Peter Diamandis writes,
By 2024, we are connecting every person on Earth to the web with bandwidths far beyond what Fortune 500 CEOs and heads of nations had daily access to just a couple of decades back.
. . .With plans for wide-scale deployment in 2020, 5G will be 100X faster than 4G, and 10X faster than your average broadband connection.
From his email newsletter. Years ago, I predicted that the last mile would be wireless, but I thought that it would come from mesh networks, not from cell carriers, balloons, and space-based networks, which is where Diamandis sees this coming from.
Incidentally, these folks were not as aggressive in their predictions for 5G wireless. They discuss the obvious implication that once 5G does become ubiquitous consumers won’t need cable or FIOS anymore.
It also strikes me that all this bandwidth will invite bandwidth-hungry apps to soak it up. Virtual reality, video-conferencing, and video calls come to mind.
Mesh networks were probably conceived in 1970, but re-invented later.
http://www.quantium.plus.com/ahr/synsol.htm
This was proposed as a means of servicing people using roads or public transport without masses of communication towers.
The greatest advantage of mesh networks globally would be that there would be no central agency like the mobile telephone companies with their unpopular charging structures. The only cost would be the purchase of the handsets.
But it is a chicken and egg situation. There have to be lots of handsets around for it to work. People will only buy them if they work, and they won’t work for early adopters.
Unfortunately someone has to build whatever tech infrastructure that delivers 5G. No matter how we get it, we will still be paying AT&T, Comcast, or some new giant company, for the use of the satellites, balloons, towers, or whatever.
I don’t understand this comment. Don’t you like to be paid for what you do?
The post was a rebuttal to the idea that 5G would free us from having to get service from Comcast, etc. I was stating that someone would have to build the 5G infrastructure. We will be buying 5G services.from those same companies instead of somehow getting largely free, or at least much cheaper, content. The ‘unfortunately’ referred to not getting cheaper stuff. I have no problem with the companies getting paid for what they provide us.
I will believe it when I see it. I live in a barely rural area eight miles from a major research university, and neither cable nor DSL are available to the homes on our road, and many others in the area. In the 4GLTE world of today, less than three miles from a carrier’s cell tower in the valley, five miles from two mountaintop tower complexes, there are days when even 3G cell reception barely works at our home, 4G is sporadic. A cell antenna on the house is the only means of internet connection we have as the telecom no longer will repair the copper landlines when service goes down.
5G will require an enormous network of closely-sited equipment to provide that last mile of service, and the equipment is highly unlikely to be dispersed to service areas such as mine. My state has about a half-million people living in more remote locales than where I live.
Have you looked into fixed wireless? Your situation sounds ideal for it.
Alternately, you and your neighbors could get together to have a fiber connection pulled to the area and then distribute it yourselves, but that obviously comes with higher initial costs.
Bottom line, you probably have more options than your post indicates, although perhaps you really meant “Options in my price range which I already know about”.
Our house and several neighbors had fixed wireless for five years, frequently lost signals, the provider insisted there was interference in their frequency range and declared our neighborhood a non-service area. We have negotiated with a fiber carrier for two years to extend service on our road, one home has a home-based business that requires reliable high speed service. Despite offering to pay $20k+ up front for initial installation and pole expenses, the provider has declined to proceed with the project.
The telecom and electrical utilities refuse to share existing poles, despite telecom no longer having any landline customers in the area because they will not longer maintain their switches and copperline service is erratic and full of static. So the fiber provider will need to put in new poles, which are much cheaper than underground lines. The price our neighborhood is willing to pay is quite high, more than reasonable, but the only available fiber provider is not interested. There are new high-density developments planned in the region, they are concentrating their capacity increases in new developments, not existing neighborhoods.
One of the reasons I am skeptical that my phone, xbox, etc. is not videoing everything I say and do is that it would take so much bandwidth for everyone’s phone/xbox to do that we’d certainly notice. Maybe not in five years.
Not a moment too soon. My ISP is terrible. Plus its the only one in the area (not counting satellite which is both terrible and expensive.)
Additional bandwidth beyond the ability to stream HD video is not particularly useful. The real problem is monthly data caps — especially on wireless, but also, increasingly, on wired connections. Without increases there, faster speeds will only mean the ability to burn through your limited data that much faster.