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Comment by beyondzero | Hacker News Reader

Spot on. This could be a game changer for us ($xB 100+ year old manufacturing company), where we are on a long, slow journey to digitize every piece of manufacturing (long and slow because manufacturing runs almost 24x7x365). Wifi, even the top enterprise systems, is not as resilient, cheap and quickly installed as we'd like.

So now I can use 5G instead, and template and deploy it via the cloud? Yes, yes! We'll put this through some cost models, but it will likely jump NPV of IoT and automation projects by pushing down the initial capital costs (fiber runs pulled by union electricians to wifi gear installed by a vendor vs. 5G base stations and servers installed and configured by plant electricians and corporate IT).

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If you have problems with wifi resiliency I've got bad news for you about the wavelengths 5G uses.

I think GC might be talking about how the reliability of a large-scale mesh network using wifi isn't great (mostly because that's not what wifi was designed for), while this is literally what 5G was designed for.

I think 5G will replace wifi within next 10 years. We don't need WiFi anymore

As somebody not very well-versed in this, a sincere question. Would something like 5g be able to replace a home intranet / network? Eg I have a personal media server that I stream to devices on my wifi--would this be able to work with 5g? From my perspective 5g can only replace internet access, yes? Devices that want to communicate with each other securely would still prefer to be connected over wifi or other personal network like Ethernet?

The part of 5G that gets thrown around a lot with high speed and capacity is mostly based on mmWave bands(think 10's of Ghz) which attenuate incredibly quick. Most of them are nearly direct line of sight. You already see some issue with 5Ghz wifi not going well through walls, there's a high chance you'd be falling back to one of the lower speed bands inside.

The other thing is there's a non-zero amount overlap in the way spectrum is used in wifi and 3/4/5G, MIMO, spread spectrum and other approaches are all trying to get as close to the theoretical limit of the channel bandwidth. When you start looking at large scale wifi deployments it starts getting split into cells of channels not to dissimilar to cellular deployments. There are some differences and certain bands benefit from discrete allocation/cell management but at the end of the day it's all radio waves over the air.

This would seem like an argument for installing wired / wire->mesh 5G base stations around our houses instead of the wifi repeaters we currently use..

Amazon in the past flirted with the idea of building a mesh network of Amazon IOT devices so that your neighbours Echo could connect yours to the internet even if you didn't have a connection. BT in the UK offered reduced price broadband if other BT customers could use a WiFi Guest network from your connection - so BT customers had like 90% free wifi coverage in cities.

I can see a amazon deploying Amazon Echos and automation poducts as 5G enabled IOT devices that backhaul to your home internet but also mesh with neighbours, then eventually deploying its own outdoor 5G coverage and suddenly becoming a mobile network.

Yes it's possible but AWS focus is to be the Layer 1. They're doing it for data and can easily replicate it for voice if there is a use case but at that time they're directly competing with Telco, a fight that they may not pickup at this time. Ideally they would utilize all the unused bandwidth & reuse it. So one neighbour can provide internet + mobile to entire street

Yes it should. Wifi isn't great with security + authentication. So ideally data would transfer over 5G.

5G is typically deployed in CBRS bands - i.e. 3.5 GHz. This isn't mmWave. Will have meaningfully higher coverage areas than WiFi (but mostly because WiFi is power-limited, not to do with frequency).

Nokia has been the pioneer in Private wireless networks. They have already deployed production ready private LTE / 5G systems in ports and factories.

For more info: https://dac.nokia.com/private-wireless/

Disclaimer: I work for Nokia.

"deploy it via the cloud" doesn't actually mean anything and confuses people. You still need to set up hardware at your own enterprise! It's NOT the same as renting a VM in a datacenter and "deploying" it in the cloud.

Sure, it might have a good UX and not require as much expertise to manage, but it's not "deploy via cloud". That's just marketing.

Telecom networks have a seriously complex back-end, that's what makes them better for larger areas than Wifi. A commercial mobile network typically has a few racks of machines below the antenna mast to run the radio systems, and then uses a fiber connection back to a mode central place to control those radios. In this case you're deploying (much smaller) local radios and AWS runs everything else in the cloud.

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