South Korea's Biggest Telco Says 5G Has Failed To Deliver On Its Promise (theregister.com) 57
SK Telecom, South Korea's dominant mobile carrier and sibling of chipmaker SK hynix, has declared that 5G was over-hyped, has under-delivered, and has failed to deliver a killer app. From a report: The telco offered that assessment in a recent white paper titled "5G Lessons Learned, 6G Key Requirements, 6G Network Evolution, and 6G Spectrum." The paper opens with an unflattering assessment of 5G, which the authors recall being sold as an enabler of autonomous driving, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAM), extended reality (XR) and digital twins. Those applications were possible, but did not succeed due to a combination of "device form factor constraints, immaturity of device and service technology, low or absent market demand, and policy/regulation issues."
The performance of 5G networks was not the issue, the paper argues. The telco argued that some of the goals set out by the UN's international standardization org ITU-R for 5G were met, but many tasks are still far from completion four years into the technology's commercial deployment. Those goals were meant to be realized in the long term -- but that expectation was not accurately conveyed to consumers, leading to "excessive expectations."
The performance of 5G networks was not the issue, the paper argues. The telco argued that some of the goals set out by the UN's international standardization org ITU-R for 5G were met, but many tasks are still far from completion four years into the technology's commercial deployment. Those goals were meant to be realized in the long term -- but that expectation was not accurately conveyed to consumers, leading to "excessive expectations."
Delivered (Score:3)
5G delivered exactly what was promised on the inside.
The problem was it also confuaed everyone by combing multiple different things under one label. 5Gmm does get the speeds but only in certian places/conditions. Mean while my phone often drops even 4G labeling because ohtaide of specific areas 5G hasnt rolled out yet
Re: Delivered (Score:2)
I have a Nokia XR21, which under good conditions gives me over 500Mbps, but it's for phone applications pointless.
It also has a 3.5mm jack that's actually more useful than having 5G.
5G - All revved up and no place to go [youtube.com].
Re: (Score:3)
5G delivered exactly what was promised on the inside.
The problem was it also confuaed everyone by combing multiple different things under one label. 5Gmm does get the speeds but only in certian places/conditions. Mean while my phone often drops even 4G labeling because ohtaide of specific areas 5G hasnt rolled out yet
Speed doesn't matter unless the speed being compared to is really bad, but if the speed is really bad for 4G, then it's likely to be really bad for 5G. Plus, most people wouldn't notice speed increases because other bottlenecks quickly become dominant. The only 5G promise that looked like a game changer was better coverage. However, the carriers decided to be cheap and convert 5G coverage advantages into cost savings rather than improved coverage.
Ultra fast speed with very short range just looks like WiF
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5G delivered exactly what was promised on the inside.
Exactly. 5G gave us a global pandemic through which the Illuminati implanted microchips designed by Bill Gates into all of us so we can be controlled by Hunter Biden's laptop. Once that's rolled out, then the conspiracy can really get going.
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5Gmm does get the speeds
5G had nothing to do with speeds. The extra speed was a side effect of over 400 other changes and improvements to 4G's standard and specs. You talk about the promise of 5G without ever discussing what was promised. Mind you TFA is equally silly. 5G is an enabling technology, nothing more. The reason it hasn't delivered is because the underlying products using this enabling technology haven't eventuated.
FYI some of the things that 5G was actually about:
- lower complexity air interface
- higher subscriber dens
Well hype rarely is justified (Score:2)
If you look at "3G" networks like UMTS you will find that it too was surrounded by logs of hype when it launched. In reality it couldn't provide enough capacity for new services, particularly as technologies like "EDGE" raised the capacity of 2G.
Maybe we are seeing the same thing with "5G". After all, there isn't to much new stuff on the radio interface side. The good parts could be retrofitted to "4G" standards. The perceived increase in capacity is mostly because of low utilization. In reality a 5G cell s
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The main reason 2G is still running where 3G has been shut down is that someone installed 100M smart meters with 2G only modems in them because they were 50c cheaper than the ones with 2G/3G modems. You are likely to see the same again because although the next wave of IoT systems are more likely to be running purpose-built IoT radios, those radios talk back to the 4G core to run their actual services.
But in future it won't be such a big deal because nowadays all the radios are software defined and agile en
Re:Well hype rarely is justified (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't just that. 2G GSM is a product of the early '80s, when audio DSPs in consumer electronics were just becoming a viable option. It uses GMSK, which can be demodulated with a simple phase detector (no baseband DSP required). It doesn't require linear RF power amplifiers, so it doesn't necessarily turn a pile of energy into heat and can get good battery life.
3G UMTS uses 5MHz channels, and requires a baseband DSP fast enough to handle that, with the associated power consumption. It also requires linear RF power amplifiers, so even though it uses much lower transmission power than GSM, it ends up wasting a lot more energy as heat. UMTS inherently has poorer battery life than GSM.
With 4G LTE, they switched to OFDMA on the downlink and SCFDMA on the uplink, with flexible carrier allocation. This means it's back to not requiring linear RF power amplifiers on the mobile device. LTE gets better battery life than UMTS due to choice of technologies. You might see LTE replacing GSM in places where UMTS failed to gain traction due to power consumption, battery life, and/or heat issues.
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No such luck in the UK. 2G is dead, Every 2G device will become useless, no matter what it does.
What??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cell provider hype didn't live up to what was promised? I'm shocked!
Re: (Score:2)
It didn't work though. People don't seem to care much.
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Cell provider hype didn't live up to what was promised? I'm shocked!
Yep, when they openly decided to snub the ITU for their marketing department's definition of "4G" they were ultimately setting themselves up for failure when their next definition failed to deliver.
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5G was not about cell providers, or even cell phones. In fact it wasn't targeted at consumers and their phones at all.
Re: (Score:2)
What do you think it was about? You stated what you think it's *not* about, what else?
IMO 5G was little more than a marketing thing that cell companies could use to get people to part with their money, to upgrade to new phones and more expensive cell plans.
Bingo (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't want fancy features. They just want their existing shit to work well.
Do I have good reception?
Can I make calls that don't sound like Nextel PTT chatter? (No, because carriers use shitty codecs still)
Can I send photos and videos quickly and with some fidelity? (Maybe.. depends on the tools since Apple won't get on board with RCS, as well RCS interoperability still being an open issue due to carrier pettiness and Google refusing to open the RCS API)
Can I stream media with some fidelity? (Usually, but data caps and forced low quality streams via "data saver" account settings interfere)
etc
The market wants the existing product to function well before XR/AR, unmanned/autonomous vehicles, etc can have their day. That's what we're all paying for, and for many that low bar isn't even met. Why reach for the moon when you can't even get to the top of a step ladder?
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A "better than nothing" slow network that always work would be more useful than bandwidth to fill your phone storage in 30 seconds.
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You're confused, and so is the carrier in TFS. 5G was never about you or your phone. It was about companies, IoT, emergency services, PTT communication, thousands of data transmitters connected to micro-cells.
The fact your phone is a bit faster wasn't a design goal, it was a sideeffect of other changes.
Re: (Score:2)
That's true, but not what marketing hyped. Marketing hyped a lie and the lie didn't come true (SURPRISE!).
Absolute farce (Score:2)
Nobody has been able to explain why 5G would be needed for autonomous cars or navigation. It's bullshit hype from day 1.
Re:Absolute farce (Score:5, Informative)
Time Division Multiplexing.
The idea is that bandwidth is shared, such as a specific RF frequency. The more bandwidth available, the more devices that need bandwidth can be added. A device may only need 1mbps for example, so if you have a 1gbps network, that enables 1000 simultaneous devices. These of course are just hypothetical numbers, and will vary by application and available equipment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Part of it is fleets of autonomous cars could communicate with each other to better handle positions, traffic, incident, and flow. It's a lot easier for a car to know what's around it if it's getting constant "I'm right here, I see you're over there" kind of updates from other cars. Or if an accident or breakdown happens a car can send a warning out so that cars behind it could react faster than something purely visual/radar/lidar. Whether that needs 5G or not is certainly a valid question (some kind of sho
Re: (Score:2)
TDM does not explain why autonomous cars need 5G. They're autonomous aren't they? GPS is receive only.
Did you not read about autonomous cars shutting down in San Francisco during Outside Lands due to lack of cell bandwidth?
Re: (Score:1)
> GPS is receive only
True but modern devices with a network connection use assisted GPS which uses network queries to assist with locking onto satellites much faster.
However, A-GPS doesnt need much in the way of bandwidth either!
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TDM does not explain why autonomous cars need 5G. They're autonomous aren't they? GPS is receive only.
Erm... because one technology that is never going to work as advertised needs something else to blame that on. Hence autonomous cars now need Eleventy G to work.
Re: (Score:2)
But without 5G they can't tattle on you!
Re: (Score:2)
Time Division Multiplexing.
The idea is that bandwidth is shared, such as a specific RF frequency. The more bandwidth available, the more devices that need bandwidth can be added. A device may only need 1mbps for example, so if you have a 1gbps network, that enables 1000 simultaneous devices. These of course are just hypothetical numbers, and will vary by application and available equipment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The big problem with bandwidth on 5G (and 4G to a lesser extent) is MIMO, Multiple Input, Multiple Output. To get the advertised speed you need multiple chunks of bandwidth. We're using TDM because there isn't enough bandwidth to support all the devices connected. Picking a popular 5G band (n78 as used by EE and O2 in the UK) is from 3300 MHz to 3800 MHz however a telco will only have a subset of that, EE has 3540 - 3580 MHz which is going to be subdivided into 5, 10, 20 (or other) MHz channels, even doing
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, I never understood that, either. No way in hell am I going to trust a self-driving vehicle that needs a cell connection.
Marketing Dude: "Hey, let's combine the time-tested software of self-driving cars with the reliability of cellular service! What could go wrong!?!?!?"
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You think self driving cars are a farce? They're trying to shove you into unmanned aerial vehicles (UAM).
That's horror in three dimensions instead of two.
Re: (Score:2)
I was under the impression that 5g could accept more users in a given area of coverage. I know before I had a 5g handset, I couldn't really use my phone at a stadium because there were way to many people. With 5g, I can use my phone surrounded by thousands of people that are also using the same set of networks I am.
This means that if the future is a bunch of cars requiring a 5g connection to work, they will need all the 5g towers. Makes perfect sense to me.
Unimaginable complexity in a standard (Score:2)
I remember when 3G was the new standard. One of the big problems we discussed in school was the threat of 'holdup.' A new 'standard' for cell technology like this has so many complex moving pieces that all have to work together that any single player can hold up or slow down the process. Specifically a patent holder on some small but crucial piece of it is like that guy who owns a shack in the middle of a giant area targeted for a new megamall.
I'm not sure about that cost-per-gigabyte claim. Even if i
Re: (Score:3)
Don't think the problems are with the standard, but with the crazy hype cycle of promises other companies were attaching to the possibilities.
5G was deployed, it was, as a network, pretty much everything that was concretely promised. Supporting higher speeds and denser population of endpoints. It did all that at the levels proposed. It's pretty god.
However, every vaguely tech company in the world made all sorts of random promises associated with that much wireless network connectivity. Those random promis
Re: (Score:2)
Do you mean self-driving cars as the specific thing? Yeah I don't know much about 5G, but the tech hype is getting completely out of control. I read this great book, that suggested that as religion stopped being a big force in peoples' lives, they simply found an alternative with all the same basic problems: tech. In the book's 2005 era it was the Internet that was going to magically save us and make us rich, nowadays it's probably AI, which unless I'm way off base, isn't really "AI" at all but an overf
Re: (Score:2)
Self-driving cars is one thing, but the other cases too, about augmented reality, IoT everywhere, etc etc.
A lot of the declared use cases don't even make sense to need '5G' per se. Autonomous driving had *better* be closed loop within the vehicle, which may suggest getting some map style data in batches, but not streaming the mapping data. Augmented reality similarly should have the end device processing and sending key data, which shouldn't necessarily be a big bandwidth problem.
But a lot of use cases pr
Re: (Score:2)
I think I understand. It's just people who have no clue mouthing the words without fear of consequences. My old company would famously have executives come in and make sweeping changes and grand pronouncements and then quietly lateral-move to another company before the shit hit the fan. We're pretty sure they'd say "Did X sweeping change" on the resume without mentioning the fan.
Re: (Score:2)
I was in Marin County, CA last week and was amazed at how bad the cell signal was (not on the mountain). This is essentially where 5G really failed in my book; it didn't get deployed fast enough, and too many areas languished as a result. (Marin has one issue of people fighting cell towers, but that doesn't really change much, and the 5G promise of small towers should have solved that.)
Re: (Score:2)
Well the complaints appear to be a prelude for:
"But all the empty promises companies made around 5G, *we* will make sure they actually happen for 6G"
So they see that a whole lot of companies made promises anchored to 5G, and then didn't bother to follow through.
The simple explanation, that they had everything they needed but just didn't bother for some reason or another doesn't help hype up 6G.
The explanation that "well with different governance over the design, *this* time the companies can all succeed" wo
5G had a lot of irrelevant crap attached (Score:4, Interesting)
5G, for some arbitrary reason, was the thing a lot of companies and industries hitched their hype horses to.
"With 5G, we will be able to do "
Except, generally, the cellular networks already could support, in theory, the amazing thing they proposed. But they were able to paint a picture of how much *more* valuable they would be, and tying their timeline to some other well known, but not quite here yet event. They likely enjoyed a marketing bump and stock bump.
In practice, almost no one was looking at sincerely implementing the promises. 5G isn't some categorically distinct technology, it is "just" faster and denser iteration of what was previously available. It's great and all and took great effort, but people that said they couldn't even *begin* thinking about their hot concepts until 5G rolled out were all pretty much scamming.
Mostly those promised things were just forgotten, and announcements like this are just "hey, don't blame us, the ecosystem developers were "unexpectedly unable to deliver" (much nicer than calling them out for outright lying)"
Re: (Score:2)
5G, for some arbitrary reason
There's nothing arbitrary about it. 5G specifically was designed to address the limitations of 4G services that was hindering all the things hyped by the industry.
Except, generally, the cellular networks already could support, in theory, the amazing thing they proposed.
No it isn't. Not even remotely. What you call 5G is a set of more than 400 technical changes enabling hundreds of new features both in terms of actual features such as simulcasting (something that LTE services were missing and which was preventing the use of cellular services from replacing landmobile radio), or air interface changes that prevente
Carriers also want to bilk everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the reason I didn't really care about 5G and won't really care about 6G is because every carrier in the US still wants to extract as much money as possible.
At first 5G was a "premium" add on feature for no good reason other than "speeds" and even in most cases 5G is really just "4.5G" and even when I am in 5G reception areas the improvement is marginal compared to 4G-LTE
Also there is still the annoying issue that I can have 60-90% reception bars and my actual bandwidth can be quite low. Good reception no longer is a marker for good speeds.
The most irritating of course is the fact that I cannot pool my data across multiple lines. If I want a laptop with cell service, or an iPad or any other device it's not just the cost of the device it's another 10,20 $30 a month on my bill. What's the point of the cell company offering these huge throughput numbers they claim if I can only use my single phone on it at a time.
People will become numb to service upgrades if there isn't any actual perceivable value they can use it for.
3X! (Score:2)
3X was fine too before 4G LTE! Newer cellular sucks in rural areas. :(
5G did screw radio astronomy, though. (Score:1)
And now, prison sentences for the C suite (Score:2)
5G is all about FWA (Score:3, Interesting)
I said from the very beginning- 5G is all about "FWA" - home fixed wireless access. My Netflix video starts in .6 seconds in 4G and .6 seconds in 5G on my iPhone, so I could care less about it with my phone.
I recently saw a report that FWA now has 5% of home broadband customers. It is finally bringing competition to neighborhoods and towns that only had their cable company as an option for "broadband".
https://www.nexttv.com/news/verizon-and-t-mobile-fwa-now-control-over-5-of-the-us-broadband-market-chart
This is a big deal!
Not only did it not promise (Score:2)
Sounds like ... (Score:2)
No. Nobody wants your shit.
Those applications were possible, but did not succeed due to ... low or absent market demand
Pretty much says it all right there. Maybe if we gave you all the bandwidth, including ISM (WiFi), people wouldn't be climbing the Berlin Wall to get to freedom.
8G (Score:2)
What about that robotic surgery BS? (Score:2)
If I remember it well they're promising that 5G would enable remote robotic surgery.
Yes, enable, like if that's not for 5G, remote robotic surgery would be totally impossible.
Now tell me if anyone with a sound mind would accept being operated by a robot on a cellphone connection of any sorts.
Damn, robotic surgery is the kind of "very, very mission critical" stuff that would require low-latency, very stable optical fiber connection(s), with multiple redundancy systems (processing, connection, power, etc), be
Re: (Score:2)
That was all bullshit code for "we're going to use this for 5th generation warfare": drones to drop bombs, cluster drones, police drones, cameras... the total police surveillance state.
There was no intention of saving lives, it was always for bilking more money from the masses to fund the panopticon.
The Only Solution (Score:2)
Autonomous driving was hype (Score:2)
The marketing hype for 5G got a big meh from most people once their phone connections were fast enough to stream video. How fast does your connection need to be to watch cat videos?
"Killer App"? What did they expect? (Score:2)
Faster speeds do not make for different functionality.
Was it real 5G? (Score:2)
Was this unrealized promise because it wasn't really 5G? .... whilst not actually using most of the features that previously were decided to actually be 5th generation. .... This was the original engineering promise of 5G. .... just like 4G but newer and cooler because marketing and business majors.
Most carriers in USA simply rebranded 4G LTE as 5G
Frequency Range #2 was 24-52Ghz
What we all got was marketing and business majors feeding us 450Mhz to 6Ghz
You can do fancy things with the spectrum all you wan
And which promise was that? (Score:2)
And exactly which promise is it that it failed to deliver on? Because I heard of approximately zero "promises" anyone wanted that weren't mostly already delivered on by 3G.
Maybe it's the promise of making telcos great gobs more money while delivering nothing of value? Because that's the only promise they ever seemed concerned with.
And if that's the case then let me just say GREAT! maybe the market really can still reject trash so long as it reeks badly enough.
Same old (Score:1)
3G, was hyped. All us 2G EDGE users were supposed to be watching live football in the middle of nowhere. What we got was something that had low enough latency that apps could actually work, unlike on 2G without edge where a simple text message on whatsapp will fail as the connection has such a terrible latency the app simply times it out.
4G was hyped. Every device was supposed to have a 4G modem. Every oven, fridge, toaster, all connected at once. Oh and we were supposed to be watching football in the mid