5G is 'ready' once you redefine 'ready'... and then redefine 'reality' If the industry had one job at Mobile World Congress last week, it was to tell the world that 5G – the biggest thing since "electricity or the automobile", according to Qualcomm's CEO* – was almost upon us. But the reality on the ground in Barcelona only emphasised how far away it remains, practically, for most of us. From …
A router running Android? With a microphone? No, really, thank you.... I prefer to sell my soul to Satan, instead...
And still, if 5G requires to bring fibre to every antenna, and antennas need to be a lot more, why shouldn't I have fibre to my home too, instead of relying on a battery-powered device?
Because even if the utility right of way runs down down your street it costs a lot to run fiber from that to your house. Especially if it is on the OTHER side of the street. Much cheaper to have a small antenna mounted on the side of your house. Using one of those thin or flat ethernet cables you don't necessarily even need to drill a hole in your house - just run it through a window that can open (and then shut again)
And why would it need to be a battery powered device? There are plenty of cellular routers today that aren't.
Thank you for that reality check.
As I walked through the halls at MWC last week I could not help but think that the economic case for carrier deployment of 5G (in terms of higher speed mobile connectivity) is simply not there. One display boasted of multi-gigabit connectivity to your handset. For what please?
Now over time I am sure this will happen and some real clever augmented reality stuff and immersive technology may tickle the bandwidth capabilities of 5G, but building a case for it with the use cases I saw will be difficult due to the significant increase in base station locations that are required.
5G factories - use indoor wifi or wired connections
5G remote surgery - quoting a former colleague: 'bon chance with that'
autonomous cars - should do edge processing and have their own awareness of surroundings rather than relying on external feeds (i.e. kind of like humans) and are still some time away from mass adoption
real time gaming - let that happen in fibre connected homes
Hmmm...
Same biz case as any other idiot tax collector - ooh, shiny, pay me more.
That's about it, and it's not even very shiny.
One senses desperation. Desire for subsidies and so forth. Convince the dumb pols to pick our pockets for our own good (as if they needed more excuses).
In the good 'ole days of mockups and "new technology" we used to use Flash demonstrations to mask the fact that we had neither built the technology nor was it new. Flash, despite the fact that it was always a complete piece of excrement, has saved me from many an awkward situation: just show the client a lovely movie with lots and lots of transitions and animations and they forget that you are over budget and late on delivery (©2000 - 2019 Capita).
'Of the one that worked, he said: 'The mmWave antenna at 28Ghz is 12" from the terminal but at least one knows that it works as placing a hand in between the two stops the video.'"
Was never management material because was cleaver enough to consider an IR sensor to fail-safe the demo ...
Never buy ver1.0 if you don't want to be the quality testing guinnea pig aka MS Win10.
Wait for ver2.0 so the bugs have been ironed out (at least the major ones) & the tech is mature enough to actually be in widespread use. As in there might actually be the promised network that uses the tech for you to connect to rather than it only being available inside the lobby of the store selling it.
Or wait for ver3+ so not only have the major bugs been squashed, most of the minor ones have been as well, there should be widespread adoption of the tech, and the price for it all will have dropped from Apple-levels of insanity to Tesco-cheap-as-chips level instead. That 5G phone might cost all of £50/€50 instead of the 10x/100x "new adopter/sucker" premium it started at.
Besides, while the networks CLAIM that 5G will improve coverage until it's ubiquitous the reality is that it's been HOW many years now & they've still not got 4G to cover us all: see the story about the gentleman that drove all over his State taking real world, on the ground, no bullshit readings of actual coverage & found that the carrier coverage map was not only a lie but a big fat bald faced utter bullshit clawed from Satan's arsehole lie. I'll believe 5G will have better coverage once they finish the 4G rollout they promised us back when it started. =-/
"while the networks CLAIM that 5G will improve coverage"
Which is very strange claim, as each 5G antenna has a much shorter range than previous cell technologies. That means that more antennas are required to cover the same area. How this will make coverage an easier thing to achieve is a bit mysterious to me.
Thanks to Marketing-Speak, high end 3G (LTE) is called '4G' to the public's face. Meanwhile, referring to the REAL 4G standard, I'm unaware of anywhere in the WORLD offering actual 4G. Once we have what's formally called LTE Advanced, we'll have real 4G. Meanwhile, I've been seeing ridiculous references to '4.5G', which of course also doesn't exist IRL. And now we have a proposed 5G standard. Excellent! But first we have to get the Cheap, Lazy, Stupid mobile phone service providers to upgrade to REAL 4G. So what's the hold up?!
Was this guy correct and is this going to be an endless cycle? Next at 11!!!!
Sorry to the El Reg member who had posted this, wish I could cite his/her/apache helicopter's name but I couldn't find the original article.
It won't be a disaster, it just won't live up to the hype some people are pushing. They really believe 5G is going to drive a huge upgrade cycle in phones because it is some sort of "must have" feature (and as a corollary since Apple won't have it until fall 2020 they're doomed) and carriers that haven't already announced dozens of 5G rollout cities will shed millions of subscribers as people flee them for a network they can use their new 5G phone on.
No reason is given by these 5G hypesters as to why all these people will buy phones and change carriers just to get 5G - the desire for 5G is always taken as some sort of a given that doesn't need explaining lol
It is good to see the press is starting to give 5G a much needed reality check.
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