Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Verizon Nears 5G Launch Deals With Apple and Google: Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the early-adopters dept.

In a statement Tuesday, Verizon announced deals making Apple and Google its first video providers for a 5G wireless service its planning to launch in four cities later this year. From the report: The home broadband service will debut in Los Angeles, Houston and Sacramento, California, as well as the newly announced fourth city of Indianapolis, Verizon said Tuesday in a statement. With the introduction, Verizon will provide 5G customers either a free Apple TV box or free subscription to Google's YouTube TV app for live television service, according to people familiar with the plan. After shelving its own online TV effort, New York-based Verizon decided to partner with the two technology giants for video content, a first step toward eventually competing nationally against internet and pay TV providers such as AT&T and Comcast Using fifth-generation wireless technology, Verizon plans to beam online services to home receivers, delivering speeds that match or exceed landline connections.

32 comments

  1. "No thanks" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "I'd prefer just the regular spying"

  2. Wireless will exceed wired? by iamhassi · · Score: 2

    Wireless speeds will exceed wired? That seems unlikely.

    --
    my karma will be here long after I'm gone
    1. Re:Wireless will exceed wired? by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      I agree. It cannot be faster than my 144,000 bis V.32bis modem.

    2. Re:Wireless will exceed wired? by omnichad · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Average download speed in the US is 75.94Mbps as of the latter half of last year. The Verizon service has a theoretical limit north of 3Gbps.

      Sure, that Verizon speed is bursty (and congestion constrained) and heavily dependent on conditions and distance. The problem isn't that speed will exceed wired. The problem is that it will end last-mile fiber deployment for the foreseeable future because it's cheaper for Verizon.

    3. Re:Wireless will exceed wired? by Solandri · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When the FCC defines broadband as 25 Mbps, many cellular wireless speeds already exceed wired speeds. Particularly in areas where the only broadband available is DSL (max speed of ADSL is 24 Mbps).

      Cellular falls behind when lots of people are using bandwidth simultaneously. In wired connections, each node has a dedicated wire and bandwidth. But in wireless communications, the bandwidth is shared. 5G attempts to address that by using MIMO - basically using directional antennas to transmit different things to different locations over the same frequencies. (Imagine it as people in a room using directional flashlights to send messages to each other, instead of controlling a single light switch which turns the room's ceiling light on/off.) I'm curious to see how well it works when scaled up from the simple 2x2 and 3x3 MIMO found in 802.11ac routers.

    4. Re:Wireless will exceed wired? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Transmission lines are not ideal. Parasitics over long distances add up and increase the insertion loss to a point to make the transmission line unusable at higher frequencies. In order to achieve these higher rates, you need more bandwidth. At the higher microwave frequencies, practical systems can be designed to utilize much higher bandwidths. Combine that with high order modulation schemes like OFDM/QAM, and you can end up with very efficient use of over-the-air, high-bandwidth channels.

    5. Re:Wireless will exceed wired? by mentil · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Wireless already exceeds wired speed, at least on iPhones. Their Lightning connector uses USB 2.0 speeds, which is far slower than what even 802.11ac supports. Most Android phones use USB 2.0 over micro-USB, and even the USB-C connector can use USB 2.0 speeds. Most likely this is to encourage buying apps/media through stores in which the manufacturer receives a commission, rather than sideloading them.

      --
      Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
    6. Re:Wireless will exceed wired? by mjwx · · Score: 1

      Wireless speeds will exceed wired? That seems unlikely.

      Are you suggesting that a telephone company may be lying in a country where lying in advertisement doesn't only go unpunished, but seems to be de rigueur?

      Colour me shocked (yes, British spelling, UK resident here with 200 MB fibre for just £50 a month).

      We need to forget "G" numbers as they no longer have any meaning. What I want to know is what technology they're implementing because I may be a cynical Anglo but I suspect they're just re-branding an older technology like LTE rather than putting in a technology like LTE Advanced or beyond. Not like they haven't done this before by re-branding 3G (HSPA) as 4G

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    7. Re:Wireless will exceed wired? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I can't get AT&T to give me better than 3 and no one else will come up my street. I'd give Verizon a chunk of my back yard to put up a tower if they can beat that pathetic offering.

    8. Re:Wireless will exceed wired? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And USB 2.0 exceeds SD card write speed.
      ~30MB/s vs ~4MB/s

      " Most likely this is to encourage buying apps/media through stores in which the manufacturer receives a commission, rather than sideloading them."

      Good theory maybe but the users themselves don't want to use a file manager, don't want to maintain their own storage (which they'll lose because those maintaining back ups are a very small minority)
      Mobile vendors are to blame too because dumbing down users is a benefit to them, Microsoft to blame because their GUI is worse than 15 years ago. Why squander that Win 98 GUI that was easier to use than Mac and more powerful than Linux desktop (except some missing windowing features). Duh.

    9. Re:Wireless will exceed wired? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Transmission lines are not ideal, indeed. I live in a multi-tenant complex in Los Angeles, building was constructed in mid-1960s and appears to have had coax cables added in the 70s. Some years ago when I moved in, I tried to get AT&T DSL, only to find out that the copper wiring was so old that there was no network adapter panel, it was literally a bunch of twisted pairs that were wire-wrapped around nails on a wooden board to route to each separate unit. I decided to go with the cable company (TWC) and got a decent speed about 10 years ago. But now since Spectrum took over and bumped up the speed to 100mbps, I can only ever get 65-67mbps due to the ancient coax wires that lead from the street and all through the complex. I get faster I/O on my Samsung phone than the cable modem. There is no hope to try and retrofit the coax a half century later unless the buildings are destroyed and rebuilt, so I'm really looking forward to 5G to get away from the wires.

  3. Can they do it w/o metering? by rsilvergun · · Score: 3, Interesting

    otherwise it's not worth much. If it's $10/gigabyte or something silly like that then it's pointless.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:Can they do it w/o metering? by mentil · · Score: 1, Insightful

      You're thinking about it all wrong. With 3G and LTE, congestion prevents people from using their metered connections as much as they want to. With 5G, people will be able to consume their allotment even faster, thus encouraging spending more for a higher cap.
      Why would they spend $billions on 5G rollout/spectrum purchase just to give people greater benefit for the same price? What's that you say, they have to because of the competition? Bahahahaha!

      --
      Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
    2. Re:Can they do it w/o metering? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're likely from the US, but here's how it is in a Western European country. With 3G data caps were about 1GB to 5GB. After a couple years of 4G they went 50GB to 100GB.

      I'd be using this if I didn't hate fucking smartphones and their crippled Real Player like OS, or if I were homeless.
      Probably, web browsers should have settings to request 360p video instead of getting served 720p video (I think there's a Firefox extension doing that). Servers send us too much crap but ultimately client software requests it (hence ad blockers etc.).

  4. 3 weeks, not too bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Three weeks since it hit the news that they were looking at apple and google

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-23/verizon-is-said-to-seek-google-or-apple-as-5g-tv-provider

    Either it took ages to leak, or the deal was done quickly.

  5. Because they're hoping to compete with cable by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    head on, replacing land lines. Home broadband is incredibly profitable. I pay $100/mo for mine and by all accounts it costs somewhere between $9-$13 (depending on who you ask, since you can only get an estimate out of their SEC filings these days). There's a _lot_ of room for profit there.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:Because they're hoping to compete with cable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Without repealing net neutrality, 5G service like this would not be possible.

    2. Re:Because they're hoping to compete with cable by SlaveToTheGrind · · Score: 1

      I pay $100/mo for mine and by all accounts it costs somewhere between $9-$13 (depending on who you ask, since you can only get an estimate out of their SEC filings these days)

      There you go again. Are you ready to provide quotes of actual language from actual SEC filings that say anything vaguely resembling that proposition? It's a good thing I haven't been holding my breath all this time.

    3. Re:Because they're hoping to compete with cable by acoustix · · Score: 1

      head on, replacing land lines. Home broadband is incredibly profitable. I pay $100/mo for mine and by all accounts it costs somewhere between $9-$13 (depending on who you ask, since you can only get an estimate out of their SEC filings these days). There's a _lot_ of room for profit there.

      I can guarantee it costs more than $13/mo to deliver services to the home. Providing the bandwidth is by far the cheapest part and that's probably where you got your numbers. But the infrastructure is insanely expensive. Poles, pedestals, boring, terminations, repairs, etc. There's a log of material and labor cost in there that needs to be spread over several years. And then figure out that not everyone in the neighborhood or town will actually pay for the service. You might get lucky and get 25% of the people to purchase the service.

      --
      "A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
    4. Re:Because they're hoping to compete with cable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In my country it's forever 30 EUR per month and likely because one rule of setting prices is : the price is what the customers are ready to pay, or able to pay, or expect to pay. Some lower costs offerings are 20 to 23 EUR per month (less well known, or low cost offerings without much publicity).
      $13 per month might be not far off if you add expense like customer service, billing, sales tax.

  6. Not MiMo by pablo_max · · Score: 1

    5G actually has nothing to do with MiMo. LTE already has MiMo as a mandatory feature. Though, 2 antennas are used.
    The higher speed is generated from carrier aggregation. Basically, using multiple channels on the same band or different bands to effectively increase the bandwidth.
    LTE has a max carrier bandwidth of 20 Mhz depending on the band. Some bands only support 5 and 10 Mhz bandwidths for example.
    Category 16 can support phones support up to 4x carrier aggregation, which does use 4x MiMo and 256QAM modulation.
    Anyhow, 5G certainly does use MiMo, but that is not what makes it 5G. The modulation scheme is totally different from standard LTE. This is how it is able to dramatically reduce the latency and increase the data throughput of a given bandwidth.
    The 3GPP standards were only recently ratified, so it will still be at least a year before you see anything in real life. Likely longer.
    Phones require certification to be on the market. So far, no equipment maker is producing any 5G test equipment. Additionally, the test cases are not fully defined by the RAN group.

  7. So this isn't 5G? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... so it will still be at least a year before you see anything in real life. Likely longer. ...So far, no equipment maker is producing any 5G test equipment.

    https://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/telstra-draws-first-blood-in-battle-for-5g/news-story/960bba3d49d05d3356cee0c4bb25cddc

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/telstras-5g-network-goes-live-in-the-gold-coast/

    1. Re:So this isn't 5G? by SlaveToTheGrind · · Score: 1

      Don't just paste it -- read it:

      Today we have switched on 5G-capable sites on the Gold Coast, which enable us to test 5G pre-commercial devices in real world conditions ... It also means we can connect compatible commercial 5G devices for customers in 5G areas as they become available

  8. forget tv - lower the price by anthony_greer · · Score: 1

    Don't give me an apple tv and a pay tv subscription! I just want bandwidth! I already have a streaming device and subscriptions to my chosen services.

    And don't tell me its "free" it is never free, it is simply included in the overly high price.

  9. Interesting forecasts by Mikkelsen · · Score: 1

    Regarding 5G I just stumble across these interesting forecasts showing hoa Asia and Oceania are leading the race: https://www.statista.com/chart... https://www.statista.com/chart...

    1. Re:Interesting forecasts by Mikkelsen · · Score: 1

      Regarding 5G I just stumble across these interesting forecasts showing hoa Asia and Oceania are leading the race: https://www.statista.com/chart... https://www.statista.com/chart...

      But I guess China and Asia in generel always have been leading the race...

    2. Re:Interesting forecasts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When you can put it in one city and hit 25million people, I guess that's easy to get ahead.

  10. Continued... by Mikkelsen · · Score: 1

    Try and check this graph out as well... https://www.statista.com/stati...

  11. Re:Peer reviewed studies? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I love how you got a -1...for asking the world's most reasonable question.

    As to the answer...short and long term health should go down nicely as a result of 5G.

    Thanks for asking.

    TPTB

  12. What's the Bottom Line? by Junior+Samples · · Score: 1

    How much is 5G home internet service with unlimited data going to cost? Is 5G going to compete with cable or will they collude with cable? I don't have any warm feelings that we will have any kind of effective competition here.

    Stand alone 5G home internet will probably be cost prohibitive unless it's bundled with one of their video packages or VOIP phone services.