At least one expert is predicting that the roll out of 5G mobile service will either be delayed or poorly implemented. Over at The Register Professor William Webb offers his insight as to why this will be. He predicts that the physical upgrading or replacing of existing signal stations from 4G to 5G will be significantly more expensive than the upgrade to 4G was and that a hybrid option will result in an insignificant increase in network speeds. He also suggests that total mobile data usage is starting to plateau and we may not even need this extra bandwidth. That is a contentious claim, with mobile usage seemingly increasing thanks to more and more streaming apps and the ever expanding market of mobile users. Any slowdown in total usage could instead be caused by pricing, many simply can't afford the overage charges incurred by heavy data usage but would gleefully slurp up more the moment their data caps increase.
"THE 5G WIRELESS VISION is flawed because technological advances are insufficient to deliver it, users won't pay extra for the higher data rates and don't need the greater capacity it is expected to provide – and because mobile operators can't afford to implement it anyway."
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Ummmmm, is 5g a technology
Ummmmm, is 5g a technology yet, or is this simply speculation about some “unobtanium” tech they are expecting someone to make sometime somewhere.
Cheaper bandwidth, that’s
Cheaper bandwidth, that’s what we need in this part of the world, not faster.
We need cheaper bandwidth and
We need cheaper bandwidth and wider coverage not faster. It’s a miracle if you find a spot with full 4G speeds in most big cities. Let one suburban and rural areas. They should invest in better and wider coverage.
Some times i think it’s funny
Some times i think it’s funny for a mobile phone to have faster internet then your own local home internet,
it’s very strange how things are example
My Home has: I pay $45
5MB of Down and 1.5MB Up with a Data cap of 200GB then they kill my speed to 3MB
but on a Smartphone:my friend pays $60
25MB Down 10MB UP with a Data cap of 20GB then they cut the speed to 128KB
it looks really silly
it’s like what you say we need Better Bandwidth and Wider Coverage not make it faster
not many places have good Coverage
Well GSM is going away, 4G
Well GSM is going away, 4G speeds are not as advertised in urban areas so what advantage does 5G bring other than faster speeds. Maybe the faster 5G speeds in urban areas will allow for less congestion by the fact that more requests per unit time can be serviced quicker under 5G. But I’m not about to replace my new phone until I can get at least 2 years use out of it and the rates for data goes down. I currently have any data on my phone shut off as my phone is on a prepaid rate. So I will only use WIFI to connect, and that’s only to check for/download software updates.
I say in Cities bring on the 5G if that can take some of the bandwidth stress off of 4G for those that have 4G phones, but I’m not jumping on the 5G bandwagon until the rates go way down for prepaid usage and that’s not likely to happen.
Um what? I don’t think 5g
Um what? I don’t think 5g will be able to replace 4g for a Very long time as it is proposed to used quite high frequencies compared to what 4g uses . due to the favourable propagation characteristics of current 4g bands this really only makes it practical in fixed wireless point to multipoint situations or where a large number of macrocell or similar are deployed in certain densly populated areas. Unless 5g is deployed in the same frequency bands as 4g we will probably see 4g continue to dominate and 5g be used for high demand areas to reduce load on 4g equipment. You are completely correct in that it will cost carriers stacks of money to deploy 5g but that’s due to many factors in the 5g movement such as heterogeneous networks which could possibly mean a costly upgrade to the carriers backhaul network = big money compared to actual tower deployment costs. Users will not need to pay for extra speeds depending on how the carrier has it, it could be dynamic meaning that a pool of bandwidth will be shared between the active users so less users at the time should mean more bandwidth per user. Speeds are not the only improvement in 5g, 1ms ping possible, alot more rf capacity due to Massive MIMO, enhanced beam forming, better power usage, and support for large IoT networks. What we need is people everywhere deploying at least 3 sector towers on their roof in fringe areas running 5g and shiz on unlicensed spectrum possibly 5ghz , we just need wholesale backhaul to be alot more accessible and cheaper for tiny ISPs to run.
Totally agree the speed is
Totally agree the speed is irrelevant until cost comes under control. Once I’m above 5-10mb/sec I don’t care any more… video and music streaming work fine.
It would be nice to stop paying for multiple internet connections though. Most mobile phones have a fast enough connection to support the average household, but the data cap is at like 5% of the monthly household data consumption.