5G roadblock: labor

Fri Jan 3 18:38:11 UTC 2020

On Fri, Jan 3, 2020 at 4:37 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 3/Jan/20 11:25, Saku Ytti wrote:
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> >
> > Yes markets differ, and this is not 4G/5G question, only thing 5G does
> > is help markets which struggle to provide sufficient service in dense
> > metro installations.
>
> Which brings us full circle - what's the cost of hooking those dense
> cities up to 5G in 2020 vs. running fibre to an 802.11ac|ax access point
> to serve its residents and visitors, in 2020?

There are some folk local to my office who often speak about
wifi/cellular and have some fairly decent knowledge about the
technology and deployment/management/etc... One thing they've made
clear (and our enterprise wireless folk echo this, actually) is that
the cellular network technologies of 'today' are far better at
client/power/tower control and management.

So much so that for dense deployments it sounds, actually, better to
have 4G/LTE on the 'tower' and push that chipset into laptop/etc
things. This way you can better control client -> tower associations
and traffic patterns and power demands. This isn't something that is
easily doable in the current (before wifi5 I mean? I dont' really know
much about the wifi world beyond 802.11ac gear, sorry) wifi
deployments, and client experience suffers often because of these
problems. Things like:
  overloaded basestations
  chatty clients
  bw hog clients
  borked radio/client stacks

> And more interestingly, if that city's residents and visitors had the
> option of connecting to active 5G or wi-fi, what do we think they'd choose?

What if the world had the capability to offer solid 'cellular' at the
cost (free) of 'wifi' in a bunch of these places? if the 'cellular'
was offered by local businesses and perhaps not subject to the telco
capture problems? (costs to the client) I think that's the world the
folk in my local office were pushing for... it seemed nice :) but
getting enough 4g/5g vs wifi chipsets into the clients seemed like the
really sticky wicket :(