Very OT: 4G vs 5G vs who cares?

iaresee said:
When I’m tethering my laptop to my phone I care. But just my phone? Not much care.
Click to expand...
From my experience tethering is a low data connection, that wasn’t always so. AT&T for example would rather you have throttled unlimited data, and pay extra for wifi tethering to a vehicle. Ugh
 
I got my unlimited plan with Verizon two years ago, roughly, as I would periodically need to tether; and do use the phone for data quite a bit. The reality is I probably could/should back off the plan or go to something else. I pay $80/mo times two, and we just don't use our phones enough for $176 with taxes and bullshit.

On the other side of things, I did just scrap my cable internet and got AT&T fiber to the house. I'm getting symmetrical speeds, a hair under a gigabit, and for less than half of what I was paying the shitty cable company.
 
PincoTech said:
From my experience tethering is a low data connection, that wasn’t always so. AT&T for example would rather you have throttled unlimited data, and pay extra for wifi tethering to a vehicle. Ugh
Click to expand...


That was actually one of the things that made me dump their phone service. They wanted $25/mo for tethering back when I needed it. The final straw was when my gf moved to this area, and I tried to put her on my plan. They said they couldn't port her number and she'd have to get a new one. None of the other cell providers said that was an issue, so that was that. Had T-Mobile for a few years, but when I started traveling again, I had too many dead zones. Great in the city, but nowhere else.
 
spagthorpe said:
That was actually one of the things that made me dump their phone service. They wanted $25/mo for tethering back when I needed it. The final straw was when my gf moved to this area, and I tried to put her on my plan. They said they couldn't port her number and she'd have to get a new one. None of the other cell providers said that was an issue, so that was that. Had T-Mobile for a few years, but when I started traveling again, I had too many dead zones. Great in the city, but nowhere else.
Click to expand...
Ironically my AT&T wifi in my truck has a signal when my cellphone doesn’t.
 
I have a second line sim card in an unlocked Netgear Nighthawk M1 wifi hotspot and I just got a ping of 34, Down 67.2 MB/s and Up 21.23 MB/s

Anyway bump because Startlink opened up for orders and I put my $100 down. I live in a rural area of VA and there's no internet/TV provider.

Anyone else in on Starlink?
 
USMC_Trev said:
I have a second line sim card in an unlocked Netgear Nighthawk M1 wifi hotspot and I just got a ping of 34, Down 67.2 MB/s and Up 21.23 MB/s

Anyway bump because Startlink opened up for orders and I put my $100 down. I live in a rural area of VA and there's no internet/TV provider.

Anyone else in on Starlink?
Click to expand...
My parents are in the mountains... This looks like it could work well for them (as opposed to HughesNet, which had too many constraints and to high of a cost).
 
USMC_Trev said:
I have a second line sim card in an unlocked Netgear Nighthawk M1 wifi hotspot and I just got a ping of 34, Down 67.2 MB/s and Up 21.23 MB/s

Anyway bump because Startlink opened up for orders and I put my $100 down. I live in a rural area of VA and there's no internet/TV provider.

Anyone else in on Starlink?
Click to expand...
Are those megabits or megabytes? In either case though, I could do my job with those speeds. Kudos to Starlink.
 
That’s accurate from the standpoint of physics (source: studied theory of electromagnetic field), but it sounds like alien language for 99% of the people even after dumbing it down.
 
5G is not for your phone speed. It's for everything else IoT.
Soon they will roll out 5G tv, alexa, ip cameras, etc, that will connect directly to a service without your control!!!
No more 'silly' routers that you can control the access to your network with.
You can try to hold back for a while, but just like you can't buy a TV without being smart (that spies on you) anymore, you won't be able to buy a fridge without 5G.
 
It’s actually for speed too. The faster it’s able to transmit, the more efficiently the spectrum is used and you also get to keep the radio on for much shorter periods of time, conserving battery. And millimeter wave stuff is designed so that you’d actually have a decent data connection at the airport or in a stadium.

It will never be energy efficient enough or cost efficient enough for true IoT.
 
I'm a rather active smartphone user, but I haven't switched to 4G yet for a single reason: I'm a big fan of Elon Musk and everything he creates. I heard he plans to upgrade Starlink so that it will be a cell phone internet provider. I would better update my phone for it than for a 5G internet connection. Unfortunately, I don't know when it will occur, but I'm ready to wait and use future technologies.
 
Unlikely. Even if he figures out how to receive things inside the building, you need considerable power to transmit all the way up. That's why sat phones only work outside and are pretty bulky. It's more likely that he will cooperate with carriers and provide uplinks to cell towers instead. If the economics check out, carriers might let him set up a "carrier" of his own in return, using their cell towers.
 
5G will change the world faster than any other advancement we’ve seen; more than broadband

the ability of and for All types of “systems!” to now wirelessly and seamlessly work without limit, including the ability for AI to now provide communication systems integration without human interference - that’s just the surface, who knows what 5G truly “hath wrought”
 
One of 5g physical layer designers here, participating in 3GPP standards organization.
The main advantage of 5g I would say is unlocking more spectrum above conventional 2-3.5 GHz, that provides more data rates, more devices, etc. But from the point of a regular smartphone use case the mature 4G/LTE is currently enough.

Another interesting use case is using 5G in factories for automation, fully wireless controls, robots, etc. This area is currently growing invisibly to smartphone users.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom