Why does 5G require huge investment, but the final experience feels not much different from 4G?

Many people say that the reason why 5G is not very useful now is because the speed is not fast enough. When the speed reaches a certain level in the future, 5G will be able to show its power.

This idea completely misunderstands the actual needs.

The bottleneck of mobile Internet is no longer "faster speed".

Take cars as an example. In the early stages, it makes sense to increase the car's top speed from 20 to 50, from 50 to 100, and then from 100 to 200.

But after the maximum speed of civilian cars reaches 200, what is the point of investing a lot of resources to further increase the speed limit of civilian cars and develop cars with a maximum speed of 300km/h?

At this time, the research and development direction of automobile manufacturers is: energy saving, safety, comfort and function improvement. No foolish car manufacturer will think about developing a "faster" car to impress consumers.

Digital mobile communications have been upgraded from 2G to 4G. The core indicator is indeed the improvement of bandwidth, which has given many people an illusion that bandwidth is the only indicator to measure mobile communication technology. Linear extrapolation thinking has led to the speed increase at all costs in R&D. Then, when it comes to 5G, it finally failed.

The demand side found that faster speed is a false demand for me. What is the real demand? It is to improve stability while keeping the bandwidth unchanged, while lowering energy consumption and covering a wider area, so as to reduce construction costs and usage costs.

Unfortunately, 5G is completely contrary to the above needs. By the time everyone figured this out, hundreds of billions of dollars had been invested...

A friend said: "I have a hard time opening news pages with lots of pictures now, which means the Internet speed is not fast enough. Therefore, it is necessary to increase the Internet speed and we should build 5G."

This logic is flawed because 3G is sufficient to open pictures smoothly. If you can't open pictures fast enough, you don't need to build 5G, but should improve the existing 4G network.

It's like you're stuck in a traffic jam on the highway in an Audi, with a speed of only 20km/h. At this time, do you think that switching to an F1 car that can reach 350km/h will solve the problem?

Many people have mentioned the value and cost of R&D and exploration. I agree with this. China used to follow the strategy. As the saying goes, we cross the river by feeling the way the Eagle Sauce does. The Eagle Sauce uses good things, so we follow suit. As long as the R&D is successful, we will use it directly.

However, as China's overall strength improves, China's research and development in certain areas has accidentally surpassed that of the United States. This is when there will be trial and error costs.

My attitude is very clear: the cost of trial and error in the R&D process is inevitable and not worthless. Even if you click on the wrong technology tree or find that this road is blocked in the end, it is not a big deal, and it can even be said to be a good thing.

But mass production is a different issue, because the value of R&D lies largely in the R&D itself, while the value of mass production lies in the final use, and the resources occupied by mass production are too large, much higher than those of R&D.

We can take detours and make mistakes during the R&D process, and fail in R&D. But if we find out that we are wrong after mass production and produce a large number of worthless products, the cost will be too high.

Some people say that it takes time for new applications to emerge, and new applications in the 3G/4G era did not appear quickly.

Let me take a typical 4G application as an example, live video streaming.

In December 2013, China issued 4G licenses.

Inke, a company in the live streaming industry, launched its product in May 2015 and made a profit of 19 million that year. By the end of 2015, it had 10 million monthly active users. In the following year, 2016, its revenue reached 4.3 billion and its profit was 570 million.

In other words, exactly two years after the 4G licenses were issued, the monthly active users of just one company in the live video streaming sector had reached 10 million.

In October 2016, less than three years after the issuance of 4G licenses, Inke's monthly active users reached 30 million and the number of registered users exceeded 100 million.

The 5G license was issued in June 2019, and it has been almost three years since then. Where are the applications of 5G? How long do we have to wait?

Finally, I would like to add an expert’s speech for your reference:

5G has been politicized and its capabilities have been exaggerated. "I once attended a 5G conference, and even though I have been working on 5G for 10 years, I couldn't understand what they were talking about. Later I found out that everyone was talking about the 5G era, not 5G."

The expert believes that the evolution from 4G to 5G is not much different from the evolution from 3G to 4G. 5G will certainly be better than 4G, but not as powerful as people imagine now.

For example, without 5G and 5.5G, can cars achieve autonomous driving? The expert believes that for cars to achieve autonomous driving, they must achieve autonomous driving. Just like normal people, they can control themselves without relying on the outside world. If cars must rely on 5G and 5.5G to drive autonomously, what will happen if the network is disconnected? The requirements for operators are also very high and unrealistic.

"Of course, 5G and 5.5G are better for realizing autonomous driving, but they are more of an auxiliary function," he said.