> In response, the Wi-Fi Alliance and the DSA are trying to stoke fears that such a move would severely dent Europe's digital development, claiming Wi-Fi is the primary way consumers access the internet and constraining it would impact progress.
Just today, there’s a news report in India where the major telecom companies have lobbied that the entire 6 GHz band be reserved for mobile services and that even part of it shouldn’t be left for unlicensed WiFi. [1]
The problem in India is that the penetration of wired broadband is very low, and the telcos don’t seem to be interested in expanding it as much as they are in grabbing more of wireless spectrum.
I don’t believe it’s a good move to reserve these exclusively for mobile services. We (in general) need more unlicensed spectrum for innovation. Let the companies figure out another way out.
I also know that these bands are already allowed for unlicensed WiFi use in the US.
For better or worse mobile companies will probably make a more efficient use of the space in a country like India at a practical level. I can at least see why you might do this.
I don't know anything really about India's telecoms market, but I know in other 'similar' countries you can buy a mobile phone data plan for like a couple/few dollars a month, but a fixed line is 10X that. You could argue it's not very progressive to reserve the spectrum for the 'rich' who can afford fixed lines.
Few people have phone landlines anymore in India, but wired broadband to the home is not uncommon. It would be annoying to not then be able to have a home WiFi 6G router.
Mobile data is cheap, but broadband is much cheaper.
Given we know 5Ghz can give us like 600Mbps real world on 80Mhz channels, would a fixed line in India typically be above that speed? Is it all GPON these days or still DSL/WISP type stuff?
I'm aware, but, um, without sounding insensitive, not for $50 per sub in hardware cost. Tarana is about 10X that. If you have that kind of money labour is cheap enough to run fibre for the same amount.
The only way that starts to make any sense is if you're doing 128way-256way gpon splits which is not something most are willing to do if they need to make any kind of profit and sell anything more than 100Mbps packages. I wasn't even willing to do 64w splits over 10 years ago now and in hindsight that was wise.
You could go active but then your SFP/SFP+ per port cost eats you up.
For less than 1mil fixed wireless is going to cover 2,800km/sq. You are not going to to get anywhere near that cost trying to do the same thing to 2048(or more) subs in that footprint with fiber. That wouldn't even cover your fiber material cost!
"Mobile doesn't scale in cities" is the exact reason they need 6Ghz (because higher frequencies enable much higher density of cells, reducing terminals per cell). 6Ghz will penetrate buildings terribly, I agree, but it's honestly just not that simple, for example it's now becoming really common for carriers to be doing in building deployments; shopping centres, sports stadiums, the transit network (e.g 4g in the subway) hospitals, the list goes on. Secondly by lifting terminals off of say 800Mhz or 1.8Ghz band and into 6Ghz outside where you can, you free up capacity on those lower frequency bands that do penetrate buildings or reach weird areas like the middle of a park that has tree cover (or whatever).
Wimax hasn't been something anybody I've known in the US has talked about for more than 15 years.
I've built fiber networks and fixed wireless networks. Almost ended up becoming an LTE network as well. It didn't make any sense in any sort of financial modeling, even with spectrum availability.
LTE helps solve "general connectivity". What it does not do is build scalable, reliable, high speed, economical sensitive broadband infrastructure.
It was around that same timeframe that "TV Whitespace" was going to become the next big thing.
Anyway, LTE should be the literal last option. It requires more than 2x as many towers as fixed wireless, with gear more than 20x more expensive. That's also more than 2x-3x the required amount of of battery backup systems, networking equipment, and land / tower leases.
If you have extreme density, you NEED fiber and you need WiFi. You extend from the fiber network with extremely high quality ngFW. To fill gaps, use satellite.
Fiber requires a certain density of subscriber/mile(km), the same as any technology.
Even with 0 labor cost, you still need to get conduit in the ground (materials), fiber, terminations, switching, routing, OLT/ONT cost, handholes, any permitting or utilities location, horizontal boring equipment , jackhammers, splicers, etc. The upfront cost is many, many, many times higher for fiber and if you're okay with your cost-per passing being more than you would ever make on customer ARPU, then sure do that. Even if labor cost was 0. And it will take YEARS longer to deploy and see a return on investment from, of ever.
It doesn't matter if there's broadband to the location if nobody at the location can afford it.
Nowhere with even just an "improved" road (i.e., gravel road, not "only" a path cleared of tall vegetation) is too low density for fiber.
Unless local conditions make you want to use aerial cable, you'll just cable plow a speed pipe and put in a small access riser every 2~3 miles.
You blow the cable in segment-by-segment, either splicing at these locations or spooling the ongoing length up before moving the blower and doing the next segment.
If the cable is damaged you measure with OTDR where the break is, walk there with a shovel, some spare speedpipe, and two speedpipe connectors.
You dig out the damage, cut it out, put good pipe in, join it to the open ends where you cut the damaged section out, and bury it while taking more care to make it last better this time.
You pull/blow out the section of cable and blow in a fresh one, splice it to the existing cable and both ends of the segment, and the connection is fixed.
AFAIK cable plow for fiber in not-very-hard ground is cheaper than planting "telegraph" poles like they did in the old days.
The only expensive parts about fiber optic Internet are the machine that allows you to splice (about 1k$, unlike the 5$ LSA tool for attaching RJ-45 sockets to Cat.5/6/7 cable; this only blocks DIYers from easily doing it) and digging up developed area with more finely controlled tools than a literal plow if you forgot to put in speed pipe the last time the ground was dug up for any infrastructure at all (say, piped water).
Oh, and arguably the optics if you expect to be cheaper than copper on distances within a building at speeds under 10 Gbit/s.
Are we talking about Mumbai or an area w/ 0.2 homes per 10sq km? Because I'm talking about how to do both. Vastly different challenges and economic viability, and I have experience doing both types of environments.
5-6Ghz, certainly, lower frequencies do though. This is why T-mobile offers home broadband using their 5G network (which can support up to 1M devices per square km) in the US; they overbuilt, and have many smaller cells with lots of capacity and are undersubscribed, and monetize the remaining capacity using lowest priority fixed broadband.
One could see India deploying the same density compatible infrastructure in the usual "leapfrog" model of skipping lesser technology implementations in this space.
> mobile companies will probably make a more efficient use of the space
Uh... wat? Something like 70%+ of all internet data anywhere goes over a 2.4GHz wifi for its terminal client, squashed into a paltry 100 MHz of spectrum.
There are surely engineering minutiae arguments to be made for why radios for dedicated bands can be better in some way, or public safety arguments for why unlicensed users need to be segregated from the system that provides emergency service.
But "more efficient use of the space" seems ridiculous on its face.
India has 15% fixed broadband penetration. So let's say you've got a town of 100K households. You can;
A) give the richest 15K of them absolutely no faster WiFi whatsoever because 5GHZ will not be congested at all for them (so there is no problem to solve really)
OR
B) you can have the mobile carrier install a 6Ghz base station on every other telecoms/power pole in town and offer up terabits of mobile data capacity available to everyone throughout the town.
Wi-Fi is not a very efficient way to cover a whole town, due to its inherently low range (at least when involving consumer devices on one end). You'd be spending a lot of resources on base stations that never see any usage.
WiFi literally covers basically all of the urban US already, I'm not understanding this point.
It's true that there's no single service one can sign up for and you have to bounce around cafe and Xfinity and whatever "Free WiFi!" networks are being offered. Which is definitely annoying and it's nice to have a single company sell you service in a neatly packaged "phone" product.
But again, trying to phrase that as a technical point is ridiculous. Free bands are just plain better, technically. You get more data to more people for less money using open spread spectrum protocols than you do with dedicated bands. Period.
I never said anything about free or government-run WiFi, just about auctioning off the spectrum. Companies that build out the infrastructure should be able to charge for access, but they shouldn't be able to prevent others from competing by paying the government for exclusivity. That's a scam.
It's a technical/commercial necessity to have exclusive use over the spectrum in a given area. If you don't believe me why doesn't every city in the world have a paid wifi network? With 5Ghz it should be faster than typical 4G/5G speeds, and it only needs lampost level APs, pretty similar to the microcells that carriers deploy but an order of magnitude cheaper. Instead mobile carriers would rather buy 3 or 6ghz spectrum that only ever gets used in cities anyway, why not wifi in the cities?
ISM is tragedy of the commons; make it free, let anyone do anything and it becomes junk. Carriers need something they have exclusive use of.
ISM is thriving, the only tragedy is that carriers haven't figured out how to charge rents on it and that's a tragedy for them, it's a spectacular success for everyone using it for free.
Carriers don't need 6GHz for backhaul. They have fiber and cable and (other) microwave. Not to mention the ability to shape their own links with antennas and beam forming and do a good job of it rather than a "default job." What they don't have -- and shouldn't be given under any circumstances -- is the excuse to build a moat in the bustling public park.
At the very least, I don't see a need to grant exclusivity across an entire country. e.g. from my home, I can see 5 wifi networks including mine. Of those, only 1 other than mine has a 5GHz signal that reaches me, and everything other than mine is in the -80 to -95 dBm range. There's simply no need to reserve short-range signals in the suburbs in the way that there is for block of giant apartment buildings each with 100s of networks on top of each other.
On top of that, mobile data is quite expensive in the US, so the only time I have data when out and about is... when I'm on free public wifi networks (which is most of the time). So I don't see much reason to give more of a monopoly to mobile providers. I honestly don't even see a use-case for cell service outside of super rural areas; the only reason I even have it is because it's necessary for MFA. Cell providers are legacy tech as far as cities are concerned IMO.
To me it'd make way more sense to me to let wifi have more bands with stricter limits on power levels, and any exclusivity should be to municipalities who can contract with companies to build and manage their infrastructure.
I certainly agree about regional licensing. I think the best scenario would actually be to allow some for WiFi and some for carriers, especially since selling licenses is a two way door in a way that ISM isn't.
I live in a EU country in an apartment and 5GHz is completely crowded and pretty much unusable because of DFS (making your WiFi AP unexpectedly stop to do a complete scan and choose a new channel), so 6GHz is the only stable, high bandwidth option here, and we need more channels so that most peopole chan switch to it.
The cellular networks operators can have that shitty 5GHz part of the spectrum if they want it!
Agreed. I live the USA in a 100 year old apartment building, and can see a zillion ISP provided routers, all squabbling over the same handful of 5GHz channels. 6E is a game changer.
5Ghz is stuttery and laggy and makes it pretty much impossible to have a clean video call. I don't game, but gaming on it would be miserable. I've measured latency, and it regularly spikes above 1s.
6E is far, far better. Rock solid video calls. Latency testing sites show low, steady latency. The only real problem is signal attenuation seems to be far worse with 6E. Getting a signal 2 walls away from the router is nearly impossible. Though this is also a strength, as it limits the number of devices competing for spectrum.
> I live the USA in a 100 year old apartment building, and can see a zillion ISP provided routers, all squabbling over the same handful of 5GHz channels. 6E is a game changer.
What channel width (20/40/80/other) are you typically seeing?
Even a few sheets of drywall greatly attenuates 5 GHz. Your scenario simply seems impossible unless you have a weird router that can only utilize a tiny portion of the channels.
> And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?
Wi-Fi 6E and later standards that unlock 6 GHz are designed to mitigate contention through several dynamic power management and multiplexing capabilities: TWT, MLO, OFDMA, improved TPC, etc. While these things aren't somehow inherent to 6 GHz, the 6 GHz band isn't crowded with legacy devices mindlessly blasting the spectrum at max power, so it is plausible that 6 GHz Wi-Fi will perform better in dense urban environments. The higher frequency also contributes because attenuation is substantially greater, although in really dense, thin-walled warrens that attenuation won't solve every problem.
I know if I had noisy Wi-Fi neighbors interfering with me, the few important Wi-Fi only devices I have would all be on at least 6E 6 GHz by now, not only because 6 GHz has fewer users, but also in the hope that ultimately, when the users do appear, their devices will be better neighbors by design. I don't actually have that problem, however. The nearest 5 GHz AP I can actually see (that isn't mine,) in Kismet (using rather high gain antennas) is -96 dB, and my actual APs hardly ever see those at all. I've yet to actually detect a 6 GHz device that isn't mine. I known there are a few because the manufacturers and model numbers of many APs are visible, but between the inherent attenuation and the power level controls, I don't see them.
There is significantly more spectrum available for wifi in the 6ghz band than in the 5ghz band, so even if we moved everything off of 5ghz and ignored the attenuation benefits of 6ghz, we'd still have significantly less congestion on 6ghz than 5ghz wifi. In my apartment, my laptop can see ~50 wifi networks, we need some spectrum elbow-room to spread that out.
Even if you halve that, how many online activities are going to make use of that bandwidth? And if you have a 2x2 client, you double it anyways. A 1x1 40Mhz using 802.11ax will give you a max PHY of 287Mbps. How many activities use >100 Mbps, especially continuously?
Off the top of my head: certainly downloading a new game or software updates can eat up those bits, and photo/video editing or creation (local NAS or uploading) it might be useful; are there any other activities that use that?
As I commented elsewhere: it would be great if residential Wifi devices defaulted to 40 MHz.
Completely independent of bandwidth, higher frequencies also fall off faster. That's bad if you are trying to cover max space but good if you are trying to avoid noisy neighbors.
They are if they're in an urban environment (which is 80% of the population of the United States). Maximizing your channel width only makes sense in suburban/rural areas. You can get a much more reliable connection by using a smaller channel width.
> And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?
Yes.
5 Ghz has 12x 40MHz channels, 6 Ghz has (in the US/CA where it is basically 'fully unlocked' for Wifi) 29x 40Mhz channels. It's the difference between 500Mhz worth of total bandwidth and 1200Mhz: over double.
And given attenuation increases as frequencies goes up, your neighbours' signals won't travel as far as the lower frequency bands, which helps with localization.
We just have to hope that vendors don't ship 80 or 160Mhz channels by default for residential devices, which will potentially eat up bandwidth (though Wifi 7 makes Punctured Transmission / Preamble Puncturing mandatory, where previously it was optional). Though even if they do, 6Ghz has more 160Mhz channels than 5Ghz has 80Mhz ones (7 vs. 6).
A 1x1 40Mhz using 802.11ax will give you a max PHY of 287Mbps:
1x1 40Mhz = 287Mbps PHY ~ 143Mbps realistic ~ 100Mbps probable. Double that for 2x2 40Mhz: 200 Mbps.
Certainly some connections may need more, and is the reason for >40 Mhz options, but I'm not entirely convinced one of those should be the out-of-box default.
This less of a concern in 6 Ghz because there are many more channels, but this is what the story is all about: how is that frequency band going to be allocated? In US/CA all of it basically went to Wifi, and that gives folks more options, even in more densely populated areas.
I guess the problem is if you default it low, people will end up with slower internet for no reason. While most areas would be perfectly fine at 80mhz. Maybe routers could run their own speed test and self configure to the right bandwidth.
>And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?
Yes. Probably because they have some basic grasp of electromagnetic reality, which perhaps you might consider studying a bit before forming strong opinions?
>It will be as crowded as 5
Physically impossible. 6 GHz simply does not have the material penetration, that's the point. Having way more raw bandwidth on tap, all available all the time without DFS plopped in the middle too, is also extremely helpful of course too. But the signal just not traveling as far and not going through walls well is the core thing. You don't need special effort EM shielding for it so much, bulk material will do it. And WAPs are cheap now. Having a higher number of smaller cells has been best practice for awhile already, and 6 GHz takes that much further.
We said this about 5Ghz when that came out. I'm sorry to say it's not true, there's more than enough spectrum in 5Ghz if properly managed and co-ordinated. I would rather fix that first. Why is it we can run WiFi for thousands of developers in one room/venue just fine but people living in apartment blocks are apparently struggling with a dozen devices per 60sqm apartment?
APs using 160MHZ channel widths with 1 or 2 spatial streams because it's cheaper than 80MHZ channels and 3 or 4 spatial streams. Absolutely crap 'auto' channel selection, too high a power (because cheaper than a second AP), poor AP placement and inappropriate channel width (in an apartment block 40Mhz per AP might be optimal).
To the extent "we" said this, we were absolutely, 100% correct. 5 GHz was and remains a massive improvement over 2.4 GHz, exactly as hoped. But in the decade and half since demands have gone up a lot. 6 GHz will be even better as it propagates even worse and has even more bandwidth available, while human population density won't change.
>I'm sorry to say it's not true, there's more than enough spectrum in 5Ghz if properly managed and co-ordinated
I'm sorry to say you're wrong, there is not remotely enough usable spectrum, and that's regardless of "proper management" which in reality is completely contrary to the practical reality local networks in a setting with a high density of independent people/organizations.
>I would rather fix that first.
That's nice. Most fortunately you are not in charge.
>Why is it we can run WiFi for thousands of developers in one room/venue just fine
That's a low demand situation under the control of a single entity where people are going to be understanding of compromise given the special circumstances, unlike in home or business.
>but people living in apartment blocks are apparently struggling with a dozen devices per 60sqm apartment?
You're wondering why might want their own independent LANs in their own homes? Well, I'm sure you can think of one or two reasons if you put your mind to it.
Most of 5Ghz is unusable because of DFS. In Australia, only 2 out of the 6 80mhz channels are usable. 6 Ghz has 6 of them completely usable today, with possibly more on the upper end usable in the future.
> 6 GHz simply does not have the material penetration, that's the point.
Really? Is there something special about 6 GHz absorption through common construction materials? Otherwise, why would a 20% higher frequency be that much worse?
But perhaps all that matters is, does a band support more connections than there would be apartments or businesses in range? For some people in dense apartment complexes, 5Ghz evidently does not. But if 6Ghz supports twice as many, that might be a limit that gets hit by vastly fewer "localities" like that.
(Student wifi hotspots in a large lecture theatre, that's another problem entirely!)
Hmm, I'm in a 60-apartments block and we don't have this problem at all. Heck, even my shitty Meross devices manage despite all the 2.4 and 2.4+5 GHz connections around. What I struggle with is reliable 4G, and even 5G is so shabby I might as well keep it disabled. More spectrum for network signal sounds like it would help much more than improving Wi-Fi, which is already very reliable and plenty fast. My 2 cents…
Same, if a wireless device needs more than 54Mbps (802.11g, what the ancient Linksys WRT54G already offered) then I feel I'm doing something wrong and I'd better off just plugging it to my USB-C dock to get ethernet and power.
It's enough to stream 4k video (though barely, and I'd be better off moving to a TV), has better wall penetration and is fast enough for browsing and updating software.
I don't have to deal with congestion though. I think I've only seen a neighbour's AP once and I doubt they started hiding their SSID. My guess is that congestion is an issue because transmission power isn't low enough and there's little you can do to fix someone else's AP other than be increasingly louder than them.
Isn't 2.4GHz too congested already, esp considering a lot of wifi-connected devices still work at that range? I typically go the other way around to avoid congestion.
This is Europe where we have concrete or masonry walls and good insulation, I see maybe 2 other APs in the worst days in the apartment. On the good days I have no other APs.
I don't know about other areas but any apartment buildings post like 1990s are just absolute junk when it comes to separation. Before then it was just concrete or structural brick and now somehow it's often 'fireproof magicboard'.
I wonder if delegating LiFi to do downstream and very narrow bands of Wifi for upstream would solve congestion problems. As example if existing smartphones could receive LiFi signal with current front facing sensors.
It's not even that, it's just build apartment blocks out of real materials like concrete and brick not wood and plasterboard.
I have lived in the centre of a city in a victorian apartment block and looking back it was a dream. About a foot of brick wall between me and the next flat either side. Never heard a peep, excellent WiFi.
A way to solve this would be to switch to a hyperbolic space. We should have evolved from Euclidean geometry long ago. R'lyeh has no problem with wireless networking, you never drop a call.
This would come at the expense of lowering density and multiplying infrastructure costs by a few orders of magnitude, making everything less accessible in doing so.
Or, if you are not being sarcastic, the solution to wireless networking issues is to… rebuild cities in which billions of people live and spread those people over… where? Never mind the fact that cities are the best way of arranging lots of people, where would you build those "houses not so close to each other" that is not a desert, a cliff, or an ocean?
Whether they’re joking or not, it’s a good example of the sort of reasoning you see in those town hall meetings where a bunch of ancient home owners come up with straight faced reasons for why an apartment complex shouldn’t get built.
“They’ll have congested internet!” would go well alongside “It will block the sun on my daily walk on that part of the street!”
Multiple things can be true simultaneously. For instance:
* The reach for 6GHz by mobile service providers is straight-up greed, as Wi-Fi is a threat to their business expansions towards monopolization
* Wi-Fi is incredibly overcrowded, and a shift to 6GHz will not solve the underlying issues causing the crowding in the first place (mobile device density, over-reliance on Wi-Fi instead of running ethernet to capable devices and drop points)
* ISPs would prefer mobile service providers get 6GHz so they can get higher speeds to fixed receivers without the requisite network buildout
My personal position? Give 6GHz to Wi-Fi, but also make it clear that this is the last spectrum the standard will get. Simultaneously, promote (through regulations, subsidies, or municipal buildouts) wired networking wherever practicable. The fact new construction in 2025 doesn’t mandate ethernet drops in every non-bathroom is what’s contributing to Wi-Fi crowding, and prevalent last-mile wired access ensures that mobile operators have to compete on cost rather than data caps - and thus hinders their monopolization efforts.
> The fact new construction in 2025 doesn’t mandate ethernet drops in every non-bathroom is what’s contributing to Wi-Fi crowding, and prevalent last-mile wired access ensures that mobile operators have to compete on cost rather than data caps - and thus hinders their monopolization efforts.
This would raise the cost of construction, in the middle of widespread housing shortages.
By peanuts and pennies for a significant ROI. Many places still mandate some form of coaxial or telephone wiring, which means you already have the drop points for ethernet. Even better, telephone runs are often done with CAT5e due to cost, and could easily be rewired for ethernet if it’s laid structurally in the first place.
You’re talking a $10k expense on a new home, tops. That’s chump change and easily shoved into regulations regarding new builds without significantly harming progress. The real regulations impacting housing are zoning anyway.
I can't imagine it's anywhere near $10k to install if it's done at the same time as the other electrical before the drywall goes up. Retrofitting it is so much more expensive.
I mean given the computing devices most people use are you suggesting a large majority of the population switches to ethernet adapter's for their tablets and phones?
No, not remotely? I don’t know why folks jump to that (wrongest) conclusion whenever someone mentions ethernet being made a requirement in construction or use.
Can tablets and phones use ethernet? Yes! Should they? Perhaps for a fixed installation, but otherwise no, because that’s not their primary role? Same goes for laptops: if it’s stationary, plug it in; if not, WiFi is fine.
The goal is to shift traffic where reasonable and practical onto wired networks. Desktops, laptops, set top boxes, streaming rigs, control panels, SBCs, game consoles, the list goes on. The only “Wi-Fi required” devices are really just laptops, phones, tablets, watches, and similarly high-mobility devices.
Having to blast wifi through an entire building is part of the problem. If transceivers only need enough power to go a foot or three from an ethernet port with a wifi dongle on it, the problem is solved.
See also: cell phones having to boost power for more distant towers.
As things are, every device has to scream to be heard.
We gave WiFi 800Mhz in the 5Ghz band and we said the same thing at the time 'this is the last we'll need'. That's 10x as much as in 2.4ghz and at a higher frequency.
I remember a lot of people at the time getting really upset about how wasteful that was. Just saying.
It’s wasteful on its face when not combined with regulation and incentives to shift stuff off of Wi-Fi. 6GHz has practical applications in the AR/VR space, which is why I’m in favor of giving it to Wi-Fi. Ultimately though, we need the industry to stop being lazy and start really agitating for ethernet in construction and devices as the norm, not Wi-Fi.
Carriers will never fix issues that they have a revenue stream off of. They sell services to detect call forwarding attacks, sim swap attacks etc to banks and other services.
Its like robocalling, fraud texts and calls you received. Carriers can't sell services to filter them if they fix the issues that allow these to happen in the first place.
Way to fix it is to make the carrier liable. It will be fixed instantly.
I’m in France. I don’t get 30 a day, but at least 2 to 5. I automatically ignore unknown callers and my voice mail message basically says to send a SMS instead.
My Android phone has a feature to not ring unless the number is in my contacts OR they call twice in 15 minutes and my voice mail message tells people to call me twice to reach me. The scammers never do.
No. SS7 predates cellphones. It's the legacy control plane for the PSTN (public switched telephone network). It was never designed for security since it originally never crossed corporate boundaries as everyone had to use the monopoly provider. (Except for international calls).
I admittedly don't know that much about it, but the googling I did indicated the SS7 is only active when you roam/call to legacy networks with 2G/3G that aren't all-IP?
From what I've read that tends to change when the phone companies in question have shut off 2G and 3G though. The only reason to keep using SS7 is for intercompatibility with legacy networks who still have 2G or 3G devices on them.
You can't shut down 2G, because there are a lot of devices, mainly embedded systems like alarms, lift emergency call button, GPS trackers, etc. that still use 2G. Also 2G is the only reliable network connection in a lot of areas that are not otherwise reached by 3G/4G/5G, mainly because a 2G connection is more tolerant to low signal and noise, and also is low frequency, thus 2G is the only option available in situations such as on top of mountains and stuff. And finally there is still a lot of people, maybe elders, that don't have/want a smartphone (mainly because they are more complex to use etc.) and still use an old Nokia with 2G networks (they only need to call or send SMS in the end).
Also: VoLTE is not a thing since a lot of years, and probably there are even a ton of smartphones out there that does not support it (and thus switch back to 2G/3G to place voice calls).
You claim that they cannot be disabled, while this is already happening [0][1][2]. Some countries, like Switzerland, already completed the shutdown years ago [2].
It's the same "we can't introduce chip-and-pin because of all the credit card readers" argument that kept carding an issue a decade longer in the US than in the EU.
Ever since the analog TV shutdown and the refarming of those low frequencies to 4G LTE, you see that 4G actually has higher coverage than 2G/3G (this both in sparsely-populated places like Australia and dense ones like Japan).
And for 2G especially GSM has a physical cell size limit due to TDMA that LTE does not have so in sparse areas the same transmitter location can reach further.
If in your country 2G still has better coverage that's not due to technical superiority of the standard but due to decisions made by the operator.
I think you are wrong. 2g and 3g is slowly but surely being killed everywhere. Which is a shame because it's much easier on batteries then 4g, but they want that bandwidth.
For example, lower-frequency bands have longer reach, but lower bandwidth. Because everyone has 2G support, it makes sense to put 2G on the lower frequencies as fallback, with 3G/4G/5G on higher frequencies as optional bandwidth booster. But this also means 5G reliability is being limited by its frequency! You could have better 5G - if it could use the frequency currently occupied by 2G...
It also doesn't help that 2G and 3G aren't forward-compatible. They require their own dedicated frequency, so you need to sacrifice a lot of potential bandwidth for a small number of low-data devices. 4G and beyond can play nice with future tech: a single base station using a single frequency can handle both 4G and 5G connections at once - it'll dynamically allocate the air time as needed.
About the elderly: my 95-year-old grandma uses a tablet for video calls and a big-button 4G-capable feature phone. My 85-year-old other grandma has fully embraced her smartphone. Turns out they really like seeing pictures of their great-grandkids! Give them a reason to switch and they will adopt it - they both ditched their land lines.
Same with elevators and stuff: schedule a kill date 5 years into the future and they'll be replaced by 4G-capable units instead of ancient slightly-cheaper 2G-only ones when their warranty inevitably expires.
It's not that simple. There are a ton of legacy systems that upgrading would cost a lot of money and it's not the fact or replacing a 100 euros smartphone. A lot of these systems have a critical (safety) function, and thus if they stop working there would be consequences (I've mentioned the elevator alarm, but consider alarms for plants in remote areas that use 2G to send out alarms, let's say a pumping station for sewer, remote sensors in the mountains, dataloggers, electronic bracelet given to people that has restrictive sentences, etc).
This is the same reasoning why they keep active the "old" analog telephone network, why not everyone is switched to VOIP, because there are situations where it's still used by stuff that is critical or too expensive to replace.
> with 3G/4G/5G on higher frequencies as optional bandwidth booster.
There are 5G bands in the ~700MHz bandwidth (that was recovered by switching to more efficient encoding for DTV) that could be used that are even lower than 2G that is around 900MHz.
They could (and probably will) dismiss 2G for consumer use, but keep some frequencies that are used by operators that provide MTM SIM.
> Give them a reason to switch and they will adopt it - they both ditched their land lines.
I've tried to make my grandma learn how to use a phone to send SMS multiple times and failed. If she uses a mobile phone (rare situation) she uses it as a landline phone, that is type the number that she wants to call, not even using the contacts in the phone. To be fair I had difficulties explaining how to use a cordless landline phone.
Speaking of elderly, there are a lot of them that have dedicated devices that they can use to make emergency calls to registered numbers, that probably use 2G network (some other use even landline). Since these devices are even provided for free by the national healthcare system, I see that there is not much money to spend to upgrade them.
BTW, are we sure that all the smartphone out there support VoLTE? If not, to make phone calls they need to fallback to 3G/2G, it was a common problem not many years ago, with some providers (Iliad) that even started supporting VoLTE like less than 2 years ago...
Interestingly, my country turned off 3G before 2G.
I think the reasoning was that the heavy data 3G users had already upgraded to 4G and beyond, and low data 3G users could fall back to 2G, so retiring 3G would have negligible impact - while opening up a lot of bandwidth for 4G and 5G.
On the other hand, there were plenty of 2G-only low data users around, so retiring that early would break stuff for a lot of people. Keeping it around longer gave people more time to upgrade.
It's already been completely shut down in large swaths of the world.
> mainly because a 2G connection is more tolerant to low signal and noise
Huh? Everything I've heard about 2G indicates that it is an incredibly noisy protocol with horrible congestion characteristics, and that it craps out even when there's only a few devices. Maybe it's only winning because it has nearly completely disappeared?
No, I'm talking about anyone with SS7 access basically has root on the whole network and can query for locations of any phone number anonymously... no audit trail, no access control.
Tbh it's probably much more useful for mobile operators than wifi. 6GHz does not propagate well at all at wifi power limits and as such one 320MHz band probably won't overlap much with neighbours, even in apartment buildings. This does preclude having 640MHz bands though in future wifi standards, but I'm not sure how important that is - Wifi7 on MLO could theoretically deliver 7.2gbit/sec in 2x2 config and double that again in 4x4. If devices need more speed (laptops more than phones) then they can move to 4x4 more?
Whereas for mobile operators it would be very useful in outdoor/indoor (airports etc) urban areas that are very busy.
2.4GHz is completely unusable in urban environments, because you're getting interference from two dozen neighbours. And everyone has a poor connection, so their "handy" nephew will turn up the transmission power to the maximum - which of course makes it even worse.
6GHz barely makes it through a concrete wall, so you're only receiving your own AP, so you have the whole bandwith mostly to yourself.
On the other hand, cellular networks are well-regulated: if an airport's entire network is managed by a single party they can just install extra antennas and turn down the power.
And it's not like cellular operators will be able to use it often: outdoor use falls apart the moment there are a bunch of trees or buildings in the way, so it only makes sense in buildings like airports and stadiums. Why would the rest of society have to be banned from using 6GHz Wifi for that?
Besides, didn't 5G include support for 30GHz frequencies for exactly this application? What happened to that?
> 6GHz barely makes it through a concrete wall, so you're only receiving your own AP, so you have the whole bandwith mostly to yourself.
I agree with this and the fact that 6GHz should still be available for wifi, but this whole bandwidth frenzy over wifi has always seemed like a meme for anyone except power users. A 4K netflix stream caps out around 15mbps, so >95% of typical home users will be just fine using 2.4/5GHz inside their own homes.
You've got to take into account that those bandwidth figures exist on paper only - nobody is getting 5Gbps out of their wifi.
In practice it is all about degraded performance. If you're sitting in another room than the AP, close to your neighbour, do you want to be left with 50Mbps remaining out of the original 5000Mbps, or 2Mbps remaining out of the original 200Mpbs?
Yeah, but that's just because Netflix streams are ridiculiously over compressed -- they use extremely low quality encodes. It's technically a "4K" stream, sure, but at a bitrate only realistically capable of 1080p.
An actual 4K stream (one capable of expected resolution at 4K) is around 30 to 40mbps.
This ~10 to 20 Mbps is enough nonsense is like claiming that 24 fps is enough to play games.
I mean sure, its usable, but its not good. You can notice the differences in buffering / scrubbing speed well into the 100+ mbps range.
Plus being able to download and upload files quickly. Particularly from something like a home NAS, is important. 15 mbps is like using a shitty USB 2 stick for everything!
But your home NAS should be on ethernet? Who would buy a NAS and then not wire it in??
The point here is that only devices like a TV, mobile, tablet or laptop should be on WiFi and it's pretty hard to notice the difference between say 50Mbps and 500Mbps on any of those except maybe if you are moving files around on your laptop.
Family of 4 comes home after a long day out, all plug in their phones at the same time to charge and drop down in the sofa to vegetate in front of Netflix. Why is it buffering so bad?!?
Traffic is bursty. Higher bandwidth connections make the whole internet more efficient - if you can race to idle then servers have fewer concurrent connections to keep track of, routers can more quickly clean up their NAT tables etc etc
> 6GHz barely makes it through a concrete wall, so you're only receiving your own AP, so you have the whole bandwith mostly to yourself.
6GHz barely makes it thought a piece of paper. I live in dense downtown area of Los Angeles and I see zero 6Ghz networks except mine, sometimes three 5Ghz networks (usually just two). No issues using 160Mhz wide channel on 5Ghz, at least for me.
My balcony separated from AP with a 2 panel window, other than that it's in line of sight: 6Ghz not visible at all, 5Ghz poor signal, but better than 2.4Ghz. 2.4 Ghz is unusable in my area at all.
> 6GHz barely makes it through a concrete wall, so you're only receiving your own AP, so you have the whole bandwith mostly to yourself.
I'm no expert and only speak from personal experience. When the signal is weak, you don't have the whole bandwith, you only get low throughput. Ideally you would want a strong, high penetration signal (low frequency) and all users on separate channels. It's of course impossible in densely populated areas.
Whenever I have to deal with setting up WLAN in the office or at home, I hate the experience and I try to use wired connections wherever possible.
That’s not how RF works (generally). It’s about signal/noise ratio.
It gets really bad when signal is difficult to distinguish from noise because (for example!) everyone is talking at roughly the same power level. Think crowded bar with everyone yelling at each other.
When one is significantly louder than others, even if the others are not that quiet, it’s not a big deal unless at your ear/antenna they have the same loudness. Think concert with big speakers for the main act.
6ghz is better for many isolated networks right next to each other precisely because the others ‘voices’ lose power so quickly. You don’t have the competition for attention. Think ‘every couple in the bar gets their own booth’.
Wired connections are even better, because the amount of noise required to be unable to tell apart signal from noise is orders of magnitude higher - like ‘noisy welder right on top/EMP’ levels. Because the wires can actually be shielded. It’s like having your own hotel room.
It's not saying 6GHz shouldn't be used for WiFi. It's saying that 6-6.4GHz (approx) is reserved for WiFi and 6.4-7GHz should be used for cellular networks.
My point isn't that we shouldn't have no WiFi on 6GHz, but 1GHz extra for WiFi is limited utility compared to cellular networks.
You can still fit an entire 320MHz channel width in the lower 6GHz and if it doesn't overlap like you say why bother with 3x that?
The question then is: do we really need the whole 1Ghz of spectrum for wifi, if it doesn't really propagate to your neighbour? It should be much easier to avoid interference than on 2.4Ghz, so you need less channels.
I count approximately twice as many channels available on 6ghz than 5ghz, so even if we ignore the penetration differences between 5 and 6ghz, the 6ghz band is still better. Plus this isn't a "pick one" type of scenario (especially with MLO), 5ghz + 6ghz is 3x as many channels as 5ghz alone.
> I count approximately twice as many channels available on 6ghz than 5ghz
Isn't this mostly arbitrary? Eg what frequency range one defines channels over and thus how many channels? Eg in the wikipedia link that "6GHz" goes up to ~7.1GHz. Because otherwise channels seem to be more or less spread centered 20MHz apart in each case.
Yeah, I wasn't making that argument as some sort of intrinsic benefit to frequencies around 6ghz, but rather we have administratively decided that the slice of spectrum available for "6ghz" wifi has approximately twice the room compared to the slice of spectrum we have administratively allocated for "5ghz" wifi. In reality, "5ghz" wifi is more like 5.2-5.9ghz (with a hole around 5.4ghz) and "6ghz" wifi is more like 5.9ghz to 7.1ghz.
The intrinsic benefit for the frequencies around 6ghz is the reduced penetration through walls which will also reduce the congestion.
No definitely not in practice. 5Ghz reaches across multiple rooms with some loss whereas 6Ghz clearly looses more and drops off to 0 much faster.
The really big problem here is that 6Ghz also comes with the ability to have 320Mhz towards one channel so its got double the bandwidth of 5Ghz as well as being lower penetration. Its really good for things like VR headsets due to the lower interference and higher bandwidth.
6GHz has worse penetration than 5Ghz, but the difference is indeed not as pronounced as it is compared to 2.4GHz.
The main benefit is going to be the additional frequency space. 5GHz effectively has 3ish channels, and 6GHz adds another 3-7 to that. Combine it with band steering and dynamic channel allocation, and you and all of your close neighbours can probably all get your own dedicated frequency.
Even if you half that, that's (IMHO) probably sufficient for the vast majority of online activities. And if you have a 2x2 client you double it anyway.
They are trying to improve service by avoiding noise. Something few realize is that all wireless technologies are, in effect, time-share: Every device on the channel, router/tower included, take turn to talk while everyone else shuts up and listens.
If other types of devices also use your channel, you'll have to shut up and wait for airtime even longer. Having WiFi and cellular co-exist mean that they are both fighting eachother over airtime, and both spending a lot of time silent.
It's preferable to avoid channel overlap when the services need to co-exist.
They don’t need a frequency channel dedicated to them just to improve reception inside a stadium or an airport.
Tell me what stops them from using the exact same technology they use for WiFi calling? They just want to own the means the people connect to the internet and be a tax on everyone.
Yes they do? Just like WiFi needs way more channels than it has available to work well inside a Stadium, which is why it doesn't work well inside a stadium or airport at all. Heck, I would never even bother trying WiFi in such a setting - between 5G and WiFi, 5G is much better designed for handling such dense cells.
It's important to note that "they" are not trying to fix calls, they are trying to improve cellular connectivity. Getting calls to work is easy, and traditional calls have become a niche use of smartphones. Many already have excellent internet connectivity on their devices and would like that to just remain seamlessly available in all situations rather than having to switch technologies and maintain multiple subscriptions.
While I'm quite happy with my fiber at home, I only really use WiFi on my phone at home is to access local devices. In other situations, especially in corporate or public settings, WiFi is not only inconvenient but often a way worse and slower experience than just staying on 5G - after all, my phone gets gigabit on 5G with a public IPv6 address, and the latency is pretty good too, which can't be said for overcrowded WiFi and crap enterprise network solutions. If it wasn't for casting, 5G + tailscale would alleviate most needs to WiFi.
Heck, for the smartphone-native generation it might even seem weird that they need another internet subscription for their home when they pay for on for their phone, "just because" 5G or whatever wasn't allowed to step on a spectrum - a quite literal tax.
(Don't get me wrong, I like my WiFi, but cellular is not the enemy. We just need to hand out more spectrum to both.)
Let’s start with the things we agree and then I’m going to voice my concerns.
We do need a lot more frequencies to be opened up both for personal and professional use. New technologies, dynamic long and short range connections etc.
We also need to enforce frequency usage as well so that a neighbor of ours doesn’t block the entire 2.4GHz for the entire block with his access points blasting at full power.
Here’s the problem, 6GHz already became a WiFi standard and these cellular companies are lobbying to retroactively change the frequency allocation for themself because they think they can use it better and more importantly all the research and development is already done and they don’t want to waste money developing new technologies there.
But why? Why would we do all the research and development with public fund and then allocate the frequency bands to cellular companies and let them charge people $100+ per month and have 40%+ profit margins while increasing their prices over 60% since 2020.
Hypothetically speaking just a small fraction of that money can be used to put fiber internet all over the place with tons of 6GHz access points and let everyone have free internet.
The cellular companies are late to the game here so they can have a small section of the 6GHz or some of the 7GHz can be opened up but there’s no reason for 6GHz to be retroactively given to them because they lobbied for their own benefits.
I have no idea where your 100 USD+ per month comes from, my 5G plan is 10 USD per month - considerably cheaper than my 50 USD per month fiber connection, even though they're both gigabit. And the fiber rollout cost more.
> Hypothetically speaking just a small fraction of that money can be used to put fiber internet all over the place with tons of 6GHz access points and let everyone have free internet.
That's what 5G is: fiber running to a bunch of APs running a suitable technology for covering an entire area with a lot of devices in high-speed internet.
WiFi is not that technology (it doesn't target that kind of device density or coexistence, and only really works well with very low device counts in RF quiet buildings), nor would anything about that be cheaper - sounds like the issue you voice is mainly greedy ISPs, while using WiFi deployments would not give them any reason to be any less greedy. A free internet service is a choice that can be done with both WiFi and 5G.
(Yes it would be nice if they didn't both trample on upper 6GHz, but improving cellular, but I'm not sure if WiFi is the greater value prop for those channels.)
The Trump administration is diligently working to undo that. Why dedicate such a resource to the public, when you can let private companies charge us to use it?
The Register, being British, should probably have gotten this right, but people constantly get this wrong. Even a lot of people living in the union don't even realize the different between EU, Europe, EEA, Schengen and all the other layers, so maybe it's hard to blame "outsiders" from not getting it either.
I'm guessing maybe the "European Commission" threw them off, because it's an EU entity (basically the executive branch), not "Europe wide" one, which the name kind of implies. But then "EU" also implies "Europe wide" in its name, and people seem to kind of get the difference most of the times.
The Register know very well what the EU is. However, in practice, the EU is colloquially referred to as "Europe" in many contexts in the UK.
The rules the EU establishes will also apply to the EEA, and in practice will almost certainly also be adopted by the UK, which has tended to take its lead from the EU on such matters since Brexit. So, while pedantically these are not rules for Europe, _for practical purposes_ they likely will be.
It's not obvious at all actually, since there are many European things that also affect Island, Norway and Switzerland for being part of EFTA, but an equally high number of things that don't.
And even the EU itself is pretty fragmented with various overlapping areas with different rules.
As someone who's studied European relations, I can tell you that it's a real mess, and the fact that journalists don't accurately reporting the facts definitely isn't helpful.
Whenever I go to the UK, people there seem to consistently refer to EU or the rest/continental europe in general as "europe", esp in political/economic context. My impression is that the UK is just too important to be grouped together with other countries.
But in politics the distinction between EU and Europe matters, there's the political EU region, but countries like Switzerland and Norway are politically still in Europe despite not being in EU just due to all the neighboring countries, in theory same should apply to UK
I think most people realise there is a difference. If nothing else, Brexit made it very clear to those who didn't already know that you can be in this part of the world but not in the EU. But rightly or wrongly, people still use "Europe" as shorthand for "the European Union". It's no different to referring to the US as "America".
I do think the media should aim to do better so agree that the Register should have used the correct term.
I find your comparison not so convincing. While there is some common misidentification between the EU and Europe, I’ve never heard anyone in the world refer to “America” in a way that was not for the United States.
Maybe in English. In Spanish (and we’re a bunch, the native Spanish speakers) I guarantee that if you say “América” you’re referring to the continent. The country is “Estados Unidos” (United States) or its abbreviation, EEUU. And its citizens, “estadounidenses”, not “americanos”.
And in French the inhabitants of "les Etats-Unis" are "Etats-uniens". I've taken the habit of referring to them as USAians, which often gets negative reactionsand remains rare - but I find it is the most accurate demonym and I'll keep pushing it.
I look forward to the world inventing demonyms for the citizens of the European Union, because at least it will mean that our emerging national body is getting mindshare !
> I look forward to the world inventing demonyms for the citizens of the European Union, because at least it will mean that our emerging national body is getting mindshare !
The European Union is an emerging country - it is my country. For now, many don't yet understand how common necessity binds us, and some remain under the illusion that they can make it alone against China and the USA, but ever closer union is real and whoever has been on Erasmus student exchange knows we are one people. On my French passport, "Union Européenne" is written above "République Française" - that is the hierarchy. A nation is people who will to live together, and the European Union is that... The rest is a couple treaties and a few decades away !
"In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America" is a sentence I've certainly heard before, but he didn't at any point land on any area covered by the United States of America (except maybe Panama)
That ambiguity disappears if you call it "the Americas", but many places see America as one continent (including Latin America, parts of Europe and the Olympic flag)
It is normal in Spanish-speaking countries (and probably others) to consider the entirety of North and South America to be one continent called “America”.
One of the most famous soccer teams in Mexico is even called “Club América”, obviously this doesn’t refer to the US.
In my personal experience, people from Latin American countries will sometimes point out that they are American because they come from North or South America.
Which is, of course, true; however, in English conversation, it's often nothing more than pedantry. In Spanish it makes more sense, since there is a separate demonym for a US person that doesn't co-opt the term "American."
Outside of Romance language speakers born on the American continents, I agree that everyone seems fine calling US-born persons "Americans" without much confusion nor gnashing of teeth.
It’s even more amusing in some ways. A common way to refer to those from the USA in Brazil, for instance (even an official one!) is ‘Norte Americano’.
Which is all kinds of weird because - what about Mexico and Canada? And what about the ‘United states’ part?
It’s just to disambiguate from ‘Americano’ as in what others in South America sometimes use to refer to latin Americans and as a little bit of a FU to the USA, hahah.
Ahh, I forgot about that...and to be transparent, I actually have no idea what French Guyana, Haiti, or Belize typically do to differentiate between people of the American continent(s) and US persons. I should have said Hispanoamerica, but oh well.
> I actually have no idea what French Guyana, Haiti, or Belize typically do to differentiate between people of the American continent(s) and US persons.
In French, people from the Americas are américains. This includes, say québecois and Brazilians. When context matters, people from the US are états-uniens.
Probably because the US are much more mentioned than other American countries. But that’s not really the point, though. People from the US are américains, they’re part of the group of people living in America (which, in French and when it is not qualified, refers to all of them, North, Central, and South).
The point is that nobody would object if you refer to someone from anywhere else in the Americas as américain. Like my lab mate from Buenos Aires or friends from Montréal. And we’re definitely not in Haiti.
You’re right, but this is probably a losing battle. People are probably never going to stop colloquially referring to the political entity that contains most of Europe’s land and population as “Europe”.
And, being on an island, British people are probably never going to stop thinking of “the continent” as at least a little bit of a different thing from themselves.
And on top of that, when it comes to anything radio, ITU has quite the lot to say as well, and you got the ham radio community / IARU as well.
Radio, by virtue of physically not caring about borders, is a really really hot mess, with lots of very powerful and very monied interests floating around.
Not directly though. They get some exceptions and they have referenda to implement things.
They align with the EU a lot for commercial reasons but not completely. Same with Norway. And really, if they did align completely there'd be no reason to not join.
> To be really pedantic we should acknowledge there's no good reason to separate Europe from Asia, it's all one geographical continent.
To be even more pedantic you have to throw in Africa as well, as that is connected by land to Asia just like Europe is! Now we have the supercontinent Afroeurasia which contains like 85% of the worlds population.
Tell me more how Europe is separated by a canal from Asia ? There are benefits splitting America in two, splitting Africa from Eurasia, splitting Australia from Eurasia. What's the benefit of splitting Eurasia into Europe and Asia, besides catering to europeans who believe they're unique in the world ? It only creates more problems
Are there? Most Latin American countries, who see all of America as a single continent, would disagree.
It really makes no sense to argue about this. As I already mentioned, there is no universally agreed model of which continents exist and where the boundaries lie. In the end people feel like they belong to one or the other and that's as far as it will probably ever get.
Europe and Asia are separated by mountains. Geographically that's at least as valid as splitting America on a canal, and splitting Africa from Asia on a canal. If anything the mountains are a more significant barrier to travel and migration than those canals
If we were to rearrange the continents if anything we should split up Asia further, and split Africa into Northern Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa (maybe giving Sub-Saharan Africa to the same new continent as the Arabian peninsula, but that's debatable)
So Africa separated from Eurasia in 1869? And if canals count then Northern Germany is its own continent, Great Britain is several continents, etc. Man-made canals forming a meaningful geographical separation is a weird concept on so many levels
Obviously, but in case the sarcasm of my comment didn't come through: I was trying to make the point that you can't draw lines between continents just because of geography (or tectonic plates for that matter). It's arbitrary - after all we can't even agree which continents do exist.
It's an interesting topic since most people in a hypothetical Eurasia would probably never call themselves Eurasian, but would have a strong sense of being one or the other. But on the other hand there is also no universally agreed to boundary between the two as well. And maybe this imprecision the best representation of reality that we have for this.
It's essentially exactly the same as when people refer to the US as 'America'. While the US does not encompass all of the American continent, there is only one political entity called 'America' so it's not ambigious.
I really don't understand the underlying physics, politcs or really anything. Why don't we at home just host 'cellular' networks instead of WiFi? Could we just have a our own little cellular network? Why do we need both?
> In response, the Wi-Fi Alliance and the DSA are trying to stoke fears that such a move would severely dent Europe's digital development, claiming Wi-Fi is the primary way consumers access the internet and constraining it would impact progress.
Just today, there’s a news report in India where the major telecom companies have lobbied that the entire 6 GHz band be reserved for mobile services and that even part of it shouldn’t be left for unlicensed WiFi. [1]
The problem in India is that the penetration of wired broadband is very low, and the telcos don’t seem to be interested in expanding it as much as they are in grabbing more of wireless spectrum.
I don’t believe it’s a good move to reserve these exclusively for mobile services. We (in general) need more unlicensed spectrum for innovation. Let the companies figure out another way out.
I also know that these bands are already allowed for unlicensed WiFi use in the US.
[1]: https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/j...
For better or worse mobile companies will probably make a more efficient use of the space in a country like India at a practical level. I can at least see why you might do this.
I don't know anything really about India's telecoms market, but I know in other 'similar' countries you can buy a mobile phone data plan for like a couple/few dollars a month, but a fixed line is 10X that. You could argue it's not very progressive to reserve the spectrum for the 'rich' who can afford fixed lines.
Few people have phone landlines anymore in India, but wired broadband to the home is not uncommon. It would be annoying to not then be able to have a home WiFi 6G router.
Mobile data is cheap, but broadband is much cheaper.
Given we know 5Ghz can give us like 600Mbps real world on 80Mhz channels, would a fixed line in India typically be above that speed? Is it all GPON these days or still DSL/WISP type stuff?
> would a fixed line in India typically be above that speed?
My family lives outside of a tier 2 city border, in what used to be farmland in the 90s.
They have Asianet FTTH at 1Gbps, but most of the video/streaming traffic ends at the CDN hosts in the same city.
That CDN push to the edge is why Hotstar is faster to load there - the latency on seeks isn't going around the planet.
That is really cool, but sad to see it's only at around 15% penetration.
WISP can do 1Gbps in 6GHz now, reliably, with Tarana. The technology is staggering.
I'm aware, but, um, without sounding insensitive, not for $50 per sub in hardware cost. Tarana is about 10X that. If you have that kind of money labour is cheap enough to run fibre for the same amount.
The only way that starts to make any sense is if you're doing 128way-256way gpon splits which is not something most are willing to do if they need to make any kind of profit and sell anything more than 100Mbps packages. I wasn't even willing to do 64w splits over 10 years ago now and in hindsight that was wise.
You could go active but then your SFP/SFP+ per port cost eats you up.
For less than 1mil fixed wireless is going to cover 2,800km/sq. You are not going to to get anywhere near that cost trying to do the same thing to 2048(or more) subs in that footprint with fiber. That wouldn't even cover your fiber material cost!
Mobile doesn't scale for densely populated mega cities. The signal also doesn't penetrate glass and concrete very well.
"Mobile doesn't scale in cities" is the exact reason they need 6Ghz (because higher frequencies enable much higher density of cells, reducing terminals per cell). 6Ghz will penetrate buildings terribly, I agree, but it's honestly just not that simple, for example it's now becoming really common for carriers to be doing in building deployments; shopping centres, sports stadiums, the transit network (e.g 4g in the subway) hospitals, the list goes on. Secondly by lifting terminals off of say 800Mhz or 1.8Ghz band and into 6Ghz outside where you can, you free up capacity on those lower frequency bands that do penetrate buildings or reach weird areas like the middle of a park that has tree cover (or whatever).
You could do gigabit fixed wireless for less than 1/10 the cost of LTE, and have better performance.
LTE is what somebody would do without much telecom experience and more money than sense.
LTE is what the telecom people wanted. The rest (slightly exaggerated) wanted wimax.
Wimax hasn't been something anybody I've known in the US has talked about for more than 15 years.
I've built fiber networks and fixed wireless networks. Almost ended up becoming an LTE network as well. It didn't make any sense in any sort of financial modeling, even with spectrum availability.
LTE helps solve "general connectivity". What it does not do is build scalable, reliable, high speed, economical sensitive broadband infrastructure.
Back when LTE was rolled out initially the competitor was wimax.
It was around that same timeframe that "TV Whitespace" was going to become the next big thing.
Anyway, LTE should be the literal last option. It requires more than 2x as many towers as fixed wireless, with gear more than 20x more expensive. That's also more than 2x-3x the required amount of of battery backup systems, networking equipment, and land / tower leases.
If you have extreme density, you NEED fiber and you need WiFi. You extend from the fiber network with extremely high quality ngFW. To fill gaps, use satellite.
Fiber requires a certain density of subscriber/mile(km), the same as any technology.
Even with 0 labor cost, you still need to get conduit in the ground (materials), fiber, terminations, switching, routing, OLT/ONT cost, handholes, any permitting or utilities location, horizontal boring equipment , jackhammers, splicers, etc. The upfront cost is many, many, many times higher for fiber and if you're okay with your cost-per passing being more than you would ever make on customer ARPU, then sure do that. Even if labor cost was 0. And it will take YEARS longer to deploy and see a return on investment from, of ever.
It doesn't matter if there's broadband to the location if nobody at the location can afford it.
If you want broadband, LTE is the worst option.
Nowhere with even just an "improved" road (i.e., gravel road, not "only" a path cleared of tall vegetation) is too low density for fiber.
Unless local conditions make you want to use aerial cable, you'll just cable plow a speed pipe and put in a small access riser every 2~3 miles. You blow the cable in segment-by-segment, either splicing at these locations or spooling the ongoing length up before moving the blower and doing the next segment.
If the cable is damaged you measure with OTDR where the break is, walk there with a shovel, some spare speedpipe, and two speedpipe connectors. You dig out the damage, cut it out, put good pipe in, join it to the open ends where you cut the damaged section out, and bury it while taking more care to make it last better this time. You pull/blow out the section of cable and blow in a fresh one, splice it to the existing cable and both ends of the segment, and the connection is fixed.
AFAIK cable plow for fiber in not-very-hard ground is cheaper than planting "telegraph" poles like they did in the old days.
The only expensive parts about fiber optic Internet are the machine that allows you to splice (about 1k$, unlike the 5$ LSA tool for attaching RJ-45 sockets to Cat.5/6/7 cable; this only blocks DIYers from easily doing it) and digging up developed area with more finely controlled tools than a literal plow if you forgot to put in speed pipe the last time the ground was dug up for any infrastructure at all (say, piped water).
Oh, and arguably the optics if you expect to be cheaper than copper on distances within a building at speeds under 10 Gbit/s.
Are we talking about Mumbai or an area w/ 0.2 homes per 10sq km? Because I'm talking about how to do both. Vastly different challenges and economic viability, and I have experience doing both types of environments.
I was not at any point talking about fixed wireless.
5-6Ghz, certainly, lower frequencies do though. This is why T-mobile offers home broadband using their 5G network (which can support up to 1M devices per square km) in the US; they overbuilt, and have many smaller cells with lots of capacity and are undersubscribed, and monetize the remaining capacity using lowest priority fixed broadband.
One could see India deploying the same density compatible infrastructure in the usual "leapfrog" model of skipping lesser technology implementations in this space.
> mobile companies will probably make a more efficient use of the space
Uh... wat? Something like 70%+ of all internet data anywhere goes over a 2.4GHz wifi for its terminal client, squashed into a paltry 100 MHz of spectrum.
There are surely engineering minutiae arguments to be made for why radios for dedicated bands can be better in some way, or public safety arguments for why unlicensed users need to be segregated from the system that provides emergency service.
But "more efficient use of the space" seems ridiculous on its face.
India has 15% fixed broadband penetration. So let's say you've got a town of 100K households. You can;
A) give the richest 15K of them absolutely no faster WiFi whatsoever because 5GHZ will not be congested at all for them (so there is no problem to solve really)
OR
B) you can have the mobile carrier install a 6Ghz base station on every other telecoms/power pole in town and offer up terabits of mobile data capacity available to everyone throughout the town.
What's the most efficient use?
The most efficient way to extract money from people is to sell off the spectrum to the highest bidding rent seeker, I agree.
As for most efficient use of the resource, well, consulting my spectrum analyzer, ISM bands are winning by a mile and we should want more of them.
Sure obviously giving it to WiFi and then installing town wide free WiFi would be the absolute most efficient option but I'm trying to stay realistic.
Wi-Fi is not a very efficient way to cover a whole town, due to its inherently low range (at least when involving consumer devices on one end). You'd be spending a lot of resources on base stations that never see any usage.
WiFi literally covers basically all of the urban US already, I'm not understanding this point.
It's true that there's no single service one can sign up for and you have to bounce around cafe and Xfinity and whatever "Free WiFi!" networks are being offered. Which is definitely annoying and it's nice to have a single company sell you service in a neatly packaged "phone" product.
But again, trying to phrase that as a technical point is ridiculous. Free bands are just plain better, technically. You get more data to more people for less money using open spread spectrum protocols than you do with dedicated bands. Period.
I never said anything about free or government-run WiFi, just about auctioning off the spectrum. Companies that build out the infrastructure should be able to charge for access, but they shouldn't be able to prevent others from competing by paying the government for exclusivity. That's a scam.
It's a technical/commercial necessity to have exclusive use over the spectrum in a given area. If you don't believe me why doesn't every city in the world have a paid wifi network? With 5Ghz it should be faster than typical 4G/5G speeds, and it only needs lampost level APs, pretty similar to the microcells that carriers deploy but an order of magnitude cheaper. Instead mobile carriers would rather buy 3 or 6ghz spectrum that only ever gets used in cities anyway, why not wifi in the cities?
ISM is tragedy of the commons; make it free, let anyone do anything and it becomes junk. Carriers need something they have exclusive use of.
ISM is thriving, the only tragedy is that carriers haven't figured out how to charge rents on it and that's a tragedy for them, it's a spectacular success for everyone using it for free.
Carriers don't need 6GHz for backhaul. They have fiber and cable and (other) microwave. Not to mention the ability to shape their own links with antennas and beam forming and do a good job of it rather than a "default job." What they don't have -- and shouldn't be given under any circumstances -- is the excuse to build a moat in the bustling public park.
At the very least, I don't see a need to grant exclusivity across an entire country. e.g. from my home, I can see 5 wifi networks including mine. Of those, only 1 other than mine has a 5GHz signal that reaches me, and everything other than mine is in the -80 to -95 dBm range. There's simply no need to reserve short-range signals in the suburbs in the way that there is for block of giant apartment buildings each with 100s of networks on top of each other.
On top of that, mobile data is quite expensive in the US, so the only time I have data when out and about is... when I'm on free public wifi networks (which is most of the time). So I don't see much reason to give more of a monopoly to mobile providers. I honestly don't even see a use-case for cell service outside of super rural areas; the only reason I even have it is because it's necessary for MFA. Cell providers are legacy tech as far as cities are concerned IMO.
To me it'd make way more sense to me to let wifi have more bands with stricter limits on power levels, and any exclusivity should be to municipalities who can contract with companies to build and manage their infrastructure.
> On top of that, mobile data is quite expensive in the US
It's not 2015 - that narrative is long dead. There are countless options for unlimited mobile data (5G, with hotspot) for $15-$20/mo.
I certainly agree about regional licensing. I think the best scenario would actually be to allow some for WiFi and some for carriers, especially since selling licenses is a two way door in a way that ISM isn't.
The best plan would be fiber + fixed wireless + satellite. This is considering cost to deploy, end subscriber cost, and overall performance.
Fiber won't go everywhere, fixed wireless extends the reach much, much cheaper than LTE, satellite fills in the gaps.
I pay 30$ a year for 2/3 GB per day and unlimited calls. This is more than enough for me.
For broadband I pay 10$ a month for 100 Mbps.
Mobile is terrible at times, Broadband service is amazing, even though it is slow.
Broadband is not that common
I don't know… probably… probably… I don't know anything really
If you don't know what you're talking about, why even bother to post? Maybe wait for a topic that you know something about before responding.
topic isn't about India's telecom market to be fair. I'm happy to see a wide range of opinions on the topic.
This is just corporate greed!
I live in a EU country in an apartment and 5GHz is completely crowded and pretty much unusable because of DFS (making your WiFi AP unexpectedly stop to do a complete scan and choose a new channel), so 6GHz is the only stable, high bandwidth option here, and we need more channels so that most peopole chan switch to it.
The cellular networks operators can have that shitty 5GHz part of the spectrum if they want it!
Agreed. I live the USA in a 100 year old apartment building, and can see a zillion ISP provided routers, all squabbling over the same handful of 5GHz channels. 6E is a game changer.
5Ghz is stuttery and laggy and makes it pretty much impossible to have a clean video call. I don't game, but gaming on it would be miserable. I've measured latency, and it regularly spikes above 1s.
6E is far, far better. Rock solid video calls. Latency testing sites show low, steady latency. The only real problem is signal attenuation seems to be far worse with 6E. Getting a signal 2 walls away from the router is nearly impossible. Though this is also a strength, as it limits the number of devices competing for spectrum.
> I live the USA in a 100 year old apartment building, and can see a zillion ISP provided routers, all squabbling over the same handful of 5GHz channels. 6E is a game changer.
What channel width (20/40/80/other) are you typically seeing?
I've been using the free version of NetSpot, and it does not seem to show the width. The ISP really should configure the narrowest width possible.
Our ISP provided router does seem to default to 20MHz (I think; I cannot recall if I changed it). It offers the choice of 20 or 40Mhz.
I can recommend https://github.com/VREMSoftwareDevelopment/WiFiAnalyzer for a pretty comprehensive Wi-Fi analysis.
How is this even possible?
Even a few sheets of drywall greatly attenuates 5 GHz. Your scenario simply seems impossible unless you have a weird router that can only utilize a tiny portion of the channels.
And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?
It will be as crowded as 5
> And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?
Wi-Fi 6E and later standards that unlock 6 GHz are designed to mitigate contention through several dynamic power management and multiplexing capabilities: TWT, MLO, OFDMA, improved TPC, etc. While these things aren't somehow inherent to 6 GHz, the 6 GHz band isn't crowded with legacy devices mindlessly blasting the spectrum at max power, so it is plausible that 6 GHz Wi-Fi will perform better in dense urban environments. The higher frequency also contributes because attenuation is substantially greater, although in really dense, thin-walled warrens that attenuation won't solve every problem.
I know if I had noisy Wi-Fi neighbors interfering with me, the few important Wi-Fi only devices I have would all be on at least 6E 6 GHz by now, not only because 6 GHz has fewer users, but also in the hope that ultimately, when the users do appear, their devices will be better neighbors by design. I don't actually have that problem, however. The nearest 5 GHz AP I can actually see (that isn't mine,) in Kismet (using rather high gain antennas) is -96 dB, and my actual APs hardly ever see those at all. I've yet to actually detect a 6 GHz device that isn't mine. I known there are a few because the manufacturers and model numbers of many APs are visible, but between the inherent attenuation and the power level controls, I don't see them.
There is significantly more spectrum available for wifi in the 6ghz band than in the 5ghz band, so even if we moved everything off of 5ghz and ignored the attenuation benefits of 6ghz, we'd still have significantly less congestion on 6ghz than 5ghz wifi. In my apartment, my laptop can see ~50 wifi networks, we need some spectrum elbow-room to spread that out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels
There is arguably less? 6Ghz is considered 5945 to 6425, 5Ghz allows far more if you include outdoor and fixed wifi.
This isn't true, 6GHz uses 5.925 to 7.125.
WiFi uses the above, for now.
"significantly" is 50%, but still nowhere near 1 channel per network even if all networks cooperated.
> "significantly" is 50%, but still nowhere near 1 channel per network even if all networks cooperated.
5Ghz has 500Mhz worth of total bandwidth, while 6Ghz has (in US/CA, and hopefully in EU eventually) 1200Mhz. That's over double.
6Ghz has more 160Mhz channels (7) than 5Ghz has 80Mhz channels (6).
5Ghz has 9 non-SRD 40Mhz channels (4 x 80MHz), while 6GHz has 12 (3 x 160MHz).
so in reality you're 1 channel up over 6GHz becasue people are not buying wifi6 router to stay on 80MHz channel
> so in reality you're 1 channel up over 6GHz becasue people are not buying wifi6 router to stay on 80MHz channel
In reality, a 1x1 80Mhz connection gives you a 600 Mbps PHY rate:
* https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
* https://superuser.com/questions/1619079/what-is-the-maximum-...
Even if you halve that, how many online activities are going to make use of that bandwidth? And if you have a 2x2 client, you double it anyways. A 1x1 40Mhz using 802.11ax will give you a max PHY of 287Mbps. How many activities use >100 Mbps, especially continuously?
Off the top of my head: certainly downloading a new game or software updates can eat up those bits, and photo/video editing or creation (local NAS or uploading) it might be useful; are there any other activities that use that?
As I commented elsewhere: it would be great if residential Wifi devices defaulted to 40 MHz.
Completely independent of bandwidth, higher frequencies also fall off faster. That's bad if you are trying to cover max space but good if you are trying to avoid noisy neighbors.
They are if they're in an urban environment (which is 80% of the population of the United States). Maximizing your channel width only makes sense in suburban/rural areas. You can get a much more reliable connection by using a smaller channel width.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45542444
> They are if they're in an urban environment (which is 80% of the population of the United States).
About 40% of the US population lives in a coastal county:
* https://coast.noaa.gov/states/fast-facts/economics-and-demog...
About two-thirds (66%) of the US population lives with-in 100 miles (150km) of the border:
* https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/your-rights-bord...
The US population is more concentrated than many people realize.
> And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?
Yes.
5 Ghz has 12x 40MHz channels, 6 Ghz has (in the US/CA where it is basically 'fully unlocked' for Wifi) 29x 40Mhz channels. It's the difference between 500Mhz worth of total bandwidth and 1200Mhz: over double.
* https://www.everythingrf.com/community/what-frequency-band-d...
* https://spectrum.potatofi.com
* http://www.potatofi.com/posts/spectrum-viewer/
And given attenuation increases as frequencies goes up, your neighbours' signals won't travel as far as the lower frequency bands, which helps with localization.
We just have to hope that vendors don't ship 80 or 160Mhz channels by default for residential devices, which will potentially eat up bandwidth (though Wifi 7 makes Punctured Transmission / Preamble Puncturing mandatory, where previously it was optional). Though even if they do, 6Ghz has more 160Mhz channels than 5Ghz has 80Mhz ones (7 vs. 6).
A 1x1 40Mhz using 802.11ax will give you a max PHY of 287Mbps:
* https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
* https://superuser.com/questions/1619079/what-is-the-maximum-...
Even if you half that, it's (IMHO) probably sufficient for the vast majority of online activities. And if you have a 2x2 client you double it anyway.
I don't see any reason not to use 80Mhz. Many home internet connections are faster than 40Mhz can provide.
> Many home internet connections are faster than 40Mhz can provide.
Define "many". The US average, as of 2023, seems to be ≤150Mbps:
* https://www.opensignal.com/2023/05/23/usa-fixed-broadband-ex...
Cloudflare has data of more sustained-use bandwidth that shows lower numbers:
* https://radar.cloudflare.com/quality
1x1 40Mhz = 287Mbps PHY ~ 143Mbps realistic ~ 100Mbps probable. Double that for 2x2 40Mhz: 200 Mbps.
Certainly some connections may need more, and is the reason for >40 Mhz options, but I'm not entirely convinced one of those should be the out-of-box default.
This less of a concern in 6 Ghz because there are many more channels, but this is what the story is all about: how is that frequency band going to be allocated? In US/CA all of it basically went to Wifi, and that gives folks more options, even in more densely populated areas.
I guess the problem is if you default it low, people will end up with slower internet for no reason. While most areas would be perfectly fine at 80mhz. Maybe routers could run their own speed test and self configure to the right bandwidth.
> While most areas would be perfectly fine at 80mhz. Maybe routers could run their own speed test and self configure to the right bandwidth.
The Wifi Alliance may wish to provide guidance on this, at least for the residential space. Some ideas:
* have the router/AP do a speed test (at boot; regularly), and if the connect is ≤X Mbps then the wider channels won't help anything;
* do a sweep of the band (boot up; intervals), and if ≥Y% (50?) of it already in use, default to narrower channel.
Either/both of these would be done on a default "Auto-choose" setting, with allowable manual override.
>And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?
Yes. Probably because they have some basic grasp of electromagnetic reality, which perhaps you might consider studying a bit before forming strong opinions?
>It will be as crowded as 5
Physically impossible. 6 GHz simply does not have the material penetration, that's the point. Having way more raw bandwidth on tap, all available all the time without DFS plopped in the middle too, is also extremely helpful of course too. But the signal just not traveling as far and not going through walls well is the core thing. You don't need special effort EM shielding for it so much, bulk material will do it. And WAPs are cheap now. Having a higher number of smaller cells has been best practice for awhile already, and 6 GHz takes that much further.
We said this about 5Ghz when that came out. I'm sorry to say it's not true, there's more than enough spectrum in 5Ghz if properly managed and co-ordinated. I would rather fix that first. Why is it we can run WiFi for thousands of developers in one room/venue just fine but people living in apartment blocks are apparently struggling with a dozen devices per 60sqm apartment?
APs using 160MHZ channel widths with 1 or 2 spatial streams because it's cheaper than 80MHZ channels and 3 or 4 spatial streams. Absolutely crap 'auto' channel selection, too high a power (because cheaper than a second AP), poor AP placement and inappropriate channel width (in an apartment block 40Mhz per AP might be optimal).
>We said this about 5Ghz when that came out.
To the extent "we" said this, we were absolutely, 100% correct. 5 GHz was and remains a massive improvement over 2.4 GHz, exactly as hoped. But in the decade and half since demands have gone up a lot. 6 GHz will be even better as it propagates even worse and has even more bandwidth available, while human population density won't change.
>I'm sorry to say it's not true, there's more than enough spectrum in 5Ghz if properly managed and co-ordinated
I'm sorry to say you're wrong, there is not remotely enough usable spectrum, and that's regardless of "proper management" which in reality is completely contrary to the practical reality local networks in a setting with a high density of independent people/organizations.
>I would rather fix that first.
That's nice. Most fortunately you are not in charge.
>Why is it we can run WiFi for thousands of developers in one room/venue just fine
That's a low demand situation under the control of a single entity where people are going to be understanding of compromise given the special circumstances, unlike in home or business.
>but people living in apartment blocks are apparently struggling with a dozen devices per 60sqm apartment?
You're wondering why might want their own independent LANs in their own homes? Well, I'm sure you can think of one or two reasons if you put your mind to it.
Most of 5Ghz is unusable because of DFS. In Australia, only 2 out of the 6 80mhz channels are usable. 6 Ghz has 6 of them completely usable today, with possibly more on the upper end usable in the future.
It’s faster to fix this by moving to 6 GHz than retrofitting everybody’s 5 GHz routers.
Moving to 6Ghz will require a new router. Realistically it's even worse because it's not moving to 6Ghz it's adding 6Ghz.
Now each AP has to have 3 radios, 2.4ghz for compatibility, 5ghz for compatibility while still maintaining some performance and 6ghz for performance.
What about when 6ghz is full of the same crap, do we add 7ghz?
> 6 GHz simply does not have the material penetration, that's the point.
Really? Is there something special about 6 GHz absorption through common construction materials? Otherwise, why would a 20% higher frequency be that much worse?
The main 5G frequency in Europe is 3.5Ghz so it's about twice as high.
True, but almost completely unrelated to Wi-Fi.
But perhaps all that matters is, does a band support more connections than there would be apartments or businesses in range? For some people in dense apartment complexes, 5Ghz evidently does not. But if 6Ghz supports twice as many, that might be a limit that gets hit by vastly fewer "localities" like that.
(Student wifi hotspots in a large lecture theatre, that's another problem entirely!)
Higher frequency, more bandwidth.
Hmm, I'm in a 60-apartments block and we don't have this problem at all. Heck, even my shitty Meross devices manage despite all the 2.4 and 2.4+5 GHz connections around. What I struggle with is reliable 4G, and even 5G is so shabby I might as well keep it disabled. More spectrum for network signal sounds like it would help much more than improving Wi-Fi, which is already very reliable and plenty fast. My 2 cents…
that's why I'm running only 2.4Ghz APs, enough bandwidth for mobile common uses, all static hardware has wires to them. Far better then 5GHz band
Same, if a wireless device needs more than 54Mbps (802.11g, what the ancient Linksys WRT54G already offered) then I feel I'm doing something wrong and I'd better off just plugging it to my USB-C dock to get ethernet and power.
It's enough to stream 4k video (though barely, and I'd be better off moving to a TV), has better wall penetration and is fast enough for browsing and updating software.
I don't have to deal with congestion though. I think I've only seen a neighbour's AP once and I doubt they started hiding their SSID. My guess is that congestion is an issue because transmission power isn't low enough and there's little you can do to fix someone else's AP other than be increasingly louder than them.
Isn't 2.4GHz too congested already, esp considering a lot of wifi-connected devices still work at that range? I typically go the other way around to avoid congestion.
This is Europe where we have concrete or masonry walls and good insulation, I see maybe 2 other APs in the worst days in the apartment. On the good days I have no other APs.
I saw about 50 in maybe 10 years old apartment building, once the new ISP in the block started giving people routers with wifi enabled by default
I don't know about other areas but any apartment buildings post like 1990s are just absolute junk when it comes to separation. Before then it was just concrete or structural brick and now somehow it's often 'fireproof magicboard'.
I recall being surprised that 2.4 GHz was completely unusable in an upper west side apartment. <56k throughput and >1000 ms latency.
Hahaha.
There's still a load of non-DFS channels you could be using? At least in an apartment you can run an ethernet cable for the most important devices.
So few devices have Ethernet ports these days.
You say that but my TV, Games console, computer, smart lights bridge, printer etc all do.
Having said that I'm still mad they removed it from the MacBook pro and that was like 14 years ago now so I feel you.
I wonder if delegating LiFi to do downstream and very narrow bands of Wifi for upstream would solve congestion problems. As example if existing smartphones could receive LiFi signal with current front facing sensors.
Realn solution is to have houses not so close to each other.
It's not even that, it's just build apartment blocks out of real materials like concrete and brick not wood and plasterboard.
I have lived in the centre of a city in a victorian apartment block and looking back it was a dream. About a foot of brick wall between me and the next flat either side. Never heard a peep, excellent WiFi.
Not a realistic solution at all
A way to solve this would be to switch to a hyperbolic space. We should have evolved from Euclidean geometry long ago. R'lyeh has no problem with wireless networking, you never drop a call.
This would come at the expense of lowering density and multiplying infrastructure costs by a few orders of magnitude, making everything less accessible in doing so.
Hard, hard no.
Great one!
Or, if you are not being sarcastic, the solution to wireless networking issues is to… rebuild cities in which billions of people live and spread those people over… where? Never mind the fact that cities are the best way of arranging lots of people, where would you build those "houses not so close to each other" that is not a desert, a cliff, or an ocean?
Whether they’re joking or not, it’s a good example of the sort of reasoning you see in those town hall meetings where a bunch of ancient home owners come up with straight faced reasons for why an apartment complex shouldn’t get built.
“They’ll have congested internet!” would go well alongside “It will block the sun on my daily walk on that part of the street!”
I feel like this is an unfair characterization. Having attended a couple of these type meetings, the common complaints are always traffic and crime.
Are they legitimate worries? I don't know.
But certainly more legitimate than congested internet and shade.
I was joking yes. Should have put an /s
Multiple things can be true simultaneously. For instance:
* The reach for 6GHz by mobile service providers is straight-up greed, as Wi-Fi is a threat to their business expansions towards monopolization
* Wi-Fi is incredibly overcrowded, and a shift to 6GHz will not solve the underlying issues causing the crowding in the first place (mobile device density, over-reliance on Wi-Fi instead of running ethernet to capable devices and drop points)
* ISPs would prefer mobile service providers get 6GHz so they can get higher speeds to fixed receivers without the requisite network buildout
My personal position? Give 6GHz to Wi-Fi, but also make it clear that this is the last spectrum the standard will get. Simultaneously, promote (through regulations, subsidies, or municipal buildouts) wired networking wherever practicable. The fact new construction in 2025 doesn’t mandate ethernet drops in every non-bathroom is what’s contributing to Wi-Fi crowding, and prevalent last-mile wired access ensures that mobile operators have to compete on cost rather than data caps - and thus hinders their monopolization efforts.
> The fact new construction in 2025 doesn’t mandate ethernet drops in every non-bathroom is what’s contributing to Wi-Fi crowding, and prevalent last-mile wired access ensures that mobile operators have to compete on cost rather than data caps - and thus hinders their monopolization efforts.
This would raise the cost of construction, in the middle of widespread housing shortages.
By peanuts and pennies for a significant ROI. Many places still mandate some form of coaxial or telephone wiring, which means you already have the drop points for ethernet. Even better, telephone runs are often done with CAT5e due to cost, and could easily be rewired for ethernet if it’s laid structurally in the first place.
You’re talking a $10k expense on a new home, tops. That’s chump change and easily shoved into regulations regarding new builds without significantly harming progress. The real regulations impacting housing are zoning anyway.
I can't imagine it's anywhere near $10k to install if it's done at the same time as the other electrical before the drywall goes up. Retrofitting it is so much more expensive.
I mean given the computing devices most people use are you suggesting a large majority of the population switches to ethernet adapter's for their tablets and phones?
No, not remotely? I don’t know why folks jump to that (wrongest) conclusion whenever someone mentions ethernet being made a requirement in construction or use.
Can tablets and phones use ethernet? Yes! Should they? Perhaps for a fixed installation, but otherwise no, because that’s not their primary role? Same goes for laptops: if it’s stationary, plug it in; if not, WiFi is fine.
The goal is to shift traffic where reasonable and practical onto wired networks. Desktops, laptops, set top boxes, streaming rigs, control panels, SBCs, game consoles, the list goes on. The only “Wi-Fi required” devices are really just laptops, phones, tablets, watches, and similarly high-mobility devices.
Otherwise, ethernet should be the norm.
Having to blast wifi through an entire building is part of the problem. If transceivers only need enough power to go a foot or three from an ethernet port with a wifi dongle on it, the problem is solved.
See also: cell phones having to boost power for more distant towers.
As things are, every device has to scream to be heard.
Wireless ethernet adapters
We gave WiFi 800Mhz in the 5Ghz band and we said the same thing at the time 'this is the last we'll need'. That's 10x as much as in 2.4ghz and at a higher frequency.
I remember a lot of people at the time getting really upset about how wasteful that was. Just saying.
It’s wasteful on its face when not combined with regulation and incentives to shift stuff off of Wi-Fi. 6GHz has practical applications in the AR/VR space, which is why I’m in favor of giving it to Wi-Fi. Ultimately though, we need the industry to stop being lazy and start really agitating for ethernet in construction and devices as the norm, not Wi-Fi.
Yeah it seems like channel width should be limited to 80mhz or narrower per AP
there is only 160MHz on 5Ghz that's non DFS/Weather Radar
I wish govt would put a condition on the mobile carriers to fix SS7 vulnerabilities.
Yeah, but how could their secret services then snoop on everyone?
update to the latest software
Carriers will never fix issues that they have a revenue stream off of. They sell services to detect call forwarding attacks, sim swap attacks etc to banks and other services.
Its like robocalling, fraud texts and calls you received. Carriers can't sell services to filter them if they fix the issues that allow these to happen in the first place.
Way to fix it is to make the carrier liable. It will be fixed instantly.
I get 20 to 30 spam calls a day now.
At some point this year I was getting 14-20 spam calls per hour. I'm in Italy.
Wow. Did you have to get a new number?
In EU? Where are you located?
I’m in France. I don’t get 30 a day, but at least 2 to 5. I automatically ignore unknown callers and my voice mail message basically says to send a SMS instead.
My Android phone has a feature to not ring unless the number is in my contacts OR they call twice in 15 minutes and my voice mail message tells people to call me twice to reach me. The scammers never do.
Wow, I have about 2 or 3 per year. It's always a robot voice telling me the police is looking for me.
I'm in the US.
Isn't that simply fixed by shutting down the old 2G and 3G networks, like is happening in a lot of countries now?
No. SS7 predates cellphones. It's the legacy control plane for the PSTN (public switched telephone network). It was never designed for security since it originally never crossed corporate boundaries as everyone had to use the monopoly provider. (Except for international calls).
I admittedly don't know that much about it, but the googling I did indicated the SS7 is only active when you roam/call to legacy networks with 2G/3G that aren't all-IP?
Even when the phones on both ends use IP calling technology, the interconnection between phone companies is usually not IP.
From what I've read that tends to change when the phone companies in question have shut off 2G and 3G though. The only reason to keep using SS7 is for intercompatibility with legacy networks who still have 2G or 3G devices on them.
You can't shut down 2G, because there are a lot of devices, mainly embedded systems like alarms, lift emergency call button, GPS trackers, etc. that still use 2G. Also 2G is the only reliable network connection in a lot of areas that are not otherwise reached by 3G/4G/5G, mainly because a 2G connection is more tolerant to low signal and noise, and also is low frequency, thus 2G is the only option available in situations such as on top of mountains and stuff. And finally there is still a lot of people, maybe elders, that don't have/want a smartphone (mainly because they are more complex to use etc.) and still use an old Nokia with 2G networks (they only need to call or send SMS in the end).
Also: VoLTE is not a thing since a lot of years, and probably there are even a ton of smartphones out there that does not support it (and thus switch back to 2G/3G to place voice calls).
You claim that they cannot be disabled, while this is already happening [0][1][2]. Some countries, like Switzerland, already completed the shutdown years ago [2].
[0]: https://newsroom.vodafone.de/2g-abschaltung-macht-lte-und-5g...
[1]: https://www.telekom.de/hilfe/2g-abschaltung
[2]: https://www.rosenberger-telematics.com/en/news/switching-off...
It's easy to make the switch in a rich country with less than 10 millions of inhabitants, mostly living in big cities.
Check out reference 2. This is being done across the whole of Europe. It has already been done in Australia.
It's the same "we can't introduce chip-and-pin because of all the credit card readers" argument that kept carding an issue a decade longer in the US than in the EU.
Ever since the analog TV shutdown and the refarming of those low frequencies to 4G LTE, you see that 4G actually has higher coverage than 2G/3G (this both in sparsely-populated places like Australia and dense ones like Japan).
And for 2G especially GSM has a physical cell size limit due to TDMA that LTE does not have so in sparse areas the same transmitter location can reach further.
If in your country 2G still has better coverage that's not due to technical superiority of the standard but due to decisions made by the operator.
I think you are wrong. 2g and 3g is slowly but surely being killed everywhere. Which is a shame because it's much easier on batteries then 4g, but they want that bandwidth.
A lot of this is a chicken-and-egg problem.
For example, lower-frequency bands have longer reach, but lower bandwidth. Because everyone has 2G support, it makes sense to put 2G on the lower frequencies as fallback, with 3G/4G/5G on higher frequencies as optional bandwidth booster. But this also means 5G reliability is being limited by its frequency! You could have better 5G - if it could use the frequency currently occupied by 2G...
It also doesn't help that 2G and 3G aren't forward-compatible. They require their own dedicated frequency, so you need to sacrifice a lot of potential bandwidth for a small number of low-data devices. 4G and beyond can play nice with future tech: a single base station using a single frequency can handle both 4G and 5G connections at once - it'll dynamically allocate the air time as needed.
About the elderly: my 95-year-old grandma uses a tablet for video calls and a big-button 4G-capable feature phone. My 85-year-old other grandma has fully embraced her smartphone. Turns out they really like seeing pictures of their great-grandkids! Give them a reason to switch and they will adopt it - they both ditched their land lines.
Same with elevators and stuff: schedule a kill date 5 years into the future and they'll be replaced by 4G-capable units instead of ancient slightly-cheaper 2G-only ones when their warranty inevitably expires.
It's not that simple. There are a ton of legacy systems that upgrading would cost a lot of money and it's not the fact or replacing a 100 euros smartphone. A lot of these systems have a critical (safety) function, and thus if they stop working there would be consequences (I've mentioned the elevator alarm, but consider alarms for plants in remote areas that use 2G to send out alarms, let's say a pumping station for sewer, remote sensors in the mountains, dataloggers, electronic bracelet given to people that has restrictive sentences, etc).
This is the same reasoning why they keep active the "old" analog telephone network, why not everyone is switched to VOIP, because there are situations where it's still used by stuff that is critical or too expensive to replace.
> with 3G/4G/5G on higher frequencies as optional bandwidth booster.
There are 5G bands in the ~700MHz bandwidth (that was recovered by switching to more efficient encoding for DTV) that could be used that are even lower than 2G that is around 900MHz.
They could (and probably will) dismiss 2G for consumer use, but keep some frequencies that are used by operators that provide MTM SIM.
> Give them a reason to switch and they will adopt it - they both ditched their land lines.
I've tried to make my grandma learn how to use a phone to send SMS multiple times and failed. If she uses a mobile phone (rare situation) she uses it as a landline phone, that is type the number that she wants to call, not even using the contacts in the phone. To be fair I had difficulties explaining how to use a cordless landline phone.
Speaking of elderly, there are a lot of them that have dedicated devices that they can use to make emergency calls to registered numbers, that probably use 2G network (some other use even landline). Since these devices are even provided for free by the national healthcare system, I see that there is not much money to spend to upgrade them.
BTW, are we sure that all the smartphone out there support VoLTE? If not, to make phone calls they need to fallback to 3G/2G, it was a common problem not many years ago, with some providers (Iliad) that even started supporting VoLTE like less than 2 years ago...
I can tell you that here in Australia we shut down 2G in 2011 and 3G in 2022-2023.
And yes many things broke, train ticket vending machines stopped working, smart meters stopped working, etc. But then the got replaced.
2G and 3G is a horrible waste of bandwidth compared to 5G. Keeping them on and wasting all that bandwidth is borderline negligence.
Interestingly, my country turned off 3G before 2G.
I think the reasoning was that the heavy data 3G users had already upgraded to 4G and beyond, and low data 3G users could fall back to 2G, so retiring 3G would have negligible impact - while opening up a lot of bandwidth for 4G and 5G.
On the other hand, there were plenty of 2G-only low data users around, so retiring that early would break stuff for a lot of people. Keeping it around longer gave people more time to upgrade.
It's already been completely shut down in large swaths of the world.
> mainly because a 2G connection is more tolerant to low signal and noise
Huh? Everything I've heard about 2G indicates that it is an incredibly noisy protocol with horrible congestion characteristics, and that it craps out even when there's only a few devices. Maybe it's only winning because it has nearly completely disappeared?
this would require some encryption and still can be intercepted. Any ideas how to fix that?
No, I'm talking about anyone with SS7 access basically has root on the whole network and can query for locations of any phone number anonymously... no audit trail, no access control.
https://youtu.be/xfWyU5iXJ3I?t=860
https://youtu.be/wVyu7NB7W6Y
right, that's how police and criminals do it, I am aware how it works, what I wonder is how do you fix it, replace the protocol? encrypt it?
Why when we have bandaids like ss7 firewalls.
Tbh it's probably much more useful for mobile operators than wifi. 6GHz does not propagate well at all at wifi power limits and as such one 320MHz band probably won't overlap much with neighbours, even in apartment buildings. This does preclude having 640MHz bands though in future wifi standards, but I'm not sure how important that is - Wifi7 on MLO could theoretically deliver 7.2gbit/sec in 2x2 config and double that again in 4x4. If devices need more speed (laptops more than phones) then they can move to 4x4 more?
Whereas for mobile operators it would be very useful in outdoor/indoor (airports etc) urban areas that are very busy.
That's exactly why it should be used for wifi!
2.4GHz is completely unusable in urban environments, because you're getting interference from two dozen neighbours. And everyone has a poor connection, so their "handy" nephew will turn up the transmission power to the maximum - which of course makes it even worse.
6GHz barely makes it through a concrete wall, so you're only receiving your own AP, so you have the whole bandwith mostly to yourself.
On the other hand, cellular networks are well-regulated: if an airport's entire network is managed by a single party they can just install extra antennas and turn down the power.
And it's not like cellular operators will be able to use it often: outdoor use falls apart the moment there are a bunch of trees or buildings in the way, so it only makes sense in buildings like airports and stadiums. Why would the rest of society have to be banned from using 6GHz Wifi for that?
Besides, didn't 5G include support for 30GHz frequencies for exactly this application? What happened to that?
> 6GHz barely makes it through a concrete wall, so you're only receiving your own AP, so you have the whole bandwith mostly to yourself.
I agree with this and the fact that 6GHz should still be available for wifi, but this whole bandwidth frenzy over wifi has always seemed like a meme for anyone except power users. A 4K netflix stream caps out around 15mbps, so >95% of typical home users will be just fine using 2.4/5GHz inside their own homes.
You've got to take into account that those bandwidth figures exist on paper only - nobody is getting 5Gbps out of their wifi.
In practice it is all about degraded performance. If you're sitting in another room than the AP, close to your neighbour, do you want to be left with 50Mbps remaining out of the original 5000Mbps, or 2Mbps remaining out of the original 200Mpbs?
> A 4K netflix stream caps out around 15mbps
Yeah, but that's just because Netflix streams are ridiculiously over compressed -- they use extremely low quality encodes. It's technically a "4K" stream, sure, but at a bitrate only realistically capable of 1080p.
An actual 4K stream (one capable of expected resolution at 4K) is around 30 to 40mbps.
Back in the day, it was better to upscale netflix's 720p to 1080p than to stream 1080p.
The problem is not bandwidth. The problem is inconsistent performance and latency spikes caused by interferences.
The average normie now is downloading 100GB Call of Duty updates over wifi. 5Ghz is ok but most of it is unusable due to DFS.
This ~10 to 20 Mbps is enough nonsense is like claiming that 24 fps is enough to play games.
I mean sure, its usable, but its not good. You can notice the differences in buffering / scrubbing speed well into the 100+ mbps range.
Plus being able to download and upload files quickly. Particularly from something like a home NAS, is important. 15 mbps is like using a shitty USB 2 stick for everything!
But your home NAS should be on ethernet? Who would buy a NAS and then not wire it in??
The point here is that only devices like a TV, mobile, tablet or laptop should be on WiFi and it's pretty hard to notice the difference between say 50Mbps and 500Mbps on any of those except maybe if you are moving files around on your laptop.
> But your home NAS should be on ethernet? Who would buy a NAS and then not wire it in??
Your smartphone is not talking to your NAS over Ethernet.
I think you'll find downloading files to your phone from a NAS is like 0.01% type behaviour.
iCloud backups are something normal people do each time they plug in their phone.
50Mb is more than fine for iphone backups.
Family of 4 comes home after a long day out, all plug in their phones at the same time to charge and drop down in the sofa to vegetate in front of Netflix. Why is it buffering so bad?!?
Traffic is bursty. Higher bandwidth connections make the whole internet more efficient - if you can race to idle then servers have fewer concurrent connections to keep track of, routers can more quickly clean up their NAT tables etc etc
> 6GHz barely makes it through a concrete wall, so you're only receiving your own AP, so you have the whole bandwith mostly to yourself.
6GHz barely makes it thought a piece of paper. I live in dense downtown area of Los Angeles and I see zero 6Ghz networks except mine, sometimes three 5Ghz networks (usually just two). No issues using 160Mhz wide channel on 5Ghz, at least for me.
My balcony separated from AP with a 2 panel window, other than that it's in line of sight: 6Ghz not visible at all, 5Ghz poor signal, but better than 2.4Ghz. 2.4 Ghz is unusable in my area at all.
> 6GHz barely makes it through a concrete wall, so you're only receiving your own AP, so you have the whole bandwith mostly to yourself.
I'm no expert and only speak from personal experience. When the signal is weak, you don't have the whole bandwith, you only get low throughput. Ideally you would want a strong, high penetration signal (low frequency) and all users on separate channels. It's of course impossible in densely populated areas.
Whenever I have to deal with setting up WLAN in the office or at home, I hate the experience and I try to use wired connections wherever possible.
That’s not how RF works (generally). It’s about signal/noise ratio.
It gets really bad when signal is difficult to distinguish from noise because (for example!) everyone is talking at roughly the same power level. Think crowded bar with everyone yelling at each other.
When one is significantly louder than others, even if the others are not that quiet, it’s not a big deal unless at your ear/antenna they have the same loudness. Think concert with big speakers for the main act.
6ghz is better for many isolated networks right next to each other precisely because the others ‘voices’ lose power so quickly. You don’t have the competition for attention. Think ‘every couple in the bar gets their own booth’.
Wired connections are even better, because the amount of noise required to be unable to tell apart signal from noise is orders of magnitude higher - like ‘noisy welder right on top/EMP’ levels. Because the wires can actually be shielded. It’s like having your own hotel room.
You're misunderstanding what is being proposed.
It's not saying 6GHz shouldn't be used for WiFi. It's saying that 6-6.4GHz (approx) is reserved for WiFi and 6.4-7GHz should be used for cellular networks.
My point isn't that we shouldn't have no WiFi on 6GHz, but 1GHz extra for WiFi is limited utility compared to cellular networks.
You can still fit an entire 320MHz channel width in the lower 6GHz and if it doesn't overlap like you say why bother with 3x that?
The question then is: do we really need the whole 1Ghz of spectrum for wifi, if it doesn't really propagate to your neighbour? It should be much easier to avoid interference than on 2.4Ghz, so you need less channels.
Doesn’t 6ghz have essentially the same penetration as 5ghz and thus in a few years will have all the same problems as people shift to 6ghz?
I count approximately twice as many channels available on 6ghz than 5ghz, so even if we ignore the penetration differences between 5 and 6ghz, the 6ghz band is still better. Plus this isn't a "pick one" type of scenario (especially with MLO), 5ghz + 6ghz is 3x as many channels as 5ghz alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels
> I count approximately twice as many channels available on 6ghz than 5ghz
Isn't this mostly arbitrary? Eg what frequency range one defines channels over and thus how many channels? Eg in the wikipedia link that "6GHz" goes up to ~7.1GHz. Because otherwise channels seem to be more or less spread centered 20MHz apart in each case.
Yeah, I wasn't making that argument as some sort of intrinsic benefit to frequencies around 6ghz, but rather we have administratively decided that the slice of spectrum available for "6ghz" wifi has approximately twice the room compared to the slice of spectrum we have administratively allocated for "5ghz" wifi. In reality, "5ghz" wifi is more like 5.2-5.9ghz (with a hole around 5.4ghz) and "6ghz" wifi is more like 5.9ghz to 7.1ghz.
The intrinsic benefit for the frequencies around 6ghz is the reduced penetration through walls which will also reduce the congestion.
No definitely not in practice. 5Ghz reaches across multiple rooms with some loss whereas 6Ghz clearly looses more and drops off to 0 much faster.
The really big problem here is that 6Ghz also comes with the ability to have 320Mhz towards one channel so its got double the bandwidth of 5Ghz as well as being lower penetration. Its really good for things like VR headsets due to the lower interference and higher bandwidth.
6GHz has worse penetration than 5Ghz, but the difference is indeed not as pronounced as it is compared to 2.4GHz.
The main benefit is going to be the additional frequency space. 5GHz effectively has 3ish channels, and 6GHz adds another 3-7 to that. Combine it with band steering and dynamic channel allocation, and you and all of your close neighbours can probably all get your own dedicated frequency.
> 5GHz effectively has 3ish channels, and 6GHz adds another 3-7 to that.
It would be useful if vendors shipped with 40Mhz channels by default.
A 1x1 40Mhz using 802.11ax will give you a max PHY of 287Mbps:
* https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
* https://superuser.com/questions/1619079/what-is-the-maximum-...
Even if you half that, that's (IMHO) probably sufficient for the vast majority of online activities. And if you have a 2x2 client you double it anyway.
That’s true. I hadn’t realized that 6ghz has 500mhz of extra spectrum over 5ghz and also doesn’t have to contend with DFS.
And why does it need to be reserved exclusively for them?
Can’t they be just another user of a well established standard or do they want to abuse the crap out of it?
They are trying to improve service by avoiding noise. Something few realize is that all wireless technologies are, in effect, time-share: Every device on the channel, router/tower included, take turn to talk while everyone else shuts up and listens.
If other types of devices also use your channel, you'll have to shut up and wait for airtime even longer. Having WiFi and cellular co-exist mean that they are both fighting eachother over airtime, and both spending a lot of time silent.
It's preferable to avoid channel overlap when the services need to co-exist.
They don’t need a frequency channel dedicated to them just to improve reception inside a stadium or an airport.
Tell me what stops them from using the exact same technology they use for WiFi calling? They just want to own the means the people connect to the internet and be a tax on everyone.
Yes they do? Just like WiFi needs way more channels than it has available to work well inside a Stadium, which is why it doesn't work well inside a stadium or airport at all. Heck, I would never even bother trying WiFi in such a setting - between 5G and WiFi, 5G is much better designed for handling such dense cells.
It's important to note that "they" are not trying to fix calls, they are trying to improve cellular connectivity. Getting calls to work is easy, and traditional calls have become a niche use of smartphones. Many already have excellent internet connectivity on their devices and would like that to just remain seamlessly available in all situations rather than having to switch technologies and maintain multiple subscriptions.
While I'm quite happy with my fiber at home, I only really use WiFi on my phone at home is to access local devices. In other situations, especially in corporate or public settings, WiFi is not only inconvenient but often a way worse and slower experience than just staying on 5G - after all, my phone gets gigabit on 5G with a public IPv6 address, and the latency is pretty good too, which can't be said for overcrowded WiFi and crap enterprise network solutions. If it wasn't for casting, 5G + tailscale would alleviate most needs to WiFi.
Heck, for the smartphone-native generation it might even seem weird that they need another internet subscription for their home when they pay for on for their phone, "just because" 5G or whatever wasn't allowed to step on a spectrum - a quite literal tax.
(Don't get me wrong, I like my WiFi, but cellular is not the enemy. We just need to hand out more spectrum to both.)
Let’s start with the things we agree and then I’m going to voice my concerns.
We do need a lot more frequencies to be opened up both for personal and professional use. New technologies, dynamic long and short range connections etc.
We also need to enforce frequency usage as well so that a neighbor of ours doesn’t block the entire 2.4GHz for the entire block with his access points blasting at full power.
Here’s the problem, 6GHz already became a WiFi standard and these cellular companies are lobbying to retroactively change the frequency allocation for themself because they think they can use it better and more importantly all the research and development is already done and they don’t want to waste money developing new technologies there.
But why? Why would we do all the research and development with public fund and then allocate the frequency bands to cellular companies and let them charge people $100+ per month and have 40%+ profit margins while increasing their prices over 60% since 2020.
Hypothetically speaking just a small fraction of that money can be used to put fiber internet all over the place with tons of 6GHz access points and let everyone have free internet.
The cellular companies are late to the game here so they can have a small section of the 6GHz or some of the 7GHz can be opened up but there’s no reason for 6GHz to be retroactively given to them because they lobbied for their own benefits.
I have no idea where your 100 USD+ per month comes from, my 5G plan is 10 USD per month - considerably cheaper than my 50 USD per month fiber connection, even though they're both gigabit. And the fiber rollout cost more.
> Hypothetically speaking just a small fraction of that money can be used to put fiber internet all over the place with tons of 6GHz access points and let everyone have free internet.
That's what 5G is: fiber running to a bunch of APs running a suitable technology for covering an entire area with a lot of devices in high-speed internet.
WiFi is not that technology (it doesn't target that kind of device density or coexistence, and only really works well with very low device counts in RF quiet buildings), nor would anything about that be cheaper - sounds like the issue you voice is mainly greedy ISPs, while using WiFi deployments would not give them any reason to be any less greedy. A free internet service is a choice that can be done with both WiFi and 5G.
(Yes it would be nice if they didn't both trample on upper 6GHz, but improving cellular, but I'm not sure if WiFi is the greater value prop for those channels.)
6Ghz will suck for mobile due to the incredibly bad building penetration. One of the reasons that makes it pretty ideal for indoor WiFi.
For the context - what do US, UK and China do?
In the US, it's open for unlicensed use for very low power devices. That is, it's open for WiFi. It's used by WiFi 6E, 7, and 8.
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-opens-entire-6-ghz-band-ver...
Perhaps not for much longer:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785987
The Trump administration is diligently working to undo that. Why dedicate such a resource to the public, when you can let private companies charge us to use it?
https://publicknowledge.org/ted-cruz-wants-to-sell-your-wi-f...
They're also planning some overlap.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/innovative-use-of-spectrum...
China has already reserved the entire 6GHz for cellular and vehicles.
EU, not Europe.
The Register, being British, should probably have gotten this right, but people constantly get this wrong. Even a lot of people living in the union don't even realize the different between EU, Europe, EEA, Schengen and all the other layers, so maybe it's hard to blame "outsiders" from not getting it either.
I'm guessing maybe the "European Commission" threw them off, because it's an EU entity (basically the executive branch), not "Europe wide" one, which the name kind of implies. But then "EU" also implies "Europe wide" in its name, and people seem to kind of get the difference most of the times.
The Register know very well what the EU is. However, in practice, the EU is colloquially referred to as "Europe" in many contexts in the UK.
The rules the EU establishes will also apply to the EEA, and in practice will almost certainly also be adopted by the UK, which has tended to take its lead from the EU on such matters since Brexit. So, while pedantically these are not rules for Europe, _for practical purposes_ they likely will be.
Also, most people are aware that "Europe" the continent is unlikely to make such decisions, so it's pretty obvious what's meant by context.
It's not obvious at all actually, since there are many European things that also affect Island, Norway and Switzerland for being part of EFTA, but an equally high number of things that don't.
And even the EU itself is pretty fragmented with various overlapping areas with different rules.
As someone who's studied European relations, I can tell you that it's a real mess, and the fact that journalists don't accurately reporting the facts definitely isn't helpful.
There are others ways to coordinates european countries than EU institutions
>the EU is colloquially referred to as "Europe" in many contexts in the UK.
It really should have been EUR for Europe, and EU as in European Union.
What continent does UK consider itself part of then?
It likes to believe it is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Whenever I go to the UK, people there seem to consistently refer to EU or the rest/continental europe in general as "europe", esp in political/economic context. My impression is that the UK is just too important to be grouped together with other countries.
Context matters; you can generally tell whether someone's talking politics or geography.
But in politics the distinction between EU and Europe matters, there's the political EU region, but countries like Switzerland and Norway are politically still in Europe despite not being in EU just due to all the neighboring countries, in theory same should apply to UK
Ask two different people and get three different answers.
I think most people realise there is a difference. If nothing else, Brexit made it very clear to those who didn't already know that you can be in this part of the world but not in the EU. But rightly or wrongly, people still use "Europe" as shorthand for "the European Union". It's no different to referring to the US as "America".
I do think the media should aim to do better so agree that the Register should have used the correct term.
I find your comparison not so convincing. While there is some common misidentification between the EU and Europe, I’ve never heard anyone in the world refer to “America” in a way that was not for the United States.
Maybe in English. In Spanish (and we’re a bunch, the native Spanish speakers) I guarantee that if you say “América” you’re referring to the continent. The country is “Estados Unidos” (United States) or its abbreviation, EEUU. And its citizens, “estadounidenses”, not “americanos”.
> estadounidenses
And in French the inhabitants of "les Etats-Unis" are "Etats-uniens". I've taken the habit of referring to them as USAians, which often gets negative reactionsand remains rare - but I find it is the most accurate demonym and I'll keep pushing it.
I look forward to the world inventing demonyms for the citizens of the European Union, because at least it will mean that our emerging national body is getting mindshare !
Whenever I’ve heard the term américain it’s been used to refer to a US citizen, not a mexicain or citizen of some other American country.
Yes, "Américains" is much more common - and that is the windmill I'm tilting at.
> I look forward to the world inventing demonyms for the citizens of the European Union, because at least it will mean that our emerging national body is getting mindshare !
USA is a country and EU is not
The European Union is an emerging country - it is my country. For now, many don't yet understand how common necessity binds us, and some remain under the illusion that they can make it alone against China and the USA, but ever closer union is real and whoever has been on Erasmus student exchange knows we are one people. On my French passport, "Union Européenne" is written above "République Française" - that is the hierarchy. A nation is people who will to live together, and the European Union is that... The rest is a couple treaties and a few decades away !
"In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America" is a sentence I've certainly heard before, but he didn't at any point land on any area covered by the United States of America (except maybe Panama)
That ambiguity disappears if you call it "the Americas", but many places see America as one continent (including Latin America, parts of Europe and the Olympic flag)
I have no idea why this informative and totally correct comment was downvoted, but anyway, I upvoted it to balance that out.
It is normal in Spanish-speaking countries (and probably others) to consider the entirety of North and South America to be one continent called “America”.
One of the most famous soccer teams in Mexico is even called “Club América”, obviously this doesn’t refer to the US.
Kind of up to the US border. Canada gets lumped up in with the USA hah.
In my personal experience, people from Latin American countries will sometimes point out that they are American because they come from North or South America.
Which is, of course, true; however, in English conversation, it's often nothing more than pedantry. In Spanish it makes more sense, since there is a separate demonym for a US person that doesn't co-opt the term "American."
Outside of Romance language speakers born on the American continents, I agree that everyone seems fine calling US-born persons "Americans" without much confusion nor gnashing of teeth.
It’s even more amusing in some ways. A common way to refer to those from the USA in Brazil, for instance (even an official one!) is ‘Norte Americano’.
Which is all kinds of weird because - what about Mexico and Canada? And what about the ‘United states’ part?
It’s just to disambiguate from ‘Americano’ as in what others in South America sometimes use to refer to latin Americans and as a little bit of a FU to the USA, hahah.
Ahh, I forgot about that...and to be transparent, I actually have no idea what French Guyana, Haiti, or Belize typically do to differentiate between people of the American continent(s) and US persons. I should have said Hispanoamerica, but oh well.
> I actually have no idea what French Guyana, Haiti, or Belize typically do to differentiate between people of the American continent(s) and US persons.
In French, people from the Americas are américains. This includes, say québecois and Brazilians. When context matters, people from the US are états-uniens.
Perhaps in Haiti, I don’t know. But at least in France, “américain” means from the US 99% of the time.
Probably because the US are much more mentioned than other American countries. But that’s not really the point, though. People from the US are américains, they’re part of the group of people living in America (which, in French and when it is not qualified, refers to all of them, North, Central, and South).
The point is that nobody would object if you refer to someone from anywhere else in the Americas as américain. Like my lab mate from Buenos Aires or friends from Montréal. And we’re definitely not in Haiti.
If I’ve learned anything in Brazil, it’s that it’s all good bro - as long as you aren’t Argentinian. Then we need to fight, or something hah.
North America also formally has two United States: Mexico and America.
You’re right, but this is probably a losing battle. People are probably never going to stop colloquially referring to the political entity that contains most of Europe’s land and population as “Europe”.
And, being on an island, British people are probably never going to stop thinking of “the continent” as at least a little bit of a different thing from themselves.
And on top of that, when it comes to anything radio, ITU has quite the lot to say as well, and you got the ham radio community / IARU as well.
Radio, by virtue of physically not caring about borders, is a really really hot mess, with lots of very powerful and very monied interests floating around.
Switzerland is not in the EU but they follow EU legislation.
It's kinda like Canada and the US.
Not directly though. They get some exceptions and they have referenda to implement things.
They align with the EU a lot for commercial reasons but not completely. Same with Norway. And really, if they did align completely there'd be no reason to not join.
I think people understand that a continent isn’t making decisions.
To be really pedantic we should acknowledge there's no good reason to separate Europe from Asia, it's all one geographical continent.
The distinction between EU and Europe is very important. They're "word stealing" something as neutral as a geographical concept, to make it political.
But in this case here, probably if EU legislate on this, others non-EU european countries will follow
> To be really pedantic we should acknowledge there's no good reason to separate Europe from Asia, it's all one geographical continent.
To be even more pedantic you have to throw in Africa as well, as that is connected by land to Asia just like Europe is! Now we have the supercontinent Afroeurasia which contains like 85% of the worlds population.
Tell me more how Europe is separated by a canal from Asia ? There are benefits splitting America in two, splitting Africa from Eurasia, splitting Australia from Eurasia. What's the benefit of splitting Eurasia into Europe and Asia, besides catering to europeans who believe they're unique in the world ? It only creates more problems
> There are benefits splitting America in two
Are there? Most Latin American countries, who see all of America as a single continent, would disagree.
It really makes no sense to argue about this. As I already mentioned, there is no universally agreed model of which continents exist and where the boundaries lie. In the end people feel like they belong to one or the other and that's as far as it will probably ever get.
Europe and Asia are separated by mountains. Geographically that's at least as valid as splitting America on a canal, and splitting Africa from Asia on a canal. If anything the mountains are a more significant barrier to travel and migration than those canals
If we were to rearrange the continents if anything we should split up Asia further, and split Africa into Northern Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa (maybe giving Sub-Saharan Africa to the same new continent as the Arabian peninsula, but that's debatable)
Europe and Asia are highly connected land masses
Suez Canal exists and cuts off Africa from Eurasia
So Africa separated from Eurasia in 1869? And if canals count then Northern Germany is its own continent, Great Britain is several continents, etc. Man-made canals forming a meaningful geographical separation is a weird concept on so many levels
Sitting in my bathtub I am more a continent than North-America
Obviously, but in case the sarcasm of my comment didn't come through: I was trying to make the point that you can't draw lines between continents just because of geography (or tectonic plates for that matter). It's arbitrary - after all we can't even agree which continents do exist.
Relevant watching: Map Men: How many continents are there? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrsxRJdwfM0)
Yes it is arbitrary (like most of things actually) but the distinction between Europe and Asia is the most arbitrary of all of them
It's an interesting topic since most people in a hypothetical Eurasia would probably never call themselves Eurasian, but would have a strong sense of being one or the other. But on the other hand there is also no universally agreed to boundary between the two as well. And maybe this imprecision the best representation of reality that we have for this.
That'd be another definition we could use yes
As others mentioned, this is British press and Britts tend to colloquially refer to EU as 'Europe'.
It’s called a metonymy and is purposeful.
Everyone understood that it was the relevant nearly pan-European political entity which was actually designed by the geographical designation.
It's essentially exactly the same as when people refer to the US as 'America'. While the US does not encompass all of the American continent, there is only one political entity called 'America' so it's not ambigious.
EU is more Europe than USA is America, yet you don't see much complaining about the latter.
> yet you don't see much complaining about the latter.
I see that a lot. It just needs people from not the US, but from Americas in comments. Suddenly there are people that are complaining about it.
Do you also write "USA, not America" for every headline that uses the later?
You are the one who corrects america with usa?
OK, can we have 7GHz and 8GHz for Wi-Fi please?
How would this even work when the devices are already on sale and people are using them?
I just unlocked the entire 5GHz and 6GHz bands for my equipment, it’s not like my networks will penetrate my exterior walls anyways.
Just waiting for the Wi-Fi cops to show up
I really don't understand the underlying physics, politcs or really anything. Why don't we at home just host 'cellular' networks instead of WiFi? Could we just have a our own little cellular network? Why do we need both?
Thank you Europe?
No worries brother