What I want from 5G phone connections

[andrewducker]

Is not, in fact, faster mobile internet.

I mean, I'm not going to say "No, don't give me that faster internet, keep it away from me." But it's not the main thing that I'm missing from 4G.

There are two main things I want:
1) More efficiency. I want a mode which is used 99% of the time where the phone is doing nothing at all, and so it's barely connected to the network in the first place. Because right now I've got my phone switched to 3G, because 4G knocks a good hour or so off my my daily battery life. And if there's no signal, because I'm in the middle of nowhere, or inside a big metal box, I don't want the transmitter to ramp up to maximum power in the hopes of finding a signal. I mean, I want it to do that for maybe 1/10 of a second, but after that I want it to back off and assume that there _is_ no signal, and then use no battery at all for 30 seconds before trying that 1/10 of a second again. Because being out of signal in Hereford _also_ really sucked battery-wise.

2) The ability to make phone calls and send texts even if I'm not connected directly to my provider's network. I mean, they can do this for roaming to a different network, but if I'm completely out of signal, but have WiFi then why on earth can't my phone use that to pass voice/SMS/MMS over? It's all just bits after all. And yet, when I was in the holiday home in Hereford, completely out of mobile signal, but with perfectly workable WiFi, I'm cut off from phone/texts? This makes no sense...

Give me both of those and _then_ I want more speed, obviously. (Although what I'll use it for other than tethering I have no idea.)

Comments

[matgb]

One thing I miss about my Nokia was dead simple "use 2G for phone unless I want to go online" setting. I'm sure if I delved into the guts of Android or searched app stores I'd find how to do that for my Samsung but for now I just put up with the 3G powersink.

I didn't use it much out and about in Devon last week, but could tell it was frantically trying to find a signal when I was sat on a beach in the middle of nowhere, and the reason I was sat on a beach in the middle of nowhere was in part to get away from the temptation to just check Twitter, etc.

But yeah, phones that constantly try to find connections and waste battery to do it are annoying, it's ultimately a software issue but it'd be good if the specs for something like 5G were set to degrade gracefully and to only use the higher end spectrum when needed rather than for everything.

[marahmarie]

I want a mode which is used 99% of the time where the phone is doing nothing at all, and so it's barely connected to the network in the first place.

This is what my current phone provider (Net10) does by default and I'm telling ya, you probably don't want that (at least not as their technology for it currently stands). The problem is this mode practically shuts down your wifi and 3G connections until you can't get enough of a signal with either to do what you want when you want to do it. It's like sleep mode with a wake button set by them, not by you, so if you interrupt this mode before they're done running it you're sort of out of luck.

It's the only thing I still dislike about Net10's service (outside of dropping the second part of two-part or more SMS messages, a problem I've endured almost daily for the last two years that they seem to have finally fixed just last month).

As for 2) there's apps for that, but I'll assume you know that and really mean they should just bake what the apps do into the damn service already...and if so then yeah, I could not agree more.