[LINK] Don’t believe the hype: We’re a long way from 5G

[David]

On Saturday, 2 June 2018 22:27:41 AEST Michael wrote:

> But my computer does struggle even now with some tasks.  It is a pain to do a full back up to off-site locations.  Video conferencing is poor (I urge you to try a Cisco telepresence video conference if you have the chance.  It uses about 30mbps).  When you buy a new Xbox you need to budget several hours for the downloads of all the updates before you can play a game.  [...]   I am sure there are game developers right now who would love to be able to design a game with tens of megabits of bandwidth they could rely upon.
> 
> Most of these needs occur for mobile users too. [...]  If 5G means I can be as carefree as I am at home, that is a win.

In a properly-managed Australia you'd have a fibre connection to your home, or at least something a lot better than &(^%* FTTN.  And you should then be able to get decent WiFi speeds to your mobile devices.

> In the last couple of years, always on, effectively unlimited data transfer on home links has opened the door to new apps like distributed file transfer, blockchains, non-hardware media entertainment, voip, video conferencing and other things routinely.  15 years ago the same things were hard and just for hobbyists.  Let's see what 5G always on, effectively unlimited data to mobile devices brings.

Well it will be interesting to see how many people are prepared to pay for all that bandwidth-sec usage.  I wouldn't like to be the person doing the cost / benefit / risk analysis for the telcos.

Cheers,
DavidL