What is DECT-2020 New Radio (NR), and how big a deal is it? (2021)

Hmm ya good points.

Well maybe "fiberless fiber optics" where each end would have a plugin for an arbitrary length of fiber optic cable, normally about 10 feet long, that would run up to the ceiling and optionally exit a lens to talk to the other end through open air, with maybe a range of 100+ meters or something. If someone could make one for under $100 that could handle 10K HDMI/100 Gbps, I'd buy it. Ideally with radio fallback on something like NR for partial functionality if the view gets blocked. I want something that "just works".

Thinking about this further, I'd like to see a resilient fiber optic standard with a 180 or 360 degree fisheye lens where bandwidth falls off by angle of alignment. So light bouncing off the walls might give 1 Mb/sec, but direct line of sight would give Gbps to Tbps speed.

It's 2024 for crying out loud. I'd like to see some of these trillion dollar tech companies actually innovate for once instead of milking decades-old technologies and sucking up all the available capital to keep us delivering fast food instead of inventing this stuff in our parents' basement like in the late 1900s when people had any leisure time or disposable income at all.

This TV station guy packs 4K video transmission on 18 Mbps RF channel [1].

Mind you most of networking high bandwidth real-time transfer and processing is just another low bandwidth batch processing accumulation.

Personally I am working on a new robust and low latency wireless PHY based on polarization that can work even with non line of sight (NLoS) that perhaps can do away with retries, but we shall see.

[1]TV Station Launches Multiple 4K Broadcasts OTA on ATSC 1.0 [video]:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39727651

> How many companies are there that actually implement 5G, as opposed to buying a chipset from those that do?

The number of companies actually building stuff is far eclipsed by the number of companies amassing IP hoards around the tech.

Modern standards are an absolute tarpit; total waste of time to drive your career into that nonsense IMO. It's cool tech, but good luck with that -- you cant even start to build anything or use it without an army of lawyers and bankers clearing the path.

Anything needing high reliability is plugged in. Actual remote surgery involves an on site backup surgeon, and redundant private wired links.

The problem is that the 5G hype isnt telling the whole story. Yes, you certainly could drive high thruput across the radio access network, at low latency, and yes, thats exactly what you would need to do things like self driving cars. The problem is that the radio is just one tiny part of the whole communication chain, and for safety-critical things, the entire chain must be equally fast and robust.

That means, for example, that the chip inside the car/robot must detect failures in the transmission path incredibly quickly and switch to a secondary channel, that the radio controller can detect when the network (packet core) it thought it was talking to goes away, and recover, and that the packet core itself can detect failures in its components and fail over or restart. It has to do all this in the time it takes for a warehouse robot to crush a worker, or a car to hit a bollard. Did I mention that todays packet cores are built from kubernetes and prayers? This degree of safety simply isnt happening anytime soon.

Perversely, it might actually be safer to deploy an entirely private network under the control of an enterprise and take your lumps there as best you can, than rely on an operator's network being able to do what you want all the time.

mmWave doesn't cross walls very well, what's the point if you have to install infrastructure inside buildings anyway? Plus, indeed, companies really prefer to have their own stuff, also because of reliability (what if the 5G carrier has a problem? It's rare but can happen), and simplicity (why using a VPN that passes through a public network and goes back to the company network, adding dozens of ms of delay in the process, if you're anyway on-site?)

It isn't, except when it is, and WiFi is established already. Sure, for a big industrial IoT rollout, you'd have to set up dedicated networks anyway, so you can choose them on their peculiar merits. For consumer IoT, requiring an additional hub or regional infrastructure is a losing proposition. For consumer-like commercial/industrial IoT and similar connectivity, think Redbox kiosks or fishing license machines where sites will not put the machines on their WiFi network, you might not have a good case for replacing cellular with your own infrastructure.

Where DECT might be competitive would be applications like wireless utility meters - high densities of installations where your own infrastructure could be more practical than cellular.

mmWave is way to finicky, where even a human body can block the signal.

What I saw a lot of buzz about a few years ago was 5G NR-U, where 5G was standardized to run on the ISM bands (same bands as WiFi) so you could basically set up your own 5G network just like Wi-Fi. I'm not sure what happened to that, my assumption is the 5G patents are just way too expensive to justify the hardware set it up ad hoc like that compared to WiFi. Whoever is developing DECT these days may be way more willing to lower prices since they don't have a bunch of telcos to gouge.

802.11ah, not 802.11ac.

It's pretty mediocre. But usable. DECT was much better but our company wanted to remove the avaya PBXes from all sites.

They are wireless. They're just rugged Android phones in fact.

DECT is awesome for wireless business headsets. Further range, clarity and less interference compared to BT.

> DECT is a surprisingly complex and capable system

'99-'00 I worked on a Linux-based tablet where the first iteration used a DECT extension for data (DECT MMAP)... Wifi was not yet dominant enough to be the obvious winner.