What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

Michael Thomas mike at mtcc.com
Tue Jan 25 18:06:51 UTC 2022


On 1/25/22 6:02 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
>
>
> On 1/25/22 15:45, Masataka Ohta wrote:
>
>> As is stated in free part of the article that:
>>
>>     The country’s three biggest carriers, AT&T, Verizon and
>>     T-Mobile, have offered 5G connectivity but in practice
>>     this differed little from the earlier 4G.
>>
>> 5G is nothing. That's all.
>
> Considering the relatively decent performance of 4G/LTE, especially as 
> fibre + wi-fi is more rife, particularly in the dense metropolitan 
> areas that would be fibre-rich, with folk offloading a lot more of 
> their traffic to wi-fi in lieu of GSM, I am still struggling to see 
> the 5G use-case, outside of implementing 3GPP specs. for their own sake.
>
> By one operator offering 5G, all other operators are forced to offer 
> 5G. So they all end up spending billions to remain in the same place.
>
> Ah well...
>
> As far as AWS 5G goes, they don't have to be locked into just 5G. 
> De-risking the back-end for non-traditional greenfields would allow 
> them to even support GPRS if it made sense. It's all software and CPU.
>
That's what I've been trying to figure out as well. The use case of 
seamless handoff across large regions is fairly niche imo. Sure that was 
the original motivation for cell phones, but smartphones are about as 
statically located as laptops and nobody is rushing to get their laptops 
seamless handoff capabilites. That handoff capability comes at a 
tremendous cost in both spectrum and coverage.

Since everybody has their own wifi it seems that federating all of them 
for pretty good coverage by a provider and charging a nominal fee to 
manage it would suit a lot of people needs. It doesn't need expensive 
spectrum and the real estate is "free". Basically a federation of 
"guestnets".

Mike



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