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5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos Or companies that want to break the residential broadband monopoly in a l
by joezydeco 9y ago
5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos
Or companies that want to break the residential broadband monopoly in a local area. Personally, I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town. 5G would be a complete success if that happens.
- dvdhnt 9y agoThat's a really good point! I'm curious as to how expensive implementation will be for municipal providers.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoMuni/coop internet providers? Should be low if they can keep lease costs down for 5G base stations colocating with existing muni real estate, and use existing fiber for backhaul (or new fiber laid as part of Dig Once guidelines).
- Azerb 9y agoThis is the key. Look at the roadblocks Google Fiber has hit in their own fiber deployments, pivoting to wireless to bypass the resistance they're getting from incumbents.
- jeffreyrogers 9y agoI'm interested to see how this plays out. When I looked into it, it seemed hard to compete with wired broadband internet. I think wireless has the best chance in areas where people's only option is satellite or dial-up.
- DenisM 9y agoWhy? TMO is faster than Comcast, they just need more capacity.
- jeffreyrogers 9y agoBecause there's only so much wireless spectrum and at some point you saturate the link. Plus interference from other carriers reduces the capacity of the link. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's also not obvious to me that wireless is better in dense areas, especially since the main cost in wired internet is laying the cable in the first place, which is easier to do cost effectively when you have an urban market to offer service to.
- DenisM 9y agoHow can there be interference between different carriers, if each is using their own spectrum?
- jeffreyrogers 9y agoIt depends on whether it is licensed or unlicensed spectrum. Some of the technology is in ISM bands that anyone can use. In either case, the channels still have capacity limits. I'm not saying it's impossible, which is partly why I brought it up in the first place. I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in. The main advantage wires have is you can just run more of them when you reach your capacity (or in some cases you can just change the hardware at either end of the wire to newer technology).
- DenisM 9y agoAre there any US carriers that are using unlicensed / shares spectrum? The bandwidth is only limited per tower, you can easily double the throughput of a given area by doubling the number of cell towers (and reducing power to avoid interference). It’s a lot cheaper to build a new tower than to run new wires to 200 homes (permits and all). On top of that 5g gives 10x bandwidth over 4g in the same band.
- topranks 9y agoMeh. You can have 1,000 wires in a bit of pipe, effectively 1,000 "spectrums." The air will always only be a single spectrum. Cell division does not scale infinitely, and becomes more and more complex to manage. Running cable you do once, then you can benefit for a long time. Wired will always be the better technical solution, and more economic one, in built up areas.
- joecool1029 9y ago>Personally, I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town. Yeah... about that: https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-reiterates-apathy-toward-fixed-5g-services https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-reiterates-...
- joezydeco 9y agoJan 2017, 10 months before the Layer3 acquisition. We'll see what happens.
- a_imho 9y agoI'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town Is Comcast really that bad? In my admittedly European experience all the service providers are (dis)functional and greedy pretty much to the same degree, none of them are good guys.
- wetpaws 9y agoIt's even worse.
- qwz4233 9y agoI live in a Cox area. They offer fine service, but they are monopolistic and keep increasing prices.
- godzillabrennus 9y agoComcast and Countrywide were in the running for the Consumerists 2008 worst company of the year. Countrywide won but had to help nuke the economy. Comcast had a real shot at winning for being such a malignant organization. The rebrand to Xfinity is a joke.
- a_imho 9y agoWhy? Are they significantly more hated than any big co? Like Uber and Facebook received quite a lot of bad press lately. Is this just perception or are they really that bad/evil? TMO (yeah Austria, not US but still) were bragging about not hashing passwords on twitter just a couple of weeks ago. Not exactly professional.
- geodel 9y agoWell good companies are one which write same CRUD apps Nth time. And then in few months/years they either shutdown or join forces with a bad company.
- csydas 9y agoIn the US they are. Comcast has rather notorious Customer Retention policies and frequent abuse of their position as monopolies in many cities, whether it's a matter of the prices, the data caps, the script injections, the promises made to cities that never materialize, and so on. It's basically like comic book villainy, the only thing missing is photos of Comcast Executives cackling over the complaints from customers. And I say that as someone who was overall okay with Comcast's service the one time I had them. The behavior of Comcast defines the perception most of the US has with them.
- ac29 9y ago5G would need to increase capacity by at least 2 orders of magnitude over 4G to compete with wireline service. That's not going happen, radio spectrum is a finite resource.