It's interesting; the current state of the railways is clearly a complete joke but 10-15 years ago, my perception at least, was that it was basically a OK and working system. The stats are only a bit worse now than they were then, I wonder why the massive perception gap.
I don't know about other areas but any apartment buildings post like 1990s are just absolute junk when it comes to separation. Before then it was just concrete or structural brick and now somehow it's often 'fireproof magicboard'.
We gave WiFi 800Mhz in the 5Ghz band and we said the same thing at the time 'this is the last we'll need'. That's 10x as much as in 2.4ghz and at a higher frequency.
I remember a lot of people at the time getting really upset about how wasteful that was. Just saying.
It’s wasteful on its face when not combined with regulation and incentives to shift stuff off of Wi-Fi. 6GHz has practical applications in the AR/VR space, which is why I’m in favor of giving it to Wi-Fi. Ultimately though, we need the industry to stop being lazy and start really agitating for ethernet in construction and devices as the norm, not Wi-Fi.
It's not even that, it's just build apartment blocks out of real materials like concrete and brick not wood and plasterboard.
I have lived in the centre of a city in a victorian apartment block and looking back it was a dream. About a foot of brick wall between me and the next flat either side. Never heard a peep, excellent WiFi.
We said this about 5Ghz when that came out. I'm sorry to say it's not true, there's more than enough spectrum in 5Ghz if properly managed and co-ordinated. I would rather fix that first. Why is it we can run WiFi for thousands of developers in one room/venue just fine but people living in apartment blocks are apparently struggling with a dozen devices per 60sqm apartment?
APs using 160MHZ channel widths with 1 or 2 spatial streams because it's cheaper than 80MHZ channels and 3 or 4 spatial streams. Absolutely crap 'auto' channel selection, too high a power (because cheaper than a second AP), poor AP placement and inappropriate channel width (in an apartment block 40Mhz per AP might be optimal).
To the extent "we" said this, we were absolutely, 100% correct. 5 GHz was and remains a massive improvement over 2.4 GHz, exactly as hoped. But in the decade and half since demands have gone up a lot. 6 GHz will be even better as it propagates even worse and has even more bandwidth available, while human population density won't change.
>I'm sorry to say it's not true, there's more than enough spectrum in 5Ghz if properly managed and co-ordinated
I'm sorry to say you're wrong, there is not remotely enough usable spectrum, and that's regardless of "proper management" which in reality is completely contrary to the practical reality local networks in a setting with a high density of independent people/organizations.
>I would rather fix that first.
That's nice. Most fortunately you are not in charge.
>Why is it we can run WiFi for thousands of developers in one room/venue just fine
That's a low demand situation under the control of a single entity where people are going to be understanding of compromise given the special circumstances, unlike in home or business.
>but people living in apartment blocks are apparently struggling with a dozen devices per 60sqm apartment?
You're wondering why might want their own independent LANs in their own homes? Well, I'm sure you can think of one or two reasons if you put your mind to it.
Most of 5Ghz is unusable because of DFS. In Australia, only 2 out of the 6 80mhz channels are usable. 6 Ghz has 6 of them completely usable today, with possibly more on the upper end usable in the future.
But your home NAS should be on ethernet? Who would buy a NAS and then not wire it in??
The point here is that only devices like a TV, mobile, tablet or laptop should be on WiFi and it's pretty hard to notice the difference between say 50Mbps and 500Mbps on any of those except maybe if you are moving files around on your laptop.
Family of 4 comes home after a long day out, all plug in their phones at the same time to charge and drop down in the sofa to vegetate in front of Netflix. Why is it buffering so bad?!?
Traffic is bursty. Higher bandwidth connections make the whole internet more efficient - if you can race to idle then servers have fewer concurrent connections to keep track of, routers can more quickly clean up their NAT tables etc etc
For better or worse mobile companies will probably make a more efficient use of the space in a country like India at a practical level. I can at least see why you might do this.
I don't know anything really about India's telecoms market, but I know in other 'similar' countries you can buy a mobile phone data plan for like a couple/few dollars a month, but a fixed line is 10X that. You could argue it's not very progressive to reserve the spectrum for the 'rich' who can afford fixed lines.
Few people have phone landlines anymore in India, but wired broadband to the home is not uncommon. It would be annoying to not then be able to have a home WiFi 6G router.
Mobile data is cheap, but broadband is much cheaper.
Given we know 5Ghz can give us like 600Mbps real world on 80Mhz channels, would a fixed line in India typically be above that speed? Is it all GPON these days or still DSL/WISP type stuff?
I'm aware, but, um, without sounding insensitive, not for $50 per sub in hardware cost. Tarana is about 10X that. If you have that kind of money labour is cheap enough to run fibre for the same amount.
The only way that starts to make any sense is if you're doing 128way-256way gpon splits which is not something most are willing to do if they need to make any kind of profit and sell anything more than 100Mbps packages. I wasn't even willing to do 64w splits over 10 years ago now and in hindsight that was wise.
You could go active but then your SFP/SFP+ per port cost eats you up.
For less than 1mil fixed wireless is going to cover 2,800km/sq. You are not going to to get anywhere near that cost trying to do the same thing to 2048(or more) subs in that footprint with fiber. That wouldn't even cover your fiber material cost!
"Mobile doesn't scale in cities" is the exact reason they need 6Ghz (because higher frequencies enable much higher density of cells, reducing terminals per cell). 6Ghz will penetrate buildings terribly, I agree, but it's honestly just not that simple, for example it's now becoming really common for carriers to be doing in building deployments; shopping centres, sports stadiums, the transit network (e.g 4g in the subway) hospitals, the list goes on. Secondly by lifting terminals off of say 800Mhz or 1.8Ghz band and into 6Ghz outside where you can, you free up capacity on those lower frequency bands that do penetrate buildings or reach weird areas like the middle of a park that has tree cover (or whatever).
Wimax hasn't been something anybody I've known in the US has talked about for more than 15 years.
I've built fiber networks and fixed wireless networks. Almost ended up becoming an LTE network as well. It didn't make any sense in any sort of financial modeling, even with spectrum availability.
LTE helps solve "general connectivity". What it does not do is build scalable, reliable, high speed, economical sensitive broadband infrastructure.
It was around that same timeframe that "TV Whitespace" was going to become the next big thing.
Anyway, LTE should be the literal last option. It requires more than 2x as many towers as fixed wireless, with gear more than 20x more expensive. That's also more than 2x-3x the required amount of of battery backup systems, networking equipment, and land / tower leases.
If you have extreme density, you NEED fiber and you need WiFi. You extend from the fiber network with extremely high quality ngFW. To fill gaps, use satellite.
Fiber requires a certain density of subscriber/mile(km), the same as any technology.
Even with 0 labor cost, you still need to get conduit in the ground (materials), fiber, terminations, switching, routing, OLT/ONT cost, handholes, any permitting or utilities location, horizontal boring equipment , jackhammers, splicers, etc. The upfront cost is many, many, many times higher for fiber and if you're okay with your cost-per passing being more than you would ever make on customer ARPU, then sure do that. Even if labor cost was 0. And it will take YEARS longer to deploy and see a return on investment from, of ever.
It doesn't matter if there's broadband to the location if nobody at the location can afford it.
Nowhere with even just an "improved" road (i.e., gravel road, not "only" a path cleared of tall vegetation) is too low density for fiber.
Unless local conditions make you want to use aerial cable, you'll just cable plow a speed pipe and put in a small access riser every 2~3 miles.
You blow the cable in segment-by-segment, either splicing at these locations or spooling the ongoing length up before moving the blower and doing the next segment.
If the cable is damaged you measure with OTDR where the break is, walk there with a shovel, some spare speedpipe, and two speedpipe connectors.
You dig out the damage, cut it out, put good pipe in, join it to the open ends where you cut the damaged section out, and bury it while taking more care to make it last better this time.
You pull/blow out the section of cable and blow in a fresh one, splice it to the existing cable and both ends of the segment, and the connection is fixed.
AFAIK cable plow for fiber in not-very-hard ground is cheaper than planting "telegraph" poles like they did in the old days.
The only expensive parts about fiber optic Internet are the machine that allows you to splice (about 1k$, unlike the 5$ LSA tool for attaching RJ-45 sockets to Cat.5/6/7 cable; this only blocks DIYers from easily doing it) and digging up developed area with more finely controlled tools than a literal plow if you forgot to put in speed pipe the last time the ground was dug up for any infrastructure at all (say, piped water).
Oh, and arguably the optics if you expect to be cheaper than copper on distances within a building at speeds under 10 Gbit/s.
Are we talking about Mumbai or an area w/ 0.2 homes per 10sq km? Because I'm talking about how to do both. Vastly different challenges and economic viability, and I have experience doing both types of environments.
5-6Ghz, certainly, lower frequencies do though. This is why T-mobile offers home broadband using their 5G network (which can support up to 1M devices per square km) in the US; they overbuilt, and have many smaller cells with lots of capacity and are undersubscribed, and monetize the remaining capacity using lowest priority fixed broadband.
One could see India deploying the same density compatible infrastructure in the usual "leapfrog" model of skipping lesser technology implementations in this space.
> mobile companies will probably make a more efficient use of the space
Uh... wat? Something like 70%+ of all internet data anywhere goes over a 2.4GHz wifi for its terminal client, squashed into a paltry 100 MHz of spectrum.
There are surely engineering minutiae arguments to be made for why radios for dedicated bands can be better in some way, or public safety arguments for why unlicensed users need to be segregated from the system that provides emergency service.
But "more efficient use of the space" seems ridiculous on its face.
India has 15% fixed broadband penetration. So let's say you've got a town of 100K households. You can;
A) give the richest 15K of them absolutely no faster WiFi whatsoever because 5GHZ will not be congested at all for them (so there is no problem to solve really)
OR
B) you can have the mobile carrier install a 6Ghz base station on every other telecoms/power pole in town and offer up terabits of mobile data capacity available to everyone throughout the town.
Wi-Fi is not a very efficient way to cover a whole town, due to its inherently low range (at least when involving consumer devices on one end). You'd be spending a lot of resources on base stations that never see any usage.
WiFi literally covers basically all of the urban US already, I'm not understanding this point.
It's true that there's no single service one can sign up for and you have to bounce around cafe and Xfinity and whatever "Free WiFi!" networks are being offered. Which is definitely annoying and it's nice to have a single company sell you service in a neatly packaged "phone" product.
But again, trying to phrase that as a technical point is ridiculous. Free bands are just plain better, technically. You get more data to more people for less money using open spread spectrum protocols than you do with dedicated bands. Period.
I never said anything about free or government-run WiFi, just about auctioning off the spectrum. Companies that build out the infrastructure should be able to charge for access, but they shouldn't be able to prevent others from competing by paying the government for exclusivity. That's a scam.
It's a technical/commercial necessity to have exclusive use over the spectrum in a given area. If you don't believe me why doesn't every city in the world have a paid wifi network? With 5Ghz it should be faster than typical 4G/5G speeds, and it only needs lampost level APs, pretty similar to the microcells that carriers deploy but an order of magnitude cheaper. Instead mobile carriers would rather buy 3 or 6ghz spectrum that only ever gets used in cities anyway, why not wifi in the cities?
ISM is tragedy of the commons; make it free, let anyone do anything and it becomes junk. Carriers need something they have exclusive use of.
ISM is thriving, the only tragedy is that carriers haven't figured out how to charge rents on it and that's a tragedy for them, it's a spectacular success for everyone using it for free.
Carriers don't need 6GHz for backhaul. They have fiber and cable and (other) microwave. Not to mention the ability to shape their own links with antennas and beam forming and do a good job of it rather than a "default job." What they don't have -- and shouldn't be given under any circumstances -- is the excuse to build a moat in the bustling public park.
At the very least, I don't see a need to grant exclusivity across an entire country. e.g. from my home, I can see 5 wifi networks including mine. Of those, only 1 other than mine has a 5GHz signal that reaches me, and everything other than mine is in the -80 to -95 dBm range. There's simply no need to reserve short-range signals in the suburbs in the way that there is for block of giant apartment buildings each with 100s of networks on top of each other.
On top of that, mobile data is quite expensive in the US, so the only time I have data when out and about is... when I'm on free public wifi networks (which is most of the time). So I don't see much reason to give more of a monopoly to mobile providers. I honestly don't even see a use-case for cell service outside of super rural areas; the only reason I even have it is because it's necessary for MFA. Cell providers are legacy tech as far as cities are concerned IMO.
To me it'd make way more sense to me to let wifi have more bands with stricter limits on power levels, and any exclusivity should be to municipalities who can contract with companies to build and manage their infrastructure.
I certainly agree about regional licensing. I think the best scenario would actually be to allow some for WiFi and some for carriers, especially since selling licenses is a two way door in a way that ISM isn't.
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