Yet another Hacker News

22 points Betelbuddy 56 minutes ago 24 comments

jruohonen 44 minutes ago | parent

Well, I suppose the rolling out of 5G must happen at some point, but otherwise his/her take in Section III.A is spot on and the most important takeaway.

VorpalWay 34 minutes ago | parent

5G seems pretty widly available here in Sweden in my experience, even in the countryside. Not that the speeds are actually better than 4G, but the indicator say 5G as I'm writing this in a tent in the middle of nowhere. :)

I guess other countries are further behind?

jruohonen 30 minutes ago | parent

> I guess other countries are further behind?

Yes, and even in Europe. The demand-led need was badly misunderstood or anticipated in my opinion as operators were hesitant to invest (and some big ones still are). In this sense, 7G is a pipe dream (but of course worth researching as such).

tvink 27 minutes ago | parent

On raw coverage of 5g, only a few much denser countries are better. You live in basically the best 4g and 5g covered, sparsely populated country on earth :) most countries are not just further behind.

hn_throwaway_99 26 minutes ago | parent

With 5G in particular I think it's important that people talk about which specific technologies they're referring to.

In the US at least, low-band or extended range 5G is widely available and has been for some time (and I'm talking about the "real" 5G low-band, not the BS marketing speak AT&T used for a while). Mid and high band 5G, or 5G ultra capacity, is much less available but if course it only really makes sense in dense cities.

I'm surprised that low band 5G isn't widely available in most 1st world countries, as again it's been here in the US for many years now.

kergonath 16 minutes ago | parent

Lucky you. On some parts of my commute, in an urban area of 10M people, I am happy if I get some 3G.

dorianmariecom 29 minutes ago | parent

yes

BlackRabbit1 28 minutes ago | parent

5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?

I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM.

Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much solved with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.

esperent 22 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure what the "SA" part means but my phone says it's on 5g right now and has done most of the time for a couple of years now.

BlackRabbit1 6 minutes ago | parent

5G NSA requires additional LTE infrastructure.

tomasGiden 21 minutes ago | parent

And companies are selling electric cars even though not everyone has a petrol car…

I remember people saying the same thing about 4G relative 3G and 5G relative 4G.

respectattentio 26 minutes ago | parent

The right question:

Will 7G be needed?

I say no for the next 15 years. Because there are 1425235 other things that are way much important than this.

someguynamedq 23 minutes ago | parent

Right and society only works on one thing at a time

respectattentio 15 minutes ago | parent

Yes, why working on something that "may" be beneficial in the far future? This is like inventing a 128-bit CPU architecture. Nobody would be able to utilize like even 1% of that, even with AI.

tolugenius 25 minutes ago | parent

Could there come a limit to the G-cycle? Like either a) marginal gains slow/stall progress or b) more connectivity simply not being better? Curious to hear from folks in this field if this question has been raised.

londons_explore 19 minutes ago | parent

Not soon there won't be.

There is no reason you can't have phased array antennas of tens of elements on the handset and thousands on the masts, to give a massive bandwidth increase.

It will take a lot of generations to get to the limit physics sets.

ck2 22 minutes ago | parent

even the moon only has 4G

well if they ever get the lander upright, you'd think they'd learn to put crashbags that self-inflate to upright landers by now

* https://www.wired.com/story/nokia-4g-network-on-the-moon/

Havoc 21 minutes ago | parent

There will always be new Gs...marketing teams require it.

I hope they go into the direction wifi is taking though - stability rather than speed.

I never think about cell speeds being slow anymore but irritation at lack of coverage is still frequent. Esp in urban jungles where buildings block it

walrus01 21 minutes ago | parent

Note that "G" generally is a marketing term for consumers, the actual tech is 3GPP rev-whatever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP

Like 3GPP release 15 or 16 is what we currently know as a lot of in production LTE/LTE-Advanced stuff.

zkms 15 minutes ago | parent

Run the abstract through pangram.com; this is AI slop: https://www.pangram.com/history/49f81c92-a2f4-46f6-91b3-e185...

0utcast 11 minutes ago | parent

Ironically for mobile data, I've liked and found 4G to be more consistent. Not always as fast, but it never drops for me or fails to load.