On 3/Jan/20 20:38, Christopher Morrow wrote:
There are some folk local to my office who often speak about wifi/cellular and have some fairly decent knowledge about the technology and deployment/management/etc... One thing they've made clear (and our enterprise wireless folk echo this, actually) is that the cellular network technologies of 'today' are far better at client/power/tower control and management.
So much so that for dense deployments it sounds, actually, better to have 4G/LTE on the 'tower' and push that chipset into laptop/etc things. This way you can better control client -> tower associations and traffic patterns and power demands. This isn't something that is easily doable in the current (before wifi5 I mean? I dont' really know much about the wifi world beyond 802.11ac gear, sorry) wifi deployments, and client experience suffers often because of these problems. Things like: overloaded basestations chatty clients bw hog clients borked radio/client stacks
You mean like when we all thought ATM was the hottest thing and that laptops would have it instead of Ethernet :-). It's kind of like the argument between a PSTN engineer and IP engineer about which network is better. Practically, GSM data works because folk self-police; because there is an artificial barrier called Data (as in $$, not as in bits). Release that artificial dam, and watch GSM data crumble to its knees.
What if the world had the capability to offer solid 'cellular' at the cost (free) of 'wifi' in a bunch of these places? if the 'cellular' was offered by local businesses and perhaps not subject to the telco capture problems? (costs to the client) I think that's the world the folk in my local office were pushing for... it seemed nice :) but getting enough 4g/5g vs wifi chipsets into the clients seemed like the really sticky wicket :(
The problem with consumer solutions is that they need to designed, implemented, built, sold and operated at scale. Ethernet and wi-fi are a lot better at this than SDH and GSM, when it comes to having these components running around in people's hands. I mean, just look at the Internet. Mark.