. They just know it works or doesn't.
I wish there was more user/client transparency here. That I could know when my service is over used vs. the tower is down vs. lots of interference vs...
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From: Derrick Mealiffe (Apr 01 2022, at 19:12)
5G boils down to 3 things:
1. Spectral efficiency
2. Latency
3. Network slicing (basically defined segmentation of the network by performance and/or use case)
Those things alone may or may not make any difference to the end user experience. All three could. Some matter now, some will matter in the near future.
1. Spectral efficiency: NR (5G radio) is 10-15% more specteally efficient than LTE. This means operators can squeak out a bit more performance and utilization from their spectrum. Ultimately, this helps the user experience a bit.
What’s commonly conflated with 5G are the newly available frequency bands (and spectrum) being made for its use. There is nothing technically excluding using these new bands for LTE or even UMTS (3G). This spectrum extra real estate is what gives 5G its promised speeds, not the air interface or core technology.
2. This is helpful for the same reasons it’s helpful on fixed internet connections. Deploying infrastructure closer to the edge helps with performance on wireless for the same reasons as fixed. Physics. The virtualization of hardware functions makes a lot of this better.
3. Slicing will enable specific segmentation of the network for particular uses. You don’t care if your vending machine gets 500 Mbps, but you want it to reliably let you know when stock is low, or ensure it can authorize a connection. The wireless industry is leaning heavily on slicing to come up with value added use cases that will help drive revenue and differentiate their service as opposed to being relegated to over-the-top status (which they basically are now).
5G is fine. The public was marketed an idea that promised something it was never designed to deliver.
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From: David Collier-Brown (Apr 02 2022, at 05:03)
5G is 4G with high-speed, low-range bands added at the top. My local providers have been building antennae for the new stuff in densely populated areas, and adding the medium-speed, medium-range antennae in rural areas.
As a result, I'm getting better service at the cottage with my 4G, medium-speed-only phone. I'll get 5G on my next one, but I expect no measurable change unless I happen to be downtown where the high-speed service is available.
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