5G roadblock: labor

Sat Jan 4 05:40:23 UTC 2020

On 4/Jan/20 00:06, Andrey Kostin wrote:

>
> Currently /me don't bother switching to wifi in public places bcz LTE
> provides enough bw for my humble needs.

When I'm in South Africa, same for me, because:

  * Most hotels, restaurants, shops, and airport lounges still use ADSL.
    So the wi-fi sucks. If I know that any of these establishments is on
    fibre (likely because my company services them, or services an ISP
    that services them), I am happy to use their wi-fi.

  * On my work mobile, I get 30GB of data per month as per contract. I
    probably only use 2GB - 3GB of that, both for work and other stuff.

On the other hand, when I am traveling, I have to use wi-fi, even when
it's dodgy, because my provider's GSM roaming requires one to sacrifice
their grandmother (and no, that 30GB/month plan does not include
roaming). Luckily, the hotels I tend to stay at have had great wi-fi,
probably explained by how much they cost to stay at :-).

> And when the next phone will be released with 4k 120fps camera and 4k
> display there will be a lot of people (not only kids) who will use it
> and abuse it all the time for gaming, streaming ,etc.

Agreed.

But I stress "it's the kids" because they don't know or care about how
all this works. They just want to stream nonstop, regardless of the cost
of data. We, their parents, aren't wired that way because it's us paying
for it.

> It's not about competition with WiFi, it's just a new thing that is
> coming. But 5G will take away it's share of fixed users for sure.

I don't think wi-fi and 5G are deliberately in competition - I think
that competition is just a natural evolution of where the
state-of-the-art is. Kind of like cutting the linear TV cord in favour
of a VoD streaming service.

> When first iphone was released it was pretty much useless toy because
> all apps were bound to Internet and cell networks were you know where
> at that time with public WiFi only starting to take off. But now we
> can't live without services which are novadays considered as basic and
> then were fancy technology break-outs for geeks.

Agreed, but also 802.11ac/ax are miles ahead of 802.11a/b/g/n, in a
world where premises (commercial and private) have tons more fibre than
they did when the iPhone launched in 2007.

Mark.
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