Think it is a fair comment.
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News 5G Cellular Service Installation Under Way at WDW
- Thread starter The Visionary Soul
- Start date
Honestly they look like speaker or lighting stanchions, they are so innocuous that unless you're looking for them they are hard to find. And I personally hate breaking thematics.
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JohnD
Well-Known Member
Maybe I should re-post the same Far Side Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't cartoon. WDW needs 5G! Those 5G poles are hideous! Sigh. . .
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
The limitations of the technology at present are such that you pretty much have to be looking at them in order to get their benefits.
MrPromey
Well-Known Member
It's complicated.
At this point, the hype being generated for consumers is way overblown.
For the carriers it's kind of a big deal because it means a lot more bandwidth to handle extra traffic at once so they can cram more and more devices onto their networks without hitting slowdowns. That's a big deal in densely populated urban areas for them and to a degree, if you're a consumer in those areas, you. You'll see the benefit even if you aren't on 5g as more and more people move to that tech because while they're using the 5g bands, there will be less congestion on the LTE you're using, too.
In a football stadium that could hold 50k people* all with cell phones and smart watches, 5g could be the difference between being able to have a reliable connection or not since this kind of capacity issue can't be fixed by simply adding more towers for LTE and slower speeds - there's simply a hard cap to how much data can travel through the air in a fixed space on various frequencies at one time.
That's not a very exciting or sexy sell to consumers, of course.
Longer-term, this will be a direct benefit to consumers, too though. It's just not as clear exactly how or when. We have a tendency to grow into tech capacity. My first Windows computer had a 1 gig hard drive. The most the motherboard on the system could even handle being upgraded to was 4 gig (Packard Bell, I do not miss you one bit).
Today of course, you can't readily buy a micro sd card with that little of storage on it.
When 3g hit, there wasn't much video that could be streamed online that wasn't flash and flash didn't work on mobile. Today, people watch streaming video all the times on their phone (and in 4k!) which is one of the biggest users of high-speed data.
Many websites are not optimized to the degree they once were while some are optimized way better but with 10x the code to be optimized. This is all because the developers know nobody's looking at this stuff with a 28.8 kbit/s dial-up modem anymore.
I deal with a lot of media stuff. I'm constantly having to pull our client's assets off their own websites because it's faster and easier than trying to get them to figure out who to get the original files from and it's not uncommon to pull a background image that's over 3 or 4 megs in size for no good reason (when it could have been 250k or less) other than that it was never properly sized and optimized - mostly because they were able to get away with it since the page still loaded fast enough for who ever had to approve it on whatever higher speed network it was being viewed on.
We take for granted, things like moving video as backgrounds that can be 10, 20 or more megs which is entirely unnecessary but a large part of the more media rich web experience a lot of people have come to expect.
You won't be like "Wow, 5g (or whatever happens after that) really changed everything!". Your digital life will just slowly evolve in that direction as everyone figures out how to make 5g work better and how to make better use of the bandwidth freed up on the other "slower" frequencies as they're able to move more traffic onto it (5g).
Through enhancements and/or lazy developers/designers growing into these faster speeds, you'll see that extra speed soaked up just like how highway expansions never seem to totally solve congestion problems for long. It's just a question of when and how - not if - but some day, rest assured, we'll be complaining about how unbearably slow 5g is.
But the hype today for consumers, is still way, way overblown.
*you know, in times when we aren't dealing with the plague :/
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GrumpyFan
Well-Known Member
At the very least they should be painted brown or green. The gray does stand out a bit more.
But, in all fairness, most of the times when I've seen these outside of WDW, they're painted in a glossy brown, which doesn't help to conceal them any, IMO.
Perhaps they can paint them in an ominous matte black, or maybe even Vantablack just for the conspiracy theorists.
MrPromey
Well-Known Member
I originally thought Rapunzel's tower might have been a cleverly hidden short-range cell tower.
Of course, I was giving current people in charge, way too much credit.
networkpro
Well-Known Member
- In the Parks
- Yes
In a nutshell just think of it as really fast cat videos.
JoeCamel
Well-Known Member
They could have made them look like purple martin or bat housesAt the very least they should be painted brown or green. The gray does stand out a bit more.
But, in all fairness, most of the times when I've seen these outside of WDW, they're painted in a glossy brown, which doesn't help to conceal them any, IMO.
Perhaps they can paint them in an ominous matte black, or maybe even Vantablack just for the conspiracy theorists.
montyz81
Well-Known Member
I thought edge computing would minimize the need to be backhauled. Aren't most 5G towers including that edge capability?
networkpro
Well-Known Member
- In the Parks
- Yes
Its not the towers that matter, they are just radios on a platform. Its the core that matters. The main difference of NSA (Non-Standalone Architecture) and SA (Standalone Architecture) is that NSA anchors the control signaling of 5G Radio Networks to the 4G Core, while the SA scheme connects the 5G Radio directly to the 5G core network, and the control signaling does not depend on the 4G network at all. NSA, as the name suggests, is a 5G service that does not ‘stand alone’ but is built over an existing 4G network. SA, on the other hand, allows completely independent operation of a 5G service without any interaction with an existing 4G core. A lot of US carriers are moving to this, but only one has it currently deployed.
Handle and content jibes.
networkpro
Well-Known Member
- In the Parks
- Yes
Marketing speak, most people just want it to work without having to learn something.
ronsmith35
New Member
That's fiber laying out on the ground in the pole pics, so hopefully they are doing it right and bringing the 5G speeds to the masses.
In the future it'll be a big play for them and us.
In the future it'll be a big play for them and us.
montyz81
Well-Known Member
If it is 5G radio on a 4G core then I suspect it is TMo or ATT. If it has a fiber base, then its a good assumption it is a Verizon network underneath. But who knows.
networkpro
Well-Known Member
- In the Parks
- Yes
You'd be wrong. T-mobile was the first carrier in the world to launch a stand alone 5G core last August.
sanctumsolitude
Active Member
At Grand Floridian too.
Figment1986
Well-Known Member
I know I get 5G on my t-mobile iPhone 12 in certain areas of property.... gonna be nice to get it on more areas soon hopefully.