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The new millimeter-wave network, or what AT&T calls "5G+," will be available in "parts" of New York City, though parts may be a bit of a stretch. In its release, AT&T acknowledges that the service will be in "limited areas initially" with a company spokesperson telling CNET that the new service will be available first in parts "near and around East Village, Greenwich Village and Gramercy Park."
[...] "As a densely-populated, global business and entertainment hub, New York City stands to benefit greatly from having access to 5G, and we've been eager to introduce the service here," said Amy Kramer, president of AT&T's New York region, in a statement. "While our initial availability in NYC is a limited introduction at launch, we're committed to working closely with the City to extend coverage to more neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs."
[...] It is still unclear when AT&T will make 5G available to everyone, but the company plans to deploy a nationwide 5G network on its wider-ranging "sub-6" spectrum in the "first half of 2020."
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday August 07 2019, @01:56PM (10 children)
5G's 4ms latency is just about the fastest humans can perceive for dragging in UI interfaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3MaC_1zpMs [youtube.com]
So, at the highest end of the client and infrastructure, you'll get video calls that don't suck.
Btw, that video is also why Wayland for the linux desktop matters and why Google and Microsoft are switching to tiling interfaces without drag/drop and swipes for both the desktop and mobile.
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(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday August 07 2019, @02:04PM
I don’t understand why that isn’t being handled already by doing GUI processing locally.
That’s a 22 minute long video, BTW!
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday August 07 2019, @02:19PM (4 children)
I still don't think this nears the threshold for the expenditure.
Nor do I believe the hype, I believe under optimal conditions you can get 4ms latency, but why would we expect that they could deliver that en mass? And if every gamer in your apartment building is getting 4ms latency at the same time it's going to be beaming a whole ton of very intense beams all over the place.
Why does it seem like I am talking to an empty room when I say that this direction is a full wireless world where wires are just old fashioned and every device, and the physical properties of its connection, communicates by sending wave energy through my body tissue? And cannot be audited because there is a blackbox in the transmitting chip?
If I went to a VR studio I would expect in that room maybe to get some more wave energy beamed at me so that I could have a wireless experience, but they are planning to wire the entirety of new york city with this stuff and then start rolling out new products to saturate that bandwidth.
Has anyone simulated what it would be like in an apartment with 500 5g devices? I don't think so, and that's why I say this is a giant unscientific unethical experiment being ran on the population like we are testing subjects and not people.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday August 07 2019, @04:15PM (3 children)
It's not like all those 4g antennas and base-bands are being replaced and thrown away. It will be just like 3G to 4G. In most places you'll get a few new 5g base-stations servicing the few thousands of early adopters. If there's a large demand the service companies will order more. Otherwise, they'll only replace old 3G and 4G stations as they breakdown.
On the consumer side, most smartphones are crap that doesn't even last 2-5years anyhow so by the time you won't be able to get a 4G signal, your phone will already support 5G and possibly even 6G.
This isn't about having everything wireless. It's about competing against terrestrial infrastructure providers just enough for businesses and home owners to demand fiber and low latency and threatening they'll switch to 5G if they don't get it. Worked well enough last time.
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(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 08 2019, @09:27AM (2 children)
The entire 5g install is a bargaining tactic to force the hand of cable providers to install fiber?
That is a pretty elaborate conspiracy your are proposing.....they sure had me fooled.
At any rate we are far below the threshold of trust where we can allow TPTB just to install new beaming tech willy nilly all over the neighborhood, no matter the reason, is my main point.
My second point is that it's not intelligent, we do not need more data or lower latency on mobile devices. It's not a problem that needs to be solved, at least not globally. It is true though that they would rather just tack up all these strange looking grey boxes everywhere as opposed to running glass to poor neighbhorhoods and through old city infra.
In that way wifi is like the ultimate colonialist infrastructure. Powerful people don't care about your houses or the auditability or the emf, they get use of their devices everywhere they might want to go, backdoors into all of yours, and when they are done working they will go back to their third home in montana.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday August 08 2019, @01:18PM (1 child)
Nothing to conspire. Just market forces. Back in the 80s it was satellite television vs cable... Recently people switched to using WhatsApp for text and even voice calls just to workaround the providers' price gauging... Otherwise it's back to cartels, monopoly and state-owned as the only recourse to address those problems.
Maybe. Though an automatic live translator for a conversation when vacationing would be nice. I can't come up with much more than that... And yeah, privacy and security issues... But still, there ARE legitimate use cases.
About the EMF and health concerns, the literature doesn't suggest anything definite and in a world where heavy silicon is paying for papers saying it's safe while the service providers are paying for papers saying the opposite, you just can't help having to go to market and test in the real world. It was like that with high-power lines and junctions too where the effects where much more visible so I doubt we'll ever get anything concrete now...
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(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 08 2019, @05:48PM
If there were a section of the airport, or hotel, or union square, or lobby that had 5g and it were marked, and if you could get one for your living room, I think that would be a totally decent middle ground.
But for some reason nothing even close to that is on the table, it will be steamroll installed without any more public discussion than what we are doing right now, which is frankly wildy insufficient given the risks and potential expense.
If gorgle tracked everyone's android map use while lying about it and then just said sorry and it was memory-holed, we are not at a point where we can trust our government or these companies to regulate/self-regulate.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 07 2019, @03:52PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday August 07 2019, @04:26PM (2 children)
Augmented reality rendering isn't likely to be done locally for quite some time. The resolutions are just too high even for contemporary discrete graphics that draw hundreds of w from the grid let alone on-battery glasses. And bobbing your head isn't all that different from dragging a mouse / swiping a finger.
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 08 2019, @06:59AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday August 08 2019, @07:35AM
Yeah but we all know the killer app is going to be some variant of Pokemon Go since it already happened and since we're discussing why tech companies are deploying and investing rather than what we want out of it...
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