5G roadblock: labor

Wed Jan 1 06:30:08 UTC 2020

On Mon, 30 Dec 2019, Brian J. Murrell wrote:

>I'm not saying that maybe one day we won't need 25Mb/s to a hand-held
>device, but hologram telephone calling, Netflixing and even video
>calling, are not the use-cases, IMHO.

Actually you went on to say that future innovations shouldn't exist 
because that's just crass consumerism, and that we should be satisfied 
with (in particular) HDMI instead of desiring better -- sorry, people 
will want better, e.g., the realism of 4k, 8k and 16k which the devices 
and networks of today either cannot provide (that HDMI flatscreen 
display probably cannot handle even 4k much less 8k+) or would struggle 
to provide (carrying 25+ Mb/s to dozens or hundreds of nodes -- remember 
even pico cells server multiple nodes).

Video to tablets and phones/phablets are indeed a major use case, for 
the majority not you or I -- you don't want high bandwidth video calling 
yet others might, i.e., Facetime is quite the thing and perhaps in 2 
years with enough bandwidth available those holographic calls would be 
too.  Even I might change my mind if my customers began demanding 
high-fidelity video conferencing even while mobile.

Some messages back mention was made of SSH being nice over the reduced 
latency 5G brings which might appeal to you but would be meaningless to 
most users.  I had no issue with SSH even over 1xRTT so I guess 3G need 
not have been deployed.

IoT will need lots of bandwidth but not the low latency nor the reduced 
jitter that 5G can provide.  A single thing generally won't need much 
but that isn't the measure since the idea is there will eventually be 
hundreds of things per household and thousands or millions per business, 
of which dozens, hundreds or thousands will be within the service area 
of a group of cells.  And even if that's still low in toto it translates 
to needing headroom so the things that do need significant individual 
streams won't starve.  Besides we aren't the customers for most of 
these, we're the product.

But there's no need to imagine a killer use case nor even a significant 
set of cases -- they will come if the ability is there.  In NA the key 
will be probably the cost, as another message pointed out.  The 
transition from 3G to 4G didn't proportionally increase the usage 
allowed, at least IME, but it was enough that many make video calls from 
their mobile device and some do watch videos on them.

/mark