back to article Qualcomm all ye faithful: 5G's soon triumphant... like 2020 soon. Really

As the chip supplier to almost half the phone market, Qualcomm should be able to make a decent guess about when 5G will condense from vapourware into something more solid. Alex Katouzian, SVP and GM, Mobile, Qualcomm Tecnhnologies, Inc Shows off the Company's New Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform with 5G OM5G... Qualcomm teases …

  1. Major N

    Exceptional headlining, Sir

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Pint

      Yup, I clicked on this article entirely to make a similar post. I'm not a huge fan of the traditional "supercali..." headlines - but this one is spectacularly good. And that's against some stiff competition from other high quality El Reg offerings.

      I'm sure when the headline writer sits on Santa's knee they'll be told that they've been a good little subbie and that they'll be getting something nice from his sack...

    2. choleric

      Hark! the El Reg headline bling, Cheery with a yule-tide ring.

      Oh, and this line, "5G NSA (Non Standalone)", did they tell you to write that?!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A warning, really.

    Unless you're a development engineer, why would you buy a first generation 5G phone with separate modem in 2019? Some of us remember the power consumption fiasco of the first 4g phones with separate modem, the first 64 bit Qualcomm CPU (810)...

    Let's hope my present phone lasts till well into 2020.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: A warning, really.

      Same old story:

      When I can buy it, in a shop, at a decent price, with a reasonable chance of working. Then, and only then, do I bother to look at whether it's something that I want or need.

      Until then it doesn't matter if there's one chip or a million that does the job, one mast or a million, one handset or a million.

      Until I can buy it as consumer hardware, through ordinary channels, and it's advertised to me as an available product (i.e. 5G will work on my usual telecoms company, etc.) then it literally doesn't matter.

      Same as every battery advance, "electric car", stupendous CPU, amazing new tech, or whatever else.

  3. Fred Goldstein

    5G has to be the biggest hype machine since, say, the Supersonic Transport, Quadriphonic sound, and Push Tech-No-Lo-Gee! It basically means that the network can use more than one band at a time to get more speed (at the expense of power consumption of course). But how many people are complaining that their LTE phones have too little peak speed, when in range of an uncongested cell? It's the vendors' way of getting the carriers to shell out money they don't need to or want to shell out.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      5G may be overhyped. But it's an inevitable requirement for the future.

      It's only sensible to assume that, in the next 10-15 years, we will:

      - Have more cellular devices online.

      - Have more cellular devices per person/household (e.g. smartphones, smartwatches, GPS trackers, cars, smart meters, etc. etc. etc.)

      - Those cellular devices will thus be more densely packed and need to share bandwidth.

      - Some of those cellular devices will require greater speeds than are available today. Whether that's people streaming 4K movies, playing VR, website HTML sizes increasing, more live-streaming of video, or whatever, it's a reasonable assumption that they will use - on average - more data than today.

      As such, 5G is necessary. For nothing else than it's capability to support more devices in the same areas using more frequency bands, with the total speed available to share out from each mast having to be more than at the moment.

      It's not that people are complaining - people are satisfied. But you only need one "fad" (think "Pokemon Go / Tamagotchi / etc. but with something cellular-based") and if you have failed to prepare, the whole network will collapse for even today's use. And naturally there will be more things online tomorrow than today. Fail to prepare for that, and everyone's current capacity drops in proportion to the number of new devices. How long before you're buying a "Netflix box" or Amazon Fire Stick that directly streams over 4/5G and doesn't need to connect to your wifi at all? Especially with eSim technology, they could easily do that, and thus bypass issues with other cellular providers or their backhaul providers.

      It's an inevitable and necessary upgrade. Hence, why people would hype it up, I can't understand.

      I live my life via a 4G Wifi box and a smartphone. I literally do not have a landline connection (despite there being one in the property, it would cost more to activate and use, to provide a slower connection than I already get over 4G). If I can live your entire digital life without ADSL/VDSL/Cable today, then 4G is already viable to do this on. 5G just means that EVERYONE would be able to do so. I game, I stream, I have a SIP phone, etc. etc. Nobody even notices, you just join my wifi from a little box and you're "online". They even question the need for the box because I could just "hotspot" from my phone, they say. They know that... they use it themselves.

      5G could easily make your "Internet" connection travel with you (so you can check your plane tickets from work, for instance, without filters getting in the way), and make landlines obsolete. It's far from a useless leap in technology (unlike, say, 4K/8K/HDR/etc. which will still sell millions of devices alone).

      Literally, my only hope is that, with the new speeds and high-capacity, data prices will drop. I can get 40Gb for £22 a month. I actually use 90Gb a month on that package (it doesn't include certain streaming services). I really could easily burn through 400Gb in a month if I had the money to do so. There's no technical reason in the way of me doing so at all, even in the middle of a large city inside the M25, sharing the "connection" capacity with all the neighbours and anyone who walks past with a smartphone.

      But if 5G gives me bigger data allowances, greater speed, and a more resilient connection using more frequencies, I'll buy into it. Whether that's a 5G SIM in my existing 4G box, or whether that's buying a special 5G Wifi box with eSIM, I know that I'd end up getting it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        You can get up to 38mb FTTC for £20 per month with unlimited downloads and free line connection (even cheaper if you use a promotional cashback deal). This is cheaper than what you are paying at the moment, and although the speed might be lower you would have no problem using the 400GB you speak of or more.

        Additional you would not have to worry that someone has brought their laptop over and it's decided to download a load of windows downloads, and you'd also be able to view 4K videos (which I assume you are not as your monthly usage is too low for this to be happening unless you watch very little).

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