Impacts of Encryption Everywhere (any solution?)

Wed May 30 20:35:15 UTC 2018

On 30/May/18 19:10, K. Scott Helms wrote:

> Mark,
>
> A couple of things, first that kind of utilization isn't feasible once
> penetration rates in dense areas reach certain levels.  There's a
> reason that NTT Docomo moved more than 70% of their data traffic to
> the 3.5 GHz band and that reason is that there's not (nor will there
> be) enough wireless spectrum to meet the needs of everyone with
> licensed space.  (That same use case is why all the big North American
> providers are looking at CBRS.) Further, 4G/5G is going to have
> trouble scaling to the kinds of network demands going forward, again
> especially in dense areas.  While it's certainly possible today to
> stream unicast video over LTE and will (for a while) even more
> feasible over 5G the physics simply aren't with the wireless world. 

I don't disagree - fundamentally, one can't argue with the scalability
of wired media vs. any kind of wireless media. In (South) Africa, two
things are happening to scale out 4G:

  * Getting the regulators to issue new spectrum to MNO's. This is also
    aided by the country's migration plans from analog to digital for
    free-to-air TV, which will make new spectrum available for the
    MNO's. However...

  * ... the above isn't moving at the pace the MNO's would like, which
    is why they have become some of the most efficient mobile operators
    in the world by re-farming existing spectrum and scaling that way.

>
> I'd say that your example of poor DSL performance isn't unique, it
> happens in some spots in the US,

As with the Internet, the technology is the technology regardless of
where it's applied in the world. ADSL scaling properties suffer in
Africa the same way they do in any other continent.

> but in general wired performance has much higher individual and even
> higher aggregate capacities /when correctly deployed./

No argument from me there. I use 3G/4G for data when I travel within the
country, as I mentioned before. When I'm at home, my FTTH service does
the job. When I'm in the office, my backbone does the job. Wireless will
never meet the demands, long-term, be it on 5G or 802.11ax. But for now,
3G/4G/LTE is the most appropriate technology for, pretty much, all of
Africa. And to be fair, it is not doing a half-bad job, across the board.

> /  /I doubt your hotel example is a poor deployment though, it's more
> likely that the hotel owners are under paying for both the WAN
> connection and the WiFi infrastructure.

I'm a network engineer - I can tell when the issue is a pretty bad wi-fi
setup, a pretty bad LAN switch, a pretty bad NAT44 translator, or a
pretty bad ISP.

I was in Paris in March for a conference, and I couldn't get the hotel
staff to understand that the problem with the hotel Internet was both a
combination of poorly deployed wi-fi on each floor + insufficient
capacity from their ISP. Their solution to me was, "Reboot your laptop
and check again".

I don't have the luxury of data roaming when I'm outside of South
Africa. When I'm in South Africa, tethering always works better, even
when the hotel wi-fi has moments of being decent.

Mark.