The future are super dense networks Lifi, 60GHz, then 5Ghz, then 2.4-1.8GHz because that will give the most bandwidth for the buck. You always want higher frequency first because it can carry more and then fall back to lower frequencies if you are out of coverage of the high freq.
Outside developed areas there will be internet by solar drones and lower orbit satellite internet.
The bandwidth doesn't depend on the frequency you're occupying, but on the amount of spectrum available: you "usually" get in the order of 1 bps for every Hz of spectrum available for mobile: a 20Mz chunk of spectrum will give you ~20Mbps, no matter if it is 700MHz or 5 GHz. (Please notice that YMMV, LTE gets several times that, illustrative, bla bla bla, etc.).
Higher frequencies have awful penetration and range, that's why today you define who wins in the mobile game by the amount of 700MHz and 800MHz spectrum they own. In other words, lower frequency spectrum is (within certain limits) always better.
That's simply false. What is true is that per-band allocations tend to be larger at higher passband frequencies, but the width of the baseband in absolute terms is what determines information capacity. See: The Shannon limit
Not really, the bandwidth doesn't depend on the frequency, but on the how much spectrum you have. The frequency impacts in other ways (noise, penetration, etc.) but not in the amount of raw data you can put through a channel.
Cellular network capacity is a function of channel width, modulation, and spatial reuse. Because there are many more low-frequency channels of a given width than high frequency ones, it's much easier to justify very wide channels at higher frequencies. The better propagation of lower frequencies is also a double edged sword. It's much easier to build a very dense cellular network if cell sites far apart can't hear each other (causing co-channel interference). Also, because higher frequencies propagate more directionally, it's also easier to take advantage of spatial reuse techniques.
> there are many more low-frequency channels of a given width than high frequency ones, it's much easier to justify very wide channels at higher frequencies.
Right conclusion, wrong (mis-stated?) premise. There are more high-frequency channels of a given width than low-frequency ones. 700-800 MHz is a whopping 12.5% change, and it gets you 100 MHz to work with, but 5.725-5.875 is only a 2.5% change and gets you 150 MHz to work with.
> because higher frequencies propagate more directionally
Again, right conclusion but wrong premise. The don't propagate more directionally, but as they have limited penetration and high attenuation, they are more useful for point-to-point with line-of-sight than for broadcast.
Anyone got a resource that explains the relationship between spectrum/frequency/modulation-tech/etc and bandwidth in an understandable way for someone not-so-physics/signal-processing-literate?
My [uninformed] intuition tells me that you can have theoretically infinite bandwidth over any spectrum or modulation scheme, but the cost/size/energy-requirement quickly gets prohibitively high because of the "sensitivity" such a device would have to have?
For example, in order to sample the FM radio signals in the
frequency range of 100-102 MHz, it is not necessary to
sample at 204 MHz (twice the upper frequency), but rather it
is sufficient to sample at 4 MHz (twice the width of the
frequency interval).
Also take a look at spectrum efficiency, which is the "practical implementation" of all this.
It really helps to understand how spectrum is a limited public resource. For example, a carrier with 20MHz of spectrum each way and a tower covering 1km2 in 3 sectors could offer at most 60Mbps down over 3G.
If you have 6000 customers in that same area (remember that some cities have densities in the 10+k/km2), that means ~10Kbps per customer on average, which is enough for 1.5 GB/month/customer.
It's very strange that "3G" networks are so slow. HSPA+ supports 22 Mb/s and has better spectral efficiency than LTE, so why do we never see anything approaching that in real life?
Honest statement: people in big orgs string together stuff in mad lib format to get headlines. Speaking from personal experience, this is the way academics works. From what I can tell there is a disproportionate amount of this amongst the more stately corporations, IBM et al. too. I say this to advise consideration about how much impact will come of such "impressive" projects.
I wish I could understand how engineers are able to transmit so much wireless data at those distances, with so many devices at the same time.
I guess antenna technologies have improved a lot for the last 10 years, and I still wonder where the subscription cost goes: are there patents for those new types of antennas, are those antennas expensive to build, or does the cost just reflect the amount of antennas installed and the infrastructure built to achieve that wireless bandwidth?
Other question is, if you have solar drones, how much upload (from the device to the drone) can you achieve, since batteries are still very much limited?
Google's Loon Project involves having the balloons float over the weather. So cloud cover isn't the issue. Batteries only have to function at night. Furthermore each drone will in software limit itself to N active connections (just like cell towers do), so you just use that N to calculate max battery draw, then size batteries appropriately.
I was talking about the battery of smartphones. In general smartphones are good at receiving data, but not so good at sending it because their batteries are very limited.
It depends on a lot of things; OFDM modulation multi path and fading mitigation, MIMO space-time coding for channel capacity increases, adaptive beam forming, error correction, efficient power amplification, base-band processing.
For Google's line of sight application, the adaptive beam forming and power amplification are the main tech drivers.
I think we should be working more on improving consumer and enterprise software for local area networks!
The global internet does not need the level of hops we are using to transmit data. Things should be done locally first. I don't even want to say "offline first" because the idea of a binary online/offline is again a symptom of thinking that one is either "connected to the internet" or not, with the former implying very comfortable access to the internet to get anything done.
We should be encouraging things like IPFS. Back in the day, usegroups and other software did things better than the glorified mainframe approach of today.
This can't get here fast enough. To people who don't really get why they're doing this, or who think it only makes sense in undeveloped regions with no cell towers, I wrote about this here:
Basically, if you think that in developed areas cell tower density has or should have an inverse correlation with the cost of bandwidth, then you don't live in the real world. There's a reason that there are only a few network operators on most towers, and those guys get away with highway robbery in terms of pricing and quotas.
Here is the money graf:
"It’s when I began seriously working on the cell tower option that the beauty and inevitability of the balloon idea truly clicked for me. Don’t get me wrong — on its face the Internet balloon idea is still actually nuts, but it’s vastly better than the terrestrial alternatives, which are all terrible because of one fatal problem: any moderately long-range wireless bandwidth solution needs line-of-sight to work, which means you need elevation, and (absent a viable balloon technology) elevation is a function of geography, which makes it eminently exploitable by rent-seekers.
This geography-based rent-seeking, by both wireless carriers (via national tower networks) and fixed-line ISPs (via cable, fiber, phone networks, and trunk locations) is the only reason that bandwidth quotas exist in 2016, and it’s what brings the Internet-of-balloons idea down from cloud cuckooland and into the realm of inevitability."
I share your general optimism on sky-based broadband, but I have to admit that I do not follow your argument about rent-seekers.
All physical space, even space in the sky, is in limited supply. So why does the rent-seeking nature of cell towers make sky-based broadband inevitable?
I can see why sky-based broadband affords a huge competitive advantage, allowing Google to beam 1gbps for $5/mo to the 15 million people who live in Northern California.
But why does that make it more likely to come to pass? Are balloon/drone flight plans inevitably easier to file than zoning permits for cell towers? Won't altitude eventually be auctioned off by the FCC? I fear that part of what makes sky-based broadband attractive is the perhaps naïve notion that government will always control the skies in the relatively light-handed way in which it currently controls the skies.
I hadn't really thought about how rent-seeking might apply to sky-based broadband via FAA licenses and the like. I'll have to think about that one some more.
I think the reason rent-seeking is less of an issue in the sky (although I don't have any opinion about viability) compared to the ground is that the earth is not flat / smooth (also has buildings on it), but if you go even 1000 feet in the air there are no objects ruining line of sight. There's a lot of sky. Even sky 1000 feet above a cliff side is sky, you probably don't want to put a land-based cell tower there though.
how much of the housing cost problem is caused by a huge number of people needing wired broadband within X miles of a city center, competing with rich foreigners who want the exact same real estate?
imagine if middle class knowledge workers currently feeling the squeeze could realistically live 30+ miles out and telecommunicate most most/all of the time. not only would it revitalize the outskirts of some cities that need residents/activity, it would put a hedge on the insanely fast rise in the cost of housing near the city center.
or at least give working people an option to live further away, have a high standard of life (more space), and still be able to do their jobs without commuting 2-3 hours a day.
but maybe this is all anecdata: i have a tiny place (studio) in the city and i am completely uninterested in spending close to $1M to upgrade my conditions. however, i am willing to spend a considerable amount of money to either add a country home (best of both worlds), or move altogether. where prices are good, bandwidth sucks, and i can't realistically live there and run a business.
this is clearly an imbalance in the marketplace and i hope it gets addressed in the next 5 years.
Just like you, I don't have to imagine. I make an engineer salary working from home. I live in a low cost of living part of Florida, 5 minutes from the beach on the gulf side.
Because I didn't go to SF, and have worked remotely, I've been able to save a non-insignificant amount of my income; I'll be able to retire around 35-37 (I'm 33 now).
Always be willing to say no when someone can extract rent of any sort from you; otherwise, you're a slave to them.
congratulations. as i get older i consider doing the same more and more, or just getting out of tech altogether. seems like it's a treadmill in a lot of ways.
No need to congratulate me! This is what people should be doing if they want to be free from a job or industry that provides them no enjoyment.
I too will be getting out of tech when I "retire", or rather, focusing on using my technical skills in a more philanthropic way. I'm tired of the circular "what was old is new again", always having to prove yourself to a new team, all that jazz. I can lead a very comfortable life on a beach in Belize while I hack on things that matter.
I have been toying with one fantastic idea lately. I know why it would seem like a pure fantasy, and I'm not pretending that it's anything more at the moment, but give it some benefit of a doubt.
It's quite simple. Imagine, just for a second, that current trillion evaluations for all the unicorns will turn out to be true in some point in the future. How can it be? What will be going on in this fantastic world? There's only one possible explanation: internet ate everything.
The dotcom boom hanged on a very simple, explicit assumption: that internet commerce is viable. That people actually will spend money on the internet. Of course, it lead to a bubble, and that bubble burst, but the assumption itself turned out to be correct. More than that: the valuation that NASDAQ have given to the whole internet industry in the late 90s is a reality know. Of course, individual 90s startups weren't worth that money, but internet industry as a whole certainly is. Even if you judge it just by turnover, without even looking at prospects of growth.
So, the first step of internet revolution that was promised by dotcoms already happened. But what about the next step? No one is really talking about it, because it's too fantastic to believe in and nobody wants to be laughed at. But we know what it can theoretically be: the current wave of SV unicorns will _eat_ their respective industries.
Imagine it. 90% of taxi industry is Ubers, Lyfts, Getts. 90% of book industry is Amazon. (Wait, that almost already happened). 90% of TV is Netflix and stuff. 90% of payments are Square and Paypal. 90% of hotel industry is AirBnB, Booking.com and something else. Walmart have gone after Blockbuster, everybody orders groceries with online drone delivery. Giant malls stand abandoned, everybody's ordering from AliBaba. And so on.
Of course it sounds a little stupid; I drastically simplify it, so we can talk about it without spending time arguing about inconsequential details. And don't forget, all this is more like a fantasy right now.
But the point is, in this fantastic world such initiatives by Google, just as free basics by Facebook have nothing to do with charity. Remember, how in the 90s, the only companies that really made money of internet were telecom companies, because the only sure way to monetize an internet user was to charge him for access? (Oh, and porn of course). In contrast, in this fantasy world, the cost of internet access will become insignificant compared to all the money you can get from a person with internet access. And in this fantasy world internet corporations will gladly provide you the access for free. May be they will still charge you a couple of cents for 100Mbps to 1Gbps upgrade, but the 0 (zero) bps to 1Mbps upgrade will make so much money to them that you have no chances of paying for it.
You know you could've condensed that entire post down to "I think Internet will eventually be free and subsidized by the companies that profit from the usage of it."?
Hell, Facebook's already doing it with Internet.org.
Maybe because the aero guys had legal issues with their last product. That being said, as a Bostonian I am excited about this potential internet option.
Where I live in Maine, this is a third world country when it comes to connectivity.
The best you can get is about 25mbps when sitting right under our only cell phone tower in town, it is about 0.5mbps when I can get a signal at my house.
My wired home Internet? 15/1 ADSL2. We have cable, they offer speeds up to 30/5 or so, but they force you to bundle it with cable TV to get speeds that high, and I don't want cable TV in my house, nor do I want to pay >$100 for internet only twice as fast; plus, during peak hours, the network falls apart, our local ADSL2 network doesn't.
I've written to Google, trying to get them to deploy Google Fiber in Maine, since we need it badly: we don't have a monopoly, we just don't have anything recognizable as the Internet, not the way the rest of the US gets it.
Hopefully, they start deploying this in my area sometime in the next few years.
And the drones are going to stream pictures of me to google servers while hovering over my head 24x7. Those pictures will be analyzed, A/B tested and ad brokered to friendly ad-triggered on-demand services. Wall-e, red is the new blue.
Maybe this has already been asked, but the part that I struggle to understand is what about TX ? I mean is a smartphone going to have enough wattage to beam a message back to this drone ? If not then what's the plan for solving that 1/2 of the equation.
63 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadOutside developed areas there will be internet by solar drones and lower orbit satellite internet.
Maybe somehow I'm the last generation who remembers really shitty remote controls for televisions. :\",
Higher frequencies have awful penetration and range, that's why today you define who wins in the mobile game by the amount of 700MHz and 800MHz spectrum they own. In other words, lower frequency spectrum is (within certain limits) always better.
EDIT: No, I'm wrong.
Right conclusion, wrong (mis-stated?) premise. There are more high-frequency channels of a given width than low-frequency ones. 700-800 MHz is a whopping 12.5% change, and it gets you 100 MHz to work with, but 5.725-5.875 is only a 2.5% change and gets you 150 MHz to work with.
Again, right conclusion but wrong premise. The don't propagate more directionally, but as they have limited penetration and high attenuation, they are more useful for point-to-point with line-of-sight than for broadcast.
My [uninformed] intuition tells me that you can have theoretically infinite bandwidth over any spectrum or modulation scheme, but the cost/size/energy-requirement quickly gets prohibitively high because of the "sensitivity" such a device would have to have?
Wikipedia might work as a primer. See Nyquist & Shannon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
Shannon was a once-in-a-century genius...in a century of many once-in-a-century geniuses.
It really helps to understand how spectrum is a limited public resource. For example, a carrier with 20MHz of spectrum each way and a tower covering 1km2 in 3 sectors could offer at most 60Mbps down over 3G.
If you have 6000 customers in that same area (remember that some cities have densities in the 10+k/km2), that means ~10Kbps per customer on average, which is enough for 1.5 GB/month/customer.
Tower range is getting smaller to reuse spectrum.
I guess antenna technologies have improved a lot for the last 10 years, and I still wonder where the subscription cost goes: are there patents for those new types of antennas, are those antennas expensive to build, or does the cost just reflect the amount of antennas installed and the infrastructure built to achieve that wireless bandwidth?
Other question is, if you have solar drones, how much upload (from the device to the drone) can you achieve, since batteries are still very much limited?
For Google's line of sight application, the adaptive beam forming and power amplification are the main tech drivers.
The global internet does not need the level of hops we are using to transmit data. Things should be done locally first. I don't even want to say "offline first" because the idea of a binary online/offline is again a symptom of thinking that one is either "connected to the internet" or not, with the former implying very comfortable access to the internet to get anything done.
We should be encouraging things like IPFS. Back in the day, usegroups and other software did things better than the glorified mainframe approach of today.
http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2016/01/15/wisp-tria...
Basically, if you think that in developed areas cell tower density has or should have an inverse correlation with the cost of bandwidth, then you don't live in the real world. There's a reason that there are only a few network operators on most towers, and those guys get away with highway robbery in terms of pricing and quotas.
Here is the money graf:
"It’s when I began seriously working on the cell tower option that the beauty and inevitability of the balloon idea truly clicked for me. Don’t get me wrong — on its face the Internet balloon idea is still actually nuts, but it’s vastly better than the terrestrial alternatives, which are all terrible because of one fatal problem: any moderately long-range wireless bandwidth solution needs line-of-sight to work, which means you need elevation, and (absent a viable balloon technology) elevation is a function of geography, which makes it eminently exploitable by rent-seekers.
This geography-based rent-seeking, by both wireless carriers (via national tower networks) and fixed-line ISPs (via cable, fiber, phone networks, and trunk locations) is the only reason that bandwidth quotas exist in 2016, and it’s what brings the Internet-of-balloons idea down from cloud cuckooland and into the realm of inevitability."
All physical space, even space in the sky, is in limited supply. So why does the rent-seeking nature of cell towers make sky-based broadband inevitable?
I can see why sky-based broadband affords a huge competitive advantage, allowing Google to beam 1gbps for $5/mo to the 15 million people who live in Northern California.
But why does that make it more likely to come to pass? Are balloon/drone flight plans inevitably easier to file than zoning permits for cell towers? Won't altitude eventually be auctioned off by the FCC? I fear that part of what makes sky-based broadband attractive is the perhaps naïve notion that government will always control the skies in the relatively light-handed way in which it currently controls the skies.
don't forget about the actual rent, too.
how much of the housing cost problem is caused by a huge number of people needing wired broadband within X miles of a city center, competing with rich foreigners who want the exact same real estate?
imagine if middle class knowledge workers currently feeling the squeeze could realistically live 30+ miles out and telecommunicate most most/all of the time. not only would it revitalize the outskirts of some cities that need residents/activity, it would put a hedge on the insanely fast rise in the cost of housing near the city center.
or at least give working people an option to live further away, have a high standard of life (more space), and still be able to do their jobs without commuting 2-3 hours a day.
but maybe this is all anecdata: i have a tiny place (studio) in the city and i am completely uninterested in spending close to $1M to upgrade my conditions. however, i am willing to spend a considerable amount of money to either add a country home (best of both worlds), or move altogether. where prices are good, bandwidth sucks, and i can't realistically live there and run a business.
this is clearly an imbalance in the marketplace and i hope it gets addressed in the next 5 years.
Because I didn't go to SF, and have worked remotely, I've been able to save a non-insignificant amount of my income; I'll be able to retire around 35-37 (I'm 33 now).
Always be willing to say no when someone can extract rent of any sort from you; otherwise, you're a slave to them.
I too will be getting out of tech when I "retire", or rather, focusing on using my technical skills in a more philanthropic way. I'm tired of the circular "what was old is new again", always having to prove yourself to a new team, all that jazz. I can lead a very comfortable life on a beach in Belize while I hack on things that matter.
It's quite simple. Imagine, just for a second, that current trillion evaluations for all the unicorns will turn out to be true in some point in the future. How can it be? What will be going on in this fantastic world? There's only one possible explanation: internet ate everything.
The dotcom boom hanged on a very simple, explicit assumption: that internet commerce is viable. That people actually will spend money on the internet. Of course, it lead to a bubble, and that bubble burst, but the assumption itself turned out to be correct. More than that: the valuation that NASDAQ have given to the whole internet industry in the late 90s is a reality know. Of course, individual 90s startups weren't worth that money, but internet industry as a whole certainly is. Even if you judge it just by turnover, without even looking at prospects of growth.
So, the first step of internet revolution that was promised by dotcoms already happened. But what about the next step? No one is really talking about it, because it's too fantastic to believe in and nobody wants to be laughed at. But we know what it can theoretically be: the current wave of SV unicorns will _eat_ their respective industries.
Imagine it. 90% of taxi industry is Ubers, Lyfts, Getts. 90% of book industry is Amazon. (Wait, that almost already happened). 90% of TV is Netflix and stuff. 90% of payments are Square and Paypal. 90% of hotel industry is AirBnB, Booking.com and something else. Walmart have gone after Blockbuster, everybody orders groceries with online drone delivery. Giant malls stand abandoned, everybody's ordering from AliBaba. And so on.
Of course it sounds a little stupid; I drastically simplify it, so we can talk about it without spending time arguing about inconsequential details. And don't forget, all this is more like a fantasy right now.
But the point is, in this fantastic world such initiatives by Google, just as free basics by Facebook have nothing to do with charity. Remember, how in the 90s, the only companies that really made money of internet were telecom companies, because the only sure way to monetize an internet user was to charge him for access? (Oh, and porn of course). In contrast, in this fantasy world, the cost of internet access will become insignificant compared to all the money you can get from a person with internet access. And in this fantasy world internet corporations will gladly provide you the access for free. May be they will still charge you a couple of cents for 100Mbps to 1Gbps upgrade, but the 0 (zero) bps to 1Mbps upgrade will make so much money to them that you have no chances of paying for it.
Hell, Facebook's already doing it with Internet.org.
http://vita.mcafee.cc/PDF/feint.pdf
"If you don't provide service to our expectations, we will step in."
The usual preventative physics apply; friction, efficiency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984755
The best you can get is about 25mbps when sitting right under our only cell phone tower in town, it is about 0.5mbps when I can get a signal at my house.
My wired home Internet? 15/1 ADSL2. We have cable, they offer speeds up to 30/5 or so, but they force you to bundle it with cable TV to get speeds that high, and I don't want cable TV in my house, nor do I want to pay >$100 for internet only twice as fast; plus, during peak hours, the network falls apart, our local ADSL2 network doesn't.
I've written to Google, trying to get them to deploy Google Fiber in Maine, since we need it badly: we don't have a monopoly, we just don't have anything recognizable as the Internet, not the way the rest of the US gets it.
Hopefully, they start deploying this in my area sometime in the next few years.
$45.89 currently.