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To: Svartalfiar

“but if you game or stream a lot of HD, any big file up/downloading”

The relevance of 5G is higher speed in the wireless part of a communication. Data rates over fiber are in multi-gigabytes per second and such rates are valuable as you get further into the backbone. Most individual users will be in heaven with an 8 megabyte stream which would deliver the highest video resolution available.

Over-the-air communication is always going to be slower wire (fiber) communication because a given fiber is shielded from other transmissions.

Carriers are investing in fiber because of its huge capacity advantage over wireless.


50 posted on 03/30/2020 10:21:16 AM PDT by cymbeline
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To: cymbeline
The relevance of 5G is higher speed in the wireless part of a communication. Data rates over fiber are in multi-gigabytes per second and such rates are valuable as you get further into the backbone. Most individual users will be in heaven with an 8 megabyte stream which would deliver the highest video resolution available.

Over-the-air communication is always going to be slower wire (fiber) communication because a given fiber is shielded from other transmissions.


Well yea, but I don't see how this is such a major game-changer. From a business/industrial standpoint, you're going to be running wired connections for anything high-speed, and probably wanting wired as well for large parts of your system, with the inherent security over a freefloating wireless network. Businesses without those concerns likely don't actually need 5G capability. For individuals, unless 5G is the same price as 4G, what do you really need it for? Even gaming doesn't really need it, and neither does streaming unless you have 4k/8k content or several people using it. But again, most real gamers will have their tower wired to the router. Likewise for many people's cable boxen.

Yes, the backbone/infrastructure is fiber because of the required speed/bandwidth, but like you also say, 5G isn't really part of that. It's not that valuable to the ISPs/IXPs, unless they plan to start installing/charging for wide-area wifi networks? How would that work competing directly with cell companies?
61 posted on 04/02/2020 7:21:34 PM PDT by Svartalfiar
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