I'm reminded of that limitation all the time when I pick my daughter up from school. My cell phone has two bars, but it doesn't work at all, because when parents are picking up their kids and everybody's got at least one cell phone in their pocket, the infrastructure is dead. Nothing changes when it comes to wireless. The limitation will be there. If we invent something like the tachyon, from Star Trek, and we're able to leverage it to get around that limitation, that'll probably work. But the carriers are hard pressed to get enough infrastructure at the density level they need. 5G is supposed to help with some of that, because you're doing edge computing and pushing more of the work to the edge.
But I think the FirstNet that first responders are implementing is a good idea. It’s basically a carved out frequency on the network. I think that can be leveraged in other ways depending on the high beta.
It's almost like quality of service (QoS). At what point does the FCC have to open up more bands? The ISM band is full; it's completely loaded, because everything's on it. WiMAX never took off here, but it can work in a much larger number of bands. With the FCC, it's outrageously expensive and difficult to license those. I think we solved it technologically a long time ago, but our own limitations that we've put in place will prevent us from really leveraging it for a while.
But we have all these regulations too. If you go to Seoul, South Korea, they have 10 gig wireless through the entire city.
For fixed devices/locations, I think wired is still the best option. Wireless (both wifi and cellular) are now viable alternatives for non-fixed endpoints, low-data endpoints (such as IoT), and difficult to physically connect end points.
Recent updates to new office space include shared/hoteling spaces with BYOD expectations and ubiquitous/high density wifi. Minimal wired connections exist for conference rooms and printers.
We are getting closer. Ericcsson has now taken the lead in RAN/5G from Huawei and as it gets broader implementation, we will get more towards a fully wireless world. I'm still getting 800Mb out of my 1gb fibre home internet connection over a wired network but that drops to 400Mb when over the home WiFi mesh so wired still has it's place. It's worse for non 802.11ax (WiFi 6) devices that connect. There are also people who are sensitive to EMF who will only have wired in their homes.
Also the adoption of more IOT devices will drive a wider adoption of a wireless world due to the fact that they often do not come with a wired connection.
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