It’s Time To Rethink 6G.
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Well they could spend some money on fixing all the fucking
security holesbackdoors that has plagued xG for years, they could increase coverage everywhere, but especially in rural areas, or any other plethora of issues with wireless communication. -
I think they were trying to make the point that we HAD faster speeds, but it was discovered that most people didn't really need it and were happy paying less to go slower. They are comparing this to 6G, sure, some will use it, but for most it will be a needless expense.
On the actual supersonic air travel point - eh, is it really needed considering the massive extra energy required?
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No, actually the solution is broadband nationalisation.
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Yeah, that’s why faster wireless broadband is a good thing.
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That too
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Hmmm. I guess.
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That’s just another monopoly. How much do you trust your government?
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Abso-fucking-lutely, amen and hallelujah. I want 6G to focus on improving range and performance in marginal conditions. When shit is good, 5g is fast enough for now. I don't know how you improve range and penetration without going to lower frequencies, so maybe we should try to do that? Lower frequencies mean less bandwidth, but RF is black magic fuckery and there's all kinds of crazy shit that can be done with time division, so maybe we can improve throughout in the sub-ghz regime. I dunno about that, I'm just an idiot software developer who is thankful that shit works without me having to sacrifice a goat.
Maybe there's a way to broadcast at higher power levels, and maybe there are ways for base stations to be more sensitive or do filtering to increase SNR. I have no idea, but I think that should be what the telecos focus on. Better service over a wider area with the same number of towers would be huge.
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Cities probably have a higher density of towers, or the towers in cities have more capable antennas. Point-to-point microwave links can be pretty damn fast and reliable. They have their limitations, but even low-end systems like some of Ubiquiti's 60ghz stuff can form full duplex 5Gbps links at 10+ kilometers. Fiber is still king, but I'm guessing the backhaul isn't the issue.
I'm guessing that the issue is congestion on the client radios. 5g is supposed to be much better at dealing with this thanks to time sharing improvements, but it seems likely that there just aren't enough towers. One scenario that seems reasonable is that your telco (incorrectly) assumed that they wouldn't need as many towers when upgrading, so they only upgraded a subset of their towers and removed old ones once 4g was deprecated.
edit: you might be able to get better information about wtf is going on by using a community-sourced site like https://cellmapper.net
I believe you can use that site to get info about how many towers there are and what the client-side congestion is like.
EDIT: ew, cellmapper is closed source. OpenCellid or beaconDB seem to be open source equivalents.
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Yeah this whole article fell pretty flat with me and this analogy especially. I'd sure as hell like faster air travel and sure, I'm pretty sure I'll find a use for faster mobile connections too. Agree I'd much rather see better coverage maps with 5G than a speed bump in the select areas where I do get a good 5G connection, but seems likely that eventually there will either be some demand for 6G speeds or it will at least become cheap enough to implement as a marketing tool by telecoms.
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I pay the cheapest electricity of all of the OECD, and rake in billions every year that is reinvested in society. Thank supply side Jesus for publically owned monopolies.
How's that competition going with the Texas grid?
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I like nationalising industries, but here in France, privatizing France Telecom made Internet and phone prices much lower.
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Only because it is highly regulated. The FAIs have to allow everyone access to the network. Free wouldn't exist if it wasn't for that.
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A part is thanks to free (the company) refusing to oligopole up the prices.
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True, but nothing was stopping the public company from lowering their prices and improving their service.
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You rake in billions every year...?
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Society does indeed. Hydro Quebec gives back something like $3B a year that is reinvested into various government services.
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just as there may still be executives or world leaders who continue to look forward to spanning the globe at supersonic speeds.
They should stop. Their luxury makes the earth warmer faster for everyone.
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My friend, most base stations got fiber backhaul before 5G even existed. We are well beyond that problem.
In fact, it is not uncommon in 2025 to have fiber fronthaul from the remote radio (at the mast) back to the "cloud" where the actual base station is virtualized and/or software-defined (at the data center).
The usable signal issue is a whole other complex can of electromagnetic worms and in contemporary times is a side effect of how 5G NR is sort of "bolted on" to 4G LTE. It is not dissimilar to the growing pains that mixed 3G/4G networks had.
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That's a cool resource. Ty
