5G roadblock: labor

Mon Jan 6 21:32:23 UTC 2020

On 1/5/20 10:39 PM, Mark Tinka wrote:
>
> On 5/Jan/20 22:56, Michael Thomas wrote:
>
>> It occurs to me that what we're really quibbling about here is where
>> fiber ends.
> Indeed.
>
> The notion that wireless will replace fibre is misplaced. Wireless is
> just so prevalent because folk don't want to be hooked up to some kind
> of wire. It limits mobility. But make no mistake; at the front of that
> wireless mobility is a wire carrying bits, and going forward, it's
> mainly going to be fibre.
>
>
>> Is it at every street corner, or is it directly into my house?
> This will vary by market (both at a national and international level).
> But everyone is working toward fibre. Whether it be up to the curb +
> copper to your house, or all the way to your house, it will drive
> significant bandwidth that any kind of wireless can never support as a
> backhaul medium.

Or not. It has always amazed me at how backward the bay area is wrt 
networking. The only one installing ftth in San Francisco is a small 
company called Sonic (that I'm aware of). And it's taking them years and 
years and years. The local telco's don't seem to be in any hurry, and 
the cable folks don't seem to have much motivation.

>
> Some will argue about whether the Internet should be considered a basic
> service. However, if we are looking to diffuse it to folk like we did
> water, power, road transportation and a simple copper voice line, we
> can't rely on private businesses whose sole incentive is profiteering.

It sounds like your kids would take extreme exception to it not being a 
basic service. :)

Seriously though, does anybody even remember how we used to figure stuff 
out anymore before the internet?

>> The only advantage they have is that they can do handoffs which while
>> useful, is not a deal breaker in a *lot* of situations. Other than
>> that, I really don't want to use their air bits.
> Like I said before, I personally don't think seamless hand-off is the
> killer app. The kids don't call each other; it's uncool. Already, VoWiFi
> hand-off to GSM doesn't work. And when the call breaks, we are all just
> used to taking the hit and re-dialing. So if the MNO's are trying to
> make seamless hand-off a selling point, they are better off spending
> their time doing other things.

It's rather ironic that one of the hardest technical problems that 
carriers solved was handoffs. I was involved with trying to do the same 
thing over IP instead of L2 and I can tell you that it gives a huge 
amount of appreciation for what those folks pulled off in the '70's. But 
now it's not a very big deal. It's kind of niche need. A useful niche 
and glad to have, but it probably would not have been engineered if we 
had high speed internet then.

Mike