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1/13 Super interesting post (as usual) on 5G from @adriancolyer at “the morning paper”: https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/10/05/understanding-operational-5g/
“the authors investigate whether 5G as deployed in practice can live up to the hype. The short answer is no.”
But wait, there’s lots more to say.
“the authors investigate whether 5G as deployed in practice can live up to the hype. The short answer is no.”
But wait, there’s lots more to say.
2/ First of all, this thread is a summary of a summary. Original paper is at http://xyzhang.ucsd.edu/papers/DXu_SIGCOMM20_5Gmeasure.pdf
Title: “Understanding operational 5G: a first measurement study on its coverage, performance and energy consumption”
Title: “Understanding operational 5G: a first measurement study on its coverage, performance and energy consumption”
3/ Disclosure: I am a major 5G skeptic. Hundreds of billions in capex, no killer app.
But to address the specifics…
But to address the specifics…
4/ Problem 1: The coverage wasn’t very good in their test.
Serious? Not sure, the holes were only 8% of total area and these are early days, operational experience is thin. My guess: This can be figured out.
Serious? Not sure, the holes were only 8% of total area and these are early days, operational experience is thin. My guess: This can be figured out.
5/ Problem 2: Throughput and latency.
Serious? Not sure, seemed TCP-specific, the proportion of net traffic that is UDP will increase monotonically as QUIC spreads through the ecosystem, and UDP numbers were good. But…
Serious? Not sure, seemed TCP-specific, the proportion of net traffic that is UDP will increase monotonically as QUIC spreads through the ecosystem, and UDP numbers were good. But…
6/ …I'm getting 130Mbps right now on LTE+ in my boat. These folks got 880 on UDP but I'm really stretching to think of apps don't work at 130 but do at 880…
7/ … they mention 4K streaming. Maybe, but I'm having trouble motivating myself to replace our 10-year-old 1080p TV, which is anyhow fibre-connected. Is 4K on your phone a killer app? iPad maybe? When away from WiFi with fibre behind it?
8/ Problem 3: Application performance, “ 5G only reduced page loading times (PLT) by about 5% compared to 4G”
Serious? Maybe, but once again they ignore QUIC. However…
Serious? Maybe, but once again they ignore QUIC. However…
9/ … a lot of the latency is on-device rendering and frame processing. This might be very serious. With Moore’s law stalled (at least for single-thread processing), it’s not clear to me how much performance headroom is left in pocket-sized devices.
10/ Problem 4: Energy consumption.
Serious? Unclear, 5G design is supposed to be good at this, better radio power management *might* have a lot of headroom.
Serious? Unclear, 5G design is supposed to be good at this, better radio power management *might* have a lot of headroom.
11/ Coda: “I’m intrigued by the potential for 5G to drive increasing use of edge computing platforms, getting the compute and data as close to the 5G network…” etc.
I have to confess I’m super dubious about this…
I have to confess I’m super dubious about this…
12/ Designing low-latency apps to take good advantage of edge computing is brutally difficult. Anyone know of success stories? I don't but this isn’t my specialty. I do know of wheel-spinning failures.
13/13 Pardon me for being boring, but I keep coming back to monster capex and no killer app. Interesting times…
