You’re conflating policy with technology. The short answer is that as a technology WiFi gives complete connectivity to the entire world and anyone can extend it. 3GPP is designed to prevent it till you pay. This is why this is an issue for DC3. Don’t confuse today’s perimeter security policies with what’s intrinsic. Alter mundi is shows what one can do with Wi-Fi.
I realize there are limits to how much we can drill down on this in email – it’s best done in person. But I’ll make one attempt and try to not to overwhelm the list. This is also revisiting an
old topic.
When you say consumers would prefer a femto cell you need to ask why femto cells failed so completely and decisively. In fact that was model for the residential gateway in the 1990’s – a bunch of managed services from a provider. I take some credit for breaking that model by putting the NAT at the edge of your house so you now owned the connectivity. And I had to overcome the very notion that you had to have someone manage the network for you. The problem with that view is that you’d be charged for each service and each device each month and the manager second-guessing everything. Note that this was before Wi-Fi but it matters not whether you have radios (Wi-Fi or whatever) or wired connectivity. What matters is whether you are able to create the services yourself or are dependent upon a provider. I was honoring the design point of the Internet – the one that has empowered people to create their own solutions.
One example I use is the tracking of the lions on the Serengeti which used cellular technology. It meant the lions needed accounts so it couldn’t be used to track cows. If the community owns the facilities it can use it as it wished without a fee for each device or service.
The Internet was designed to get around the limits of a central approach in which you had to petition a provider for each service. The provider also creates points opportunities for failure in trying to assure that only billable bits get through. Providers also create scarcity (AKA the busy signal) by dedicated resources. One example of this that people have died because cellular is all-or-nothing so you can’t fall back to simple messaging if the signal is weak. And one reason it’s weak is that a provider doesn’t make money in low density areas. And if you’re doing an application like crop management why would you want a system that depends on a distant provider?
I realize that it seems as if Wi-Fi is just local but that’s not at all true. That’s an accidental property of a telecom legacy including perimeter security policies and others who have built on that model. Rather than asking a providers [sic] to create solutions we need to take more responsibility for assuring decentralized systems work as I did with home networking.
5G is going in the opposite direction – attempting to bring back the fatal dependency upon the center.
Bob Frankston
From: dc3-bounces@listas.altermundi.net <dc3-bounces@listas.altermundi.net> On Behalf Of Kurtis Heimerl
Sent: Friday, November 2, 2018 16:28
To: Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity <dc3@listas.altermundi.net>
Subject: Re: [DC3] Neat article on wifi vs 5G
I don't think it misses the point at all. There are key affordances provided by 3GPP technologies (wide area, mobility, etc) that Wifi does not provide, and those needs are going to push more and more people towards centralized networks. Not a good thing, but i'm not sure why I, as a consumer, wouldn't prefer a small cell in my house over my own wifi router. If laptops commonly had cellular radios we'd all be in big big trouble, imo.
On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 1:01 PM <dc3@bob.ma> wrote:
Yes, 5G is the dystopian world of centralized networks. An attempt to take control back from communities and give them to Telcos. It is more a death match than a friendly contest.
The piece is frustrating, like almost all 5G writing is that it misses the point and treats 5G as an alternative to WiFi doesn’t get to the real point – the make all radios generate billable events and frustrate communities’ efforts to own their own facilities. Similar to the problem with LTE – it’s a useful technology but currently captive to the telco business model.
Bob Frankston
From: dc3-bounces@listas.altermundi.net <dc3-bounces@listas.altermundi.net> On Behalf Of Kurtis Heimerl
Sent: Friday, November 2, 2018 15:33
To: Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity <dc3@listas.altermundi.net>
Subject: [DC3] Neat article on wifi vs 5G
Discusses what I consider a somewhat dystopian world of only centralized networks.
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