5G roadblock: labor

Tue Jan 7 21:01:37 UTC 2020

On 7/Jan/20 18:49, Andrey Kostin wrote:

>  
>
> I'm had some aquintance with this technology and participated once in
> WiFi network rollout on a relatively big stadium. All these wifi
> controllers have their limits that in my understanding are
> significantly lower than mobile networks. You can cover one building
> or campus, but how about the next building on the street? It it's
> owner has a different system it may be difficult to connect them even
> aside of bureaucratic reasons.

To be specific, I was talking about something like this:

    https://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/wireless/mist/

And more intently, this:

    https://www.mist.com/artificial-intelligence-for-it/

I know, getting into the vendor-sphere is not my intention here, but
just to give the example that goes beyond the regular WLAN controller.

> The main asset of wireless networks is their infrastructure and
> coverage that they were building from 90-s. If you have the network
> that covers a large area you can deploy any technology that fits in
> it. Definitely people from mobile networks have their own way of
> thinking as well as transport and telephony engineers but if wifi
> could satisfy all the requirements they would probably be deploying
> it. Do you remember Wimax? At that time it was better for data then
> mobile networks but probably demand for data services wasn't big
> enough at that time and then new specs were developed that partially
> used existing mobile technologies. I'm not a protagonist of mobile
> networks as I'm working in fixed networks field, but you can't ignore
> the fact that at the moment they have widest coverage, not the best
> everywhere but the most unversal service, non-elastic demand and the
> best prospective for future growth.

Wi-fi is not the application for wide, vast outdoor areas. GSM works
better for that.

Wi-fi is better for dense, particularly (semi)close(d) environments,
e.g., inside hospitals, inside malls, inside homes, inside restaurants,
inside business premises, inside airports, inside train stations, that
sort of thing.

You can address a huge amount of demand in dense cities when people are
around such infrastructure that pools them together in one location,
with wi-fi, and help ease the pressure off GSM networks, while still
maintaining (and perhaps, even improving) the online user experience. At
least until 5G is cheap enough to roll out en masse.

Mark.