Someone do wifi next! I cant wait for a good option for assembling APs from parts.
Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
91–100 of 110 posts
Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raspberry Pi is a corporate endeavor as well. They also have employees, and a payroll to maintain. Seems a bit harsh to blame them for selling their products to the customers who are most able to pay for them, which enables them to stay in business. (Whatever quantity Vodafone is buying is DEFINITELY more than any hobbyist is able to pay.)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17190918 You're very wrong, that was not what it was for. Dr Upton says that will help the project grow much more quickly than previously thought. "We didn't realise how successful this was going to be," he said. "This means we can scale to volume. Now we can concentrate on teaching people to program." What a lie that turned out to be!
And yet the annals of history are littered with open source education efforts that failed, because they weren’t able to figure out a revenue model that was sustainable to their creators.
Maybe this thread is just a lightning rod for a bunch of OSHW anger but there’s compounding good that comes from a huge customer like Vodafone buying a shitload of Pis.
The major thing I can think of is higher volume for the Pi foundation, which means more negotiating power with their chip suppliers or price breaks at a certain ordering volume.
Might mean you don’t get any Pis now.
Also might mean they drop the per unit cost by $5-10 in a year.
Not that I expect any of these facts to make you feel any less angry or betrayed or whatever, but they’re net goods for the Pi Foundation, and the OSHW community if they do indeed come to pass.
Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raspberry Pi is a corporate endeavor as well. They also have employees, and a payroll to maintain. Seems a bit harsh to blame them for selling their products to the customers who are most able to pay for them, which enables them to stay in business. (Whatever quantity Vodafone is buying is DEFINITELY more than any hobbyist is able to pay.)
> Whatever quantity Vodafone is buying is DEFINITELY more than any hobbyist is able to pay. You're arguing for the parent comment with this. The "foundation" was intentioned as for hobbyists and people who wanted to learn while being affordable that's how it was sold to the general public. Chasing a higher payer will always lock out "affordable". An analogy would be healthcare. Capitalism and affordable+for-many are…
> Chasing a higher payer will always lock out "affordable".
This reveals a misunderstanding of the economics of both chipset vendors and electronics manufacturing.
The more Pis that the foundation can make at one time, the cheaper their unit costs can be, by encouraging competition from suppliers and getting price breaks from chipset vendors.
Large customers like Vodafone buying 10k or 100k is a huge advancement towards that goal.
In the short term? Yeah, maybe some shortages of SBCs.
In the long term, they’ll probably be able to build more Pis at higher quantities and cheaper unit prices.
Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Raspberry Pi is a corporate endeavor as well. They also have employees, and a payroll to maintain. They would have sold out either way. What does payroll have to do with who they prioritize to sell to?
It's easier and less risky to sell in-bulk to another business on a contract than it does to sell retail
Another good point. Not to mention probably a more profitable end venture for the Pi Foundation. Fewer pounds of flesh doled out to retailers and middlemen.
Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
No but it is before you add one, so that's the best place to start.
Not necessarily. If this is based on a CM4 (almost certainly), then there's no SBC at all since the CM4 is a SoM.
Yes and there are dozens more than just the CM4 that have it embedded... on a single system board.
Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
#96This is the reason why you can't get a Raspberry Pi computer. Eben Upton, (Raspberry Pi Founder) sold out his his base. When the chip shortage hit, Upton made the decision to prioritise supply to industrial buyers over retail/hobbyists/education. His rationale was that companies that had bills to pay and salaries to pay should get priority because people's livelihoods depended on getting those Raspberry Pi's. Sounds…
this makes me nervous to design anything substantial around an RP2040 with a Raspberry Pi at least you could port your application to any board that runs Linux just by moving the code over but if your project depends on the PIO subsystem in any way, you're locked in to buying their chips forever; you can't just take your code to another platform
At least the RP2040 chip is appearing in boards from other manufacturers, like Arduino
Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whatever quantity Vodafone is buying is DEFINITELY more than any hobbyist is able to pay. You're arguing for the parent comment with this. The "foundation" was intentioned as for hobbyists and people who wanted to learn while being affordable that's how it was sold to the general public. Chasing a higher payer will always lock out "affordable". An analogy would be healthcare. Capitalism and affordable+for-many are…
> Chasing a higher payer will always lock out "affordable". This reveals a misunderstanding of the economics of both chipset vendors and electronics manufacturing. The more Pis that the foundation can make at one time, the cheaper their unit costs can be, by encouraging competition from suppliers and getting price breaks from chipset vendors. Large customers like Vodafone buying 10k or 100k is a huge advancement towa…
> In the long term, they’ll probably be able to build more Pis at higher quantities and cheaper unit prices.
My retort is - then you misunderstand the gap between Android and iPhone. MediaTek+Qualcomm vs Apple [0]
It's too simplistic to think just because you produce more you'll make more money. There's an absolute maximum in the pricing-volume curves. Even if you have to pay more for the chips, if you can simply charge more you'll make money hand over fist. That's what this thread is saying that the RPi foundation "sold out".
The last sentence is incredibly hard to achieve, but if your brand is a household name like iPhone or R.Pi then you can start jacking up the price and as long as you have correctly identified the price insensitive (or less sensitive anyway) you price to the max of the particular group.
[0] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-ap-ma...
Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dont know if I want to be so close to a 5G transmitter after reading this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34778597/
It turns out that the barriers to publication on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov are very low.
I've tracked the link down to
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ajctres.com+Evidence+f...
https://www.jctres.com/media/downloads/jctres07202105007/%5B...
Beverly Rubik
Department of Mind-Body Medicine, College of Integrative Medicine and Health Sciences, Saybrook University, Pasadena CA, USA; Institute for Frontier Science, Oakland, CA, USA
Robert R. Brown
Department of Radiology, Hamot Hospital, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Erie, PA; Radiology Partners, Phoenix, AZ, USA
Michal Heger
Department of Pharmaceutics, Utrecht University, the Netherlands; Department of Pharmaceutics, Jiaxing University Medical College, Zhejiang, China
The review process for submission and subsequent comments/suggestions to gain publication can be read here. https://www.jctres.com/media/filer_public/5b/02/5b021dc8-6d5...
Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
#99This is the reason why you can't get a Raspberry Pi computer. Eben Upton, (Raspberry Pi Founder) sold out his his base. When the chip shortage hit, Upton made the decision to prioritise supply to industrial buyers over retail/hobbyists/education. His rationale was that companies that had bills to pay and salaries to pay should get priority because people's livelihoods depended on getting those Raspberry Pi's. Sounds…
You can bitch about RPIs or you can go support something else . Lots (9000+) of Beaglebone Blacks over here -> https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/BeagleBoard-by-Seeed-St... TI documentation is stellar (except the graphics--which nobody documents) unlike the RPi or any of it's clones. The chips are all available at volumes less than millions. You don't have to sign NDAs in order to get stuff. The Linux is standard D…
It's not perfect. There was (not sure if they fixed in subsequent hardware revisions) an issue with the ethernet not working about 50% of the time, and this required cutting the physical power to the device to fix. https://community.element14.com/products/devtools/single-boa...
I found this out the hard way after building an IOT vehicle logger using these boards, had to work in a hardware self-reset to rework the board.
Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
#100This is the reason why you can't get a Raspberry Pi computer. Eben Upton, (Raspberry Pi Founder) sold out his his base. When the chip shortage hit, Upton made the decision to prioritise supply to industrial buyers over retail/hobbyists/education. His rationale was that companies that had bills to pay and salaries to pay should get priority because people's livelihoods depended on getting those Raspberry Pi's. Sounds…
I think this is an uninformed knee-jerk reaction. Eben has been very public about the supply chain issues, the prioritization of small companies that rely on shipping stock to keep afloat and how mainstream stock will be replenished (it is already possible to buy Pis again—I have an RSS feed for rpilocator and the number of updates increases daily).
Vodafone is doing the Vodafone thing and pushing out a _prototype_ that just happens to have a Pi managing a $400 RF board. I worked there for 11 years and have seen this thing time and again (I was a product manager for broadband and CPEs, and remember the Linksys WRT54g-3G, a bunch of Sagem and Huawei mini base stations, etc.). You are completely misinterpreting the reach of such a prototype, no matter what the marketroids spun around it.
It’s Mobile World Congress week, so the telco distortion field is at its yearly zenith.