The last bit is just stuff I wanted to whine about. I obviously know it is faster, you don't need to explain that concept. I have just never had need of any significant internet speed on my phone. I don't download things, and only sometimes stream video. Most of the time I am just checking emails, or calendars, or something trivial like that. Unless I do some kind of benchmark, I can't notice the difference between 4G and 5G.
> I have just never had need of any significant internet speed on my phone. I don't download things, and only sometimes stream video.
But other people do.
And the main resource that is limited with cell service is air time: there are only so many frequencies, and only so many people can send/receive at the same time.
So if someone wants to watch a video video, and a particular segment is (say) 100M, then if a device can do 100M/s, it will take 1s to do that operation: that's a time period when other people may not be able to do anything. But if the device can do 500M/s, then that segment can come down in 0.2s, which means there's now 0.8s worth of time for other people to do other things.
You're not going to see any difference if you're watching the video (or streaming music, or check mail), but collectively everyone can get their 'share' of the resource much more quickly.
Faster speeds allow better resource utilization because devices can get on and off the air in a shorter amount of time.
4G and 5G can use the same frequencies, but they don't coexist on the same frequencies like the different revisions of WiFi can.
5G can also operate on additional higher frequencies than regular 4G deployments. But often a lot of 5G you see deployed are in the same 700-1900MHz-ish kind of range.
If 5G lived up to everything it was touted to do, you could use a 5G hotspot for your home internet would could be a huge positive in areas that only have one ISP available. However, 5G does not live up to the promises, and your traffic is much more heavily shaped than non-wireless ISPs.
I know many households which use 5G hotspots for home internet. They even do cloud-rendered gaming and remote telework on such setups. Consistently get several hundred megabits at pretty decent latency and jitter. I'd say that lives up to many promises.
And I know just as many that have tried but get crap service, so we're even now?
I barely get regular cell service in my house from my provider. There's no way I'd get a hotspot for a service that is a must have. Provider's "coverage" maps are such a joke to make them useless.
I'd say its then more YMMV rather than a blanket "does not live up to the promises".
I can routinely go around most of the metro area on any given day and get hundreds of megabits of throughput back home at <10ms latency on a plan that's costing me ~$30/mo on a device that cost less than $400. I can be in a crowded sports arena and on my regular cellular internet and still manage to pull >50Mbit down despite the crowd. Several years ago, I'd be lucky to even get SMS/MMS out quickly and reliably.
During the pendemic, I was stuck working from home, and for a couple of periods my home internet connection was quite unreliable (it's DOCSIS, and nearby construction kept damaging the cable; eventually the cable company actually strung the cable across the road, _attached it to a tree_, and ran it back, to bypass the construction site). So I regularly had to tether on my (then LTE) phone. And it was _fine_; it was actually surprisingly okay.
I'm getting bad 5G ~= 5G does not deliver as promised.
to the person that is affected by it, it's not a good thing. we can argue all day about it but you're wrong to whoever you're arguing against at that point.
It would matter more if you were in a crowded place, with more users taking up the spectrum. But yeah, as with computer speed, ordinary applications maxed out a while back.
That's a very interesting observation - - the bandwidth requirement is more for the transmitter than the receiver as we get more and more connected devices
In a similar manner, I got 5G recently and used it as my main link, and i'm still at 150GB downloaded (multiple persons, multiple laptops, regular OS updates, docker pull etc). I'm not even smart about this .. Without constant 4K streaming I realized that my needs will rarely exceed 200GB.
