Comment by wtmt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtmt | Hacker News Reader

> In response, the Wi-Fi Alliance and the DSA are trying to stoke fears that such a move would severely dent Europe's digital development, claiming Wi-Fi is the primary way consumers access the internet and constraining it would impact progress.

Just today, there’s a news report in India where the major telecom companies have lobbied that the entire 6 GHz band be reserved for mobile services and that even part of it shouldn’t be left for unlicensed WiFi. [1]

The problem in India is that the penetration of wired broadband is very low, and the telcos don’t seem to be interested in expanding it as much as they are in grabbing more of wireless spectrum.

I don’t believe it’s a good move to reserve these exclusively for mobile services. We (in general) need more unlicensed spectrum for innovation. Let the companies figure out another way out.

I also know that these bands are already allowed for unlicensed WiFi use in the US.

[1]: https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/j...

For better or worse mobile companies will probably make a more efficient use of the space in a country like India at a practical level. I can at least see why you might do this.

I don't know anything really about India's telecoms market, but I know in other 'similar' countries you can buy a mobile phone data plan for like a couple/few dollars a month, but a fixed line is 10X that. You could argue it's not very progressive to reserve the spectrum for the 'rich' who can afford fixed lines.

Few people have phone landlines anymore in India, but wired broadband to the home is not uncommon. It would be annoying to not then be able to have a home WiFi 6G router.

Mobile data is cheap, but broadband is much cheaper.

Given we know 5Ghz can give us like 600Mbps real world on 80Mhz channels, would a fixed line in India typically be above that speed? Is it all GPON these days or still DSL/WISP type stuff?

> would a fixed line in India typically be above that speed?

My family lives outside of a tier 2 city border, in what used to be farmland in the 90s.

They have Asianet FTTH at 1Gbps, but most of the video/streaming traffic ends at the CDN hosts in the same city.

That CDN push to the edge is why Hotstar is faster to load there - the latency on seeks isn't going around the planet.

That is really cool, but sad to see it's only at around 15% penetration.

WISP can do 1Gbps in 6GHz now, reliably, with Tarana. The technology is staggering.

I'm aware, but, um, without sounding insensitive, not for $50 per sub in hardware cost. Tarana is about 10X that. If you have that kind of money labour is cheap enough to run fibre for the same amount.

The only way that starts to make any sense is if you're doing 128way-256way gpon splits which is not something most are willing to do if they need to make any kind of profit and sell anything more than 100Mbps packages. I wasn't even willing to do 64w splits over 10 years ago now and in hindsight that was wise.

You could go active but then your SFP/SFP+ per port cost eats you up.

For less than 1mil fixed wireless is going to cover 2,800km/sq. You are not going to to get anywhere near that cost trying to do the same thing to 2048(or more) subs in that footprint with fiber. That wouldn't even cover your fiber material cost!

Mobile doesn't scale for densely populated mega cities. The signal also doesn't penetrate glass and concrete very well.

5-6Ghz, certainly, lower frequencies do though. This is why T-mobile offers home broadband using their 5G network (which can support up to 1M devices per square km) in the US; they overbuilt, and have many smaller cells with lots of capacity and are undersubscribed, and monetize the remaining capacity using lowest priority fixed broadband.

One could see India deploying the same density compatible infrastructure in the usual "leapfrog" model of skipping lesser technology implementations in this space.

"Mobile doesn't scale in cities" is the exact reason they need 6Ghz (because higher frequencies enable much higher density of cells, reducing terminals per cell). 6Ghz will penetrate buildings terribly, I agree, but it's honestly just not that simple, for example it's now becoming really common for carriers to be doing in building deployments; shopping centres, sports stadiums, the transit network (e.g 4g in the subway) hospitals, the list goes on. Secondly by lifting terminals off of say 800Mhz or 1.8Ghz band and into 6Ghz outside where you can, you free up capacity on those lower frequency bands that do penetrate buildings or reach weird areas like the middle of a park that has tree cover (or whatever).

You could do gigabit fixed wireless for less than 1/10 the cost of LTE, and have better performance.

LTE is what somebody would do without much telecom experience and more money than sense.

LTE is what the telecom people wanted. The rest (slightly exaggerated) wanted wimax.

Wimax hasn't been something anybody I've known in the US has talked about for more than 15 years.

I've built fiber networks and fixed wireless networks. Almost ended up becoming an LTE network as well. It didn't make any sense in any sort of financial modeling, even with spectrum availability.

LTE helps solve "general connectivity". What it does not do is build scalable, reliable, high speed, economical sensitive broadband infrastructure.

Back when LTE was rolled out initially the competitor was wimax.

It was around that same timeframe that "TV Whitespace" was going to become the next big thing.

Anyway, LTE should be the literal last option. It requires more than 2x as many towers as fixed wireless, with gear more than 20x more expensive. That's also more than 2x-3x the required amount of of battery backup systems, networking equipment, and land / tower leases.

If you have extreme density, you NEED fiber and you need WiFi. You extend from the fiber network with extremely high quality ngFW. To fill gaps, use satellite.

Fiber requires a certain density of subscriber/mile(km), the same as any technology.

Even with 0 labor cost, you still need to get conduit in the ground (materials), fiber, terminations, switching, routing, OLT/ONT cost, handholes, any permitting or utilities location, horizontal boring equipment , jackhammers, splicers, etc. The upfront cost is many, many, many times higher for fiber and if you're okay with your cost-per passing being more than you would ever make on customer ARPU, then sure do that. Even if labor cost was 0. And it will take YEARS longer to deploy and see a return on investment from, of ever.

It doesn't matter if there's broadband to the location if nobody at the location can afford it.

If you want broadband, LTE is the worst option.

Nowhere with even just an "improved" road (i.e., gravel road, not "only" a path cleared of tall vegetation) is too low density for fiber.

Unless local conditions make you want to use aerial cable, you'll just cable plow a speed pipe and put in a small access riser every 2~3 miles. You blow the cable in segment-by-segment, either splicing at these locations or spooling the ongoing length up before moving the blower and doing the next segment.

If the cable is damaged you measure with OTDR where the break is, walk there with a shovel, some spare speedpipe, and two speedpipe connectors. You dig out the damage, cut it out, put good pipe in, join it to the open ends where you cut the damaged section out, and bury it while taking more care to make it last better this time. You pull/blow out the section of cable and blow in a fresh one, splice it to the existing cable and both ends of the segment, and the connection is fixed.

AFAIK cable plow for fiber in not-very-hard ground is cheaper than planting "telegraph" poles like they did in the old days.

The only expensive parts about fiber optic Internet are the machine that allows you to splice (about 1k$, unlike the 5$ LSA tool for attaching RJ-45 sockets to Cat.5/6/7 cable; this only blocks DIYers from easily doing it) and digging up developed area with more finely controlled tools than a literal plow if you forgot to put in speed pipe the last time the ground was dug up for any infrastructure at all (say, piped water).

Oh, and arguably the optics if you expect to be cheaper than copper on distances within a building at speeds under 10 Gbit/s.

Are we talking about Mumbai or an area w/ 0.2 homes per 10sq km? Because I'm talking about how to do both. Vastly different challenges and economic viability, and I have experience doing both types of environments.

Mumbai doesn't have issues of arguably too low density to split digging costs across enough users.

It might have issues with the cost of digging, though.

It's the "homestead in Maine" type of situation where the fiber plow enables economic viability of burial.

I was not at any point talking about fixed wireless.

> mobile companies will probably make a more efficient use of the space

Uh... wat? Something like 70%+ of all internet data anywhere goes over a 2.4GHz wifi for its terminal client, squashed into a paltry 100 MHz of spectrum.

There are surely engineering minutiae arguments to be made for why radios for dedicated bands can be better in some way, or public safety arguments for why unlicensed users need to be segregated from the system that provides emergency service.

But "more efficient use of the space" seems ridiculous on its face.

India has 15% fixed broadband penetration. So let's say you've got a town of 100K households. You can;

A) give the richest 15K of them absolutely no faster WiFi whatsoever because 5GHZ will not be congested at all for them (so there is no problem to solve really)

OR

B) you can have the mobile carrier install a 6Ghz base station on every other telecoms/power pole in town and offer up terabits of mobile data capacity available to everyone throughout the town.

What's the most efficient use?

The most efficient way to extract money from people is to sell off the spectrum to the highest bidding rent seeker, I agree.

As for most efficient use of the resource, well, consulting my spectrum analyzer, ISM bands are winning by a mile and we should want more of them.

Sure obviously giving it to WiFi and then installing town wide free WiFi would be the absolute most efficient option but I'm trying to stay realistic.

I never said anything about free or government-run WiFi, just about auctioning off the spectrum. Companies that build out the infrastructure should be able to charge for access, but they shouldn't be able to prevent others from competing by paying the government for exclusivity. That's a scam.

It's a technical/commercial necessity to have exclusive use over the spectrum in a given area. If you don't believe me why doesn't every city in the world have a paid wifi network? With 5Ghz it should be faster than typical 4G/5G speeds, and it only needs lampost level APs, pretty similar to the microcells that carriers deploy but an order of magnitude cheaper. Instead mobile carriers would rather buy 3 or 6ghz spectrum that only ever gets used in cities anyway, why not wifi in the cities?

ISM is tragedy of the commons; make it free, let anyone do anything and it becomes junk. Carriers need something they have exclusive use of.

ISM is thriving, the only tragedy is that carriers haven't figured out how to charge rents on it and that's a tragedy for them, it's a spectacular success for everyone using it for free.

Carriers don't need 6GHz for backhaul. They have fiber and cable and (other) microwave. Not to mention the ability to shape their own links with antennas and beam forming and do a good job of it rather than a "default job." What they don't have -- and shouldn't be given under any circumstances -- is the excuse to build a moat in the bustling public park.

At the very least, I don't see a need to grant exclusivity across an entire country. e.g. from my home, I can see 5 wifi networks including mine. Of those, only 1 other than mine has a 5GHz signal that reaches me, and everything other than mine is in the -80 to -95 dBm range. There's simply no need to reserve short-range signals in the suburbs in the way that there is for block of giant apartment buildings each with 100s of networks on top of each other.

On top of that, mobile data is quite expensive in the US, so the only time I have data when out and about is... when I'm on free public wifi networks (which is most of the time). So I don't see much reason to give more of a monopoly to mobile providers. I honestly don't even see a use-case for cell service outside of super rural areas; the only reason I even have it is because it's necessary for MFA. Cell providers are legacy tech as far as cities are concerned IMO.

To me it'd make way more sense to me to let wifi have more bands with stricter limits on power levels, and any exclusivity should be to municipalities who can contract with companies to build and manage their infrastructure.

I certainly agree about regional licensing. I think the best scenario would actually be to allow some for WiFi and some for carriers, especially since selling licenses is a two way door in a way that ISM isn't.

> On top of that, mobile data is quite expensive in the US

It's not 2015 - that narrative is long dead. There are countless options for unlimited mobile data (5G, with hotspot) for $15-$20/mo.

Wi-Fi is not a very efficient way to cover a whole town, due to its inherently low range (at least when involving consumer devices on one end). You'd be spending a lot of resources on base stations that never see any usage.

WiFi literally covers basically all of the urban US already, I'm not understanding this point.

It's true that there's no single service one can sign up for and you have to bounce around cafe and Xfinity and whatever "Free WiFi!" networks are being offered. Which is definitely annoying and it's nice to have a single company sell you service in a neatly packaged "phone" product.

But again, trying to phrase that as a technical point is ridiculous. Free bands are just plain better, technically. You get more data to more people for less money using open spread spectrum protocols than you do with dedicated bands. Period.

The best plan would be fiber + fixed wireless + satellite. This is considering cost to deploy, end subscriber cost, and overall performance.

Fiber won't go everywhere, fixed wireless extends the reach much, much cheaper than LTE, satellite fills in the gaps.

I don't know… probably… probably… I don't know anything really

If you don't know what you're talking about, why even bother to post? Maybe wait for a topic that you know something about before responding.

topic isn't about India's telecom market to be fair. I'm happy to see a wide range of opinions on the topic.

I pay 30$ a year for 2/3 GB per day and unlimited calls. This is more than enough for me.

For broadband I pay 10$ a month for 100 Mbps.

Mobile is terrible at times, Broadband service is amazing, even though it is slow.

Broadband is not that common

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