Worst of the Week is all about 5G progress, but asks that we first make sure we finish what we started with 4G
Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
The recent Mobile World Congress event showed me a few things.
First, people still like to get together at trade shows to show off their latest doo-dads, tattoos and how jet lagged they can be.
Second, MWC showed that the mobile telecom space is getting real serious about this whole 5G business. It seemed you couldn’t throw a semi-functional 4G phone without hitting someone shouting about the virtues of 5G. But, I guess that’s what happens when you put 100,000 people in a small space, all so excited to talk about what’s next that they miss the fact they have done a poor job of making sure what’s here today actually works.
And thus my 4G vs. 5G dilemma.
In recent months, the “4G” service on my personal phone has been as erratic as mid-80s Crispin Glover.
Don’t get me wrong, I am as excited as the next person that someday soon I will be able to stream a high-definition 4D movie to my smartphone in under 1 second, but is it too much to ask that my phone today be able to access a low-quality, 2-minute YouTube clip without buffering?
I mean, are we still dealing with buffering?
I know there are 1,001 reasons why certain wireless services at certain location at certain times of the day fail to live up to expectations. I get it. Wireless is complicated, and as with all things technology related, it never works perfect all of the time.
I also know that when you tell someone something is going to do a certain thing and in turn charge that person money for that thing to do its wonderful certain thing, maybe that wonderful certain thing should be an actual thing, and not sort of a thing.
I have noticed over the past several months greater fluctuations in cellular performance regardless of carrier, location, device or advertisements telling me I am on the best performing network. As an example, I have recently disabled VoLTE calling on all of my devices due to network inability to actually let me complete voice calls. I know we put up with sub-optimal call quality back in the 1G days, but why is something that should be the most basic of service from a cellular carrier back to being sub-optimal in these 4G days?
And, I know I can’t be alone in this. The continued cries of “can you hear me know?” tell me that I am not alone.
My disdain for this 5G movement includes all forms of anything being marketed as superior to 4G, including “4.5G,” “LTE-Advanced Pro” or “LTE-Advanced Pro now with more Advanced Pro.” All these things are doing is distracting us from first making sure 4G works.
This issue becomes more severe as this 5G talk also includes such awesome ideas as connected cars and the “Internet of Things,” two other buzzwords running rampant at MWC.
Now, for IoT I am not as worked up over poor network quality. So what if my garbage can can’t tell my smoke detector its full. How much harm can come from connected devices anyways?
But, if we are talking connected cars and autonomous cars that it seems everyone now has pretty much has assumed will be roaming our highways in the next few years, well I think there we should probably make sure there are no “dead” zones less we make new “dead” zones.
Telecom history has shown that about every 10 years we all get bored with what we have, even if we really don’t have what we think we have, and in turn need to have something better/faster/stronger. This mentality leads to a lot of great innovation and in the telecom space does indeed result in some really cool things happening in laboratory environments and commercials.
Unfortunately, the real world has shown me at least that we have not really nailed down this whole 4G business, thus we should not be in a hurry to pass go.
I just think before the mobile industry starts riding down the 5G highway, it might want to make sure the underlying 4G road is stable enough to handle the load.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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