Tests show 5G wireless potentially 60 times faster than NBN

Electronics & Technology NBN
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Telstra announces that their 5G network now covers 75% of the population. At the last census, 71% of Australian lived in “major cities”. More than 86% were classed as “urban”.

This article is an interesting insight into spin. All providers are inclined to concentrate on the number of devices connected to their networks. Vodaphone comes up with:

So 85% of the population of six cities. I guess that’s supposed to distract from the fact that they cover less than 1% of the mainland’s area (or something).

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While the promise of 5G and beyond rivals NBN and broadband, one must never discount the providers need for profits and ways to achieve them. Whether we need speed at any price is a matter for individual pocketbooks.

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I don’t believe anyone needs such speeds, but I get why some want them, which is a whole nother thing.

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While not explicitly related to 5G or mobile services that statement is an absolute that does not meet with reality.

There are long standing legitimate needs of certain businesses and research interests that are not reflected by most peoples limited experiences watching videos, streaming, web browsing, gaming, online banking and ecommerce experiences.

In the 1970’s there was already an issue moving data, and the quantities of data have nothing but exploded. Back then it was sent around a country and the world on mag tapes, often by the truckoad for the input set of a single analysis that took a week to complete on a supercomputer of the time, that informed $200 million business decisions.

Circa 1990 a certain US lab had a global user base that was unable to do what they needed and had to make do with what they could. Most of their long haul global data was by sat services limited by both bandwidth and latency although domestic traffic was far better catered for.

20 years on our Australian researchers were hampered because it took them the best part of a day and sometimes longer to move their data across the country. The better endowed nodes had 10 moving to 40 gbps ports into AARnet.

Today the BOM is struggling between Melbourne and Canberra.

“One the main issues with the Robust datacentre plans was getting sufficient bandwidth to and from Melbourne and Canberra,” one staffer said. “At one point people talked about sending hard disks via courier because it was faster than using the internet.’

For relevance CSIRO did that regularly between Melbourne and Hobart for many years and AFAIK still might? It impacts research, discoveries, invention, output, and knowledge, flowing on to developing public policy for issues such as climate change and others.

It would be better if a dismissive opinion was qualified to recognise all requirements, not just those of ‘the people on the street’.

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Speed is how data services are commonly marketed. Wireless technology relies on shared capacity. The faster the connection the greater the capacity able to be shared, and the greater the number of customers able to use the service.

One collection of viewpoints.

Some of us have more modest needs. Although with paid streaming services increasing their influence, there is no assurance our modest needs will not increase.

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Apparently the need for 5G is all the fault of the consumer. So said the :woman_fairy: at the bottom of the garden. :joy:

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True. These are among the legitimate needs, then. Joe Average doesnt. yet.

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Bill Gates once famously declared to the world “I don’t know why anyone would need more than 640Kb of memory”. It was around the time Microsoft launched MS-DOS. The computers his “OS” was loaded on ran twin 360Kb floppy disks.

The bare minimum PC (Chromebook) today has ~4 thousand times the memory (his "640KB was actually 1Mb), and 450 thousand times the directly connectable storage.

If you live on your own and need monitored medical equipment installed, you might want reliable network access.

If you work from home, you may need to upload large documents. I had the joy of trying to upload a 20MB file for a solicitor to lodge with the Supreme Court for a court case where I was an expert witness. The court required it be lodges by 9 am, and the solicitor needed to review it prior to lodging. I was still stuck on unreliable FTTN. I finished the last edit at 10:30 pm. It took until 4am to get it uploaded. The problem was that there was signal attenuation on the old wires between the house and the node, which resulted in multiple packet failures; retries and time-outs and so on. The software decides

You would not have wanted to hear the language that came from me. I had a fibre connection connected to the outside wall of my house, but that’s another story.

Since the fibre was connected, I’ve had very few problems, and I run over configured to minimise contention.

The internet is like the road network, except that the performance is only as good as the weakest link. Apart from that, has single lane roads and multi-lane roads (frequency division). It has traffic lights (time division), and the traffic queues up. If you live on a single lane dirt road that’s subject to flooding, good luck getting out if you need to. The freeway you want to get to might might be flowing, but you might not get there if it’s wet.

My 20 MB file was like a group of cars that needed to get down a dirt road that was flooded. The big 4WDs could get across, but the drivers know the smaller cars won’t make it, so they phone the house and tell them not to bother coming yet. They turn back and try again later, because they need to keep together as a group. Eventually the flood drops enough, and the whole group can drive through. Once they hit paved road on high ground, they’re fine was fine.

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Bill Gates is claimed to have declared that. Original citations are very definitely in short supply.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/

Of course, those who remember the early PC architecture also remember that it was not actually 640KB of directly addressable memory - you could utilise some upper memory with the right fancy tricks, giving an additional 384KB (total 1MB) less what the BIOS was actually using.

Those of us who wanted to play games like Wing Commander made very good use of that upper memory.

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Interesting article. I stand corrected.

Funny quote from Olsen too. I knew a guy who had a PDP-11 in his garage, and he had it running Unix System V.

Those MS-DOS tricks weren’t for ordinary users though. Segmented memory, clunky stuff. I only ever played one computer game: Adventure. It was on the PE we had. Fun until became frustrating, but I mapped it, cracked it, and optimised down to around 205 plus the two random number parts. Over and done.

Now I wonder about the Thomas Watson quote: “I think there’s a world market for only about 5 computers.” Sure enough: https://geekhistory.com/content/urban-legend-i-think-there-world-market-maybe-five-computers