AWS Private 5G

Let me put my perspective, coming from a guy who is involved in private Cellular networking (US as well as other countries):

1) Private 5G can be deployed either with licensed operator (Cellular provider) or in CBRS band (CBRS band is opened by FCC for the private cellular deployment). It can be used free or paid, different options. (Fees is minimal).

2) CBRS still doesnt support 5G. No idea how AWS will provide. But even if it is private 4G, for the end user it doesnt matter.

3) Your available bandwidth is limited by the air waves bandwidth you are using, nit by 4G or 5G. Per enterprise, CBRS band is limited to LTE equivalent band (20MHz). Total CBRS band is 200MHz, if I am not wrong). You are not going to get giga speed just because its 5G.

4) Not all phones support CBRS band. You will be limited to CBRS band support in handset feature. 5) Each end device will need SIM (SIM card either physical or virtual). Its not like your laptop will be connected with private 4G or 5G. You will need modem as well as SIM card (unless your devices support these features).

6) Its really for small geographic reason. Its not that easy to take the equipment with you and start using. (like in car or train etc).

7) There is a concept of SAS server, that's why AWS device needs to be connected to this server in cloud (There are SAS license holders, to them). Once you install the system and that is connected to the SAS server, first you get the frequency band which is open in your area. If some one using that band (another CBRS player), you are out of luck (ask me , who has to call different teams when deploy in lab). PLus, there are scenarios when these licenses can be revoked (if you are using free band). The law enforcement can ask FCC to use the band temporarily. GCC can revoke your lic and stop the system.

What AWS did is big, but for enterprises.

A simple explanation is that the nature of a cellular network requires that all base stations have a relatively large amount of shared state (which can get as fine as TDMA synchronization) and the ability to exchange information with each other in realtime. WiFi generally doesn't have this requirement, especially now that roaming extensions have mostly obsoleted AP virtualization (which is what pricey enterprise WiFi systems with a dedicated controller used to add).

An even simpler explanation is that the architecture of the cellular network is both old and comes out of the telecom industry, which both mean that it has many layers and strict requirements for QoS, traffic engineering, etc.

In a little more detail (given that this is not a topic I'm an expert in and it can get confusing): most of the magic in 5G happens in a component called the RAN or radio access network. The RAN is basically everything between your phone and the "core network" that provides actual services like telephony and IP access (which is going to be in a data center). The RAN can be fairly complex as in newer technologies it involves things like making intelligent heuristic decisions about which base station a given device should be communicating with.

Historically base stations were expected to be largely independent and handle basically everything between the phone and the existing ISDN network, which just sort of dated back to how analog radiotelephones had worked. This required a lot of equipment to provide the entire RAN on-site. The new direction has been to absolutely minimize what is located in the field, both for size and power savings but also to simplify management since there's less field equipment to upgrade and maintain. This means that a typical 5G gNB, the actual radio station, basically does nothing but encode/decode to/from binary, which it then sends to a "virtual RAN" or vRAN running in a data center somewhere. All of the actual protocol implementation, access control, traffic engineering, etc. is done in the vRAN. This adds a lot of flexibility since the vRAN can be maintained and iterated on more easily and can flexibly allocate resources between sites. It also simplifies field installation because the site only needs connectivity back to the vRAN, which is a little simpler to arrange (via VPN, fiber, metro ethernet, ISDN, whatever) than getting the site connectivity into an actual mobile exchange, and to IP capabilities, etc.

Or in other words, your WiFi AP does contain the business logic of IP switching and 802.11 session management. But that's relatively simple and done for a relatively small number of clients compared to a cellular base station, and WiFi has (mostly) always been designed with the idea of minimal to zero requirements for inter-AP communication beyond existing IP capabilities.

Unsure. But private LTE is already a thing where you can install your own towers onprem and configure your devices to connect to those towers instead of the ones of your standard AT&T provider (or whatever). I don't think there's any magic voodoo involved. I assume there's a way to configure 5G capable devices to connect to some local physical network you set up at a factory.

I don't expect this is for telephony, but rather a faster (I guess it's faster...) wifi. But who knows. Maybe if you install your own telephony servers or whatever you could call people on that network. Unsure anyone would care about that unrealistic usecase.

Will this let me build out a 5G network near my mom's house in the sticks?

Everyone quick, Amazon now wants us to pay to help build out its cellular infra. Jump on the inflated prices, quick!