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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

The important part to understand is that mmWave is really short range and is blocked by walls, windows, and sheets of paper. Phones with it may need to have "windows" to let the signal make it through the phone case to the antenna.

So it basically works outdoors in very busy cities where it's worth it to put an antenna every few hundred feet: Most Americans will never actually benefit from it. It won't work in their houses or anywhere not very dense urban.

Some Verizon stores actually put a mmWave antenna physically inside the showroom so you can see the performance... but it won't work when you step out the door.

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Yup.

mmWave will make a big difference for the likes of stadiums and theaters. Places with huge crowds. A feature of the high frequency is it doesn't travel far which limits cross talk and allows you to pack in more antennas to serve more people.

How often Telecoms will want to deploy it is a different matter. My guess is you'll see it go up most often in places where companies want to optimize customer experiences. Likely as a partnership with the various telcos. For example, I could see the likes of Disney deploying it across disneyworld and disneyland.

I guess... but like, that's what Wi-Fi AX is supposed to cater to. Apart from voice traffic, which isn't extreme, it's hard to imagine why cellular (which is carrier-specific) would be preferred over Wi-Fi deployment. If the cell towers are in the facility, they need to provide the fiber backhaul either way.

The major difference is that for wifi, you need to setup your connection to whatever wifi network is provided. With your cell data service, that happens automatically for you. You don't need to go in and explicitly join some guest network and sign their ToS.

Maybe if there was some "cell->wifi" standard that could happen, but I'm somewhat doubtful about the benefits there. You'd also have to be super careful, for the same reason you wouldn't really want to join a random open network.

The WiFi industry is working on a new "cell->wifi" standard called OpenRoaming. Pixel phones turned on OpenRoaming support with Android 11.

LTE WiFi offload takes care of securely transiting voice over untrusted networks (like your home network) to the telcos core network using IPSec.

5G has a bunch of frequencies in the same range as wifi, too. They can handle a good chunk of density.

Doesn't 5G have the ability to be carrier agnostic, so that multiple carriers can be on the same antennae? Or am I sniffing glue again?

Nope, carriers buy broadcasting bands. Phones are designed to be able to take in and process the various frequencies that all the carriers use.

Whenever there is a bandwidth auction, you'll have the potential of your phones not having access to your new network's bands.

How we've been handling this is that new purchases often go to newer tech. However, there has been some cannibalism of really old bands (For example, taking a 2g band and turning it into a 5g band). That happens per carrier.

3G is already in the process of being shut down.

Which makes it a little annoying how long they kept making phones that had 4G support but still depended on 3G for calls. Still, it seems like we're on track to get those bands reclaimed at a significantly better pace than 2G.

It's an interesting application, but with Covid-19, it may be a while before places with huge crowds are happening again.

Oh, totally. It's VERY apparent that 5g was developed for a pre-covid world :D

Corona is not going to hamstring the world forever, that’s just some authoritarian fantasy.

I won't be forever certainly. But it's entirely possible that large-scale gatherings like that will be discouraged for at least the timeframe of the next generation of phones, i.e. 1-2 years.

Look at the areas where the epidemic is considered controlled. The first thing they do to show it is organize large scale gatherings, like China with large dance festivals and New Zealand with sports events.

So it basically only works if you're sitting or walking outside? I'm assuming it wouldn't work if you're in a car/bus (unless maybe a convertible/tour bus?)

I imagine it would work just the same as wifi on buses currently. There will be a mmWave access point inside the bus which will use something else (maybe a cell backhaul?) for it's connection.

As someone mentioned in another comment, the best use case for mmWave is places with very high density such as concerts, sports stadiums, etc where current cell networks and wifi seriously struggle. You don't have channel congestion if the waves can't make it through the walls in the venue.

My guess is that it will be good for high-density outdoor environments like stadia.

Hopefully some other useful applications will present themselves. Cruise ships, maybe? Airport terminals?

Took me a second, but the arent meant "stadia" as in the plural of "stadium", not google's gaming service.

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