5G Rollout Disappointments

https://spectrum.ieee.org/5g-rollout-disappointments

by mfiguiere • 3 years ago

78 97 3 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

mjevans• 3 years ago

Skimmed, it seems like exactly what the reader might have suspected.

* More users on the 5G sites dragging that greenfield under-used speed mark down to the more typical value.

* Much of the hype 'best' with extremely high HZ spectrum that has short distance and low penetration E.G. Mostly giant sports stadiums.

* Suburbs and rural areas not a good match for the distance (frequency use) or capital investment required.

hedora• 3 years ago

Rural coverage is the only problem I had with 4G, even living in the city, etc. These days, the land line phone company has abandoned our area, and the cell companies carpet bomb us for unlimited 5G home internet service that doesn’t exist near us (despite the fact that we get a 5G connection at home). So, it is starlink for us.

Count me as unimpressed with 5G. I wish they’d focus on better geographic coverage and more reliable coverage instead.

pangolinja• 3 years ago

Ah, millimetre wave, best known for allowing unqualified TSA staff to see through your clothes at airports.

Of course broad-area surface-penetrating surveillance is not what this technology is being rolled out for at all.

mschild2• 3 years ago

I live in a large European city and am very often out and about and use my phone to navigate and consume content. I simply don't see the need for 5G.

4G was a major stepup in speed and given the rise of smartphones and platforms like YouTube, the speed increase made sense. There was an actual use for it. The speed increase for 5G seems to not really be needed though? At least for a majority of people 4G seems to do exactly what it needs to do.

tommiegannert• 3 years ago

(Outside Zürich) I see 5G as motivated by carriers, being able to pack more customers into the same cell. And I would never pay extra for it.

My carrier once called and wondered if the 5G is working, and how I experience it. I'm guessing that was a PR stunt, since otherwise I wouldn't have noticed the awesome things they do for me in the background... But I might be too negative on this point. Maybe they actually wanted to know if their technology was working, by calling me and asking...

blensor2• 3 years ago

Tangentially, if you are from outside Switzerland make sure to know your roaming charges very very well.

Swiss carriers have gigantic roaming charges.

Every time. I fly through Zurich (from Austria) I blow through my roaming limit 60 seconds after landing because I forgot to disable data.

1MB/16€

Yes that is Megabyte not Gigabyte

carschno• 3 years ago

Agree. I have an Android tablet that is a few years old, and the bottleneck is already the device's processing power, not the network, when it comes to rendering fancy web pages, for instance. This is clearly visible on both 4G and wi-fi.

Of course, the counterargument is that higher speed enables a new generation of (web) applications. Perhaps that materializes one day, but at this point it mostly remains irrelevant for the consumer.

nextweek2• 3 years ago

Faster speeds might not seem necessary, however you have to remember you are sharing the bandwidth. The quicker you can get your data the less time you spend using bandwidth.

If I can halve the download time that allows another user to use the bandwidth sooner.

Fragoel2• 3 years ago

Indeed, the article mentions that the 'killer app' of 5G has yet to be found

zeroimpl• 3 years ago

Am I charged less for that data transfer when it’s 5G? To me the important consideration is the cost of the data. 1Gbps seems pointless if the cost is still $10+/GB.

throwaway049• 3 years ago

In the UK there are companies offering 5g as an alternative to fixed line at your home. Do you have something like that where you live?

fuzzfactor2• 3 years ago

AT&T doesn't seem to intend to upgrade those of its older wired systems which are still at 1MB download.

Instead they expect you to migrate to a wirelss solution.

ksec3• 3 years ago

5G is about capacity, if you want more people to use the network, using more Data, and more affordable. Then you want 5G.

Yes, your 1Gbps Ethernet is enough for majority of your needs. Except you are not the only one using the 1Gbps Ethernet.

f6v2• 3 years ago

5G is about capacity

If that’s right, then all the consumer-oriented ads for 5G are pointless.

makeitdouble2• 3 years ago

I think this message should have been at the top of the 5G marketing, and would have helped the reception of the technology as bringing an altruistic angle.

Right now, as it was pushed as something we're supposed to want for ourseleves and allow us to do rocket surgery from our phones, people just got burned and either learned to kill it in the settings or bitch about it all day long.

I was watching a wireless home bridge review, and half of it was the reviewer looking into the settings and documentaton how to force 4G to get better speeds (spoiler: 4G was effectively faster). And that's a bog standard consumer targeted video with 700K views at launch.

r1ch• 3 years ago

It's crazy to me that some carriers still charge extra for 5G when this was the real goal. They're actively incentivizing me to stay on 4G and increase congestion.

kalleboo• 3 years ago

Where I live, mobile base stations are a popular form of home broadband since it's cheaper than fiber (the only other option for most homes). The 4G networks have long been inadequate as they are too overloaded and only with expanded 5G coverage have these solutions actually worked well.

mschild2• 3 years ago

Our providers offer that as well, but its significantly more expensive for the same speeds you'd get from cable/fiber/dsl. 500Mbits is 49 for wired, but 79 for having a 5G modem. And typically, if you have a 5G station close to you, you usually also have a fast wired internet option so baring edge cases, it doesnt make sense here.

27fingies• 3 years ago

Is LTE and 5G performance degradation due to the wireless technology or is it somewhere upstream of that? Like what good is throwing more radio capacity at a stadium if it’s the backhaul, peering, or some other appliance in the middle that is getting overwhelmed?

This seems unsurprising.

mixdup• 3 years ago

I think it's a combination of all of the above. Plus, 5G is still new so there's still way fewer towers and less spectrum dedicated vs. LTE

One other thing is that 5G as it stands now is a bit of a hybrid, still relying on LTE networks and control planes to do management functions. Some networks are working on, and have partially built out, 5G-native control planes but it's not done, it's new, and that also means those functions are still working out the bugs

Klathmon• 3 years ago

I've just found that any time my phone says it's on 5G, it barely works at all.

I've actually gone in and set the preferred network to LTE and every now and then I try setting it back, and almost every time I set it back within the day.

Doing some speed tests back and forth, LTE tends to have significantly less latency, higher bandwidth, and just works while every single web page load on 5G feels like a gamble.

yummypaint• 3 years ago

I think phones lying about their connection strength is a much broader problem. My phone isn't even 5G capable, but it will show me 4/5 bars or even 100% strength with full LTE when it is provably unable to transfer data. Carriers know that lying to people's faces makes them less likely to complain about poor service, just like how they lie to our faces about their service maps. There really needs to be some kind of legally codified standard for how phones report signal strength.

JW_00000• 3 years ago

Isn't that a case of the phone manufacturer lying, and not the carrier?

dijit• 3 years ago

it's also misleading in another way: namely that your connection to the cell site tells you absolutely nothing about that cell sites ability to forward your connection onto the greater internet; and absolutely nothing about the number of cells connected to the same cell site (some of whom could be consuming considerable airtime).

Boiling it down to "connection strength to the cell site" is, literally, the same as using wifi strength bars to evaluate internet speeds at home: it doesn't even begin to tell the whole picture.

SSLy5• 3 years ago

That's a problem with your UE (phone), what model is it?

afavour3• 3 years ago

FWIW I’ve experienced this a lot with an iPhone on Verizon. 5GUW literally won’t load a thing. If I put it into airplane mode then out again it’ll reconnect to 5GUW and work fine.

throwaway4good3• 3 years ago

Back when it was 4G western suppliers were under really strong competition from Chinese suppliers (ZTE and Huawei). Now these suppliers are banned/effectively banned in most Western countries. And we are left what seems to be just Ericsson and surprisingly things have gotten a lot more expensive, only slowly built-out, and not really that good.

Having said that, I just went through Copenhagen airport and the 5G network there is really good: Very low latency, very fast initial connect, and very fast download speeds.

So 5G can deliver the end-user experience it promised.

f6v2• 3 years ago

But look, now it’s only Americans who can eavesdrop. Better than those damn commies!

indeyets• 3 years ago

You mean Swedes? ;)

zaptrem• 3 years ago

This but unironically. Now the spies ultimately have to answer to my vote.

SSLy5• 3 years ago

just Ericsson

Uh, Nokia? Samsung? Whatever Amazon and the startups are cooking?

throwaway4good3• 3 years ago

In Denmark I think it is all Ericsson. Never heard of Samsung or Amazon (???) around here.

nizmow• 3 years ago

Anecdata: in Sydney, Australia, 5G on Telstra is incredibly fast (I get more than 1 gigabit at my apartment, but more typical / busier cells seem to be between 300-500Mb), and my experience using it mostly just for web browsing is it’s streets ahead of 4G.

0xy2• 3 years ago

I get 250 on 4G, so it seems like it's far from streets ahead. 4G can do 10x 4K streams at once, while 5G can do 15-20? A solution in search of a usecase. Not to mention 5G is significantly more unstable and patchy. Good luck with latency with a single wall between you and the tower.

ksec3• 3 years ago

I am thinking should I flag this. And thinking how low can ieee get? ieee publishing 20+ years ago were not great, but they wont bad. Right now this piece has no engineering insight into it, zero understanding of how MNOs across the planet earth work, no idea of 5G upgrade cycle both backend and front end, and zero mention of Pandemic / COVID delaying upgrading work. So what is the point of this article? Or are they now simply another marketing / PR company to downplay the 5G and hype 6G next?

Are we still at the stage people think Real 5G = mmWave? Which is what I believe 99.99999% of the internet comments were suggesting and at least 90% of HN believes in 2022.

Mistletoe2• 3 years ago

Why would you flag this? That’s not what flagging is for and is one of the asbolute worst features of HN. It amounts to censorship based on user preferences. It’s a real article from IEEE, just because you don’t like it or agree with it doesn’t mean you flag it.

What does [flagged] mean?
Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.

jnsaff2• 3 years ago

If you think that flagging amounts to censorship then I guess you don't believe that there are bad faith actors who exploit vulnerabilities in human cognition? I don't think this ieee article is nowhere near flagging territory but there are plenty genocide and fossil fuel shills around here.

silisili• 3 years ago

I'm not going to argue with you, but it would be really helpful to me or us if you could be more informative and perhaps less insulting to the crowd. After all, most mobile tech is done in the dark and few are truly versed in all of it.

I for one didn't think 5g == mmWave, but I specifically chose TMobile because their initial 5g rollout plan made way more sense for me, as it wasn't mmWave, where others seemed to be focusing there.

makeitdouble2• 3 years ago

To me this piece can be summed up as "5G isn't performing well, this can be due to many reasons".

Your comment seem to come up with more reasons it isn't doing as well as it could, while basically going into the same direction as the article. Why would you flag it for being basically right, even in a boring way ?

Superfrag• 3 years ago

In India, 5G has been a godsend (Mumbai & Hyderabad). I'm sure it's because the number of people on 5G is drastically lower than the number of people on 4G/LTE. Let's see what the experience is like when everyone gradually starts using the 5G network, but for now the difference between 4G and 5G is massive.

Even in remote areas (various parts of western Maharashtra), whenever 5G is available, it's a noticeably better experience than 4G.

drclau• 3 years ago

I'm sure it's because the number of people on 5G is drastically lower than the number of people on 4G/LTE.

5G has increased capacity over 4G, so even if all 4G users would switch to 5G, you will still have better service.

AHOHA• 3 years ago

5G is an umbrella for different types and technologies, and I believe that’s the confusion part of what the artice mentioned and the reader views. 5G has three main categories (technically two but separating the 2nd one to further explain it), 5G NSA (non stand alone), where the 5G RAN uses an existing 4G LTE core, 5G SA (stand alone), as the name implies, is stand alone from previous generations and has its own architecture and core, new radio, etc., and the third one -which is still a SA by the way- is the mmwave, what the article is referring.

This article has a thorough explanation (1)

In most nowadays 5G implementation is the first one, where you get a slight enhanced LTE, as it’s easier to implement, SA, which provide extra features is still not widely used -although it’s changing, and then you have the least adopted one is the mmwave due to its new bands (unlike the sub-6GHz) that require new radio/towers/etc. on a higher frequencies (also higher noise), and also new UE (or user equipment/device), which so far only very limited devices support that. In Canada, we did some cell surveys utilizing robots/drones to map the areas at different altitudes to find the deadzones and coverage, and you can say in most of the results, NSA can have the coverage as the LTE, mmwave in some cases we had not just to maintain a clear line of sight to get any signal, but also we have to be relatively close. So mmwave adoption might still in its early stages, it’s also why so operators went with C-band instead.

(1) https://dgtlinfra.com/5g-standalone-sa/#:~:text=What%20is%20....

SSLy5• 3 years ago

5G mmWave is best used in dense - ie. not so often in North America - urban areas. I's going to work great in busy metro stations, shopping streets/malls, concerts. Not in suburbia.

afavour3• 3 years ago

I’m in NYC and use mmWave for my home internet and it’s genuinely game changing: ~1Gbps internet with no wires at all. Given the monopolies internet providers have in NYC it’s liberating.

But my nearest antenna is a block away with pretty good sight lines. If I move my radio even 6ft in the wrong direction my speeds go through the floor. I think the 5G hype was excessive for a technology that only works in very specific circumstances and it’s led to some disappointment.

sidewndr463• 3 years ago

I keep 5G off on my phone because it in general doesn't work when I'm out and about. Conversely the 4G network seems to always have usable signal levels and may be less busy now that everyone's phone is using 5G by default.

qtwhat• 3 years ago

In China it is about SA only now, maybe since 2022 if I remember it correctly, all cell phone that support SA can only be allowed to enter the market. and all base station shall support SA too.

the_mitsuhiko• 3 years ago

The almost hilarious situation in Austria is that people usually have (truly) unlimited or high volume contracts. You can pull terra-bytes if data a month, even with tethering. As a result the main way in which contracts differ are speeds.

The fastest 5G contract these days is 500Mbit. Most people are fine with paying for the much cheaper 100Mbit contracts.

So even if 5G has speed benefits, usually I wont notice.

arnaudsm2• 3 years ago

I have to mention the elephant in the room : many carriers push customers to replace their home wired connection with 4G/5G modems.

These short term gains ruin the game for everyone. Wireless bandwidth is precious.

ohazi• 3 years ago

Sure, but is anyone (who has an actual choice) actually choosing to do this? From what I can tell, carriers seem to run a lot of really stupid ads and keep the marketing money faucet flowing for a long time before they finally give up.

arnaudsm2• 3 years ago

A dozen of my millennial friends do not have a wired internet connection. Gen Z even more, especially students.

izacus• 3 years ago

Yes, many people are deciding to use mobile-only connections, suffer through the usual performance degradation when everyone decides to Netflix at once... and also actively "Who needs this?" complain against building out wired infrastructure which would fix this issues en masse.

fuzzfactor2• 3 years ago

When Sprint first built out its digital cellphone network, their slogan was "you can hear a pin drop".

It was basically true, this was more clarity and intelligibility than the full-quality land line POTS.

After a year or two their airwaves got crowded and it became apparent they were compressing the audio enough to be noticeably way worse than the POTS was.

Cell carriers seem to have kept performance at that low level ever since.

Plus lots of times it seems like it's no longer full-duplex, after a pause more like voice-activated from either end before it starts transmitting to the other party.

smileysteve• 3 years ago

HD Voice has been rolled out across multiple carriers for a couple of years in the US.

solarkraft• 3 years ago

It's crazy to me how much telephony still sucks. We can stream 4K video but not some audio in reasonable quality?

giantrobot• 3 years ago

If the audio of a phone call was pre-recorded on a good microphone it could sound awesome even over low bandwidth "voice" connections. Audio for voice calling is optimized almost entirely for latency. This means super short buffers and relatively simple encoding.

Streaming video/audio has a distinct advantage of not having the same latency sensitivity. It's not a two way conversation so if the stream is a second or two behind the wall clock as long as it's in sync you're never going to know unless you're watching a stream of an event you can see live, then you'll see the encode and transfer delay.

Besides latency, the microphone/audio input pipeline on a phone is in one of the shittiest recording environments it could be in. It's right next to the users mouth, sometimes far too close, so it needs automatic gain control to keep from being overdriven. It also needs to filter out the audio coming from the speaker lest it generates feedback. The microphone itself also needs to be very small and is attacked to the body of the phone so it's difficult to isolate from body sounds like the user's hand rubbing over the body.

The fact a cell phone can even transmit reasonable sounding voice is a minor miracle involving many thousands of engineer-hours. The extra processing power and bandwidth available today to handle wideband voice helps a little with quality but it's still very latency sensitive and still suffers vs less latency sensitive codecs or one-way streaming.

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

It's crazy to me how much telephony still sucks.

I think about this every time I use make a voice call on a cellphone -- in terms of audio quality, it blows my mind how inferior it is to what we had on POTS lines in the 80s.

lucumo2• 3 years ago

I just figured I'd do some measurements of the different speeds.

Location: in the center of a modern well isolated family home, with HR++ glass. So not ideal for optimal reception, but I didn't care to get up from the kitchen table.

Tested with speedtest.net in the browser with Android Chrome. Network is T-Mobile NL.

5G: 69.52 Mbps down, 37 ms ping 4G: 56.79 Mbps down, 34 ms ping 3G: 4.01 Mbps down, 56 ms ping

I'm not sure if T-Mobile is still keeping their 3G network at optimal performance. All their competitors have phased out 3G. They'll probably follow soon (though only 2G phase out is announced).

Anyway, 4G → 5G is an improvement, but not orders of magnitude. That might be a bit much to expect though.

I also measured my wifi/fiber connection. Got to 162.86 Mbps and 17 ms ping. Still much better than the mobile networks. (And lower than I expected, so probably time to debug a bit.)

SSLy5• 3 years ago

For a comparision, 80's apartment complex on a city outskirts

5G: Rx 233 mbps, Tx 90 mbps, ping 18 ms

4G (LTE): Rx 185 mbps, Tx 63 mbps, ping 19 ms

It's hard for me to tell where is the 5G tower, but the LTE one is on the condo block across the street. EDIT: I think they're co-located.

I guess it just depends on what is the infrastructure around you and how close is it.

usr1106• 3 years ago

I'm not sure if T-Mobile is still keeping their 3G network at optimal performance. All their competitors have phased out 3G. They'll probably follow soon (though only 2G phase out is announced).

Are you saying in the NL 2G networks will be closed before 3G networks?

In Germany 3G networks are already closed, in Finland closing has been announced. But 2G networks are promised to run still for years.

lucumo2• 3 years ago

It looks like T-Mobile is the only one to phase out 2G before 3G. The other two networks (KPN, Vodafone) have already phased out 3G, but will keep 2G until 2025. T-Mobile announced 2G phase out will finish in June this year, but hasn't announced 3G phase out yet.

MisterBastahrd• 3 years ago

I'm about half a mile from a 5G tower and have been using a T-Mobile hotspot for about a month because the only telco that has run internet on my side of the street (in a town that literally has fiber 300 feet away) is AT&T, and then they only have DSL. This is in a Dallas suburb. AT&T? Nearly 90 bucks for 50Mbps down, 12 up. T-Mobile? 50 bucks 140 down, 50 up during peak times.

anecdotal1• 3 years ago

Cancel your T-Mobile and buy a Calyx (also using T-Mobile) and you'll be paying ~$45/mo (after hotspot device cost) and have no data cap or throttling (it's real, grandfathered contract from Clearwire)

I can do 800mbit+ on mine, symmetrical.

xchip• 3 years ago

In Belgium 4G speed was capped, nibody notices it, the speed was enough, but still deployed 5G as if it was going to be a game changer.

joshspankit• 3 years ago

I just now asked a non-technical friend (who knows nothing about 5G besides it’s supposed to be better):

“5G towers are faster but they have less range. What problems would you expect when rolling it out across the nation?”

They identified all of the major ones in the article.

Just like many in tech did when 5G was announced.

And yet somehow we’re still here.

kriro• 3 years ago

I think 5G is more of an enterprise technology than consumer tech. For me latency and "campus networks" (or simply the ability to apply for a license to operate your own 5G network in a fixed location) are the two most interesting things about 5G. Those are clearly valuable if you think about a production line of connected devices in some fixed geographic location (factory etc.). Pure download speeds etc. don't matter that much to me, 4G was already plenty.

The rollout is a bit curious though. In Germany providers are incentivised to connect people no cover area (iirc they have to connect at least x% of the population). Sort of makes sense but also cuts off potentially very interesting use cases (for example rural areas where 5G could be used for agricultural machinery).

blurbleblurble• 3 years ago

5G is preliminary sensing infrastructure. Don't take my word for it, go read and watch all the IEEE and 5G/6G industry literature that spells this out in great detail.

"Integrated sensing and communication" is the search term to get you started.

s3p• 3 years ago

This article is a disappointment, not 5G. Cellular speeds have been increasing at an increasing rate over the last few years. Things have been getting much better for consumers. The article cites the lack of mmWave as the reason 5G is getting "slower" but then kills its own argument by explaining how mmWave has almost zero range.

What is this article even trying to accomplish?

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

The real problem with 5G, in my opinion, was the usual problem with tech -- the hype. All of the exaggerated and unrealistic tales about the possibilities were heard as promises by most people, and those are promises that 5G cannot meet in the real world.

The reality is that 5G was hugely desired by the telecoms because it eases their problem with the amount of load the cell system has to carry. And deploying it is very expensive, so they wanted public money to help. Which means they wanted to get people excited about it, thus the hype machine was put into overdrive.

johnea• 3 years ago

Hmmm, maybe because the whole thing was marketing bullshit from the benginning?

5G Rollout Disappointments

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