Cheap, fast, wireless connectivity won’t happen without more fiber | Hacker News Reader

Cheap, fast, wireless connectivity won’t happen without more fiber

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111 pointsmirandak457 comments

Back at the start of the decade, i followed a certain startup in Moscow closely [1]. They wanted to provide 4G to the city.

For perspective, back in 2009 there wasn't even 3G in Russia - the frequencies were all owned by the military, and companies were still trying to wrestle them.

The most interesting part was the scope of the project - the startup nearly went broke not for the need to install 4G equipment, but for the need to build an entire fiber backbone to power that equipment. They invested heavily into building the network that would carry the mobile traffic to the internet al large.

They nearly went broke... And then they became the only service provider giving 4G in a 12 million soul city that knew nothing better than GPRS. It didn't last long, but for a time they more or less had a license to print money.

Last time i checked, that backbone they built is still used by every other provider that built a 3G/4G network since then.

So, yeah. Fiber was the right investment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yota

It didn't last long, but for a time they more or less had a license to print money.

My impression, perhaps wrong, is that most people won't build large, fixed infrastructure in Russia for fear of it being seized by the state or someone with state backing (see e.g. http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3427198/banking...).

I wouldn't build a Fiber network in the current U.S. climate for the same reason.

Really? While you might be required to lease it at market rate I don't see where the gov't would allow or help someone to seize it.

Isn't that just as bad as it getting seized though?

Is this 'Market Rate' the same 'Market Rate' you get reimbursed when you loose your place to civil forfeiture?

*Eminent domain

You realize they'd have to pay you to condemn it, right? Unlike Russia, we have the Fifth Amendment.

In the US 5G isn't really too useful for the users, as long as 4G is priced way too expensive. On my US SIM card I pay $10 per GB. On my Austrian SIM card I pay 26 Euros a month for a LTE flatrate (without any hidden caps and with unlimited tethering allowed). Wireless data is so cheap there that many people cancel their wired connection and only use LTE instead.

Why would I need 5G on a connection where I can't use more than a few GB because it gets too expensive otherwise?

You're not wrong in the sense that 5G isn't actually that much of value for the users directly, however there are many other reasons that directly benefit the users.

Telco's pay 2 big costs for running a cellular data network: Infrastructure and Spectrum licensing. Your cost of data is supposed to cover these two with an added profit for the telco. What 5G brings to the table is faster data, which means you are able to transfer you file quicker, which means the average spectrum usage per "facebook load" is lower since the transmission happens much faster. Instead of you occupying that spectrum for 30 sec while loading over GPRS, you instead fetch all the files in less than a second, making the average potential bandwidth in the network much higher for everyone, thus lowering the price per gigabyte.

In addition to that, with 5G the phone can fetch data much more fast which means the radio can enter power-saving mode much faster. If a page on 4G takes 4 seconds to download and on 5G takes 1 second, it might end up being a 4X reduction (i'm stretching it for the sake of the example) due to the radio not having to be powered for that long.

So the consumer wins on pricing and battery consumption while the networks can squeeze more out of the already occupied spectrum.

It depends on which technology is implemented for 5G. In one model, the user's device can become a node to propagate wireless signals. The idea is, in an 'internet of things' where every device is sending and receiving signals concurrently, you get this decentralized virtual network spanning multiple bands, that is dissociated from the physical infrastructure like cell towers. Networks on this 5G 'cloud' become niche based and much cheaper to operate, and there is no single provider bottleneck. In other words, 5G is supposed to be not only orders of magnitude faster than 4G (it's essentially global wifi), it's also orders of magnitude cheaper.

After reading this article though, I'm starting to wonder how much of this is pure marketing nonsense.

I've been guilty lately about getting a little overhyped about 5g, mainly because of the possibility of p2p connectivity. Device-to-device would obviously be really useful for IoT applications, which it seems like a lot of industry research has been focused on. A few links from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Research to 5g literature:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.00674.pdf

https://www.ericsson.com/research-blog/5g/device-device-comm...

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=tru...

I'm just talking out of my rear end now, but it'd be so cool if devices could form 5g mesh connections without connecting to the backbone. I enjoy imagining what it would be like if we could do for connectivity what bittorrent did for file hosting.

Adhoc Wi-Fi is not being supported by Google on Android [0]... What makes you think that they would allow p2p on 5g?

0. https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82

> What makes you think that they would allow p2p on 5g?

That's a good point. The answer that comes to mind (again, just pulling this out of my rear end) is that Google would benefit from more people having more ubiquitous and cheap internet access. As long as at least one device somewhere in a given mesh is connected to the backbone, so is the whole mesh, and then more Google ads can be seen. In other words, for similar reasons as Google Fiber.

And then I'd think Android Wear/TV/Auto devices could benefit from better p2p connectivity as well.

LTE Direct is already in the works, so the same thing could easily happen for 5G.

When Verizon talks about "wireless fiber" they are talking about fiber to the corner or fiber to the curb and then using mm-wave the last "100 Meters" so to speak. FiOS has been tremendously successful but one of the more difficult aspects is getting the fiber that last little bit into homes and offices. Getting fiber up and down the streets is no cake walk either but once done, the second part is extending it the rest of the way. The idea of using mm-wave technology to get it from the corner or curb to your living room is a great idea. If it can be made to work, it can deliver 3-5Gbps without having to have your yard torn up.

5G is a marketing term, but not necessarily a totally bad one. It generally refers to converged network technology that will more seamlessly integrate more aspect such as traditional BB, IoT, Mobility and so on. That is a pretty long term goal of course. Using 5G fixed wireless to provide BB to your home without extending fiber all the way into your house is just one aspect of 5G, one small application, but probably one of the more immediately possible and potentially profitable ones.

If Fios has been so successful, why aren't they building any more of it?

Because of the profit margin on wireless, and the ability to artificially increase profits are so much greater. People wouldn't stand for per GB pricing on FIOS because they're used to unlimited. The wireless industry has managed to perpetuate this idea that bandwidth on wireless is an extremely limited resource and they abuse it to no end.

> Because of the profit margin on wireless, and the ability to artificially increase profits are so much greater.

How is the ability to "artificially increase profits" "so much greater" in a market where everyone has 3-4 options than in a market where you're almost guaranteed to be the only game in town?

Verizon charges - and people pay - $10/GB for extra data for the same reason Apple charges $100 to for a few extra $$ of flash memory. It's classic price discrimination. You sell the minimum 90% of people are okay with, then charge a ton more for the price-insensitive customers.

> Verizon charges - and people pay - $10/GB for extra data for the same reason Apple charges $100 for a few extra $$ of flash memory.

Because consumers continue to pay those amounts.

But why can't Verizon just do the same for FiOS? And why don't consumers just get TMobile unlimited for $70?

Because Verizon has created an artificial monopoly by buying up the vast majority of the most coveted spectrum. The only reason T-Mobile is even in business still is because of the failed AT&T acquisition which netted them more valuable spectrum than they had ever or would ever have been able to get via the government auctions.

AT&T can somewhat compete, but the failed T-Mobile deal hurt them far worse than anyone seems to be acknowledging.

1) It doesn't make sense that both Verizon and all its possible competitors (including anyone not in the wireless business) would leave FTTP profits on the table merely because they can make more on wireless.

2) I thought one point of the article is that wireless bandwidth is limited. They can only get so many GB in given frequency, and the 5G requires a higher number of cell sites.

The cost of delivering the last "100Meters" is significantly less if you can do so with mm-wave technology than with fiber. Hence more profit. Hopefully if it works well, more carriers will use it which will make it more lucrative for more providers to use that approach and spread BB farther and wider. At least, that is the idea.

On the subject of last Mile, I really wish the last mile or inhouse / building / last tiny bit right to your socket is twisted copper Ethernet CAT6 / 8 cable. Why put yet another ONT in my flat / property when all Router has an Ethernet Rj45 Port.

Or we need to work on a standard Optical Fibre Solution to be placed in all Router.

Couple reasons. Best reason, the fiber has many Gbps extra capacity for Ultra-HD with augmented smellovision.

Other reason, if Verizon is delivering twisted pair, the FCC rises from the demarc in a cloud of brimstone and invokes its ancient pacts.

I'm happy to have the ONU in my apartment where I can replace it instead of in some telco cabinet where it will take a week for a tech to come out and make repairs

> Verizon launched its 4G LTE network in the US covering 93% of the population it needed about 30,000 towers, each one of which had to have a fiber connection

I'm curious whether this is true. Base stations are usually connected to the backbone network using microwave connections. The average bases station has a capacity of under 300mbits, so it would really be something if Verizon managed to connect all its base stations with fiber

Often when people talk fiber it's the idea of going to the home. If all you need is fiber backhaul to an antenna it's a mucc simpler problem and cheaper. Aside, you can hook up many antennas with other means of connectivity if need be.

In Russia, Saint-Petersburg fiber is in every home. In one year (i guess) government remove old phone and replace it with fiber + router in almost every apartment in the city. I think doing fiber is not that hard if you need to make it.

Interesting. Is the fiber placed in the ground or on poles? It makes a huge difference in terms of cost.

Under ground and fiber comes directly to apartment

A leading tech VC in New York, someone who is viewed as a thought leader, said to me not long ago, “Why do you keep talking about fiber? Everything’s going wireless.”

I hope she sent him a link to TFA. Any guesses as to who it is?

Being a VC i suspect he was talking from the economic point of view. There is likely to be a higher ROI on wireless than wired networks, as they are usage billed rather than flat rate.

remember that you pay significantly for handsets; client are carved off from wired cost in the minds of consumers. Also, no one, god included is making another bit of capacity for wireless networks (in the shannon limit sense) any time ever. In cities (where the money is) they are contended and they are contended at just the times and places you don't want.

Or each cell site will user a point-to-point microwave relay to avoid digging up earth.

It is still difficult and expensive to do true 1 Gbps line rate (FDD) by microwave PTP, although the $18,000 to $20,000 equipment cost for that can be a great deal less than the $200,000 to dig up the street in a major urban area.

However it is REALLY difficult to accomplish 6 Gbps to 10 Gbps of capacity between two routers via PTP microwave. Whereas it's really easy with two $250 1550nm SFP+ in two strands of dark fiber, if you have an optical path from point A to B.

Or even with one strand of dark fiber using bidirectional 1490/1550 SFP+.

We have been swapping out duplex sfp's for single fibre working duplex sfp's for a few years on our backhaul links here. It is a great way to increase capacity. We have also rolled out a photonic switching fibre network for customers to lease 100gbit circuits across the country. Photonic switching (basically routing at the optical level) is impressive technology 1 rack can push terabits of data.

However the equipment is in the $1,000,000 range. But that is peanuts for a large carrier.

I've seen photonic switching refer to a lot of different ideas. Sometimes it's just a remotely-controllable add-drop multiplexer.

Does this type of photonic switching differ from CWDM/DWDM?

Are routers putting the signal onto different wavelengths depending on where they want packet to go?

A lot of the equipment I've seen is largely described in broad marketing-friendly terms which makes it hard to understand why the equipment is actually more useful than existing approaches.

Photonic switching is basically a lot of servo motor controlled mirrors in a box, you can accomplish the thing with a human and a lot of SC/UPC to SC/UPC patch panels and cables. It's an OSI layer 1 thing and agnostic of servers, switches. The "box" lets you reconfigure crossconnects in software. It does introduce a degree of loss.

No it doesn't differ, its all modulating wavelengths of light through a piece of glass, CWDM using LEDs and DWDM using actual lasers. Routers put packets onto an interface queue at layer 2. Layer 1 what is what handles which wavelength(lambdas)those bits modulate.

CWDM doee actually use with lasers in some contexts. The big difference is that CWDM uses frequencies that are all far apart, with just a few frequencies. DWDM uses frequency channels that are very close. DWDM performs better because it focuses the energy in the band's that have the best properties in terms of absorption, distortion and group delay.

Yes the "C" is for course and the "D" is for dense. All of the CWDM gear I have been exposed to was LEDs, generally actual lasers are much more expensive and you dont need that sensitivity for such loose banding. In what implementations is CWDM using lasers instead of LEDs?

CWDM uses lasers too, the reduced wavelength tolerance simply means that the lasers can be uncooled (reducing the power draw) and that chirp (frequency shift during modulation) does not cause interference with neighbouring channels, making them easier to modulate directly. The 'loose' CWDM banding is actually smaller than the bandwidth of typical LEDs.

Ubiquity gear around the 1Gbps rate isn't anywhere close to $18-20k.

And for very short links, there are projects like http://koruza.net/ which use standard (cheap) 1Gbps or 10Gbps media converters for free space optical links.

I'd love to know about affordable microwave 10Gbps equipment, I'm not sure we've gotten there yet.

There are cheap P2P MW/NIR solution that can provide high bandwidth but it's still not enough.

But they have downsides, range and more importantly density is limited. there is a limit to how many of them you can deploy before they start interfering with one another even tho they are pretty unidirectional put 4-5 of them between 2 buildings and you can start having problems.

The other part is that they aren't as scalable, the main costs of fiber is laying it but you can lay cables with 50-100 fibers at almost the same cost of laying a single fiber.

Fiber can also be upgraded the same cables that gives us 10, 50, a 100 or even a 1000 gbit per second today gave us 1gig or even a 100mbit just some years ago.

The only thing you need to replace are the transmitters and or repeaters if they are used, again those can be expensive but a lot of metro networking equipment is built to be modular and upgradeable the fibers themselves often to not need to be replaced.

Pretty much every upgrade in fiber optics is built around the common diameter and refractive index fibers no one is going to buy into a new technology if they'll have to rip off all of the fibers and put in new ones.

The US and many parts of the world need better networking, it's about time that cities or at least in the case of the US states from local corporations that would deploy the infrastructure and either contract ISP's to do it or do it themselves and lease the lines to them for future use.

Mimosa Networks is a newish Ubiquity competitor and their cheapest offering for a 750mbps is only $300 for the pair of dishes... Needless to say $20k is a pretty dramatic overstatement.

They have a 1.5gbps offering as well in licensed 10.7ghz bands for ~$3k which will dramatically reduce noise and interference, but that's still well within budget. I think to get 10gbps, your're going to need to operate at a higher licensed spectrum where there aren't many commercial people playing yet.

Telecom grade MW P2P links start at 20K and upwards. They do also however work on licensed spectrums. The new un licenses 24 50 and 60 ghz links can be really cheap, but I don't know how well do they compare to the bigger telecom ones. RF equipment is pretty darn expensive to make, the telecom one have pretty impressive "RF dark magic" eco chambers milled out of aluminum blocks and many other cool features. The new commercial ones seem to be pretty simple and mostly solid state not much more complex looking than your typical wifi router. How do they fair with weather and interference how well do they coexist with each other, and how reliable are they in the long run is another question. Some of those MW drums can operate for decades I'm not sure about the 300$ or even the 3000$ ones.

yeah, no. Not in 5 GHz. Sorry to tell you the marketing hype doesn't jive with reality. Two Mimosa B5C radios and two 32dBi dual polarity high performance dishes will make a nice link, and it is awesome to be able to buy a radio link that will do dual polarity 256QAM modulation in 20, 40, 80 MHz wide channels, but it will not be 750 Mbps full duplex.

In the real world more like 250-300 Mbps full duplex, or slightly faster than that if you tell it to allocate greater bandwidth in one direction in a ratio like 75:25.

You can't compare a Mimosa B5-Lite or B5C to a carrier grade ISP, FCC Part 101 licensed band radio (6, 11, 18, 23 GHz etc) that's fed from dual -48VDC A and B power feeds and has multiple SFP slots in it.

Microtrenching is becoming a thing, which is rapidly dropping the costs of installation. It's just a groove 1.5" wide and about 6" deep. Drop a couple of conduits in it, and back fill it. Vehicles can drive right over it during the process, no need to close lanes for multiple days.

Does that mean every time you replace the road surface you also need to redo the fiber installation?

No, that's how they deployed coax (and later fiber) in Israel when the cable company was formed in the late 80's at a fraction of the cost.

The cables are laid in a trench about 30 CM deep just off the curb the trench itself is maybe only 10 CM wide you have a single machine that digs the trench lays the coax and then covers it with gravel (which is made from the asphalt, dirt and gravel it digs up) after that they just put the asphalt over it and it's done they you can do 100-200M an hour or even more like this pretty easily.

If you need to redo the road you don't have to scrape off the trench part anyhow no car can drive so close to the curb, and even if you do scrape that part off it's just like scraping the road you usually only go maybe 1cm/half and inch deep you don't remove the entire surface and even if you need to redo the road completely you can leave the 10cm wide trench alone.

Also fiber and coax cables can last for decades there is no need to redo them, the same cables can be used again and again with each upgrade to the standard since to get more speed you only need to change the optical or RF equipment there is no need to change the cable.

The same cables that used to deliver 100mbit can be used for 10gbit and even higher speeds, multiplexing is also possible over older cables.

One thing i wondered it why simply they just don't make curb stones (e.g. http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00AeqanjdwtkoK/Blue-Stone...) with a few ducts in them already couple inches in diamiter so you could just pull fibers through at any time without having to even dig up the road... Yes you have to replace them, but how often do you that? every 10 years? 20 years? and if you design it well you can either pull the cable out or heck even replace the cable with the curb stone, people can live without internet for 6 hours during the night.

The main obstacle to microtrenching and surface inlaid is not technical , but political. Many cities' streets departments won't allow it. It will take an aggressive education and lobbying effort. It is less costly than cut and cover but in $/km of fiber is ridiculously expensive compared to aerial. Even more so when you see that the limits in strand count for very small diameter cables are 72-144.

Also you often don't have to dig; mole, duct, blow - there are options.

Anyone valuing technical opinions of VCs is barking up the wrong tree.

This doesn't sound massively practical, but if it succeeds then we'll see a huge infrastructure boost globally.

>>Let’s explore the implications of these two things: the need for a standard and the need for fiber.

I respect Susan Crawford's writing and am in general agreement with her consistent drumbeat for fiber upgrades as one of the competitive edges for any country that can afford the capital costs of deploying last-mile dark fiber to more homes and buildings.

This particular article misses the history of how every standard ratified by 3GPP has always been characterized by telecommunication providers and vendors jockeying for influence and position to realize their vision of a standard that aligns with their own agendas. HTTP/2's ratification building upon Google's reference SPDY implementation is a more extreme analogy of a single player seemingly exerting much more influence or contributions to a particular standard[1]. Crawford acknowledges this reality towards the end of her article: "Ericsson is teaming up with SK Telecom to test 5G applications [...] [and] they’re probably hoping to force the adoption of a global standard that matches their own commercial plans so that they can get a head start."

Carriers will execute plays from the same playbook by generating hype for 5G devices, while commencing commercial and technical explorations over the next few years as we get closer to 2020 3GPP 5G standards ratification. As the hype builds and initial flagship/anchor cell sites/cities come online, data caps will only be raised gradually, not at all commensurate or proportional to the increase in speeds that 5G promises (when standing right next to the tower).

"Cheap, fast and ubiquitous" is Crawford's article tagline, but carriers are for-profit businesses and generally for new technologies exclusively choose the last two and drop the first since only high-ARPU early adopters with disposable incomes can afford the new 5G devices that will be released.

One final point is that will help carriers manage 5G tower field deployments are WiFi offloading. Despite known short-range limitations of higher frequency spectrum, improved WiFi/cellular handoff technology[2] and convergence of fixed and wireless assets under single organizational umbrellas will give some [US] carriers more ammunition to play up the 5G hype while backhaul, aggregation points, peering and long-term capital outlays become a reality over the next decade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2

[2] https://www.qualcomm.com/news/snapdragon/2015/01/05/lte-wi-f...

Tell this to the Australian's who keep voting for the Liberals

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