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Forums - Gaming Discussion - If 5G has 1ms lag then how does anyone apart from Nintendo survive?

* 5G is a shared spectrum. Bandwidth is shared between all users of a cell.
* 5G signal quality will attenuate depending on distance, air quality and even the weather and thus will also affect speed.
* Switch/Xbox/Playstation doesn't have 5G support. - It needs a 3rd party (another) device to piggy-back from.

Although 5G uses a different wavelength to prior technologies, it's range for each Cell is also shorter, so there should be less users per cell.
However, being a shared medium, it's likely to garner data caps still. - 4G here in Australia, despite being one of the fastest and most expansive networks in the world still has data limits which can be entirely used within minutes, such limitations don't exist for fixed line.

Is 5G the future? Sure. But due to the smaller cell size which reduces the amount of users per cell meaning less bandwidth competition between users, it's going to take allot longer to rollout as you need more cells to cover any given geographical area.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

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I have fibre to the home, and 0ms latency to the internet backbone. Doesn't change that I get 40ms lag when I play Overwatch, as you have to account for the latency beyond your control. End to end is not the same thing as your connection's latency. I do think streaming might be common, because internet gaming is common. You are already limited badly when you play CoD online, vs a theoretical LAN environment. The main advantage for Google Stadia would be running the entire game locally on the Google server, and only streaming the resulting graphics. Effectively a LAN environment for people playing multiplayer. Everyone would still have 40ms minimum lag to the server, but multiplayer connections at that server would be 0ms.



shikamaru317 said:

Lag is not the only thing handicapping game streaming though. You're forgetting that mobile internet has really tiny data caps. Streaming just 2 hours of games per day will put you at 900 GB of data usage at the end of the month on Goodle's Stadia. Verizon, the 2nd largest phone company in the US, has a so called "unlimited plan", but it costs a whopping $90 a month, and you only get the first 75 GB at 5G speed, after that you get capped to 4G speed. AT&T, the largest, is also $90 a month, but they start capping your speed after you've used 22 GB of data. 

Well the unlimited plan does cancel out your point. If theres options than it will work.



*If you have perfect line of sight with a 5G connection point without anything as much as a tree in the way that is.



shikamaru317 said:
Azzanation said:

Well the unlimited plan does cancel out your point. If theres options than it will work.

Notice I put unlimited in quotes. It's not really unlimited. There is no unlimited data plan in the US that is truly unlimited afaik, they all cap your speed if you go over your monthly allowance. In other words, you're only going to get 5G speeds for your first few hours of streaming each month, after that you're back to 4G speeds (or on some data plans, 3G speeds), which is going to bring your streaming video quality way, way down. 

That's fair enough, i am not completely sure how these plans work. Every country probably have different plans and how they work.

From what i gathered, house unlimited plans dont have a limit where it reduces your speed but seems i might be wrong here.



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Pemalite said:

* 5G is a shared spectrum. Bandwidth is shared between all users of a cell.
* 5G signal quality will attenuate depending on distance, air quality and even the weather and thus will also affect speed.
* Switch/Xbox/Playstation doesn't have 5G support. - It needs a 3rd party (another) device to piggy-back from.

Massive MIMO can be used to increase the capacity of a cell site without adding more spectrum resources ... 

Weather is only a real issue when considering millimeter wave bands ... 

Don't need another device, just need to have a baseband technology supplier (in Vita's case it was a MDM6200 from Qualcomm) and a RF antenna module supplier (Broadcom supplied Vita's RF antenna modules) integrated into the chipset just like the Vita's 3G SKU ... 

Pemalite said:

Although 5G uses a different wavelength to prior technologies, it's range for each Cell is also shorter, so there should be less users per cell.
However, being a shared medium, it's likely to garner data caps still. - 4G here in Australia, despite being one of the fastest and most expansive networks in the world still has data limits which can be entirely used within minutes, such limitations don't exist for fixed line.

5G NR can potentially be deployed on LTE bands as well like for example with T-Mobile's n71 band (600MHz) which will provide for both LTE/NR ... 

Cell range is perfectly serviceable with C-band radio frequencies (n77/n78/n79) and its the sweet spot as well in terms of capacity/coverage. It's millimeter waves that has a short range but mmWaves in itself poses problems for coverage anyway ... 

Qualcomm are banking om the life of their business that mmWaves will take off since they were the biggest proponents at 3GPP to have mmWaves standardized for 5G NR ... 

Pemalite said:

Is 5G the future? Sure. But due to the smaller cell size which reduces the amount of users per cell meaning less bandwidth competition between users, it's going to take allot longer to rollout as you need more cells to cover any given geographical area.

Smaller cell size doesn't necessarily correlate to lower bandwidth. It mostly correlates with the size of the antenna arrays which are also dependent on the radio frequencies. A cell built for 24 GHz frequency will naturally have smaller individual antenna elements compared to a cell built for the 1 GHz frequency ... 

A 4T4R LTE antenna operating at 1 GHz frequencies with 20MHz of bandwidth will be no match against a mmWave small cell antenna operating at 24GHz with 400MHz of bandwidth in terms of capacity despite the fact that the former is a far bigger cell ...

Rollout for 5G NR will definitely be a bigger challenge compared to LTE but it can be made a lot more manageable if mobile network service operators don't opt-in to deploy mmWaves like we are seeing with early 5G deployments in the US with AT&T or Verizon ... 



This is because of the "console wars are over" thread, isn't it?



shikamaru317 said:
Azzanation said:

That's fair enough, i am not completely sure how these plans work. Every country probably have different plans and how they work.

From what i gathered, house unlimited plans dont have a limit where it reduces your speed but seems i might be wrong here.

How it works in the US:

Mobile- Unlimited plans have a data cap, and if you pass it your speed gets throttled. You can pay more per month to increase the cap, but I think the highest is 75GB currently at $90 per month. Exact details of the throttle vary by carrier, some cap limit you to 4G speeds, some to 3G speeds, some only limit you during peak data hours, others limit your speed all of the time after crossing the cap.

Home- The largest ISP in the US, Comcast, has   26.5m internet subs as of last year. Comcast has a 1TB data cap. However, unlike mobile plans, if you cross that cap they don’t throttle your speed, they instead charge you an extra $10 per 50 GB you used over the 1TB cap that month, up to a maximum of $200 at 1 TB over the cap (2TB total). So between game streaming and video streaming it would be very easy for a core gamer to go over that 1TB cap, even more likely for a family to go over it if all the members of the family stream video from Netflix and such, in addition to even a single member of the family using a game streaming service like Stadia. Not sure how many other US home ISP’s have data caps besides Comcast. I know that Comcast is pretty much the only option in my area, the only other options in my area are satellite internet (terrible for gaming due to extreme latency and small data caps) and DSL (too slow for online gaming at just 3 mbps), so gamers where I live are pretty much forced into using Comcast.

At least in my area the Comcast 1TB limit does not apply to the Gigabit plan.  Gigabit plan unlimited.  Down side is it expensive ($80 a month for new user for first 3 years then it goes up to $105)   but still a whole lot cheaper then $200 if you using that much data and you get  a faster speed.



Comcast's $10 per 50 GB over the limit might only be partially accurate. Customer support is terrible, but the person I spoke to (about a year ago at this point so it may have changed) explained to me that it was $1 per GB over the 1TB limit. My response was something like "so you're saying that if there was a month that I used 2TB, or double the data cap, I would be charged over $1000 dollars". He responded back to me saying that technically you can upgrade to a truly unlimited plan for an additional $30 (or maybe it was $50) per month.

Honesty, I don't remember the exact numbers, and this was awhile ago, but I was glad to hear that this option existed, but also skeptical on whether or not the support agent had the proper information.

Out of curiosity, I did a quick Google search:

(250 Mbps) * 1 month =
82.1794947 terabytes of max download

Theoretically, if I used my 250 Mbps connection at maximum download speeds non-stop for a full month, the most I could possibly use is 82 TB. I sure hope some better competition in the US can bring better deals for the customer. I'm okay with paying a fair price, I just don't like being capped.



Optimistical scenario on OP...I still believe that Google will have absorbed everything by 15 years, and that it will happen whatever we want it or not.