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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Last mile for fixed rural wireless broadband seems like the obvious one. Today, this is generally done with either LTE or various proprietary things (or if you’re particularly unlucky, satellite). 5G should allow for greater total bandwidth, reducing the impact of contention.

And on the other side, it should be helpful for very dense urban usage. Try using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how you get on.

But yeah, not revolutionary, but should make existing LTE applications less awful in some scenarios where they struggle.

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>> Last mile for fixed rural wireless broadband seems like the obvious one.

I was under the impression that 5G has shorter range and requires smaller cells. That's exactly the opposite of being better for rural areas.

5G is several things, availability of the new mmwave spectrum is just one of them

I don’t really see 5G solving rural broadband issues. You still need to lay backhaul line from the node Bs, and 5G requires more of them, so it’s not orders of magnitude cheaper than running cable to home.

A lot of rural areas have backbone just fine.

It's the last mile that's the issue.

You can find gigabit business internet basically anywhere.

Woah, that's an enormous sweeping generalization.

I have a friend whose parents live in rural Kansas who to this day can't get more than dialup or satellite, even though they've called up every single semi-local ISP (way more than once) and said they'd be willing to pay for installation. At this point, they have more than $20K saved for the chance that some company says maybe.

It's simply way more complicated than you're making it out to be.

No, parent cited _business_ Gigabit. You're talking about retail consumer connectivity. Totally different things. Based on my deep knowledge of connectivity options here in rural Montana parent is correct: there's lit fiber all over the place (certainly to all cell towers) and various telcos will trench up to 5km from any of those pops, for a price. So a business looking to acquire Gigabit connectivity can readily access it. Ask your parents to call the ILEC business sales guy and see what happens. They'll need $5k/mo budget for transit fees and be willing to sign a 3-5 year contract.

I shall tell my friend about that. Thank you for the information!

There is also a website that documents where local schools get their internet from. You can also use those to find out potential providers. I'll try to find a link.

Found it: https://www.compareandconnectk12.org/

Rule of thumb for cable laying is between $20K and $100K per kilometre (0.609 mile) depending on environment. (Besides the actual laying, there's design, permits, landowner agreements, surface restoration, testing, certification, blah blah).

So your friend's parents' $20K gets them a kilometre of dark fibre. Maybe.

Edit to add: point-to-point wireless links might work better, but there again for a reliable wireless repeater you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars minimum in a rural environment. And in Kansas you're going to get bad Fresnel occlusion, so you need really big towers.

Just adding to this by mentioning the situation is similar in distant parts of Europe; there's a lot of areas that aren't served by anything but 2G/3G and where you can't even get dial-up.

Right, but many 5G technologies necessitate small cell size, which also creates a last mile issue.

Building towers is far less costly than going to peoples homes.

Starlink is going to dominate this. Cellular can't economically scale out to meet the vast rural coverage. There are still plenty of towns that don't have basic coverage even now, and to think that suddenly they're going to get 5G equipment... seems unlikely. Meanwhile, the Starlink satellites are up and base stations are in testing. Once they approve and start building out their ground stations, it's SpaceX's business to lose.

It's worth explicitly noting that Starlink is applicable to rural areas. As OG noted 5G is applicable to both densely populated and rural areas.

Further, it's theoretically possible to combine 5G and satellite internet where Starlink or similar serves as the connection to the internet backbone for a device broadcasting a 5G network. Connectivity isn't an all or nothing game and 5G is protocol that the SpaceX internet service business can leverage.

I feel like the viability of that depends a lot on the price point of the service and the user terminal. If it's cheap enough that everyone might as well just have their own then there's no point doing infrastructure for a terrestrial backhaul.

5g and starlink are almost certainly going to be used in tandem in rural areas.

IIRC Starlink can handle about 2gbs per 50 sq miles due to frequency bandwidth limitations. That's a few hundred subscribers. It's not going to make an impact in any but the most rural areas.

Wow, that sounds like a huge limitation, no? The number of people living in places that sparsely populated must be very limited, how does it make economical sense to launch that huge number of satellites?

Google says there's two million satellite internet users. At $50/mo, if SpaceX can grab all of them, which seems well possible, that's 1.2 billion income a year, even assuming that the improved service doesn't result in anybody else switching from bad rural internet to Starlink.

A fifth of the US population lives outside of big cities. That's not a big fraction, but it's a small fraction of a very big number. Being able to capture that market even for a decade would basically bankroll SpaceX's Mars goal by itself. And that's not even looking at other countries.

> A fifth of the US population lives outside of big cities. That's not a big fraction, but it's a small fraction of a very big number. Being able to capture that market even for a decade would basically bankroll SpaceX's Mars goal by itself.

That's about 25 million households, or about $150 billion gross revenue (not profit) over a decade at the price assumptions you give.

If SpaceX’s public estimate of total Mars program cost of $10 billion was reasonable, that might plausibly fund the program. But it's highly dubious that that is even on the right order of magnitude.

Eh, don't underestimate the savings from reuse that's actually practical and not cost-plus. I think SpaceX have demonstrated the economic case for their approach with the F9. And once SpaceX demonstrate they can put cargo on Mars, NASA'll have to get in. Plus people may actually pay to migrate. If you think those numbers are unrealistic, look at SpaceX's posted total costs for their rocket development programs. I think the message is more "every space agency has ridiculously overpaid for decades."

> Plus people may actually pay to migrate.

Sure, but “rich people's vanity may help finance the program” (and NASA will help finance the program, etc.) doesn’t anything to support “satellite internet will finance the program by itself”.

No, I mean if cost is as stated. I'm saying cost as stated is plausible if you account that flights may be sold.

> A fifth of the US population lives outside of big cities

And there are people living rurally outside of the USA, too.

Starlink could bring rural Asia and Africa into the 21st century with one terminal per village.

> Google says there's two million satellite internet users. At $50/mo, if SpaceX can grab all of them, which seems well possible

I doubt it. There are a surprising number of satellite internet customers in completely illogical places, like in the middle of major US cities. A lot of this probably has to do with the abysmal state of broadband options in the US -- many customers are served by a single wired broadband provider; when they lose faith in that provider (or are denied service), satellite may be their next best option.

If there are clusters of subscribers and vast empty areas, does that help via beamforming?

Starlink may very well fail entirely.

Does Starlink work when it's cloudy or rainy? Because satellite TV doesn't.

There’s a huge push at the US federal level to get fiber to the home in rural areas. 10s of billions in funding.

A lot of times it’s run by the electric companies (coops). They already have the right of way, pole access, and customer relationships.

There are dozens of utilities pursuing this, haven’t heard of any working with 5g.

There was a recent executive order restricting foreign equipment on the grid, and I suspect that’s going to make things harder for 5g.

I’m not saying 5g can’t be used in rural applications, just that it looks like fiber has a big head start. Now that there’s also more LEO satellite internet companies coming in with decent latency and bandwidth, that’s going to be another competitor to 5g in rural areas.

Most coops aren't able to make use of the funding due to competing regulations getting in the way. My local coop has been sending us updates every few months on the situation and they're just getting ignored. Their recent emails have taken a more cynical tone that the government was doing more than playing lip service.

Is there much evidence that this funding will do anything more than previous rounds of rural internet funding? Previous funding has simply disappeared into the pockets of incumbent players without any hardware being built.

Technology isn't a solution for graft.

>Try using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how you get on.

There was some ad campaign in Helsinki about two or three years ago telling people to do just this to compare carriers. Telia, Dna, and all the others worked just fine at rush hour at the central station with 50mbps+

Ah, but Finland considers internet access a human right.

The point is that they were able to meet capacity with 4g towers. I'm not sure how that's related. I guess I should also point out that the population of the city is 600k people, so it may not carry over to something like NYC or Tokyo.

And most of those towers provide comparably low-bandwidth connectivity (at least outside urban areas). It's not like you have decent speeds up here, but the legally mandated 2mbps is available in most places.

I used to work for a telcom, and the thing I'm most excited for is the benefits dense urban areas may see with 5G-based internet service. If it weren't for caps, it would significantly drive down the cost and bureaucracy of installing/updating infrastructure while increasing the speeds in a lot of areas.

I wonder how this will fare vs Starlink, which seems like it's trying to solve the same problem.

Starlink will probably do better than 5G for access to rural areas because you don't need to build out a physical cable. In highly dense urban areas with large numbers of simultaneous users, 5G is a better fit.

Have the 5G towers connect to Starlink rather than running the cabling to them.

That doesn't really fix the total bandwidth capacity issue though.

I wonder if a tower with a larger array of Starlink antennas could connect to multiple satellites and get more performance than the pizzabox-sized consumer receivers

In many cases you can link base stations to other downlink points using lasers or really tight beams though. It's not like they can only go upwards.

> fixed rural wireless broadband

It’s well worth trying but WiMAX tried the same so not novel

> Try using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how you get on.

uh, um, I thought LTE is already at least okay as it is for Shinjuku morning/Comiket queue problem

Quite a bit of rural fixed wireless broadband uses Wifi for the last mile.

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