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."
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AT&T will slash $3 billion off its capital investments next year
AT&T is planning to spend just $20 billion on capital investment in 2020, down from $23 billion this year. [...] The company is on pace to exceed its 2019 goal as it averaged more than $6 billion per quarter in the first three quarters. But with a forecast of $20 billion across all of 2020, AT&T expects to spend about $5 billion per quarter on capital investments going forward. The company is under pressure from investors to control spending, in part because its TV business is tanking and because of AT&T's giant debt load stemming from the purchases of DirecTV and Time Warner.
[...] AT&T's capital spending will decline next year despite the company's plan to roll 5G mobile service out nationwide. AT&T already got much of the 5G spending out of the way by purchasing spectrum licenses, and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told investors that the company's "strong spectrum position will allow for lower capital intensity" over the next three years.
AT&T has also mostly stopped its fiber-to-the-home broadband construction even though large portions of its 21-state territory still have only copper-based DSL service. Fiber deployment isn't stopping completely, as Stephenson said that "5G requires us to continue deploying fiber." But AT&T customers who can't get modern broadband speeds or reliable wireline service in their homes would welcome more capital investment in their neighborhoods.
Related: AT&T Lays Off Thousands After Nabbing Billions In Tax Breaks And Regulatory Favors
AT&T Will Give Poor People 1.5 Mbps DSL for $10 if US Allows DirecTV Merger
AT&T Employees Took Bribes to Plant Malware on the Company's Network
AT&T Turns On 5G In New York, But It Still Isn't Available To Consumers
Lawsuit: AT&T Signed Customers Up for DirecTV Now Without Their Knowledge
AT&T Considers Getting Rid of DirecTV as TV Business Tanks, WSJ Reports
(Score: 0, Troll) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday August 07 2019, @09:07AM (15 children)
I reject the proposition that I must passively accept whatever EMF some or a number of humans or corporations wants to install in my vicinity.
I support the human right to defend themselves from getting shit beamed into their brain that they do not want.
I would like to start a company in the east village where we do a complete EMF scan of apartments and demonstrate to fancy lawyers that we have a class action lawsuit. Also, faraday cage beds, I have tons of prior art on this if you're going to start this company just hire me so I don't have to take everything you have later in litigation.
The fact is due to random physical geometries and constructive interference, there are just going to be some places at this point that are actually dangerous or unpleasant I slept in a room under a 3/4g tower last year and I know I could feel it and I hated it.
Has anyone even done just this one bit of research, the blind room test where 100 people go into x rooms with y different radiation setups and see if anyone can tell a difference or feel anything? On even the very first things about this technology's effects on us, we are totally ignorant. Much less the actual bizarro physics of wave energy and molecular resonance, etc etc.
The rights of the majority do not include beaming whatever the f they want into the brains of the minority, 'go live in a cave' is not a civilized solution to the problem of faction in a pluralist society. But a pluralist society is not what some people want, and this issue is a great way to drive the remaining sector of the population with any remaining critical thinking capacity to the brink, so of course they are 'rolling it out' as soon as humanly possible even though in some parts of the country water pipes are considered too advanced of a technology.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 07 2019, @10:23AM (1 child)
Good for you! In fact, why use a cell phone at all if you don't want to accept their signals? If you're specifically concerned about what AT&T claims is 5G then you are free to move to one of the parts of the country where you claim "water pipes are considered too advanced of a technology."
I'm off to scour your journal to read your insights into AM, FM and old fashioned TV signals.
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 08 2019, @08:54AM
The first commandment of the rules of logic is not to attack the person making the assertion, which you are doing.
5g and am radio signals are not remotely comparable technologies. Your comment is essentially anti-intellectual and only tries to end the conversation through cliche.
There were some people who thought tv and radio signals are too much. TV and radio transmitters frequently kill birds and other animals who get too close. We are talking about power scale as much as frequency.
You are saying because we accepted those technologies we must always accept new technologies, and this is a very special kind of argument, so thanks for that.
You can read my website and you will find I actually am the creator and proponent of a mathematical forumula for determining the value of technological items, and then you will learn that from my viewpoint it is a lot more about this word Trust than fourier analysis. Although the fourier analysis is also very important. If you brought me fourier analysis of 5g, that would be something that might get me to consider your contribution to this discussion, because at this point I do not.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday August 07 2019, @12:21PM (2 children)
I take it you don’t use cellphones at all since having a radiation source up against your skull is likely is represent a higher level of exposure than living among cell towers.
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday August 07 2019, @01:45PM (1 child)
I use cell phones but sparingly and I keep it in a different room.
The key to good work is not being interrupted while you are doing it. People who are constantly responding to random rings are effectively capping the quality of their output.
I have slept with an iphone streaming youtube within 1 ft of my head and I honestly never sleep as well, I have run the experiment and trust my own results.
Your response is a variation of 'why dont you go live in a cave' btw. Like wireless communications should be completely rejected by me because I reject a specific technology or specific change that affects me. Which is of course a straw man and a personal critique of me, and as such in severe violation of the laws of logic and good conversation.
Me: I say this thing. Rando comment response: So I guess that means you must want to live in 1800 and only use electronics you built yourself and etc etc. If you are trying to deflect from the thing I said and be anti-intellectual, this is a great tactic.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday August 07 2019, @01:56PM
Please don’t read more into what I’ve written than what’s actually there. I’m actually very sympathetic to a more unplugged lifestyle myself— so much so that family members are sometimes embarrassed when I take my 10+ year old cellphone out in public. I’m just making you aware that the highest exposure levels for cellphone users likely come from the cellphone itself.
Also see my other post in this thread. I’m a 5G skeptic.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 07 2019, @03:47PM (2 children)
Should read:
I slept in a room I knew was under a 3/4g tower last year and given that knowledge I wanted to believe I could feel it.
I worked under one for years, every one of the thousands of employees did. This was during the time when consipiracy theorists were saying that the big telecomms company knew it was harmful, and were suppressing the results of their research. Those researchers were also in the same office building as me - are you suggesting Nokia was attempting to give all its Kilo (largest office in Espoo at the time) staff brain cancer? That's as crazy as saying that Judas Priest wanted their fans to commit suicide.
I'm with you on the right to sovereignty over your own space though, and think that capturing and decoding any transmission that passes through your own property or self should be legal, so if you can extract a TV station from the waves, then that should be your right, as they literally gave it to you (without your consent, and certainly without any agreement on what this gift may be used for!). (Of course, distrubuting what you capture for personal gain would be another matter entirely.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 08 2019, @08:49AM
I think what is going on now is different. I trust the institutions less, the standards less, the government oversight less, the military spook bullshit less, and see in every possible way 5g specifically being implemented in rushed manner with manipulative answers to basic questions.
OF all the companies I trust nokia the best. I am concerned more about the frequencies then the cumulative effects in non-ideal conditions, and the potential ability of the companies and government to focus wave energy as a weapon, which I would need to know at this point was 100% ruled out as a possibility.
I do believe that if you were under a noka tower in a noka building from 2008-2012, what we are facing now is potentially different.
But thank you for your thoughtful reply. And having the ability to decrypt and intercept and use whatever they are beaming is a nice idea but will not help me sleep better at night or compensate my damages if it turns out we can't trust these people, again.
It's the same reason I don't trust monsanto/bayer or microsoft, the organization of the modern mega corporation just lends itself very easily to the imposition of new legal realities through the installation of technology.
Or to put it more succinctly, it is 'tech upgrade as rights downgrade.' Why bother with going through congress if you can just invent something congress doesn't understand and build it under a PR blitz?
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 08 2019, @09:20AM
Until I did a blind test, go through 10 rooms with known and measurable emf and see what I could feel, none of us could know.
For some reason that is difficult to do, I'd think it'd be the first thing people should want to check before submitting to this or that generation of broadcasting emf.
I was twitchy and jumpy, I had kindof a facial tick when I was in the room. I didn't sleep as well. I didn't like how it felt and it was an actual relief to move to a different set of rooms.
I'd bet a fair amount I could detect that level of emf in a blind test, it felt different. It might be different when you're trying to relax than it is when you are trying to get stuff done. I was able to write ok and be productive.
Of course we know that the corps would never effect productivity, but relaxation and creativity and longevity etc they don't care a single bit. Fitting as always the same general behavioral pattern you would expect from an occupying alien race.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 07 2019, @04:27PM (3 children)
Sorry, bud, I already wallpapered my apartment with tinfoil.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 08 2019, @08:59AM (2 children)
Which brand of tin foil? How thick? How many layers?
I have heard internet Lore where the NSA can just image rooms that have certain tiny reflectors placed in them. I think this sounds plausible. It may be in black and white but all waves can be used like radar. I think it's actually plausible that they can image rooms from satellites.
The trouble is at this point they are inventing tech and we don't know that tech exists for the first decades of its use.
How do you know what tin foil brand to choose or what to tell your congresspeople to outlaw if we don't even know that thing exists?
And this is an existential crisis for the thing we have until now considered 'government.'
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 09 2019, @03:16PM (1 child)
Any brand of tinfoil will do. Just make sure the edges overlap. Also, I have a spigot outside that shoots chaff into the air periodically.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday August 09 2019, @08:14PM
chaff spigot, why didn't I think of that. Indeed, anything that works as a helicopter attachment you can also just attach to your house or body.
Welcome to the future.
(Score: 2) by hwertz on Wednesday August 07 2019, @04:55PM (1 child)
"I would like to start a company in the east village where we do a complete EMF scan of apartments and demonstrate to fancy lawyers that we have a class action lawsuit."
Except that won't work. They are certainly following FCC limits; the power used on mmwave is particularly low (it's line of site no matter how they set the power, so there's no reason to use high power.) There's probably more "radiation" (as the anti-cellphone types call it) pouring out of your computer while you type that message than you'll get from cell sites. Oh, are you using a cell phone? Physics fail on you.
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 08 2019, @09:02AM
I have read differently, the results of tests and discussion about this is equivocal and not certain.
'no reason to use high power' strikes me as wrong. Also your use of 'line of sight' also strikes me as wrong because it's going through walls, so that term in this context should be meaningless.
1 beamed wave may be low power, but you do realize we are talking about thousands of these beams simultaneously for devices that have only the most tenuous claims to the need for the internet, right?
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 08 2019, @09:31AM
this was not a troll post, that it is currently so scored should spark curiosity into the intentions of those who made that vote.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday August 07 2019, @12:29PM (12 children)
I’ve always wondered this and now seems a good time to ask.
What’s the difference in the end user experience in going to 5G, and what does it cost (or did it cost for development) in extra monthly fees?
I understand that it can give customers the ability to dispose of their home WiFi networks in some cases, but that money has been spent already.
This information is surprisingly hard to come by because it is saturated with hype.
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday August 07 2019, @01:50PM
Indeed.
A vast technological installation and capital expenditure with fewer verifiable specifics would be difficult to find in the history of planet earth.
On the topic of 5g it is bizarro upside down world, so this is why I am trying to be extremely vocal about it.
I've said it before here, but it's one thing to test for ideal conditions and short term effects, another thing to test for long term effects and non-ideal conditions.
Here is another good question: Is there any way that the convergance of multiple 5g towers could cause human pain?
Or more directly, is this a population control weapon in disguise and we won't know about its true capabilities until it has already been installed?
Because I trust ATT and Huawei both at around -10, -100, absolute zero, whatever the lowest ranking is on the trust scale, that is how much I trust them.
(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.
compiling...
(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.
compiling...
(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...
compiling...
(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.
compiling...
(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...
compiling...
(Score: 3, Touché) by Freeman on Wednesday August 07 2019, @04:08PM
Whatever the spec, there's one thing I can count on. Spotty service in my area.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 07 2019, @04:28PM
I thought I felt a tingling in my nuts.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hwertz on Wednesday August 07 2019, @05:13PM
Effectively, there will be two 5G networks. This is true from all carriers.
One is the mmwave 5G. This uses 28ghz band as well as 24ghz and 26ghz. Carriers have a bare minimum of 100mhz, with 400mhz or more common. This is where you'll get those massive speeds the carriers hype for 5G. But the mmwave band reaches a city block or two. Basically those areas where the carriers have been dumping in microcells already to handle the load, those are the areas that'll have the site density to make mmwave make sense.
The OTHER 5G network, the plan is to use "Dynamic Spectrum Sharing", mostly reusing the same spectrum as 4G; the 5G in these bands is supposed to get about a 15% speed boost (with some saying 30%) over the existing 4G. This is what many many users will be on (I had said "most users", but putting 5G in New York, LA, Chicago alone is enough to maybe not say "most"...). Rural sites, the block or two coverage of mmwave would cover one farmer's household, or if it's on top of a hilll maybe cover part of the hillside and ZERO households. Suburban coverage would be spotty rather than having a nice mmwave coverage area. ON the other hand, 5G on 1900, 1700/2100, 600, 700mhz, etc. should get roughly the same range as 4G, and possibly a little better.