I haven’t even bought a 5G phone yet. My carrier keeps threatening to cut 4G coverage in various areas, and has already axed 3G entirely, rendering large swathes of otherwise perfectly functional devices useless. So far my 4G Moto Z still works. For now.
At this point my conspiracy opinion that the constant “generation” changes are mostly to just force people to buy/lease new phones and devices. Even pokey old 4G has always been more than fast enough for all of my mobile internet activities. Hell, even 3G was.
I have no less than four otherwise flawlessly functional phones in a desk drawer that just won’t work with my cell carrier because they’ve either turned off 3G or discontinued the specific 4G bands those devices need.
The biggest problem with 3G/4G was capacity, not speed. Yes 4G is fast enough for almost anything, but it gets overloaded in crowded areas pretty quickly. With the increasing amount of smart devices that try to use the mobile network, 4G just doesn’t cut it anymore, especially in cities. 5G has a lot higher overall capacity than 4G and thus really was a necessary step.
If it was really necessary to completely axe 3G is a different question, but keeping the network when it’s barely in use by a few old phones is also not to be expected. Especially since it can be really hard to get any replacement parts for older tech.
Where I live, 5G isn’t even available outside of metropolitan areas. Probably won’t be for years. 4G is deteriorating all over the place. 3G is getting turned off.
Why would it be any different with 6G?
4G, 5G and now 6G are worthless if cell providers don’t provide enough bandwidth to the towers. The range also keeps decreasing as the generations increase, so now there are these big gaps that 3G used to cover.
In my area, 5G is slower than 4G and both have lower signal and slower speeds than 3G used to have. I need a dual SIM phone and to constantly switch my phone between AT&T and T-Mobile, and both are crap. I only use about 1GB in total too, and I’m lucky if I can pull more than 1 megabit on either service. I miss 3G speeds, coverage, and competition.
Worst of all, AT&T is forcing home users to switch to a 5G hotspot from DSL. It’s probably a big part of why the cell towers are always overloaded too. Imagine running your home internet on 1 megabit with constant drops…
Interestingly enough the energy requirements per terrabyte transmitted get lower the newer the technology. So even without enough bandwidth to saturate a tower there are still benefits (but I totally get your frustration, it’s not really better here)
With 4G covering all my needs flawlessly, idk if I’d need a new gen. With a laptop, probably, but a smartphone, or even tablet? Ping across the globe is a bigger offender than speeds. Having a 2-3 sec delay when calling anyone, even though having a smooth detailed picture, is more annoying than having a 480p and an instant response. Cloud gaming suffers from it too. But that’s on ISPs, international lines, and that’s harder to change than introducing the 6G in phones and local towers.
You can save a lot of energy going for the newer techs. Sth like 96%energy saved from 3g to 5g per terrabyte transferred
"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.
Voice calls don’t use much bandwidth compared to video. People who watch one video a day could start watching ten videos, and so they need 10 times the traffic. Maybe today only one person (out of n persons) watches a video per day, but in a few years ten people watches a video per day - again 10 times the traffic.
