I was hoping to see some mention of latency. Agree with the premise that for most consumer applications we don’t need much more wireless throughput but latency still seems way worse than Ethernet heyday times in college
LTE latency is 20-50ms, 5G is 1ms, Gigabit Ethernet is less than 1ms, Wifi is 2-3ms. Overall latency is more about distance, 300km is 1ms, number of hops, and response times.
With mobile, I bet contention and poor signal are more of an issue. 5G is a noticeable improvement over LTE, and I am not sure they can do much better.
LTE total latency is 20-50 ms, and you compare this to the marketing "air link only" 5G latency of 1 ms. It's apple and oranges ;)
FYI, the air link latency for LTE was given as 4-5 ms. FDD as it's the best here. The 5G improvement to 1ms would require features (URLLC) that nobody implemented and nobody will: too expensive for too niche markets.
The latency in a cellular network is mostly from the core network, not the radio link anymore. Event in 4G.
(telecom engineer, having worked on both 4G and 5G and recently out of the field)
Always been interested in this stuff. Where would you recommend a software/math guy learn all this stuff? My end goal is to understand the tech well enough to at least have opinions on it. How wifi works would be great as well if you're aware of any resources for that.
It's a good but hard question... Because cellular is huge.
In a professional context, nobody knows it all in details. There are specializations: core network and RAN, and inside RAN protocol stack vs PHY, and in PHY algos vs implementation, etc.
It's about as readable as it can get. The PHY part is pretty awful by comparison. If you have a PHY interest, you'll need to look for technical books as the specs are quite hermetic (but it's not my field either).
1ms to the cell tower. Even on fiber Internet there’s still single digit ms latency to servers in the same metro area. Only T-Mobile has deployed 5G SA (standalone). ATT and Verizon use 5G NSA (non standalone) which is a 4G control channel bonded with 5G channels so it has 4G latency.
if we go by useless endpoints, let's compare apples to apples.
on fiber network equivalent to cell tower will be probably splitter. i guess it has sub 1ms latency
I assume Speedtest servers, as they wouldn't have a way to get measurements for individual cell towers at scale.
(at least, I don't recall being able to get that sort of info from iOS APIs, nor have I ever seen data that would have required being derived that way)
When 5G first rolled out this was absolutely not the case. Not only was it not 1ms, it was like full 1000's of ms to the point where I actively turned off 5G on my iPhone because it was so bad.
I can only speculate 5G was so saturated on the initial rollout so it led to congestion and now its stabilized. But latency isn't only affected by distance and hops - congestion matters.
I was hoping to see any mention of large file downloads and uploads. Nevermind the article’s ponderous “I can’t imagine any use case for more than 5GB/s”, that’s a use case today where higher speeds above 5GB/s would be helpful. For example, a lot of AAA games are above 100GB, with the largest game in my steam library being over half a terabyte (DCS World). Ideally I wouldn’t have to store these games locally, but I do if I want to have access to them in any reasonable amount of time.
It also takes ages to back up my computer. 18 terabytes of data in my case, and that’s after pruning another 30 terabytes of data as “unnecessary” to back up.
I don't think the article ever claimed that nobody would ever want speeds above 5G. But you have to admit that your use case is uncommon. Only a tiny fraction of people has anywhere near 18 TiB stored locally and an even smaller group regularly wants to do cloud backups of all of it. There are various solutions for only backing up the diff since the last backup, rather than uploading the full image.
Are you downloading AAA games or backing up your computer over mobile?
Also, I hope you're doing differential backups, in which case it's only the initial backup should be slow. Which it's always going to be for something gargantuan like 18 TB!
I thought they were going to mention L4S or low latency low loss, over 5G which seems to be in the latest 3GPP 5G-Advanced Release 18 (2024) but I have no idea what the rollout of that is.
One of the issues with this 5g vs 6g is the long-term-evolution of it all -- I have no idea when/where/if-at-all I will see improvements on my mobile devices for all the sub-improvements of 5g or if it's only reserved for certain use cases
