Comment by vel0city

Comment by vel0city 11 hours ago

Is it possible? Sure, its possible. Would it actually be feasible and good? Probably not.

Take a look at WiFi-dense apartment buildings. So much crowding, no centralized assignment or management of the bands. It is a wild west of people transmitting on whatever channels and whatever power levels they want (within the legal limits). It ends up with few people actually having a good experience when there's no centralized management. 5GHz/6GHz makes WiFi more usable because it naturally limits your ability to hear your neighbors. Going to 700MHz/900MHz/1.2GHz (the normal frequencies used in a lot of 5G deployments) is only going the opposite direction of where WiFi has been going to solve this problem. Expect more noisy neighbor problems as you lower the frequencies.

Then we're not only going to saturate the bands with people doing whatever they want (within legal limits), we're going to depend on mesh routing through all that noise? There goes your reliability and efficiency of sending data.

throwaway48540 11 hours ago

I'm talking about creating a single mesh network, not a Wifi-like situation with many networks on the same bands.

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vel0city 11 hours ago

There is no difference in the end. It is still a single collision domain for everyone talking.
And who's to say they want to join your mesh and not Bob's super awesome mesh? Or start their own mesh? Oh, you get to decide how to operate the mesh but I can't? I guess you'll end up getting some kind of license so you can standardize how this particular mesh should operate and prevent others from running competing services on the same frequencies as your one mesh.
You'll put out standards on what kinds of devices are certified to work on it and ensure certain settings so tx/rx errors are reduced to ensure good usage. You'll start encouraging people to not put up more nodes in a certain area because it's just getting too crowded here, but hey we need to incentivize someone to set up a node on the other side of town.
Snap now it seems like we're running a regular carrier.
I participate and use city-sized WiFi mesh networks in the amateur radio world. They're not anywhere near a replacement for what normal people think of as internet connectivity. I can't imagine swapping WiFi for 5G cellular stacks would end up making a radical difference. The issues are largely with having to make multiple wireless hops, mesh routing inefficiencies/problems, and having everyone actually play nice all the time.

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