Energy efficiency starts to rock telcos' 5G infrastructure choices Sustainability goals such as greater energy efficiency have risen up the agenda with telecoms operators, to the point where these concerns are now claimed to be affecting network architecture decisions for the next phase of 5G deployments. Around the globe, telcos are moving ahead with a new phase of 5G rollouts intended to …
So far every time I've managed to connect to 5g I've been disappointed at the apparent available rate. Yes it's reported as fast by it takes forever so there is either a bottle neck or high contention.
Either way where I live 4g is not great even standing on the roof of the house. 5g no chance anytime soon, I'm more likely to get fftp.
It's because all of the 5G deployments in the UK are still using the 4G core. So you don't get the majority of the 5G benefits since it's just a high bandwidth radio tacked on to the 4G infrastructure.
Once telcos start using 5G standalone, the service you get will be significantly improved especially for jitter and latency. Plus things like network slicing will drastically improve performance. Vodafone is the furthest along with 5G SA, but VMO2 and EE are also progressing with their trials.
In places with good coverage (which a huge limiting factor!), 5G is indeed very fast, and using my phone as a hotspot I get download speeds which put any DSL connection to shame (downloading a 1 GB ISO in under 30 seconds).
I was skeptic, but now I think I could indeed live with a just a 5G connection as sole Internet access. The added benefit is you can carry it around, even take it with you on vacation/weekend.
Where public communications are concerned, it is my position that nothing should come before security.
The fact that security is not the number one concern when implementing a new layer of communication that is supposed to be open by design is a promise that, when things will go wrong (and they will, we all know that), it will be much more expensive and time-consuming to correct.
And frankly, telling me that an open infrastructure does not need to be hardened against Russian/Chinese/Nork hackers is just begging for trouble.
I strongly suspect that the people who actually answered 451's questionnaire (very rarely actual engineers) assume security is a solved problem. They trust their suppliers (they have to - if their suppliers have not solved the security problem then they might get fired for selecting them).
Power, on the other hand, is a visible, and increasing, operational cost. It is probably very high up their list of concerns because the telco knows user prices are going down and they have to find a way to make their costs go down.
Not sure how you work that one out given EE and (i think) all of the other non mvno providers have just taken advantage of their one-sided contracts to increase cost by around 14%!
Well we're not powerless about that. The increase prompted me to switch from Vodafone to Smarty. My bill has dropped from ~£14 to £7.5 (half that for the first three months) and gain some more data each month although I don't actually need it.
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