What would they use it for, though? The advantages of 5G are pretty much low latency and high bandwidth. What in everyone's life needs low latency and high bandwidth? Fortnite? I got serious about it when I put the network in here. Since my NAS can bond four gigabit links, I gave it four gigabit links. And to make that worthwhile I put in a network card in my "can't buy a faster one" pro tools computer that would bond two gigabit links. Only to discover that my can't buy a faster one PC with 12 cores and M.2 drives literally could not write faster than a gigabit link. You can get fiber channel up to 5G speeds. Faster than. I've got 10G fiber between two switches at the birth center. Why? Because I can (see "dev perspective"). And I can look at the metrics and see that there's nothing on my network, and no network devices, that can so much as tick it over and I've got a couple 4K cameras. When I put in the network I took a bid from a datacom firm that really wanted me to put in 10gigE. I figured i'd be dandy with gigabit. No, no, they said. You might really regret not having 10gig when you "upgrade." Upgrade to what? I said. ..."diagnostic ultrasound." Yeah. If I need to fling high resolution medical imaging from office to office without lag, I might saturate gigabit. But for the rest of the world? That mostly wants to watch Yankees games on their phones? Yer talkin' 8MBPS for 1080p H264.
Sorry, what I meant is that no one needs 5G but people would still sell it as if it's necessary, or a huge future. The features will be pumped with filler until they can expand to fit the feature space. You could convince people that they do need to fling high resolution medical imaging from office to office without lag, and that 5G could make it happen. You tell them the IoT can become like skynet, and they'll sign up because they think it's going to make their lives more convenient. As an app developer, it becomes a buzzword that you can slap onto your shitty startup, e.g. "ONLY POSSIBLE WITH NEW 5G" or "INNOVATIVE, NEW TECHNOLOGY YOU'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE!" Realistically, though, we'd either see a bloat in the type and amount of data being sent over mobile apps or no change at all, and the world wouldn't be any better for it. Basically, the use case isn't technological: it's the ability to sell a higher number. Most people I know are willing to accept that this one goes to 11.
Yeah I totally get that. My greater point is that developers can't even really develop for low-latency high-bandwidth applications because they don't exist. I live a weird life. At work, we've got a server. It's got two thirds of a petabyte of storage. And we fill it up every year. Heinous, heinous stacks of Newscutter. And we move stuff around on 10gigE. I literally can not think of an application that a normie would use that can tap into that kind of bandwidth. Speed is power and power is shortened battery life and if you can watch eight 4k streams at a time but also can't get your battery to make it to the end of the day, you're going to cut back to one 4k stream which will fit on 4G.
I can think of plenty of things, but they're all stupid. It's a ton of "Eight 4k Streams at the SAME TIME" ideas that don't need to exist but fucking will when 5G happens. I think we'll see some ridiculous IoT things with the low-latency, but they'll be stupid and useless and shiny and new. I think there are big, schnazzy, unimportant strides to be made with location tracking and remote automation / control. Ultimately, it'll all be shit that we do right now but with less wires. I might be missing your point here, but that's my predictionI literally can not think of an application that a normie would use that can tap into that kind of bandwidth.
Right, this is my point: all the applications for "shittons of bandwidth" are "shittons of video" and 4K out of Netflix is 15Mb/s. Verizon 4G is 5-12Mb/s all day long with peaks of up to 50Mb/s. Even those numbers are conservative: So here's the thing. Let's say you're gonna do "eight 4k streams AT THE SAME TIME". Do you have an 8k cell phone? Really? Can you see the pixels? And do you want to pay for the bandwidth? Because I've got an app on my phone that will gladly stream every goddamn camera I have at my phone all at once. They're not all 4K but they're all HD. And there are thirteen of them. And yer damn skippy that the server they're all talking to transcodes that shit down to one composite screen that fits the resolution of my phone and the bottleneck is, of course, passing the cameras to the phone. I have another app that will show me all the imagery I want on another set of cameras. It politely lets me know what my bitrate is. And here I am, in my house, looking at my four HD cameras at once, and none of 'em are breaking 1 Mb/s. Live streaming video on a brand new Samsung over Wifi. Even dumber is on my phone, I can't tell the difference between an SD stream and an HD stream until I zoom in... and the SD streams are a paltry 60kb/s. I edit video for cinema and I can't saturate CAT5e. I work for a place with 80-odd HD cameras recording to 12 HD decks uncompressed and we're throwing it all around on 10GigE. I've seen 8k/240. It's like looking through a goddamn window. Rec.2020 - the shoot-the-moon video spec - using the dumbest, most uncompressed, jurassic tech can cross 50Gb/s. So yeah - there it is. If you want to throw 8k bitmaps across your channel 240 times per second, yer gonna need 5G. But you're also gonna have to pay for it, and that, I think, is where everyone will reef the fuck back down to 1Mb/s streams.First, a bit of context. The current average download speed for 4G phones across the US is about 35 Mbps (megabits per second). As with all averages, however, there are a big range of speeds that make up that figure. For example, using a modern 4G smartphone, like the Samsung Galaxy Fold, iPhone 10S Max, or Google Pixel 4, inside my home at the north end of Silicon Valley on AT&T’s network, I regularly see average download speeds of 120-135 Mbps, or 4x faster than the national average. Peak speeds—which aren’t sustainable over time—can go even higher.