[jiggawatts]

Your ignorance of its benefits doesn't mean it has none.

You can literally google "5g benefits" and read through any number of whitepapers.

For one, it has much lower latency, making it competitive with fibre in many areas.

It's more efficient, allowing more devices in the same area. The 60GHz band in particular will allow extreme densities as seen in sports stadiums or major train stations in rush hour.

It has higher peak bandwidth.

It includes special modes optimised for very lower power devices with modest bandwidth requirements.

Etc...

[lm28469]

> For one, it has much lower latency, making it competitive with fibre in many areas.

What do people do on their phones ? I'm forcing mine in 3g all the time and it's faster than I need already. Why would you need 1ms ping and 1gbs d/u speeds ?

This sounds like phones having 4k+ screens to me, updating specs for the sake of updating specs, there is no real world need behind it. I guess many people are making big bucks in the scheme though, that's probably the major 5g benefit.

[vardump]

> Why would you need 1ms ping...

Remote desktop, ssh, VoIP, gaming... anything that's interactive. All of those work better and are more fun to use with low latency.

Even plain web browsing can be much more enjoyable with a low latency connection assuming there's no other bottleneck.

[thelazydogsback]

Recently during work on my cable line, I ran my whole house off of a T-Mobile hotspot on my S10. I was pleasantly surprised as browsing latency actually seemed to be less than cable, and I the FireTV was even able to stream video reasonably well.

[rwc]

640K is more memory than anyone will ever need on a computer.

[lm28469]

Well if my browser, music player and chat app weren't taking literal gigabytes of ram each it might be enough ...

Our computers are millions of times more powerful than back in the days but somehow my 2018 macbook pro crawls to a halt if slack displays more than 2 gifs at the same time.

Anyway, I think we're artificially creating needs that aren't needs in the first place. "b-bu-but how am I supposed to telework from the subway if I don't have my 5g =(", "I can't even stream youtube 8k videos from the bus =("

[willis936]

Yeah, it works as a competitor to Wi-Fi in the ultra dense scenarios. How on Earth is it justified to deploy it to an entire city, let alone a Metropolitan area, county, state, or country? It has specific, limited use cases, and even then Wi-Fi’s solutions are arguably much better. Where is the benefit to the consumer?