But is wireless seriously an alternative to fiber? I mean with 4k streaming spreading, what will happen on a super bowl night? There is only one shared bandwidth.
If you use the interference patterns to transmit data instead of the signals directly, and you have enough antennas, you have essentially unlimited wireless bandwidth, at least at relatively short range (ie. cells). Granted, doing this for more than 4 or so antennas is currently beyond the capabilities of deployed equipment, but we'll get there.
I don't understand why people keep saying that we won't be able to satisfy bandwidth demand on wireless. We can, and it may be a lot cheaper (esp. outside of the cities).
I don't understand why people keep saying that we
won't be able to satisfy bandwidth demand on wireless.
Is it possible, from a market incentive perspective, to build a wireless ISP business where it's more profitable to increase last mile bandwidth or turn away customers, rather than overload a cell? I'm not sure.
Wireless is fairly useful to provide basic coverage to a huge area at relatively low cost. The quality is lacking though. Low Cost, Coverage and Quality, pick two.
As someone who's now lived >5 years in 3 locations, I've always found that there are things that oppose last mile bandwidth buildouts and there are things that don't matter.
What doesn't prevent capacity buildouts:
large costs (but within an order of magnitude or so of reasonable, I'm not talking "FTTH to a fishing village on a remote island" large costs)
technological limitations (again within an order of magnitude of what's possible)
What prevents capacity buildouts:
monopolies
cartels
absurd (and required) levels of capital investment (like buried fiber/copper capacity)
And you know what I find another huge positive about wireless networks ? There's 15 in every place I've lived. 2 "really" independent ones, 1 "more or less"/partially independent one, and a dozen or so that piggyback on the others' networks, providing for more price differentiation. Physically, there's room for something like up to 5 truly independent ones, using different frequency ranges. If the military were to get off half the spectrum, we can easily make that 20, so if the situation gets bad, there is an actual reserve. This means that governments can always threaten the existing providers with allowing another one in, in a way that they can't with wired networks.
Wired providers, there was never more than 2. Mostly there was just 1. Even when there were 2, they were absolutely not comparable (I mean, I've done telecommunications consulting for huge companies, I know there are really 50 or so, with 49 having extremely limited reach, unusable for consumers). This lead to monopoly, which lead to all sorts of shit situations, including bandwidth limits and turning away of customers. Even then, in the one place were 2 were available, the key to good service was to switch wired provider every 2 years.
Wireless multicast means that the superbowl will be sent out once to many subscribers.
Wait, what? How did IPv6 become a multicast dependency? PIM/IGMP is difficult, but is quite possible without MLD/IPv6. Don't forget class D space.