I'm confused, he's talking about the user outcome - improved battery life while consuming content. The technical reason is that the modem spends less time active for the same amount of bandwidth.
Cell on my phone contributes like less than 10% of total battery consumption. The most goes to screen and cpu. So there's limited improvement for 5G in this. But for IoT devices in which comms use most of the battery, this could be significant. However, it's debatable whether spending on billions of dollars on a regional 5g network is an optimal solution for a more durable IoT infrastructure. In my understanding, there should be a more economical way to build an efficient IoT infrastructure since most of them don't need that much data speed.
I agree with your point on power consumption and agree that probably doesn't warrant the investment.
I don't work on cellular infrastructure, and don't even work on IoT anymore, but I could imagine that as far as IoT infrastructure is concerned, it might not be that any specific devices need a large amount of throughput to provide their services, but that the aggregate of a potentially very larger number of devices needing access to data services could test the throughput of the collective infrastructure, and redesigning that infrastructure to be able to have more throughput could be key, not to a future with some magical usecase of some specific types of devices, but to a future with a much larger number of simple networked devices working in concert to make the world more efficient in the aggregate.
That said, is the timing right? I don't know. It does kind of seem like it is driven more by politics than technical necessity.
If given that most people charge their phone once a day and doesn't actually need more battery efficiency, and battery efficiency is the only benefit, are there then no actual benefit from 5G?
Unless one day you could charge your phone once every two days? Or once a week! Like back in the day of the 3310, which had 22 hours of talk time and 31 days of standby. Or you could make the phone smaller/lighter/faster with the extra efficiency. I'm having trouble believing someone here on HN is arguing against improving technology.
I sometimes forget to plug my phone in, maybe after traveling, maybe after drinking haha. I'm already super glad my phone will make it through a second day. Back in the iPhone 3G days? Not so much.
Smaller/lighter/faster phones and battery banks are already available, without 5g. Why do you need 5g specifically? It's value has to exceed the value it destroys. Not all tech developments are net improvements.
That's a technical feature. The user outcome is fuzzy because you don't know really how weather prediction interference and increased RFI will play out for users.
Those are externalities unrelated to the phone or experience with it. I'm confident if 5G is widely deployed and it causes the stated problems we'll find a new way to predict the weather.
Do you study atmospheric analysis? Weather prediction is not great currently and the weather is getting more volatile.
Why should someone be allowed to implement a design at scale without testing and solving the downstream problems first? That's not how engineering works.
Lets you use your phone for longer between charges. You're acting like battery life isn't a user feature, but it is: companies advertise heavily on it, and it can often be a differentiator between midrange and premium phones.
You're looking for a user story where only looking at the corollary makes it obvious that battery life enables everything else.
Suppose you shipped a phone with 99% less battery life than its competitors. You could, at trivial expense, increase your 1% to 10%, your engineers propose how to do so.
You reply, "My phone lasts longer and that lets me _____".