Honestly, I was just laughing through the whole thing. 5G is and always has been a complete joke; it doesn't exist to improve the lives of the people who are paying for it, it's just there as a...
Honestly, I was just laughing through the whole thing. 5G is and always has been a complete joke; it doesn't exist to improve the lives of the people who are paying for it, it's just there as a way for telecommunications companies to milk more money out of people any way they can.
I can practically guarantee that there's not going to be any new vendors for 5G equipment. I've spoken to people who have been involved in engineering wireless radios, and one thing that I've heard is that these supposed standards tend to be neither open nor standard; most smaller players are actually trying to reverse-engineer what the big guys are doing. Because in any kind of technology development, how things work in the real world is almost always differs from how they do in the blueprints.
Also I was pretty amused by this statement:
Similarly, most American service providers have managed to retain far more expertise and are able to run their networks much more independently of their vendors. US providers may leak less customer data, but to compensate, they flat out sell it.
Of course, I'm laughing because the only alternative is to cry. Here in the US, our government will never do anything because there are too many people in power who think monopolies should be free to ruin everyone's lives, but I'm rather surprised that the EU isn't doing more to stop this kind of thing from happening.
From my somewhat uninformed perspective. It seems like the only useful gain from 5g is increased device counts. If you go somewhere like a sports stadium, 4G is flooded and useless. If they could...
it doesn't exist to improve the lives of the people who are paying for it
From my somewhat uninformed perspective. It seems like the only useful gain from 5g is increased device counts. If you go somewhere like a sports stadium, 4G is flooded and useless. If they could get more devices working, that would be a real user benefit.
While you're not wrong, I wouldn't mind having a faster connection on my phone or a portable one on my laptop so I didn't have to connect to sketchy WiFi as frequently. I have had to connect my...
it's just there as a way for telecommunications companies to milk more money out of people any way they can.
While you're not wrong, I wouldn't mind having a faster connection on my phone or a portable one on my laptop so I didn't have to connect to sketchy WiFi as frequently. I have had to connect my laptop to my phone over 4G/LTE when my home internet went out, and while it works OK for browsing the web and email, I can barely use it for video chat, and I can't use it to download large files like OS updates. It's just too slow for that. And I frequently have to install new OSes for work, so it would have been nice to have those better speeds during this pandemic.
Thats not really a limitation of 4g. The 4G spec goes up to a theoretical speed of 300Mbit/s and a real world speed of 100Mbit/s. If your speed is under that, its not because 4G is too slow, its...
It's just too slow for that
Thats not really a limitation of 4g. The 4G spec goes up to a theoretical speed of 300Mbit/s and a real world speed of 100Mbit/s. If your speed is under that, its not because 4G is too slow, its because the datacenter is overloaded/the airwaves are full/you have bad signal.
5G only solves the airwaves full part since it is shorter range you don't get interference from other devices but you also require the tower to be closer to you. The most likely reason your 4G is slow is because the tower is too far away or the datacenter is overloaded. 5G does nothing to fix this.
From a blog post about the situation in Europe: [...] [...]
From a blog post about the situation in Europe:
The assumed provider security model
In the 5G discussion, the assumption is that national, large scale telecommunication service providers are currently in good (or even full) control of their networks. The idea is that these providers (think Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Proximus, Orange, Telefónica, KPN etc) procure equipment, which is then shipped by the vendor to the operator.
The provider’s employees would then get trained on this new equipment, unpack it, perform tests, configure it and use it to build new networks. Subsequently, other provider employees would operate and monitor the actual network.
If the equipment behaves strangely, for example by sending data to outside servers, telco staff would be able to pick this up and investigate. Similarly, if software upgrades come in, these would be tested by the service provider to see if nothing bad is in there, and would then be installed on the network.
Highly privacy sensitive areas, like call detail records, can then be used within the service provider to perform activities like billing or to resolve customer disputes. Similarly, if local government agencies show up with warrants, the data they need is then extracted from these locally operated systems under full service provider control.
All this would then be possible because the provider has experienced staff with a lot of telecommunication expertise.
Governments also believe in this model and require key personnel within national service providers to hold security clearances, so that police and intelligence agencies can ask questions and be sure their interest does not leak to third parties.
In this model, the 5G discussion is then framed as one where picking the wrong vendor upsets this model of good local control. Suddenly things would change.
The reality
I n reality, most service providers have not been operating on this model for decades. Driven by balance-sheet mechanics and consultants, service providers have been highly incentivised to outsource anything that could possibly be outsourced, and then some.
In a modern telecommunications service provider, new equipment is deployed, configured, maintained and often financed by the vendor. Just to let that sink in, Huawei (and their close partners) already run and directly operate the mobile telecommunication infrastructure for over 100 million European subscribers.
The host service provider often has no detailed insight in what is going on, and would have a hard time figuring this out through their remaining staff. Rampant outsourcing has meant that most local expertise has also left the company, willingly or unwillingly.
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any worries about “the Chinese” being able to disrupt our communications through backdoors ignore the fact that all they’d need to do to disrupt our communications.. is to stop maintaining our networks for us!
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If we compare European telecommunication service providers, some are still holdouts that perform many of their operations in house, without wholesale outsourcing, notably in the UK. This shows it is certainly possible to still operate a network somewhat autonomously.
Similarly, most American service providers have managed to retain far more expertise and are able to run their networks much more independently of their vendors. US providers may leak less customer data, but to compensate, they flat out sell it.
Honestly, I was just laughing through the whole thing. 5G is and always has been a complete joke; it doesn't exist to improve the lives of the people who are paying for it, it's just there as a way for telecommunications companies to milk more money out of people any way they can.
I can practically guarantee that there's not going to be any new vendors for 5G equipment. I've spoken to people who have been involved in engineering wireless radios, and one thing that I've heard is that these supposed standards tend to be neither open nor standard; most smaller players are actually trying to reverse-engineer what the big guys are doing. Because in any kind of technology development, how things work in the real world is almost always differs from how they do in the blueprints.
Also I was pretty amused by this statement:
Of course, I'm laughing because the only alternative is to cry. Here in the US, our government will never do anything because there are too many people in power who think monopolies should be free to ruin everyone's lives, but I'm rather surprised that the EU isn't doing more to stop this kind of thing from happening.
From my somewhat uninformed perspective. It seems like the only useful gain from 5g is increased device counts. If you go somewhere like a sports stadium, 4G is flooded and useless. If they could get more devices working, that would be a real user benefit.
While you're not wrong, I wouldn't mind having a faster connection on my phone or a portable one on my laptop so I didn't have to connect to sketchy WiFi as frequently. I have had to connect my laptop to my phone over 4G/LTE when my home internet went out, and while it works OK for browsing the web and email, I can barely use it for video chat, and I can't use it to download large files like OS updates. It's just too slow for that. And I frequently have to install new OSes for work, so it would have been nice to have those better speeds during this pandemic.
Thats not really a limitation of 4g. The 4G spec goes up to a theoretical speed of 300Mbit/s and a real world speed of 100Mbit/s. If your speed is under that, its not because 4G is too slow, its because the datacenter is overloaded/the airwaves are full/you have bad signal.
5G only solves the airwaves full part since it is shorter range you don't get interference from other devices but you also require the tower to be closer to you. The most likely reason your 4G is slow is because the tower is too far away or the datacenter is overloaded. 5G does nothing to fix this.
Interesting. OK, that's a fair point, then.
From a blog post about the situation in Europe:
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