back to article European Telecoms Standards Institute to World+Dog: please start caring about 5G

5G is on the way – no, really, it's on the way, stop giggling – but outside the telcos and their suppliers, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is having trouble getting industries to care. That's a problem, because the business case for 5G depends not only on flogging fast broadband dongles, but …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    5G? Pah can we have 100% 3G cover first?

    no?

    Why not eh?

    There are a huge 'not spots' (no 2G let alone 3G or 4G) within 25 miles of Westminster. As for the rest of the country, coverage sucks even in quite populated areas. Large parts of the Peak District (close to the 'Northern Powerhouse' and not just the upland areas as phone dead spots.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No one cares because it isn't really needed

    Seriously, Qualcomm's first gen / test 5G chip can do 5 gigabits - what's the use case for that in a phone or tablet? Or even your home internet connection? There is none, because even Blu Ray quality 4K video is 100 Mbps at the most. Even if you are streaming a half dozen streams to your whole family you don't need 5G.

    Visual media is the richest and densest sensory input humans are capable of, we've gone from text to audio to video and with 4K are taking video about as high as we can. OK maybe in a decade once everyone has bought a 4K TV they'll start pushing 8K, but at some point people will just stop caring because no one can tell the difference.

    We haven't even come close to hitting the limits LTE offers us. The LTE most of us can get where we live is less than 10% of the maximum speed it is capable of, and when you're getting 40 Mbps on your phone most of us aren't bitching and moaning about why it isn't 100 Mbps, let alone 1 Gbps.

    I think 5G with its crazy 28 Ghz and 60-70 GHz bands will have two main uses. One, fixed wireless for home internet - LOS restrictions aren't a problem if it just needs to get to an antenna connected outside your window or on your roof. Of course at those frequencies you will lose internet when it rains really hard... Two, large open gatherings like stadiums, concerts, etc. where you temporarily have a ton of people in a small area without obstructions, and need to supplement the normally available cellular infrastructure.

    1. Tim Warren

      Re: No one cares because it isn't really needed

      It's not about individual user data throughput, but rather the aggregate date rate and power savings. The faster the air interface the less time the radio is transmitting or receiving, so the less power it uses. The less time someone occupies a frequency the more people can share the same frequency resource. This is one of the key reasons that low power radio protocols such as Zigbee have a high data rate of 250Kbps when the sensors themselves are likely to only need a fraction of that. A temperature sensor for example might only report the temperature every few seconds, or perhaps minutes, so the radio duty cycle might be something like 0.01%.

  3. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

    5G? How many people even care about 4G, even if they can get it? It's a solution to a largely non-existent problem, and 5G even more so.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like