The killer application on the future 5G may test the network bandwidth.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Three Easy Life” (ID: IT-3eLife), author of the three bacteria.
If you have recently paid attention to the 5G mobile phone conferences of major brands, you should notice a phenomenon. Almost all 5G mobile phones will emphasize at the press conference that the advantage of 5G lies in “fast speed” and almost all 5G mobile phones are also consistent in the way of demonstrating “fast network speed”, either songs or cached videos, or download and install apps in large quantities.
Of course, we don’t deny that these presentations are really intuitive, but they are a bit singular and even a bit ungrounded. After all, it is usually rare to download hundreds of songs or install dozens of software at the same time. But this does not blame mobile phone manufacturers, because behind this embarrassing scene, it reflects the current 5G ecosystem, or a major problem that 5G mobile phone consumers must face.
There is a network, there is a mobile phone, but there is no APP designed for 5G
Yes, 5G is so fast that in theory, when you watch a video online with a 5G phone, it will never be buffered. However, since all mobile video apps are optimized based on 4G network speed, this means that we will not use cards in 4G phones. Although the 5G buffer speed may be faster, users may not easily feel the difference.
Yes, 5G is very fast, so using the music client on the phone to listen to lossless or even Hi-Res music theory has no problem. But even the most extreme DSD original audio files, the bit rate per second is only about 5Mbps (by the way, mp3 is only 320kbps, which is less than 0.3Mbps), even if it is 4M network 200MThe bps bandwidth is more than enough for real-time data stream playback, and it rarely uses the high network speed advantage of 5G.
Of course, let alone the mobile game players who rely heavily on smartphones, the game data package seems to be very large, but in fact the upload and download during the game only includes basic displacement and damage data. The amount of data consumed is actually very small, and there is really no need for bandwidth.
Starting the “5G killer app”, China Unicom is worthy of praise
Therefore, if you don’t launch a good app that is really designed for 5G networks, or more accurately, only 5G can be “affordable”, relying on boring speed data alone, you can’t actually convince consumers to change. Machine and purchase 5G packages that are not cheap.
And this is why we are excited when we see China Unicom’s official launch of a wave of 5G killer applications today. Because 5G consumers seem to finally have a wave of APP and application environments that are exclusive to them. In a way, this may be more obvious than the promotion effect brought by a few more 5G mobile phones.
At the same time, from the official copy of Unicom’s “most creative, most video, most e-sports”, we are not difficult to figure out the true face of Unicom’s 5G “killer application”. They are likely to be low-latency ultra-high-definition 4K or even 8K live, ultra-high-definition 4K VR applications, ultra-high-definition 4K or 8K HDR online theaters, and 5G cloud games that allow mobile phones to play on computers, console games, and even cloud e-sports platforms. . In particular, 8K resolution live broadcast, video services, and host games, PC top 3A masterpiece “cloud” is indeed the existing 4G network can not afford anyway. As the actual experience of 5G better than 4G, it is obviously more convincing than the next few songs, cache several low-definition videos, and it can make the 5G consumers who actually paid the money feel value for money. .
Whether the application designed for 5G will also discriminate against 5G entry users?
But please note that we have emphasized many times before that, 5G “killer” application placeIn order to be a “killer”, the most important point is that it must grasp the “5G can do, but 4G is impossible”. To put it more bluntly, the demand for the actual bandwidth of the network must be much higher than the current maximum rate of 4G networks, and the 4G phones must be completely unusable (or at least very mediocre). It makes sense. The question is, is the 5G network necessarily faster than 4G?
Following the friends of Sanyi Life’s past articles, I know that if the technology itself is the fastest, the measured bandwidth of the fastest 4G network in the world has reached 1200Mbps or more, and the current 4G LTE-A Pro system. The theoretical limit is up to 3000 Mbps, whichever exceeds the maximum bandwidth limit of the current 5G commercial package in China (1000 Mbps). In other words, the most expensive 5G packages we can buy now in China may not have these 4G speeds.
Of course there are friends who want to say, you have to consider the national conditions! Then we will focus on the existing domestic 5G package. As we all know, the 5G package pricing measures of the three major operators are not only linking prices to traffic, but more importantly, the 5G packages at different price points make the difference in the maximum speed that users can enjoy for the first time.
From the above picture, we can see that the lowest bandwidth of the three operators in the 5G package is only 200Mbps, and the highest is 1000Mps (1Gbps). However, the problem arises. Does the “5G killer application” also make a difference in content quality based on the bandwidth of different packages? For example, if a 200Mbps consumer can also watch 8K video, they can also play the same quality cloud game, which may cause dissatisfaction to consumers who buy more expensive packages. Moreover, the bandwidth of 200 Mbps is also achievable for existing 4G mobile phones. Therefore, there may be a problem that 5G applications cannot distinguish between 4G and 5G experiences, which is disadvantageous for the promotion of 5G.
But on the other hand, if operators (and software developers) set the bandwidth requirement of “5G Killer APP” to 400Mbps or higher, the 5G users of the entry file can’t use these 5G experiences smoothly. It will also trigger new contradictions.
Of course, these may not be a problem for China Unicom to have a headache – because their 5G network starts at 500Mbps. But for mobile 5G users, the future 5G experience may not be so happy.