There's no "telecom as a service", and there's no "5g can be split into multiple networks" nonsense.
Amazon is just selling 5g access points and hardware (just like you would install wifi), and rents you a private connection for that hardware to AWS, and management of that network from AWS. Basically.
Spot on. This could be a game changer for us ($xB 100+ year old manufacturing company), where we are on a long, slow journey to digitize every piece of manufacturing (long and slow because manufacturing runs almost 24x7x365). Wifi, even the top enterprise systems, is not as resilient, cheap and quickly installed as we'd like.
So now I can use 5G instead, and template and deploy it via the cloud? Yes, yes! We'll put this through some cost models, but it will likely jump NPV of IoT and automation projects by pushing down the initial capital costs (fiber runs pulled by union electricians to wifi gear installed by a vendor vs. 5G base stations and servers installed and configured by plant electricians and corporate IT).
I think GC might be talking about how the reliability of a large-scale mesh network using wifi isn't great (mostly because that's not what wifi was designed for), while this is literally what 5G was designed for.
As somebody not very well-versed in this, a sincere question. Would something like 5g be able to replace a home intranet / network? Eg I have a personal media server that I stream to devices on my wifi--would this be able to work with 5g? From my perspective 5g can only replace internet access, yes? Devices that want to communicate with each other securely would still prefer to be connected over wifi or other personal network like Ethernet?
The part of 5G that gets thrown around a lot with high speed and capacity is mostly based on mmWave bands(think 10's of Ghz) which attenuate incredibly quick. Most of them are nearly direct line of sight. You already see some issue with 5Ghz wifi not going well through walls, there's a high chance you'd be falling back to one of the lower speed bands inside.
The other thing is there's a non-zero amount overlap in the way spectrum is used in wifi and 3/4/5G, MIMO, spread spectrum and other approaches are all trying to get as close to the theoretical limit of the channel bandwidth. When you start looking at large scale wifi deployments it starts getting split into cells of channels not to dissimilar to cellular deployments. There are some differences and certain bands benefit from discrete allocation/cell management but at the end of the day it's all radio waves over the air.
This would seem like an argument for installing wired / wire->mesh 5G base stations around our houses instead of the wifi repeaters we currently use..
Amazon in the past flirted with the idea of building a mesh network of Amazon IOT devices so that your neighbours Echo could connect yours to the internet even if you didn't have a connection. BT in the UK offered reduced price broadband if other BT customers could use a WiFi Guest network from your connection - so BT customers had like 90% free wifi coverage in cities.
I can see a amazon deploying Amazon Echos and automation poducts as 5G enabled IOT devices that backhaul to your home internet but also mesh with neighbours, then eventually deploying its own outdoor 5G coverage and suddenly becoming a mobile network.
Yes it's possible but AWS focus is to be the Layer 1. They're doing it for data and can easily replicate it for voice if there is a use case but at that time they're directly competing with Telco, a fight that they may not pickup at this time. Ideally they would utilize all the unused bandwidth & reuse it. So one neighbour can provide internet + mobile to entire street
5G is typically deployed in CBRS bands - i.e. 3.5 GHz. This isn't mmWave. Will have meaningfully higher coverage areas than WiFi (but mostly because WiFi is power-limited, not to do with frequency).
"deploy it via the cloud" doesn't actually mean anything and confuses people. You still need to set up hardware at your own enterprise! It's NOT the same as renting a VM in a datacenter and "deploying" it in the cloud.
Sure, it might have a good UX and not require as much expertise to manage, but it's not "deploy via cloud". That's just marketing.
Telecom networks have a seriously complex back-end, that's what makes them better for larger areas than Wifi. A commercial mobile network typically has a few racks of machines below the antenna mast to run the radio systems, and then uses a fiber connection back to a mode central place to control those radios. In this case you're deploying (much smaller) local radios and AWS runs everything else in the cloud.
to be a Telco at scale you need dedicated spectrum allocation which is seldom auctioned by the government at super high price so this is definitively what this is. it uses CBRS Spectrum which is dynamically allocated per site and the government can yank the CBRS spectrum you were temporary allocated at their discretion.
This is the biggest threat to Telco since they've paid billions in Spectrum. The sites that earn the most will be converted to 5G however CBRS has limitations but it's not bad.
CBRS has it's limitation and isn't permanent. Gov can take it back anytime and then there is also a priority. CBRS is good for smaller installation but not able to take commercial traffic. Caveat here is that 5G is difficult to deploy. You need a lot of antennas which cost $$.
So in areas with higher density, there'll be smaller telcos that'll start operating.
I'm still kinda of confused... does that mean we could say get a simcard and make voice calls via this network? insert sim card into mobile phone android/iphone and make phone calls?
They are giving you a core and a RAN (Radio Access Network). The RAN uses “lightly licensed spectrum,” (CBRS in the US), which I believe is supported in newer iPhones.
That’s enough to make bars appear on your phone. What’s missing is the IMS, which adds traditional calling, voicemail, SMS, etc. However, FaceTime, iMessage, etc. will all work.
Unsure. But private LTE is already a thing where you can install your own towers onprem and configure your devices to connect to those towers instead of the ones of your standard AT&T provider (or whatever). I don't think there's any magic voodoo involved. I assume there's a way to configure 5G capable devices to connect to some local physical network you set up at a factory.
I don't expect this is for telephony, but rather a faster (I guess it's faster...) wifi. But who knows. Maybe if you install your own telephony servers or whatever you could call people on that network. Unsure anyone would care about that unrealistic usecase.
Faster and more robust for the use case than wifi, I imagine. The wifi spec isn't really optimized for large-scale mesh networks, while this is precisely the use-case 5g was developed for.
Can you share a reference showing the support for mesh in 5G (large scale or not)? As in, the equivalent of IEEE 802.11s for WiFi?
I can't find anything about that.
Or did you actually mean "cellular"?
Mesh indicates a deployment where not all access points have a backbone connection.
Cellular indicates a deployment where all access points have a backbone connection.
It can be either. You can have multiple antennas pointing to a single Base station or each antennas having their own base station. It all depends on the use case. Challenge is when you go from Home to Roaming and vice versa as the handsoff isn't ideal but this'll improve
Benefit is the cost for enterprises. You're paying for bandwidth which'll be much lower than the regular usage to telcos.
You're however limited to data usage on this network and this focuses mostly on data
No, this is for private networks with lots of wirelessly connected devices where using Wi-Fi is not ideal (say, a building with a lot of 24/7 cameras). I cannot say for certain, but it’s unlikely Amazon would be interfacing with major telephone carriers given that 1) they are using low power radio units and 2) they are using unlicensed spectrum.
Starting from LTE, there's no distinction in the network level between data and voice or SMS, it's all just IP traffic. The voice call protocol is called VoLTE. As long as your handset can reach the VoLTE infrastructure via IP, you can make and receive calls.
This actually works already over WiFi too and that's called VoWiFi. That does not support handovers between networks though, so it is not that convenient. Specifically it means that if you walk outside the WiFI network, your call will drop. I suppose the different branding is due to this quality aspect, as there's no difference in the protocol.
To have VoLTE or VoNR (the 5G version) the SIP based software handling your calls needs to interact directly with the software stack managed by the operator via a bunch of other telco protocols.
I don't think you will be able to support "regular" calls/SMS without if it is not supported by amazon.
Basically they give you a few Wi-Fi access points and a central server PC, but instead of those being Wi-Fi and standalone, it’s 5G and cloud controlled as should be in late 2021.
And unlocked phone should work provided it supports required frequency(tricky) and voice calls should be possible, but it probably can’t readily connect to PSTN and given actual “1-555-1234567” numbers, or make 911 calls for that matter. If you’re going to have Asterisk SIP VoIP server running on-prem, that is probably supported.
So it's kind of like a VLAN except it's strapped onto the 5G network of the various providers of 5G service via hotspots. Kind of like my 4G security system piggybacks on the network but isn't really callable by a regular old cell phone.
No it's not. It's more like a wifi access point, a hardware device that sets up a private network. The public providers aren't involved in your 5G network at all (unless you are using them for internet uplink at the facility, but that is independent of the private network. AWS handles all the complicated 5G software stack in the cloud though.
Voltage supply levels vary a little bit from country to country and modern PSUs are built to accommodate that. My laptop PSU for example will take anything from 100V to 240V, at either 50Hz or 60Hz.
I don’t have insider info but you can almost certainly use this on a 120v outlet. 120 has been the standard for 50 years and you would only need special consideration if the power requirement was something weird like 3-phase 208v or 480v or something. I could be wrong but I don’t see AWS requiring specialty low-voltage electrical supply here.
https://aws.amazon.com/private5g/faqs/
There's no "telecom as a service", and there's no "5g can be split into multiple networks" nonsense.
Amazon is just selling 5g access points and hardware (just like you would install wifi), and rents you a private connection for that hardware to AWS, and management of that network from AWS. Basically.