• @[email protected]
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    386 months ago

    "This is an important research question because we can see mobile traffic going up over the next decade by a factor of 10 or even a factor of 20. "

    Wtf are they going to do with that? Always-on video from wireless devices everywhere? Holographic movies on every web page? It sounds terrible. I remember having to make phone calls for basic communication. These days you send a text or email, except now and then you want the higher bandwidth of a voice call. That is, we have been moving toward LESS bandwidth rather than more.

    Whatever is imagined being done with all the new bandwidth can’t be good.

    • @[email protected]
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      416 months ago

      Your personal usage does not align with the majority. Look at tiktok, it’s social media based around endless video files. It’s not an occasional text or email, it’s hundreds of videos that your constantly scrolling through.

      • Max-P
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        336 months ago

        The carriers love to brag about high capacity and fast speeds but they’re still unwilling to deliver the bandwidth. They’re all advertising “unlimited” data but if you scroll TikTok for a while they’ll block your line for “excessive” data usage or throttle you down to 256kb/s.

      • @[email protected]
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        6 months ago

        OK, good point. Are people using mobile data for that? Yes you’re right I’m not on social media etc. Also I’m on a super cheap mobile plan with enough monthly data to check email and look at some occasional web pages, but if I want to watch a video I almost always use home internet for that. I guess if this super high bandwidth mobile stuff kills Comcast though, some good will have come out of it. The Register article talks mostly about IoT and “AI/ML” rather than social media though.

        Is 5g mobile data cheaper for the end user than 4g in practice? The sticker prices and advertised data caps for monthly plans look to me to be about the same as before, but maybe more of the data cap is usable in practice.

      • @[email protected]
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        26 months ago

        The real problem is that people are too lazy to read. Endless video, who is tiktok targeted to? This is bad news for attention spans and your ability to work. Just try to look at how much information you can retain from a video compared to a paragraph of text.

    • @[email protected]
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      86 months ago

      They’re making the data faster, but most plans are still limited to something ridiculous like 20G/month. What’s the point of being able to stream 4K video or whatever if that’s going to burn through your data allowance in seconds?

      • @[email protected]
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        6 months ago

        A huge part of newer mobile network generations is the increased capacity. Faster speeds is effectively the same as more capacity in the towers.

        This means that companies could actually afford to start offering unlimited data caps, there just has to be the push to do so. But I do genuinely believe that within a decade there will be no more datacaps for mobile data in cities, at least (or at least plenty of plans with unlimited and no throttling). Well, idk about the US considering you got data caps on broadband, but, I’m sure Europe will get it.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 months ago

      And nobody will ever need more than 640K of memory, so the fact that even your cell phone carries vastly more than that must mean you yourself are up to no good, right?

      Even if you’re not dealing with a constant video stream, the power of the internet lies in moving vast amounts of data around. Yeah a lot of that information is based of corporate privacy invasion, but you also have things like medical databases or performing jobs remotely. I had gigabit routers in my home at a time when 10/100 routers were still typically used even in businesses. If you have a capability, someone will find a way to make use of it and new innovations will pop up that we hadn’t even considered before. Imagine where we would be at if Xerox hadn’t invented the mouse and GUI desktop years before personal home computers were even available.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 months ago

      I guess it’s for streaming?

      I’m not into any of that livestream stuff and I cannot believe that people stream their lives and other people want to watch it.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 months ago

      Always-on video from wireless devices everywhere?

      They can’t even give me more than 20GB a month without forking over more than I pay for my home internet, never happening in my lifetime.

    • Kairos
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      16 months ago

      Just make a nationwide 10gb fiber optic service it’s like 5 times cheaper.

    • @[email protected]
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      6 months ago

      Don’t you watch HDR movies in 4K on the go? Ok, not 4K, but people stream a lot of HD videos all the time. As well as stream from their phone cameras to Facebook and Twitch. Another issue is that high density cities have way too many people trying to do all this high bandwidth stuff at once.

      And video calls. Don’t forget video calls.

      • @[email protected]
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        26 months ago

        How much extra do I have to pay to not be in video calls? I almost never watch videos while mobile but I guess some people do. I doubt if I could tell the difference between SD and HD on a phone screen though.

        • @[email protected]
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          26 months ago

          If you personally don’t do something it doesn’t mean that the majority of the population is like you. Worldwide traffic use average is 20GB per person. What’s even more interesting, is that US number is lower than average in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. And guess what? More than half of the world’s population lives in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. So if you live in US, it’s not just you, but also people around you who are not representative of mobile internet use.