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Google plans to beam 5G internet from solar drones

engadget.com

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Re: Google plans to beam 5G internet from solar drones

#11

Post by ucaetano »

Armisael16 wrote: post #8
ucaetano wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

That may be true at present, but higher frequency systems do ideally allow for higher data rates. EDIT: No, I'm wrong.

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.

Re: Google plans to beam 5G internet from solar drones

#13

Post by rayiner »

ucaetano wrote: post #6
acd wrote: post #2

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, th…

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.

Re: Google plans to beam 5G internet from solar drones

#15

Post by auganov »

ucaetano wrote: post #6
acd wrote: post #2

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, th…

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?

Re: Google plans to beam 5G internet from solar drones

#17

Post by jokoon »

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?

Re: Google plans to beam 5G internet from solar drones

#19

Post by zkhalique »

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.

Re: Google plans to beam 5G internet from solar drones

#20

Post by jonstokes »

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:

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."

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