An alternative plan where wireless providers build their own 5G networks that compete with one another — though the document says the downside is it could take longer and cost more.
LOL I would love to hear a Republican say this.
And it would be to guard against China, because Putin has assured us the Russians didn’t do anything to interfere with our elections.
I wonder what our resident Libertarian, but somehow also a huge Trumpist, thinks about the government getting into the broadband business, which would seemingly need to be an infinite commitment, because a 5G network will be out of date in 5-10 years.
In addition, though it’s probably not hard now for the NSA to listen into your mobile phone calls, having the actual network run by the actual government would trivialize it. The US government would know both your location and the content of your calls in real time. Sounds like a true Conservative paradise!
All nationalizing 5G will do is provide a more stable and secure platform for manipulating people. I don’t get the point. It’s all social media manipulation, so how does that help us? Are they worried about packet sniffing?
I hate to say this, but the rural fiber/laying high speed internet cable thing seems like kind of a waste of money, and I grew up in the country. I think the solution is better/higher speed satellite internet, not digging up thousands of miles for a few thousand customers. It’s just not a good use of resources, no matter who pays.
Modern WiFi technology can do the job. You’re right that laying cable to the sticks is a bad use of resources.
Satellite will always have a problem with latency, WiFi and cell towers is better.
SpaceX claims their satellite internet will be low enough orbit to provide as low as 25ms latency (one day)
There’s just not really any reason to use satellites though.
You can achieve the same coverage with wifi via towers and balloons for a trivial faction of the cost.
Given the plummeting launch costs I don’t know if that will be true for long. Towers are geolocation dependent solutions with all that entails while I am not aware of any production solutions using balloons for the long term. Are there any?
LEO satellites could provide a ubiquitous solution, everything else would have be done piecemeal for a relatively small amount of people that are only important in aggregate.
WiFi balloons? What a great idea, who is deploying those?
What’s the range on those balloons though. I can’t really find range figures but 4g and LTE degrade at max range pretty heavily from what I understand, so satellite means larger coverage over areas (especially low density/rual) without the degradation of signal.
And wifi towers? I can’t even get Wifi to work from the end of my back yard.
I use Wifi and get 6-10mbs to a tower that is about 6-8 miles away. Wifi is line of site, it just takes a good calibration to set them up.
By WiFi do you mean cell towers?
[edit]
Bear in mind that there are different types of wifi now that are used for industrial applications which have dramatically longer range and are less affected by things like water.
I think the range record for WiFi thus far is something like 260 miles.
We had… ClearWire here for a bit. The speeds weren’t great but better than satellite… non stop not in my backyard fighting. I guess if it’s got a longer range then maybe we can find a no backyard to stick in the areas here that don’t have cable internet or cable for that matter.
Hey hey hey saw this news story and said, “speak of the devil”
“Being investigated”, that’s kind of cute. Like he’s even made an attempt to hide the fact that he works at the behest of the industry.