Something I've noticed is that a phone is actually usable at a stadium or concert when 3g or 4g felt essentially useless at that density.

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devilbunny 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've seen an interesting corollary: 4G on an airplane at the gate is much faster than the 5G microcells inside the terminal.

If I'm downloading podcasts for a flight, I do it on WiFi beforehand or on 4G on the plane. 5G in the terminal is really useful at getting you some service, but it's slow.

Probably a side effect of not enough backhaul speed.

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seb1204 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I thought that's why many large venues offer free WiFi.

	▲	ricardobeat 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		5G outperforms wifi in crowded situations. With wifi you get increasing collisions and backoff intervals until everything stalls; with 5G you just get less bandwidth (time sliced) but no collisions, and its frequency spectrum is free of interference.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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LeoPanthera 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AT&T has figured out a way to monetize that. If you have a "Turbo" plan or add-on, your phone will work in crowded cells.

If you don't, good luck with that.

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Atotalnoob 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Net neutrality would have prevented this kind of pay to win

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cortesoft 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How would it have helped? Net neutrality doesn’t mean you can’t sell your customers different bandwidth guarantees.

Net neutrality is only about the connections between a provider and external networks, not about how a company handles bandwidth contention amongst its customers.

Net neutrality would fix a problem like “only Facebook is accessible inside crowded stadiums” not “AT&T customers who pay more get better connections in crowded stadiums”

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majormajor 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Net neutrality as generally understood says nothing about being able to pay more for a higher service tier from your ISP.

It's entirely on the publisher side: net neutrality was an attempt to avoid ISPs getting paid extra---costs that would be passed onto you---in exchange for making your experience on site A be better than your experience with site B (or service, vs site).

Think: "Oh, yeah, Netflix 4k works great on your new Comcast plan! But if you want Hulu 4k, you're gonna need to pay us more, because Netflix pays us to make their shit work better than Hulu's if you don't!"

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MisterMunchkin 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Net neutrality was just big companies like Google trying to get free bandwidth for things like YouTube which saturate all their peers.

Think about it, when’s the last time you saw a funded campaign for something that was actually good for us? When’s the last time you saw Google campaigning for privacy?

	▲	chowells 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		People still believe this? Google pays their ISP. I pay my ISP. Google does not pay my ISP. Why is my ISP's response to the amount of traffic I use demanding to bill someone other than me? To be clear, Google was doing this out of self-interest. Paying user ISPs for access to those users is not a cost they want to pay. But it's the same as any other protection racket. A local shopkeeper has personal reasons to not want to pay off the mob, but that doesn't mean their position is wrong.
	▲	majormajor 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		ISP's spent $$$$$ against net-neutrality cause they wanted to get paid twice (Google already was paying for their side of the bandwidth as the source). When you add the second line---pretending that that nobody funding all the anti-net-neutrality let-big-ISPs-do-what-they-want stories that pro-legacy-company Republicans ate up---it makes me think this is some astroturfing, since it goes from "maybe this person fell for the ISP claims" to straight-up dishonest intentionally-misleading-fallacy. Google was obviously on the side of "don't get charged twice" but ultimately net-neutrality was a tech enthusiast consumer position that came out of a desire to avoid getting charged more on the basis of what sites you did or didn't want to watch, and ISP's trying to influence where you visited by cutting deals to get paid to prioritize A vs B. (Hell, ISPs were already getting paid "twice" for the bandwidth in some ways, e.g. when your "100Mb" plan only works at that speeds if your neighbors aren't using it much. That's a different sort of incomplete-advertising trickery that helped create the whole "too many people using Youtube are saturating the network!" "problem" in the first place.) (And high-bandwidth publishers already were making private peering/colo-of-servers deals with ISPs and CDNs that I don't believe would've been prohibited by net neutrality, so the 'protection racket' aspect of the ISP's game was maybe more arguably wanting to be paid thrice? Or wanting to be paid without providing that colo service?)

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Founderarcstone an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

you know AT&T will be there first in line with a plan.

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carlob an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

and that has definitely improved everybody's experience at concerts /s