Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 250 posts

Re: Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

#191

Post by lxgr »

matt-p wrote: post #144
jdewerd wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most efficient way to extract money from people is to sell off the spectrum to the highest bidding rent seeker, I agree. As for most efficient use of the resource, well, consulting my spectrum analyzer, ISM bands are winning by a mile and we should want more of them.

Sure obviously giving it to WiFi and then installing town wide free WiFi would be the absolute most efficient option but I'm trying to stay realistic.

Wi-Fi is not a very efficient way to cover a whole town, due to its inherently low range (at least when involving consumer devices on one end). You'd be spending a lot of resources on base stations that never see any usage.

Re: Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

#192

Post by ttoinou »

wongarsu wrote: post #80
ttoinou wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me more how Europe is separated by a canal from Asia ? There are benefits splitting America in two, splitting Africa from Eurasia, splitting Australia from Eurasia. What's the benefit of splitting Eurasia into Europe and Asia, besides catering to europeans who believe they're unique in the world ? It only creates more problems

Europe and Asia are separated by mountains. Geographically that's at least as valid as splitting America on a canal, and splitting Africa from Asia on a canal. If anything the mountains are a more significant barrier to travel and migration than those canals If we were to rearrange the continents if anything we should split up Asia further, and split Africa into Northern Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa (maybe giving Su…

Europe and Asia are highly connected land masses

Re: Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

#193

Post by ttoinou »

fundatus wrote: post #74
ttoinou wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is arbitrary (like most of things actually) but the distinction between Europe and Asia is the most arbitrary of all of them

It's an interesting topic since most people in a hypothetical Eurasia would probably never call themselves Eurasian, but would have a strong sense of being one or the other. But on the other hand there is also no universally agreed to boundary between the two as well. And maybe this imprecision the best representation of reality that we have for this.

That'd be another definition we could use yes

Re: Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

#194

Post by kristofferR »

Hendrikto wrote: post #175
alerighi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to make the switch in a rich country with less than 10 millions of inhabitants, mostly living in big cities.

Check out reference 2. This is being done across the whole of Europe. It has already been done in Australia.

It's the same "we can't introduce chip-and-pin because of all the credit card readers" argument that kept carding an issue a decade longer in the US than in the EU.

Re: Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

#195

Post by lxgr »

xoa wrote: post #98
Bombthecat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz? It will be as crowded as 5

> And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz? Yes. Probably because they have some basic grasp of electromagnetic reality, which perhaps you might consider studying a bit before forming strong opinions? > It will be as crowded as 5 Physically impossible. 6 GHz simply does not have the material penetration, that's the point. Having way more raw bandwidth on tap, all available all the time without DFS plop…

> 6 GHz simply does not have the material penetration, that's the point.

Really? Is there something special about 6 GHz absorption through common construction materials? Otherwise, why would a 20% higher frequency be that much worse?

Re: Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

#196

Post by throw0101d »

drewg123 wrote: post #176
fguerraz wrote: post #60

This is just corporate greed! I live in a EU country in an apartment and 5GHz is completely crowded and pretty much unusable because of DFS (making your WiFi AP unexpectedly stop to do a complete scan and choose a new channel), so 6GHz is the only stable, high bandwidth option here, and we need more channels so that most peopole chan switch to it. The cellular networks operators can have that shitty 5GHz part of the…

Agreed. I live the USA in a 100 year old apartment building, and can see a zillion ISP provided routers, all squabbling over the same handful of 5GHz channels. 6E is a game changer. 5Ghz is stuttery and laggy and makes it pretty much impossible to have a clean video call. I don't game, but gaming on it would be miserable. I've measured latency, and it regularly spikes above 1s. 6E is far, far better. Rock solid video…

> I live the USA in a 100 year old apartment building, and can see a zillion ISP provided routers, all squabbling over the same handful of 5GHz channels. 6E is a game changer.

What channel width (20/40/80/other) are you typically seeing?

Re: Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

#197

Post by msh »

esseph wrote: post #187
matt-p wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mobile doesn't scale in cities" is the exact reason they need 6Ghz (because higher frequencies enable much higher density of cells, reducing terminals per cell). 6Ghz will penetrate buildings terribly, I agree, but it's honestly just not that simple, for example it's now becoming really common for carriers to be doing in building deployments; shopping centres, sports stadiums, the transit network (e.g 4g in the subw…

You could do gigabit fixed wireless for less than 1/10 the cost of LTE, and have better performance. LTE is what somebody would do without much telecom experience and more money than sense.

LTE is what the telecom people wanted. The rest (slightly exaggerated) wanted wimax.

Re: Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

#198

Post by martinald »

crote wrote: post #45
martinald wrote: post #32

Tbh it's probably much more useful for mobile operators than wifi. 6GHz does not propagate well at all at wifi power limits and as such one 320MHz band probably won't overlap much with neighbours, even in apartment buildings. This does preclude having 640MHz bands though in future wifi standards, but I'm not sure how important that is - Wifi7 on MLO could theoretically deliver 7.2gbit/sec in 2x2 config and double tha…

That's exactly why it should be used for wifi! 2.4GHz is completely unusable in urban environments, because you're getting interference from two dozen neighbours. And everyone has a poor connection, so their "handy" nephew will turn up the transmission power to the maximum - which of course makes it even worse. 6GHz barely makes it through a concrete wall, so you're only receiving your own AP, so you have the whole b…

You're misunderstanding what is being proposed.

It's not saying 6GHz shouldn't be used for WiFi. It's saying that 6-6.4GHz (approx) is reserved for WiFi and 6.4-7GHz should be used for cellular networks.

My point isn't that we shouldn't have no WiFi on 6GHz, but 1GHz extra for WiFi is limited utility compared to cellular networks.

You can still fit an entire 320MHz channel width in the lower 6GHz and if it doesn't overlap like you say why bother with 3x that?

Re: Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

#199

Post by esseph »

msh wrote: post #197
esseph wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do gigabit fixed wireless for less than 1/10 the cost of LTE, and have better performance. LTE is what somebody would do without much telecom experience and more money than sense.

LTE is what the telecom people wanted. The rest (slightly exaggerated) wanted wimax.

Wimax hasn't been something anybody I've known in the US has talked about for more than 15 years.

I've built fiber networks and fixed wireless networks. Almost ended up becoming an LTE network as well. It didn't make any sense in any sort of financial modeling, even with spectrum availability.

LTE helps solve "general connectivity". What it does not do is build scalable, reliable, high speed, economical sensitive broadband infrastructure.

Re: Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

#200

Post by Seattle3503 »

stego-tech wrote: post #101

Multiple things can be true simultaneously. For instance: * The reach for 6GHz by mobile service providers is straight-up greed, as Wi-Fi is a threat to their business expansions towards monopolization * Wi-Fi is incredibly overcrowded, and a shift to 6GHz will not solve the underlying issues causing the crowding in the first place (mobile device density, over-reliance on Wi-Fi instead of running ethernet to capable…

> The fact new construction in 2025 doesn’t mandate ethernet drops in every non-bathroom is what’s contributing to Wi-Fi crowding, and prevalent last-mile wired access ensures that mobile operators have to compete on cost rather than data caps - and thus hinders their monopolization efforts.

This would raise the cost of construction, in the middle of widespread housing shortages.

Post reply on HN