WestOKstar

Try owning a Tesla anywhere between Interstate 25 and 35 and then tell me how great it is. Tell me how 250-mile gaps between Superchargers is a good thing if there is no need for government help in building out charging infrastructure. According to Tesla’s Supercharger map, they have no plans to add any new Superchargers in this area, which takes in over 1/3 of the US land area. Tell me that that is just fine. The closest Supercharger to my location is 50 miles away to the south. If I want to go west, the next one is 320 miles, or if I want to go north, the nearest one is 285 miles. It’s just not feasible. Considering that west of I-25 and east of I-35 there are Superchargers about every 20-30 miles, Musk needs to get his butt in gear and provide for those cross-country trips both east-west and north-south that American’s love to take.

Midband only reaches out 1-2 miles from a cell site anyway, so the fact neither AT&T nor Verizon has a site within 8 miles of the town I live in, plus neither carrier has any 5G already in the western half of the state, within 100 miles of here, none of this means a whit to me since we won’t be getting 5G at all from them, ever, unless the carriers decide to locate on the existing tower IN town where T-Mobile is located. So I will stick with T-Mobile and their low-band 5G which is pretty good, although it cannot provide the speeds that midband does. At least it’s here!

The problem is site density. T-Mobile’s standard operating procedure is to have sites spaced around 20 miles apart. That’s fine for LTE and low-band 5G but mid-band 5G only reaches a mile or two from a site, leaving a HUGE gap of no service between sites. This can only be fixed by building thousands of new sites to fill in these 20-mile gaps in their existing network. In most places this is simply not practical or financially feasible, so those areas will probably never see 5G UC.

An example is our town here. It is served by a T-Mobile site 6 miles outside of town. Low-band 5G is receivable and works OK, if a bit on the weak side, but if they install mid-band 5G on that site (which they haven’t) it would not reach town and be a useless investment since there are no houses or anything within 3 miles of that site to use the signal. The solution is to build a site here IN town like AT&T and Verizon have done, but the chances of that happening are slim to none.

Those are the sorts of speed numbers I have been seeing when I travel to an area served by 5GUC. (the problem is having to travel 100 miles to see 5GUC) Not bad at all, but if you move 100 yards the UC might go away. The radius of coverage from the site is extremely short. Not as short as millimeter-wave and it’s 50-yard range and not allowing ANYTHING between you and the transmitter, but pretty close.

This is really not all that big news. You can cover 200 million people in the US by only covering a miniscule area of the country. The real test is in covering the remaining 140 million people, almost half the population, that does not live in one of the lucky places covered already. Taking a look at T-Mobile’s coverage maps for this mid-band service, you have to drill way down to see it, and the area covered by each site has only a 1-3 mile diameter. T-Mobile does not have the site density to allow for blanket coverage, nowhere close.

Interesting article but the premise is all wrong. If Apple, or Microsoft or Google either for that matter, ever switched to a multi-year gap between major software versions, the tech press, YouTubers, and pundits would wail and whine and moan about things being boring with nothing changing at all. An example of this was the great moaning about how iOS, with its skewmorphism, had gotten "old and stale" and needed to be completely redone. For no reason than they were bored with it. Users still loved it and were not complaining, it was the tech press who were complaining because they were bored with it.

The tech press needs things to write about. They think that every single version of a product or software should be totally and completely different from the previous version so they will have something to write about. So they can write many "rumor" articles, then preview articles, and launch articles, and one-week review articles, and one-month review articles, and 6 month articles, and on & on.

The one thing I do agree with in this article’s recommendations is that some of the minor features, such as the FaceTime updates, very well should have been released during the past two years during the pandemic instead of now when, hopefully, the pandemic is easing up just a bit.