> Could maximum data speeds—on mobile devices, at home, at work—be approaching “fast enough” for most people for most purposes?
That seems to be the theme across all consumer electronics as well. For an average person mid phones are good enough, bargain bin laptops are good enough, almost any TV you can buy today is good enough. People may of course desire higher quality and specific segments will have higher needs, but things being enough may be a problem for tech and infra companies in the next decade.
The answer is yes. But it's not just about speed. The higher speeds drain the battery faster.
I say this because we currently use an old 2014 phone as a house phone for the family. It's set to 2G to take calls, and switches to 4g for the actual voice call. We only have to charge it once every 2-3 weeks, if not longer. (Old Samsung phones also had Ultra Power Saving mode which helps with that)
2G is being shutdown though. Once that happens and it's forced into 4G all the time, we'll have to charge it more often. And that sucks. There isn't a single new phone on the market that lasts as long as this old phone with an old battery.
The same principle is why I have my modern personal phone set to 4G instead of 5G. The energy savings are very noticeable.
I actually miss the concept of house phones. Instead of exclusively person-to-person communication, families would call other families to catch up and sometimes even pass the phone around to talk to the grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc.
It may have been decades ago, but there was a time when it did not seem awkward or even unusual to just...call someone's house, or to simply stop by.
There was usually a purpose in this that was more profound than just being bored or lonely or something, but none was really required.
And maybe the person they were trying to find wasn't home right now, but that was OK. It was not weird to talk to whoever for a minute, or to hang out for awhile.
Nowadays, the ubiquity of personal pocket supercomputers means that the closest most people ever get to that kind of generally-welcome (if unexpected) interaction is a text message.
"Hey, I'm in front of your house. Are you home?"
And maybe that works more efficiently between two individuals than knocking on the door did, but otherwise this present way of doing things mostly just serves to further increase our social isolation.
Sometimes it seems that the closer it is that our technology allows us to be, the further it is that we actually become.
unfortunately, these days the inundation of spam from hucksters trying to sell you something, or worse, has now made everyone extremely distrustful of unprovoked interaction.
My siblings are much older than I am and when I was 10 my sister was starting her relationship with now-husband. One time he called our house phone, I picked up, and said "yeah sister is home but she's busy at the moment so you can spend five minutes talking to me instead"
I set up an old rotary phone via twilio as a house phone for our kids. They just dial 1-9, each number is programmed to a different family member. Their cousins also have one, so they can call each other whenever they want. It’s great to also have a phone that just rings in the house, for when you don’t care about getting a specific person.
That's a facinating obsevation! I hadn't consider the side effects of calling a common phone and interacting with other people rather than exclusively the one person you wanted to talk/text with. Probably distances you from (or never allows you to know) those adjacent to the person you already know.
I can vouch that pass the phone around is still a thing in southern Europe, or being sundenly dropped into a group video call where everyone gathers around the phone to be in view.
I’m looking to set up an Asterisk server that takes calls over Bluetooth on any paired cell phones inside the house, or falls back to a VoIP line if no phones are at home.
Similarly, I find that it’s hard to catch family on their cell and much easier when I call their home.
There are some more traditional home phones which work on 4/5G networks with a DECT handset which talks to a cellular base station. You might look into switching to that model to replace your "cell phone as a home phone" concept. It makes it a bit easier to add another handset to the DECT network and often means convenient cradles to charge the handsets while the base station stays in a good signal spot with plenty of power.
Just a thought when it comes time to change out that device.
Given that it's a house phone, have you tried enabling Wi-Fi Calling (VoWiFi) in the carrier settings (if you have that option), and then putting the phone in Airplane Mode with wi-fi enabled? AFAIK that should be fairly less impactful on battery.
(Alternately, if you don't have the option to use VoWiFi, you could take literally any phone/tablet/etc; install a softphone app on it; get a cheap number from a VoIP number and connect to it; and leave the app running, the wi-fi on, and the cellular radio off. At that point, the device doesn't even need a[n e]SIM card!)
Or just port the number to Magic Jack for $20 and get a cordless phone $20 at Target that you have to charge once per week if you don’t just keep it on the dock, and pay like $5/mo or less for service. And you can make/receive calls from that number on a mobile phone using their app.
I think it's more that mobile transfer speeds is no longer the bottleneck. It's the platforms and services people are using. If you record a minute video on your phone it ends up as like 1GB. But when you send it on a messaging app it gets compressed down to 30MB. People would notice and appreciate higher quality video. But it's too expensive to host and transfer for the service.
Sure, but why is my Samsung tumble dryer "enhanced with AI" now? You know what it does? You turn it on, it shows "optimising with AI" on the screen....to show you the most used programme. That's not AI, that's a counter in a text file somewhere. But of course everything has to have AI now so my tumble dryer now has AI. The market has spoken.
And in the meantime the real physical buttons that last for millions of presses have been replaced with finicky touch buttons that don't work when there's a drop of moisture on the screen, and the whole panel dies after 2 years (only 1 year warranty sorry) and they don't sell replacements so you have to buy a new dryer or get a janky offbrand replacement off of Ebay and spend an afternoon trying to figure out how to install it (if it's even possible).
This is robber baron behavior. We aren't sending our kids to the coal breakers anymore (at least not until OSHA is shut down and child labor laws are ruled unconstitutional violations of the 1st amendment), but we are all being squeezed to the limits of our incomes and sanities, so directors and investors and the CEO can buy more yachts.
We need to enforce minimum warranty periods per product category. We already have a detailed classification of every single product for import duty purposes, let's reuse that and apply specific warranties. For instance, a car or an appliance should have a 5 years warranty. They simply consume too much resources to produce, transport and recycle to justify a shorter lifespan.
Well that's another gimmick, right. It has like 20 different programs, but the one I only ever use is "Cotton - extra dry" because that's the one that actually gets everything properly dry. Every other setting leaves things slightly wet which I don't understand how that's desirable by anyone.
It won't be a problem for them. They'll find a way to make it not enough - disable functionality that people want or need and then charge a subscription fee to enable it. And more ads. Easy peasy.
Back in the day, if you knew the secret menu, you could change the default vocoder to use on the network. The cheap cell company I used defaulted to half-rate. I would set my phone to the highest bitrate, with a huge improvement in quality, but at the expense of the towers rejecting my calls around 25% of the time. When I would call landline phones, people would mention how good it sounded.
For a short while Verizon enabled this on our super grandfathered plan. Well not exactly this, it was some more modern codec dubbed HD and it sounded so good it was freaky and unnerving
I don't understand this "good enough" argument. We never really needed anything we use daily today. Life was "good enough" 100 years ago (if you could afford it), should we have stopped?
4K video reaches you only because it's compressed to crap. It's "good enough" until it's not. 360p TV was good enough at some point too.
> 4K video reaches you only because it's compressed to crap.
Yes, but I assume when they say the "consumer" they mean everyone not us. Most people i've had in my home couldnt tell you the difference between a 4K bluray at 2 odd meters on a 65" panel vs 1080p.
I can be looking at a screen full of compression artificts that seem like the most obvious thing i've ever seen and ill be surrounded by people going "what are you talking about?"
Even if I can get them to notice, the response is almost always the same.
"Oh...yeah ok I guess I can see. I just assumed it supposed to look like it shrug its just not noticable to me"
You can't ask someone today to see what they're not used to see.
I expect a future of screens that are natively subtly 3D and where you could see someone's nose hair without focusing. Only then they will notice "why do they look blurry and flat" when comparing it to an old TV.
Today if you get closer to a TV you will see blur. Tomorrow you will see the bird's individual strands of feathers.
> Only then they will notice "why do they look blurry and flat" when comparing it to an old TV.
They either won’t notice or won’t care and even if they do, it takes far longer than enthusiasts expect for the line to move.
Large numbers of people still say in 2025 that ‘4K is a gimmick,’ so I’m not holding my breath. ‘Good enough’ lasts much longer for the majority than most realise.
Look at displays today: I can’t even buy a modern one with motion quality that matches what I had 20 years ago. Why? Because for the average consumer, what we have is ‘good enough’ and has been for a long time.
> Today if you get closer to a TV you will see blur. Tomorrow you will see the birds individual strands of feathers
No, I’ll see blur. Unless you’re suggesting we’ve magically solved sample and hold induced motion blur in the consumer display space?
Of course, I know you meant in a still frame however if I wanted to stare at a high quality still image, I’d save myself the money and just go with some nice framed artwork instead.
> “Good enough” is temporary.
I’ll grant you this on a long enough timeframe. But it’s got a long tail and it’s gonna be a slow ride.
It reminds me back when HDTV was starting to roll out to things like cable television. Often cable companies kept the standard def versions of the channels on the normal channel numbers while the HD version of the channel would be that number +500 or +1000 or whatever.
I would constantly see friends and family just tune to the standard def 4:3 version of the channel often being terribly stretched despite having a new widescreen HDTV. I'd ask why they're watching the SD channel instead of the HD version, and it seemed like most people didn't even notice it. I'd often suggest/go ahead and change the channel to the HD version and talk about where these HD channels are, but the next time I'd visit it would be on standard def 4:3 again.
> 4K video reaches you only because it's compressed to crap.
Streaming video gets compressed to crap. People are being forced to believe that it is better to have 100% of crap provided in real time instead of waiting just a few extra moments to have the best possible experience.
Here is a trick for movie nights with the family: choose the movie you want to watch, start your torrent and tell everyone "let's go make popcorn!" The 5-10 minutes will get enough of the movie downloaded so you will be able to enjoy a high quality video.
I'm not sure if you realize it, but all forms of digital media playback are streaming. Yes, even that MP4 stored locally on your SSD. There is literally no difference between "playing" that MP4 and "streaming" a Youtube or Netflix video.
Yes, even playing an 8K Blu-Ray video is still streaming.
"Streaming" as most people think of it is "heavily compressed video optimized for low bandwidth being piped over a network", usually with no user choice of resolution, encoding, or playback settings
Due to a bunch of reasons combined, I'm stuck on a plan where I have 5GB of mobile data per month, and honestly, I never really use it up. I stopped browsing so much social media because it's slop. I don't watch YouTube on mobile because I prefer to do it at home on my TV. I don't stream music because I keep my collection on the SD card. Sometimes I listen to the online radio but it doesn't use much data anyway. Otherwise I browse the news, use navigation, and that's pretty much it.
Once every few months I'm in a situation where I want to watch YouTube on mobile or connect my laptop to mobile hotspot, but then I think "I don't need to be terminally online", or in worst-case scenario, I just pay a little bit extra for the data I use, but again, it happens extremely rarely. BTW quite often my phone randomly loses connection, but then I think "eh, god is telling me to interact with the physical world for five minutes".
At home though, it's a different situation, I need to have good internet connection. Currently I have 4Gbps both ways, and I'm thinking of changing to a cheaper plan, because I can't see myself benefitting from anything more than 1Gbps.
In any case though, my internet connection situation is definitely "good enough", and I do not need any upgrades.
That is the thing with capitalist exponential growth, it doesn't last forever, eventually it flattens out, where new goods only get acquired due to existing ones being replaced, or newer generations getting to acquire their first products.
Business should learn to earn just good enough to make by.
Business culture of the 50s and 60s was closer to this, largely due to how taxes on corporations worked. At least if I'm to believe some business historians I follow.
That seems to be the theme across all consumer electronics as well. For an average person mid phones are good enough, bargain bin laptops are good enough, almost any TV you can buy today is good enough. People may of course desire higher quality and specific segments will have higher needs, but things being enough may be a problem for tech and infra companies in the next decade.