5G roadblock: labor

Sat Jan 4 05:19:40 UTC 2020

On 3/Jan/20 20:38, Christopher Morrow wrote:

>
> 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

You mean like when we all thought ATM was the hottest thing and that
laptops would have it instead of Ethernet :-). It's kind of like the
argument between a PSTN engineer and IP engineer about which network is
better.

Practically, GSM data works because folk self-police; because there is
an artificial barrier called Data (as in $$, not as in bits). Release
that artificial dam, and watch GSM data crumble to its knees.

> 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 :(

The problem with consumer solutions is that they need to designed,
implemented, built, sold and operated at scale.

Ethernet and wi-fi are a lot better at this than SDH and GSM, when it
comes to having these components running around in people's hands. I
mean, just look at the Internet.

Mark.