nanog mailing list archives

Re: 5G roadblock: labor


From: Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom mu>
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2020 23:01:37 +0200



On 7/Jan/20 18:49, Andrey Kostin wrote:

 

I'm had some aquintance with this technology and participated once in
WiFi network rollout on a relatively big stadium. All these wifi
controllers have their limits that in my understanding are
significantly lower than mobile networks. You can cover one building
or campus, but how about the next building on the street? It it's
owner has a different system it may be difficult to connect them even
aside of bureaucratic reasons.

To be specific, I was talking about something like this:

    https://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/wireless/mist/

And more intently, this:

    https://www.mist.com/artificial-intelligence-for-it/

I know, getting into the vendor-sphere is not my intention here, but
just to give the example that goes beyond the regular WLAN controller.


The main asset of wireless networks is their infrastructure and
coverage that they were building from 90-s. If you have the network
that covers a large area you can deploy any technology that fits in
it. Definitely people from mobile networks have their own way of
thinking as well as transport and telephony engineers but if wifi
could satisfy all the requirements they would probably be deploying
it. Do you remember Wimax? At that time it was better for data then
mobile networks but probably demand for data services wasn't big
enough at that time and then new specs were developed that partially
used existing mobile technologies. I'm not a protagonist of mobile
networks as I'm working in fixed networks field, but you can't ignore
the fact that at the moment they have widest coverage, not the best
everywhere but the most unversal service, non-elastic demand and the
best prospective for future growth.

Wi-fi is not the application for wide, vast outdoor areas. GSM works
better for that.

Wi-fi is better for dense, particularly (semi)close(d) environments,
e.g., inside hospitals, inside malls, inside homes, inside restaurants,
inside business premises, inside airports, inside train stations, that
sort of thing.

You can address a huge amount of demand in dense cities when people are
around such infrastructure that pools them together in one location,
with wi-fi, and help ease the pressure off GSM networks, while still
maintaining (and perhaps, even improving) the online user experience. At
least until 5G is cheap enough to roll out en masse.

Mark.


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