Don't Believe the 5G Streaming Video Hype

Don't Believe the 5G Streaming Video Hype

Type "5G better streaming" into your favourite search engine.

The result? Seemingly endless arguments that 5G will lead to better streaming. Now inspect a few. When you look under the hood, these arguments for 5G benefitting streaming are—to a streaming professional —very weak. They typically centre on "speed." Last time I checked, the speed of electric signalling and propagation delay of such signals was still pretty close to the speed of light whatever network you use. So a packet traversing a 5G network travels at the same "speed" as 4G, 3G and all those before.

What they might mean is that the peak "throughput" is ostensibly higher on 5G than 5G, and that is arguably a truism, but the devil is in the detail.

There are some caveats: To get those high bitrates you need a "high range" frequency for the 5G radio carrier. These 20GHz to 100GHz bands are not yet broadly available for license other than for astrophysics or military use. 60GHz is the most desirable for 5G because high oxygen absorption at this range means the least interference between masts operating on the same frequency. Around 10Ghz and below—the frequencies currently being licensed—throughput is considerably less, and is comparable between 4G and 5G.

So 5G as it stands might offer higher throughput in the lab, but real-world results are far off.

5G also typically has a range of ~800m at the licensed frequencies. This means more transmitters. Each transmitter can connect to a group of remote devices. With more transmitters there is thus a possibility to connect more devices to the backhaul networks than with 4G and its relatively sparse 10km range between backhaul access points.

This means that over a given area the relative "contention" (the number of users sharing a connection) on a given backhaul fibre is potentially lower. So more users can stream per mast at a given time. But to be honest, 4G is not struggling today. Consumers may demand lower contention ratios if their signal is always buffering, but most buffering is happening because of the distance from a mast, rather than because of the contention for the backhaul. Also note that backhaul is nearly always dark fibre, and so capacity is "easy" to increase at the contention point.

If you talk to executives across the mobile telecoms space, they will confirm that the contention is not on the backhaul, but on the radio spectrum. Only so many users can share that 2/5 /10Ghz carrier. Think about the comparable domestic wi-fi channels, typically 11 of them. You can't really fit more in without spreading out from your licensed frequency too far and straying into unlicensed territory. That's bad for a telco.

Even if these issues were not a problem, how many people download movies these days? And a perfectly watchable stream is viewable on a phone at 5Mbps. We already have that on 4G. So let's take the promise of speed being a benefit to the streaming consumer with a pinch of salt.

5G will definitely have benefits to CDN operators in that a new rollout offers the opportunity to install flexible computing architecture distributed across the network much deeper into the edge, following modern distributed compute architecture that is evolving to be knows as "fog" architecture as it escapes the public clouds into the telco infrastructure.

And that is cool.

But it could be done in 4G too, if anyone could raise investment to do so in a market drunk on 5G kool-aid. Following the same logic, it is difficult for network operators to invest in ubiquitous 4G rural access when they are being pushed by their shareholders to have a 5G story in the densely populated metropolitan networks.

So it boils down to latency. Latency is a hot topic in the streaming sector. Barely a conference goes by that's not dominated by the topic. Why has this happened? Because the CDNs decided to move the narrative to latency and away from price because to not do so was creat...

Don't Believe the 5G Streaming Video Hype

Type "5G better streaming" into your favourite search engine.

The result? Seemingly endless arguments that 5G will lead to better streaming. Now inspect a few. When you look under the hood, these arguments for 5G benefitting streaming are—to a streaming professional —very weak. They typically centre on "speed." Last time I checked, the speed of electric signalling and propagation delay of such signals was still pretty close to the speed of light whatever network you use. So a packet traversing a 5G network travels at the same "speed" as 4G, 3G and all those before.

What they might mean is that the peak "throughput" is ostensibly higher on 5G than 5G, and that is arguably a truism, but the devil is in the detail.

There are some caveats: To get those high bitrates you need a "high range" frequency for the 5G radio carrier. These 20GHz to 100GHz bands are not yet broadly available for license other than for astrophysics or military use. 60GHz is the most desirable for 5G because high oxygen absorption at this range means the least interference between masts operating on the same frequency. Around 10Ghz and below—the frequencies currently being licensed—throughput is considerably less, and is comparable between 4G and 5G.

So 5G as it stands might offer higher throughput in the lab, but real-world results are far off.

5G also typically has a range of ~800m at the licensed frequencies. This means more transmitters. Each transmitter can connect to a group of remote devices. With more transmitters there is thus a possibility to connect more devices to the backhaul networks than with 4G and its relatively sparse 10km range between backhaul access points.

This means that over a given area the relative "contention" (the number of users sharing a connection) on a given backhaul fibre is potentially lower. So more users can stream per mast at a given time. But to be honest, 4G is not struggling today. Consumers may demand lower contention ratios if their signal is always buffering, but most buffering is happening because of the distance from a mast, rather than because of the contention for the backhaul. Also note that backhaul is nearly always dark fibre, and so capacity is "easy" to increase at the contention point.

If you talk to executives across the mobile telecoms space, they will confirm that the contention is not on the backhaul, but on the radio spectrum. Only so many users can share that 2/5 /10Ghz carrier. Think about the comparable domestic wi-fi channels, typically 11 of them. You can't really fit more in without spreading out from your licensed frequency too far and straying into unlicensed territory. That's bad for a telco.

Even if these issues were not a problem, how many people download movies these days? And a perfectly watchable stream is viewable on a phone at 5Mbps. We already have that on 4G. So let's take the promise of speed being a benefit to the streaming consumer with a pinch of salt.

5G will definitely have benefits to CDN operators in that a new rollout offers the opportunity to install flexible computing architecture distributed across the network much deeper into the edge, following modern distributed compute architecture that is evolving to be knows as "fog" architecture as it escapes the public clouds into the telco infrastructure.

And that is cool.

But it could be done in 4G too, if anyone could raise investment to do so in a market drunk on 5G kool-aid. Following the same logic, it is difficult for network operators to invest in ubiquitous 4G rural access when they are being pushed by their shareholders to have a 5G story in the densely populated metropolitan networks.

So it boils down to latency. Latency is a hot topic in the streaming sector. Barely a conference goes by that's not dominated by the topic. Why has this happened? Because the CDNs decided to move the narrative to latency and away from price because to not do so was creat...