5G Waveforms are Potentially Power Vampires

[paddy-stone]

Just to add to the discussion, Vodaphone here in the UK has recently offered a package for 5G (and backwards) - and all for approx £30 or so per month... also roaming in 77 countries included, and all unlimited, voice, text and data, and includes tethering or using in a 4g/5g modem/router (enquiries suggest that a 3TB fair usage applies). For that I would gladly take worse battery life, especially if it takes a shorter time to download whatever it is and less cost. For instance if I get 5G where I live, I could then effectively dump my land line/broadband FTTC which costs me around £37 per month currently, get better speed and have it always with me, I'm the main data user in my house, with everybody else using say under 5GB per month between them, so if we needed to get another phone sim to cover that 5GB data usage when I am not home, it'd still end up costing a little less than we currently pay for just the landline alone... and if we factor in that I can dump my current sim which I pay £10 for then it's quite a bot better all-in.

OH, and the real kicker.... the go between that is actually offering the above (can't remember their name right now), has a cashback by redemption of around £192 per year IIRC... so works out around £14 per month.

 

[Zodiark1593]

10 hours ago, mr moose said:

No 2g In Australia,  Australia ditches it's old tech as fast as it adopts the new stuff. 

 

To those wondering about the benefits of 5G's speed/bandwidth, the reason Telco's are developing for 5g (at least here in Aus) is not so they can give everyone 1Gb/s mobile internet, but so they can give 20 times more people the same 50Mb (4G) experience.  It's a smarter tech for congested networks.  

2G is still alive here for some carriers. It is suspected that T-Mobile might actually decommission 3G before 2G due to a number of IoT devices being on 2G, and for voice, 2G is equally good as a fallback as 3G.

[dalekphalm]

I was always surprised by people thinking 5G would be some magical new technology that would change the world. It's a good improvement, but it's nothing really revolutionary.

 

5G is not going to change how we as society operate. Anyone saying otherwise are likely working for the Network Industry and are trying to sell 5G tech .

 

Sure it'll allow faster speeds - but only in ultra dense cities. We'll likely see good 5G coverage in major US/Canadian (and international, but I cannot speak from experience about cellular coverage overseas) cities within 2-3 years. Rural areas may not see 5G coverage for many years - and they will likely never get the ultra fast 5G speeds, since 5G has two main spectrums.

 

The lower freq spectrums are basically just glorified 4G/LTE on a bit of cheap low quality steroids. Yeah it'll be faster. No it won't be a huge difference.

 

The higher frequencies is where the magic shit happens. The problem there is that they have terrible range and penetration. Meaning that you'll need dozens of 5G towers to cover the area of a single 4G tower, if you want those insane speeds everyone is talking about. Because of that, there's simply no point rolling out the ultra fast high frequency 5G towers to rural areas, since you'll get maybe a few dozen houses in each tower's range (if that).

[Unixsystem]

On 7/24/2019 at 1:42 PM, Zodiark1593 said:

Unless carriers provided some direct benefit to their customers, such as 5G usage not counting toward the data cap, I too couldn't care less about 5G.

Watch them institute a second, smaller cap just for 5G.

 

Spoiler

Or all 5G data counts as double.