Will 5G Push Fibre Aside?

Exactly, so well put!

Huawei have pleaded with the Australian Govt to allow them to provide infrastructure to the %G rollout. They in part say that to exclude them will leave many less Urban areas in a digital backwater:

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Once you have considered that for a couple of moments, consider how cell densities allow telecommunications companies ever greater tracking capabilities. Your phone pings nearby towers, and your location can be triangulated based upon the towers it pings. With 5G needing more towers more tightly packed, maybe we’ll find ourselves talking on the phone in front of a digital advertising display that suddenly flips from a Telstra ad to an Optus ad!

Similarly, what if the workplace installs its own cell repeaters? Suddenly you can track where your employees are based upon their mobile phones. This is already possible with WiFi, and so I turn it off when I leave home (and in fact it appears that Android has added functionality recently that replaces my IFTTT app’s setting to do this). I do not want 5G if it makes privacy an even more remote ideal.

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Oh, great! More overlap, when the nation needs to extend telecommunications coverage.

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Partial overlap. Optus’ coverage will always be second rate in comparison to Telstra.

All that would remain is for your employer to migrate to the imagined ‘Facebook Boss’ App; to help the office run smoother and communicate better. Or ‘Google Corporate office manager’. Let us help you keep in touch with your staff, no matter where they are. Need a special done last minute on the other side of town? We’ll put you in touch with one of your staff who is right now close to where you need that extra support.

Both available in a Gold upgrade package which offers our world class employee skills and health tracker! Have you done your ten thousand steps today! Do you know which employees might be suffering fatigue this morning after getting home at 1am and watching the European Champions Cup replays? Break the ice with them opening up about how you too are disappointed with how PSG has got its coaching team so wrong, before politely suggesting they need to take a days leave to come back fresher tomorrow!

Excuse the diversion. It gets potentially creepier when your service provider knows more about your business than you do, all in the interest of improving the customer experience.

Any tools that enable personal identification, location and behavioural reporting need more than a passing glance. 5G just improves on the quality and quantity with meter level precision. Although even 3G could find me within a street number a decade prior.

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The UK opposition follows the ALP’s model for its policy, and the UK seems to be having a similar debate to that which we had, with the same conclusions from those who know. Yet our conservatives remain glued to the 20th century and still believe their own koolaid.

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More on the undeniable benefits of 5G: :face_with_raised_eyebrow:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/01/china_isnt_the_.html

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A “light read” regarding transmitting 5G radio waves along fibre optic cables.

Too easy?

phys.org needs to vet its articles a little better. Radio by definition is not over fibre, but uses electromagnetic waves.

I am amused that the linked article states that “…only inexpensive and low-bandwidth fiber links are affordable…”.

Tell that to the idiots who thought fibre was too expensive and opted for copper instead.

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A single strand can carry so much data we currently have no tech to match the capacity but it is slowly coming.and they say low bandwidth? They perhaps need to review their searches to ensure they get better info. 5G, 4G and other traffic still use fibre often throughout their journeys to other places.

I think what the authors were saying was to support those who use low bandwidth plans on fibre (fiber) could compress the data to allow more to be sent with less being used until uncompressed at the destination. This is like zip files, on the fly compression on HDD/SSD/Storage such as MS’s compression.

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It’s confusing, but perhaps it is because we are not all on the same page. Here are some more ‘not so light’ short docs on 5G and how fibre is used for ‘front haul’. Radio - electro magnetic radiation is not transmitted over fibre. It appears the protocols and format of the digital connections feeding cells or mobile broadband are very different from internet Ethernet packets. Hence ‘radio-over-fibre’.

Stop here?
I don’t understand what is being said well enough to explain what is being said. Only to suggest that there is a difference, and a well established set of protocols. Whether it is relevant to how Australian Telcos are rolling out 5G, is important. Perhaps we have no need to consider the previous news item?

A simple starter

Two items more complex and related to 5G that relate to fibre connections, for those more technically adept on 4G/5G system design.

https://www.aglmediagroup.com/the-effect-of-fiber-on-5g-fronthaul-tower-sites-and-the-radio-access-network/

https://inform.tmforum.org/sponsored-feature/2017/06/fronthaul-5g-needs-strong-optical-network/

A two panadol worthy topic @Fred123? :roll_eyes:

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With rollout of 5G, the telcos are planning to shift customers from the NBN to 5G…to directly compete with the NBN.

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Death of the nbn™ by a thousand cuts. Smart move by LNP to build an inferior network rather than the superior Labor one, then wait for the inevitable improvements in other tech to finally kill off what they didn’t want. Medicare is a similar situation with less and less real return for Doctors out of it and thus rising gap payments, so making Private Health more attractive to those who can afford it.

They just openly don’t admit it but the meaning between the lines is very loud indeed.

The 5G rollout will probably be only in the profitable centres leaving those on the fringe and further out on the currently inferior nbn™.

My cynicism about the increased fibre rollout is that it really only primarily is for carrying in the end 5G etc traffic which need fibre to carry the traffic. Sell it as a good thing for the consumer then you get less backlash over the real reasons, hmmm that reminds me of the sell of MTM nbn™ eg cheaper, faster completion etc…real reason is it created a backwater network that will die from attrition.

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The cost of 5G infrastructure that would support the kind of bandwidth even a second-rate NBN currently supports will rule it out for most places and uses. A tower on every corner that needs a physical fibre link? That simply will not happen.

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Optical fibre, ADSL over copper wire, and coax can all provide high speed enough for most uses. BUT, they are fixed. 5G gives portability AND the bandwith for things like HD video. Seems a no-brainer to me that 5G once widely available will take a lot of business away from NBN fixed services.

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How wide? Only as wide as profitability so mostly larger centre Urban, CBD, some Suburbs…go rural or remote just forget it.

Stuart or Barkly Highways once out of reasonably large towns will be just a barren electronic desert…oh yeah they are in Deserts :slight_smile: Plenty of Business, Communities, Stations, Miners around the highways but no real Internet or even at times normal non mobile phone coverage and they still rely on the RFDA (Royal Flying Doctors) to make phone calls over the radio.

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I agree, but not all customers but possibly a significant number (a large percentage).

As @grahroll indicated, it won’t be able to compete with the NBN in all areas, but where it does, it will be a significant competitor for the reasons that you have outlined (mobility).

The other will be cost. Many individuals will opt for mobile only as they will have this anyway (a mobile is becoming more a necessity of modern life). The NBN will be seen as an additional cost to the cost of mobile carriage and many will opt for no NBN connection to save considerable amount of money each month ($15+ per week).

While the internet of things (IoT) will may require connection, it will not be necessary for the devices use…think of a fridge, dishwasher etc. While it might be nice to have fully connected appliances within a household, it may not be a necessity and many will forgo the additional functionality to save money (not having the NBN).

I might be proven wrong, but recent technology is towards mobility and cost effective solutions. The NBN is neither in the true sense or an addition to that which will already be in one’s pocket.

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Except it doesn’t really give portability. The 5G base station still relies upon a fixed line to communicate up-stream. From this US-centric article a couple of years ago:

Not only must these sites be electrically powered, but to ensure their promised transmission speeds, they will need to be hard-wired with tens of millions of miles of fiber optic cable nationwide.

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You are kidding right? How do you think wireless connected devices like phones and laptops work now with WiFi and cell networks?

Pardon me for butting in but there are two communication links here. You are talking about the many to one links of the phones to the node then there is the node to the network link which is what @postulative is talking about. The latter clearly needs much more bandwidth than the former. As 5G is going to carry much more data the node to network link will be fibre not wireless.

On portability you are talking about the freedom to roam within the range of a phone network node or your local WiFi, he is saying that freedom isn’t as wide as you imagine in the case of 5G because it needs so many more nodes because their rage is shorter. It is likely there will be more dead spots in low population areas of regional and remote Oz for 5G than 3G or 4G as it will not be cost effective to build many extra nodes for little traffic.

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