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 baineschile2600 ways to livePremium
join:2008-05-10
Sterling Heights, MI | reply to Gbcue
Re: Though most people love it 5th gen, to me, is whatever comes after lte/wimax. Fios wanted to have NYC fully wired by 2014, which is the table for around post 4g deployment. | |
| said by baineschile:5th gen, to me, is whatever comes after lte/wimax. Fios wanted to have NYC fully wired by 2014, which is the table for around post 4g deployment. LTE and WiMAX will continue to evolve and take us to 2020 or so. We're not even close to 5G.
The main factor will be how powerful the lte/wimax/5th gen wireless becomes. There may not be a need for a wired connection in the future, which would make the investment a poor one.
Not to downplay wireless, and how great it is, but wireless will never be a replacement for fiber. They're really complementary technologies. The capacity of the technologies, and really the physics involved just don't compare.
Spectrum isn't infinite, and generally in short supply for wireless broadband. Wireless technologies are already approaching "Shannon's Law" (really a mathematical theorem), and all manner of techniques are needed to "get around" it. We may face diminishing returns on wireless speed increases in the future, compared to the doubling of speeds every few years or so. Practically speaking, 4G may have a few hundred megabits to share among hundreds of users, under ideal conditions.
On the fiber access side, WDM-PON looks like the next big thing. It combines the scalability of active, point to point networks, with the lower cost of point to multi-point, passive optical networks (PONs). Potentially, each customer could get their own wavelength delivering up to 10 GigE.
We're only a few years away from 100GigE on fiber in the core, which will be carried on each wavelength, and there's room for dozens of wavelengths on each fiber pair, and there's typically at least dozens of fiber pairs in each bundle of fiber. Basic research into Terabit Ethernet has likely already started.
There's a reason why people say fiber optics has practically limitless bandwidth. | |
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