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AWS Private 5G

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Re: AWS Private 5G

#281

Post by tenebrisalietum »

vishnugupta wrote: post #167
pantulis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think that's the use case. how would AWS deploy a base station to my home? But you have a real point, and AWS already solved that with the 3G enabled Kindles by having carrier agreements. Why not doing that with Smart TVs?

> how would AWS deploy a base station to my home? The TV company will deploy base station(s) in my town. Embed SIM cards in TVs they ship. No need to connect to my home WiFi to send personalised data back to their servers, or to upgrade firmware etc.,

It may interest you to know ATSC 3.0 has specifications for a "return path" to the broadcast station in it.

Re: AWS Private 5G

#282

Post by ksec »

ineedasername wrote: post #249
ksec wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search Massive MIMO, Beamforming ( Which isn't really new ), Small Cells, NR. That is about it really. You can ignore mmWave which is pure hype. Most of the other enhancements are on the carrier / operation side and not consumer. You can also ignore all the 5G Self Driving Vehicle crap.

>5G Self Driving Vehicle crap. I live in a dense suburb of a large city and 5G coverage seems not that great. I'm not sure why self-driving requires or gains much benefit from 5g anyway, but I wouldn't want to rely on it. You can certainly do car-to-car communication & coordination without it, and you wouldn't want a minor network outage turning the system into chaos.

Because certain vendor from certain country have a huge patent portfolio on Autonomous vehicle (AV) and wanted it to rely on 5G so that everything is centralised and could easily be controlled in the name of traffic shaping (cough). And somehow (cough) EU was brought into the whole thing until a Saint appeared, after being banished to hell he finally came back and convinced enough people AV with 5G would need to total state surveillance. I think, if I remember correctly EU finally abandoned that idea. But as with everything it may come back someday. ( Hope not )

Re: AWS Private 5G

#283

Post by jcims »

femto113 wrote: post #278
jcims wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a small outpost deployment + RF gear, so (guessing) $500K up front and $10-20k/mo. I don't know if it's possible to get RDOF grants for individual communities but that might cover some of it.

That's not the way AWS typically prices things--my guess is the hardware and setup costs will be baked into the monthly service charges.

Generally yes but outpost is a little different:

https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/

Either way this is just a guess :)

Re: AWS Private 5G

#284

Post by beambot »

WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #129

Become a telecom as a service! Super cool. For those who are glancing over, this is a big deal. 5G isn't really like 4G upgraded. It's more its own thing. I believe this has been available though for a while and many telecoms have partnerships with FAANG beyond Amazon. With 5G you can essentially split a network into multiple partitions and scale them independently on-demand called Network Slicing. (like cloud comput…

You can take this a step further and make the telecom as a service entirely decentralized: Earn "tokens" by providing wireless area coverage & data backhaul, spend "tokens" to transmit data.

This is exactly what the Helium (HNT) project is doing. They started with LoRa coverage (super low datarate but long range for IOT) and are moving into other protocols such as WiFi and CBRS 5G (same as this offering) via the FreedomFi project.

Re: AWS Private 5G

#286

Post by saltminer »

cshipley wrote: post #192
vineyardmike wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? This doesn't seem to use AT&T at all, and amazon is actually bringing their own hardware too. This isn't MVNO-aaS. Its Antenae-aaS.

>This isn't MVNO-aaS. Its Antenae-aaS. I think a lot of people are missing this point. This will not allow someone to become their own carrier. It allows someone to install their own "cell towers" and have devices connect to them without having to use a 3rd party carrier.

Yeah, while you might theoretically be able to build a national 5G network using this, it would be way more expensive vs just building it yourself. Amazon wouldn't be marketing this if they didn't expect to have a healthy profit margin, after all.

This seems more applicable in cases where you need 5G but there is no/insufficient 5G already, when it would be prohibitively expensive to go to existing carriers (mobile data rates in the US are ridiculous), or when the threat model necessitates a private network.

Re: AWS Private 5G

#287

Post by bri3d »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #279
danudey wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this is really what this service is intended for. If you read the whitepaper, they list examples of what this would be useful for; namely, covering your own space with your own 5G for your own devices. Deploy it in these areas instead of WiFi: 1. A stadium's remote ad/video/informational displays 2. A logistics distribution hub's stock-tracking robots/systems/handhelds 3. A corporate campus's smart displays o…

I got the impression this is Amazon providing Airave-type "femotcells" that emit a low-powered cellular signal and use your wired network for calls and data service. Seems to also imply Amazon would be providing SIM cards. I'm not sure of the advantage of this over Wi-Fi, though, except to get devices that have no other option other than cellular connectivity to be forced to go over your own network. > Cellular techn…

Large-scale, long range Amazon-managed 5G deployment should be easier than large-scale WiFi deployment, at least if the promises are accurate. Especially outdoors where deploying a large number of base stations is challenging.

Lower frequencies mean improved building material penetration in environments like warehouses and docks, meaning fewer base stations are necessary.

Generally 5G also supports higher density than WiFi for use cases like hotels and conventions, where too many devices on too few channels will quickly destroy WiFi functionality.

WiFi is pretty crappy for many-device midrange solutions (let's say a dockyard, a 1km long facility with 1000 employees).

Re: AWS Private 5G

#289

Post by saltminer »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #279
danudey wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this is really what this service is intended for. If you read the whitepaper, they list examples of what this would be useful for; namely, covering your own space with your own 5G for your own devices. Deploy it in these areas instead of WiFi: 1. A stadium's remote ad/video/informational displays 2. A logistics distribution hub's stock-tracking robots/systems/handhelds 3. A corporate campus's smart displays o…

I got the impression this is Amazon providing Airave-type "femotcells" that emit a low-powered cellular signal and use your wired network for calls and data service. Seems to also imply Amazon would be providing SIM cards. I'm not sure of the advantage of this over Wi-Fi, though, except to get devices that have no other option other than cellular connectivity to be forced to go over your own network. > Cellular techn…

> Why not just deploy Wi-Fi?

Everyone has a potential wifi access point in their pocket. The only people who have the ability to run their own cellular networks are either a) respectful of frequency allocations or b) know a thing or two about SDR. Interfering with 5G systems is difficult to do on accident and has a much higher barrier to entry to do intentionally.

And this is important for one of the use cases listed in the PDF: sports and entertainment venues. When you have a large venue, you will always have people who are using their phones as wifi hotspots (many of them having simply forgotten to turn them off), and this eats into valuable airtime. You can have your APs send deauth packets to rogue networks, but you could still end up not having enough bandwidth for your own purposes. I'm reminded of an article I read about the unveiling of the first iPhone[0]:

> The software in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio was so unstable that Grignon and his team had to extend the phones’ antennas by connecting them to wires running offstage so the wireless signal wouldn’t have to travel as far. And audience members had to be prevented from getting on the frequency being used. “Even if the base station’s ID was hidden” — that is, not showing up when laptops scanned for Wi-Fi signals — “you had 5,000 nerds in the audience,” Grignon says. “They would have figured out how to hack into the signal.” The solution, he says, was to tweak the AirPort software so that it seemed to be operating in Japan instead of the United States. Japanese Wi-Fi uses some frequencies that are not permitted in the U.S.

While wifi has come a long way since 2007, if you need a reliable, high bandwidth system in an environment with lots of interference, this is a good choice.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-s...

Edit: this comment has some more good reasons for why you would use this over wifi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29398181

Re: AWS Private 5G

#290

Post by saltminer »

jcims wrote: post #180
throwthere wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to the gear, would you have to license the spectrum from someone? I think the fcc already auctioned it all off? Or does that not apply here? Any idea what that would cost?

I don’t know the details there. Presumably there would be at least be cost for someone to maintain the paperwork and equipment certification. There’s a couple comments in here about this being on CBRS, possibly more info there.

Per https://aws.amazon.com/private5g/faqs/ it is, indeed, CBRS. And it seems like if you have other frequencies in your possession, you can use those, too.
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