this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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"This is an important research question because we can see mobile traffic going up over the next decade by a factor of 10 or even a factor of 20. "
Wtf are they going to do with that? Always-on video from wireless devices everywhere? Holographic movies on every web page? It sounds terrible. I remember having to make phone calls for basic communication. These days you send a text or email, except now and then you want the higher bandwidth of a voice call. That is, we have been moving toward LESS bandwidth rather than more.
Whatever is imagined being done with all the new bandwidth can't be good.
Your personal usage does not align with the majority. Look at tiktok, it's social media based around endless video files. It's not an occasional text or email, it's hundreds of videos that your constantly scrolling through.
The carriers love to brag about high capacity and fast speeds but they're still unwilling to deliver the bandwidth. They're all advertising "unlimited" data but if you scroll TikTok for a while they'll block your line for "excessive" data usage or throttle you down to 256kb/s.
I've only had this happen when using my phone as a hotspot
OK, good point. Are people using mobile data for that? Yes you're right I'm not on social media etc. Also I'm on a super cheap mobile plan with enough monthly data to check email and look at some occasional web pages, but if I want to watch a video I almost always use home internet for that. I guess if this super high bandwidth mobile stuff kills Comcast though, some good will have come out of it. The Register article talks mostly about IoT and "AI/ML" rather than social media though.
Is 5g mobile data cheaper for the end user than 4g in practice? The sticker prices and advertised data caps for monthly plans look to me to be about the same as before, but maybe more of the data cap is usable in practice.
Unlimited data. You do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want.
I haven't seen any carriers charging extra for 5g but I don't see why it would be more expensive since the quicker you're done using the data the quicker the tower can serve someone else.
That's what I mean, it seems to cost as much as before. I was hoping to hear that it had gotten a lot cheaper, not stayed the same. Ideally, it should be pervasive and free, but I don't mind in that case if it is relatively slow.
Every "unlimited" mobile plan I've heard of has fine print that says it slows to a crawl after some amount. I don't know if the real limits are different in practice, so I was asking about that.
These days you just get “deprioritized” instead of a hard throttle on most unlimited plans after reaching the amount. Deprioritized means the network treats your data as less important so if the tower gets congested it’ll slow down otherwise it’s still full speed.
At work we have phones that are web crawlers and they each use 50+ gigs of data per month so they're well within the deprioritized zone. But even then they still get really good speeds unless the network is super congested for some reason.
The real problem is that people are too lazy to read. Endless video, who is tiktok targeted to? This is bad news for attention spans and your ability to work. Just try to look at how much information you can retain from a video compared to a paragraph of text.
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They're making the data faster, but most plans are still limited to something ridiculous like 20G/month. What's the point of being able to stream 4K video or whatever if that's going to burn through your data allowance in seconds?
A huge part of newer mobile network generations is the increased capacity. Faster speeds is effectively the same as more capacity in the towers.
This means that companies could actually afford to start offering unlimited data caps, there just has to be the push to do so. But I do genuinely believe that within a decade there will be no more datacaps for mobile data in cities, at least (or at least plenty of plans with unlimited and no throttling). Well, idk about the US considering you got data caps on broadband, but, I'm sure Europe will get it.
And nobody will ever need more than 640K of memory, so the fact that even your cell phone carries vastly more than that must mean you yourself are up to no good, right?
Even if you're not dealing with a constant video stream, the power of the internet lies in moving vast amounts of data around. Yeah a lot of that information is based of corporate privacy invasion, but you also have things like medical databases or performing jobs remotely. I had gigabit routers in my home at a time when 10/100 routers were still typically used even in businesses. If you have a capability, someone will find a way to make use of it and new innovations will pop up that we hadn't even considered before. Imagine where we would be at if Xerox hadn't invented the mouse and GUI desktop years before personal home computers were even available.
All the examples you mention work fine with wired internet. No need to let the carriers keep gobbling RF spectrum for mobile.
Nah, it's all surveillance dystopia from here on out.
There will be plenty of uses for high speed wireless connections once the new mobile networks with big capacities come online. There's pleeeenty of research on the applications.
Don't you watch HDR movies in 4K on the go? Ok, not 4K, but people stream a lot of HD videos all the time. As well as stream from their phone cameras to Facebook and Twitch. Another issue is that high density cities have way too many people trying to do all this high bandwidth stuff at once.
And video calls. Don't forget video calls.
How much extra do I have to pay to not be in video calls? I almost never watch videos while mobile but I guess some people do. I doubt if I could tell the difference between SD and HD on a phone screen though.
If you personally don't do something it doesn't mean that the majority of the population is like you. Worldwide traffic use average is 20GB per person. What's even more interesting, is that US number is lower than average in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. And guess what? More than half of the world's population lives in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. So if you live in US, it's not just you, but also people around you who are not representative of mobile internet use.
I guess it's for streaming?
I'm not into any of that livestream stuff and I cannot believe that people stream their lives and other people want to watch it.
Just make a nationwide 10gb fiber optic service it’s like 5 times cheaper.
They can't even give me more than 20GB a month without forking over more than I pay for my home internet, never happening in my lifetime.
Ok. But that's all local traffic within your home network, and has nothing to do with 5G or 6G.
Even if your smart devices are connecting to cloud servers and streaming all your data over, it still has nothing to do with 5G or 6G.
That's for local networks right? That can moved to 5ghz wifi or whatever. No need to use spectrum controlled by mobile carriers.