The primary purpose seems to be barriers to entry and competition.
I could have told you that when I started a pirate FM radio station at 10. About limiting reach. There are valid RF safety concerns, but that could be solved via other less draconian regulatory procedures. That said, 10 watts vs 100mw. It’s laughable. 5G/LTE is in another class from WiFi, not so much technically (but yes technically speaking as well) but from a regulatory perspective alone it’s a no brainer. A future hypothetical protocol could solve a lot of WiFi’s roaming capacity dead spot and penetration issues. However the laws of physics will make even 2.4 and especially 5Ghz behave more like light than “radio” we are familiar with from lower frequency transmission. -Ben Cannon CEO 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC ben@6by7.net <mailto:ben@6by7.net>
On Jan 2, 2020, at 2:32 AM, William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson@gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/1/20 10:35 AM, Brandon Butterworth wrote:
Given the deployment of Wi-Fi into so many different applications - your statement that 5G is to "replace" WiFi seems overly ambitious We might think that but it is serious. They want to own it all and there is a small cabal of operators owning the spectrum so
On Wed Jan 01, 2020 at 09:29:20AM -0500, jdambrosia@gmail.com wrote: little room for new competitors. Deployed WiFi '5' (ac) and WiFi '6' (ax) already outperform mobile 5G.
If this were actually about performance, the standards would have converged. And there wouldn't need to be so many additional patents. The primary purpose seems to be barriers to entry and competition.
[...]
Perhaps preventing WiFi from further penetration is a better way to look at it? If the mobile companies are providing the WiFi routers they can control it (see LTE WiFi attempt) and one day replace it with 5G or 6G in all the things. If they make a better job of it than everyones devices fighting for 5GHz then they may succeed. Agreed. In my previous job, having spent considerable time talking to various standards' body participants, "replace" was the word used.