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In what scenario can you tell the difference between 40 Mbps and 1000 Mbps on a mobile phone?

20-40 Mbps is more than enough for streaming. So I suppose you’re regularly downloading very large files or something?

Genuinely curious what use cases you notice a difference.

Or maybe it’s the better latency of your gigabit that you notice more so than the throughput?



Oh, I don't use LTE on a mobile phone. All of my devices (phones included) connect to a router with LTE uplink that runs VPN 24/7; the mobile carriers can't be trusted with any unencrypted data any longer, as T-Mobile is happily publicizing. None of my phones get sim cards.

I was referring to a laptop in my original statement. I usually plug it into the LTE router directly with a gigabit cable, or use Wi-Fi which generally exceeds the uplink capacity. 5G fixes that, for a wireless LAN.

As for why you'd need higher bandwidth on a mobile device, it is simple: to live-stream the 2160p@60fps captured from the device's sensors. Another good reason is app updates: doing app updates on a mobile device frequently includes a few gigabytes of downloads. Same with laptops, of course, which are increasingly connected via mobile data. Many AAA games have updates in the 20-200GB range.

A lot of this kind of stuff assumes that someone is on mobile temporarily until they get back to a "real" wifi connection (iOS didn't let you download any apps over 2GB on mobile data for a long while). For some of us, or all of us at some times, there isn't a "real" connection to go back to.


> For some of us

I suspect it's a small enough minority nobody is too worried about it from a policy point of view.


Long-haul truckers are 1% of the US population, which is something like 3 or 4 million people.

I'm sure that number pales in comparison to the number of truckers, oil workers, and construction types globally that spend weeks or months on the road at a time. It's probably easily 100 million people that will immediately directly benefit from increased mobile bandwidth.

That's not even counting the dozens of developing countries where they just skipped cabling altogether and mobile data is the only internet access available. That probably boops the figure up to a billion or more.


Sure, and internationally I think it's a big deal. I'm certainly not going to argue that people wouldn't benefit from increased mobile bandwidth.

However, huge chunk of those people you mention are nothing like mobile only, and for many the model of heavier downloads on wifi works just fine.

My point was particularly about catering to the mobile only crowd, which is pretty small (US/ EU etc., anyway).




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