this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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is there anything an actual human does that wasn't good enough on 4G?
The spec seems to just be loosely following powers of 2 on transmission speeds.
2G - Kb/s
3G - Mb/s
4G - 100Mb/s
5G - 1Gb/s
6G - 10Gb/s (proposed, 1Km in tests)
What people don't understand is that all of this is realistically built on massive underground fiber optic networks that have been being built out since ~2006.
China is getting ahead of everyone because their national projects tend to also be infrastructural so they can put hundreds of millions of meters of fiber cables underground during the build out of those new transit lines and residential centers.
5G and 6G are presented as wireless technology, but they're more wired than anything else. The high frequencies required for those speeds mean you need antennas/towers like every 500m instead of every mile or 2 for the lower frequency tech (3G and 4G).
Because the only federal and state fiber buildouts in the US are a long major highways, you have a freeway backbone that can support high wireless speed networks, but no one lives on the highway and the short distances mean not even that many people can take advantage of that until FTTH distribution (almost entirely privately owned and state subsidized) is built.
But 6G has AI and it's essential that everything new has AI to justify how much time and energy everyone spends thinking and talking about AI.
Remote surgery
that sounds like the kind of thing you don't ever want to be wireless tho
I mean it's being done in China all the time now.
and i'm sure they'd prefer to run a wire out to whatever remote village if that was feasible
But reality is that it's not feasible in a lot of places, at least in the near future. Meanwhile, setting up 6G towers is much faster and cheaper in comparison.
Network congestion in cities which is kinda what 5G is built for. 4G is still useful for servicing wider areas with less devices
That’s basically why 5G is 3 different things glue together.
There’s low frequency (long range) that’s basically just LTE with some icing.
There’s medium range and quite a bit faster (I can get 1Gbps down in some areas)
And the. There’s mmWave or super short range 5G. That’s designed for concerts and other events with a ton of people crammed into a small area. But even that struggles at time.
4G was awful for watching videos. I had to use wireless as my main source of internet from 2G to 4G. Increase in speeds is better. 5G was where you could actually watch something (not in HD of course) without it buffering every 3 seconds. Like the way I used to use youtube was to download any videos I wanted to watch. That was less annoying than trying to watch them directly through the site. I would rather wait for the full download and watch it uninterrupted. 5G was my only option up until December of 2023. Well if you don't count satellite internet which is the worse option.
I think the AI shit is exaggerated. Back around 2018-2020 when everyone was hyping 5G there was a lot of "5G is going to enable self driver cars and IOT" like that was going to be its primary use. It's barely even used for that stuff. 6G will probably be the same. Machine learning is probably already implemented for network routing and optimization by ISPs. I don' think 6G will usher in a new age of AI technology anymore than 5G made self driving cars more common.
huh i was doing OK with youtube in ~2012 on mobile data but that was relatively static MTGO videos
Even 3.5G was plenty for me. I could get 30Mbps down on that and that was PLENTY for most 1080p YouTube content. LTE at the time was barely any faster, and at some points became slower with congestion.
Yes, you need much lower latency for robots that interact with the physical world.