On Fri, Jan 3, 2020 at 4:37 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.mu> wrote:
On 3/Jan/20 11:25, Saku Ytti wrote:
Yes markets differ, and this is not 4G/5G question, only thing 5G does is help markets which struggle to provide sufficient service in dense metro installations.
Which brings us full circle - what's the cost of hooking those dense cities up to 5G in 2020 vs. running fibre to an 802.11ac|ax access point to serve its residents and visitors, in 2020?
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
And more interestingly, if that city's residents and visitors had the option of connecting to active 5G or wi-fi, what do we think they'd choose?
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 :(