[PLUG] Fiber, means and ENDS

[Russell Senior]

On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 8:24 AM Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 3 Feb 2019, Russell Senior wrote:
>
> > My primary argument is that we need to solve the monopoly problem.
>
> This.
>

Perhaps there's a future where wifi can provide the speed and
> reliability of fiber. Maybe that will lessen the monopoly problem, or
> maybe the FCC will change guidelines to simply move the bottleneck
> from phyical access to frequency licensing. (I'm not holding my breath
> here.)
>

Doing local wireless is fine, but *depends* on usable wireline backhaul.
Wireless spectrum that is free to use is massively oversubscribed today.

There is a lot of talk about 5G these days, which is 99% talk at this point
(see paragraph below), but it will be owned by the wireless carriers that
have their own market concentration issues. The design is right, though.
The way to get higher capacity wireless connectivity in dense environments
is through shorter range radio links that don't interfere over large areas,
so that you can use the same spectrum over and over again in different
locations. The challenge is the cost of deploying all those short range
radios, and that cost and the cost of the spectrum leases is going to keep
the carrier's fees high and bandwidth caps low for the foreseeable future.

I went to the IEEE talk on millimeter-wave physical layer last summer (
https://meetings.vtools.ieee.org/m/172633). The challenges of establishing
and maintaining a link in millimeter wave are daunting. First, the ranges
are up to 200m, but only after assuming a 20dB antenna gain. Before you can
even start to talk, you need both the base station and the handset to find
each other with narrow beams (100 antenna elements, with a beam width of a
few degrees), in a highly dynamic environment with moving reflectors. The
computational load of tracking at the handset level is going to pose a
power challenge as well. I walked out with the feeling that it will be a
miracle if they get it to work.

-- 
Russell Senior
russell at personaltelco.net