this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Technology
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I haven't been following the issue, but:
So, over-the-air television uses broadcasting. You broadcast one signal, everyone in the area can receive it. You can have one viewer or a million viewers and it takes the same amount of bandwidth.
But if everyone is streaming video unicast, the way they typically would over the Internet from somewhere like YouTube -- which has the benefit of letting people watch whatever they want, whenever they want, independent of anyone else, you can't do that; you can't have a million viewers in a cell, or anything approaching that, because bandwidth consumption scales linearly with the number of viewers.
I know that the US emergency alert system uses broadcasting over the cell network, so there has to be at least limited support for broadcasting in the cell network, though. I dunno if cell providers use it for pushing out system updates to phones, but if they don't, I suspect that they should.
googles
https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2022/12/multicast-broadcast-group-communication
It sounds like there is some kind of way to do broadcast/multicast within 5G, though.