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It seems everyone here is confused. Here's the official FAQ, and it has 0 marketing garbage.
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.
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).
If you have problems with wifi resiliency I've got bad news for you about the wavelengths 5G uses.
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.
I think 5G will replace wifi within next 10 years. We don't need WiFi anymore
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
Yes it should. Wifi isn't great with security + authentication. So ideally data would transfer over 5G.
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).
Nokia has been the pioneer in Private wireless networks. They have already deployed production ready private LTE / 5G systems in ports and factories.
For more info:
https://dac.nokia.com/private-wireless/
Disclaimer: I work for Nokia.
"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.
There are other comments here claiming Telco nonsense. What you say sounds reasonable though :)
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.
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.
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.
You're right and the biggest benefit is to companies with strictly using iOT
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.
looks like it might be possible?
https://open5gs.org/open5gs/docs/tutorial/02-VoLTE-setup/
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.
They wouldn't allow voice call but yes you can do OTT apps like Signal , Whatsapp etc.
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.
From the FAQ:
> At a minimum, you need to provide 110-volt AC power outlets, public internet access....
In the US, 120 or 240 volts are used. Per ANSI C84.1-2020
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.
Japan uses 100V, FWIW.
Well there you go.
CBRS however is only available in US so that's why they specified 110V
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.
Become a telecom as a service!
Super cool. For those who are glancing over, this is a big deal. 5G isn't really like 4G upgraded. It's more its own thing. I believe this has been available though for a while and many telecoms have partnerships with FAANG beyond Amazon.
With 5G you can essentially split a network into multiple partitions and scale them independently on-demand called Network Slicing. (like cloud computing but just the network).
This could be extremely useful for security. Maybe even the death of VPNs. This is also useful for scaling network resources to services as they need it.
Short-term, things like "Tesla Free Network" could exist for their self-driving cars. Or, Uber offering free fast Internet to their drivers or a truly private device.
Long-term, I am concerned about the emergence of private networks with different access. Such as a "Google Network" or a "Netflix Network" that offer different services or privacy levels at different costs.
It's a crazy, scary, but also fun direction we are going.
Edit: Final comment. If you think this might be the death of AT&T with independent providers, think again . Amazon & Co. and others like Google are bringing their developer platform, while the telecoms offer their infrastructure. It's a gross partnership that makes sense. When you send bits over the network -- everyone will be getting paid except you.
None of this is really what this service is intended for.
If you read the whitepaper, they list examples of what this would be useful for; namely, covering your own space with your own 5G for your own devices.
Deploy it in these areas instead of WiFi:
1. A stadium's remote ad/video/informational displays
2. A logistics distribution hub's stock-tracking robots/systems/handhelds
3. A corporate campus's smart displays or door access systems
4. Oil and gas drilling/processing sites's systems monitoring in remote, non-covered areas
So this isn't about creating a new provider in your local city, but rather about connecting your devices in your space in cases where WiFi is insufficient or overloaded.
So will 5G actually be better than 5GHz WiFi? I'm not too concerned about speed but rather a stable connection.
So here's the thing, currently I have 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi in my home. Any device that is stationary connects to the 5GHz one and any device that moves around connects to the 2.4GHz one. Why? Because initially I had everything on the 5GHz network, but noticed if I move around with my phone/tablets/laptops (even as simple as standing still and turning around), the connection would become unstable/choppy and introduce some lag and in rare cases a drop in connection. The 2.4GHz one works no matter what I do in my home. I can also get 2.GHz all the way out to the curb and it still works, where the 5GHz one drops significantly once I'm outside my house. In some cases it will still show the 5GHz one being connected but any app that tries to use it just hangs and never loads whatever it tries to fetch. So the 5GHz version of WiFi has been utterly useless to me, thus I'm only using it for devices that I know have decent line of sight, are within certain distance and aren't moving around. I currently have no Bluetooth devices chatting in the same airspace and I've tried it with single network too (only 2.4GHz enabled or only 5GHz enabled) - still the same. It could be that there is interference from neighbors: I can see quite a few WiFi networks of neighbors, most have both frequencies active - but I also had the same issue before I live in this specific house. So if 5G can improve the situation, that will be pretty great.
5GHz range is less than 2.4GHz. So that's the reason
I got the impression this is Amazon providing Airave-type "femotcells" that emit a low-powered cellular signal and use your wired network for calls and data service. Seems to also imply Amazon would be providing SIM cards.
I'm not sure of the advantage of this over Wi-Fi, though, except to get devices that have no other option other than cellular connectivity to be forced to go over your own network.
> Cellular technology such as 4G/LTE and 5G augments existing networks with higher bandwidth, lower latency, and reliable long-range coverage to an increasing number of devices. With AWS Private 5G, you can build private cellular networks to take advantage of the technology benefits of 5G while maintaining the security and granular application and device controls of a private network.
That's from the Amazon website. Why not just deploy Wi-Fi?
> Why not just deploy Wi-Fi?
Everyone has a potential wifi access point in their pocket. The only people who have the ability to run their own cellular networks are either a) respectful of frequency allocations or b) know a thing or two about SDR. Interfering with 5G systems is difficult to do on accident and has a much higher barrier to entry to do intentionally.
And this is important for one of the use cases listed in the PDF: sports and entertainment venues. When you have a large venue, you will always have people who are using their phones as wifi hotspots (many of them having simply forgotten to turn them off), and this eats into valuable airtime. You can have your APs send deauth packets to rogue networks, but you could still end up not having enough bandwidth for your own purposes. I'm reminded of an article I read about the unveiling of the first iPhone[0]:
> The software in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio was so unstable that Grignon and his team had to extend the phones’ antennas by connecting them to wires running offstage so the wireless signal wouldn’t have to travel as far. And audience members had to be prevented from getting on the frequency being used. “Even if the base station’s ID was hidden” — that is, not showing up when laptops scanned for Wi-Fi signals — “you had 5,000 nerds in the audience,” Grignon says. “They would have figured out how to hack into the signal.” The solution, he says, was to tweak the AirPort software so that it seemed to be operating in Japan instead of the United States. Japanese Wi-Fi uses some frequencies that are not permitted in the U.S.
While wifi has come a long way since 2007, if you need a reliable, high bandwidth system in an environment with lots of interference, this is a good choice.
[0]:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-s...
Edit: this comment has some more good reasons for why you would use this over wifi:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29398181
I think the whole point of the service is "convenience". If deploying private 5g is as convenient as deploying Wi-Fi, why not just deploy private 5g?
We all like Wi-Fi because we can attach a Wi-Fi router to an internet link and it "just works". Similarly, if you can make a mobile network "just work", you are getting the same functionality plus the benefits you outlined.
This may not seem very impressive to someone who has no need to support large Wi-Fi deployments, like a typical home or office wireless network. These are not the cases this service is targeting anyway.
The target customers are enterprises that are managing large-scale fully-automated sites like warehouses and factories that need to support 10s-100s of thousands of IOT devices which may include some time-critical systems that need ultra-low-latency reliable connections to a backend. Today these enterprises have to rent a 4g network from a telecom provider to enable these sites which takes months of planning and is expensive to operate and extend.
This is where the "convenience" becomes a game-changer. Using a private-5g service, an enterprise can deploy new large-scale networks in days, manage the networks like just another cloud resource, and extend the network at will. I presume the pricing model for the service will also be much more affordable where instead of paying for each end-user (IOT device), you'd likely be only charged for your data usage on pay-as-you-go basis.
Large-scale, long range Amazon-managed 5G deployment should be easier than large-scale WiFi deployment, at least if the promises are accurate. Especially outdoors where deploying a large number of base stations is challenging.
Lower frequencies mean improved building material penetration in environments like warehouses and docks, meaning fewer base stations are necessary.
Generally 5G also supports higher density than WiFi for use cases like hotels and conventions, where too many devices on too few channels will quickly destroy WiFi functionality.
WiFi is pretty crappy for many-device midrange solutions (let's say a dockyard, a 1km long facility with 1000 employees).
Commercial deployments on 5G are difficult because it's fairly new . Wifi is very tried and tested. It'll take some time to get practical experience but once done, it'll be easier than Wifi
5G will displace WiFi. 5G has better authentication, handshake etc
Is there any reason it _couldn't_ become that?
Probably not, except cost. It would be too expensive to compete with the national providers and then you would still need to interface with them for any service outside of the city. It's possible, just not the intended use case and not a logical use.
I remember people making very similar claims about AWS EC2 in 2007.
Ah, so the mythical beast of future Amazon 5G use cases can be anything I want then, right?
How about unicorns?
I see what you’re saying, but just because a similar statement was made about another service, does not mean the outcome will be the same in this instance with vastly different dynamics at play.
Wifi adapters are cheap and everywhere. For 5G tot surpass wifi it will have to match that. Laptops with 5G are not that common yet. ESP like controllers with 5G I haven't seen yet.
One of the advantages is 5G operating outside of the ISM bands. That helps a lot with stability and preventing interference. It also means this is not for individuals in their home. If licensing is made so accessible that people at home can use it you will again get overlapping frequency use and increasing interference. If it not made this accessible I don't see the availability of cheap clients solved because the market will be limited.
It's fairly early but within 10 years, every device will have 5G
Huh?
This doesn't seem to use AT&T at all, and amazon is actually bringing their own hardware too.
This isn't MVNO-aaS. Its Antenae-aaS.
>This isn't MVNO-aaS. Its Antenae-aaS.
I think a lot of people are missing this point. This will not allow someone to become their own carrier. It allows someone to install their own "cell towers" and have devices connect to them without having to use a 3rd party carrier.
Btw, MVNO-aaS does exist (for 5G, too):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_enabler
Yeah, while you might theoretically be able to build a national 5G network using this, it would be way more expensive vs just building it yourself. Amazon wouldn't be marketing this if they didn't expect to have a healthy profit margin, after all.
This seems more applicable in cases where you need 5G but there is no/insufficient 5G already, when it would be prohibitively expensive to go to existing carriers (mobile data rates in the US are ridiculous), or when the threat model necessitates a private network.
AWS wants to sell their storage. Margins are there + it's a new exciting market
Like installing a PBX or email server for internal communications?
Yes I dont think OP's description is an accurate usage of Private 5G. Where it is aiming at industrial ( warehouse ) or cooperate usage within certain location ( cooperate HQ ).
Not sure how Tesla or Uber would get their own private 5G.
Ah, you're right. I am mistaken for AWS Wavelength.
Hate to be that guy, but...
AWS Wavelength is Ec2 instances running on-prem on existing telco locations.
Please excuse my vast ignorance but wouldn't Tesla, Uber or whomever need to deploy a massive network of 5g towers for that? Or is more that Tesla/Uber/etc could much more easily become an MVNO-like-provider because of network slicing?
For those at home reading this... MVNO = "Mobile Virtual Network Operator". Aka a network that doesn't have its own wireless infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operato...
at this point these are 2 sides of telecom have nearly evolved to completely separate industries
one services towers on the ground. base stations. maintenance. physical network deployment
the other is the services of running the network. roaming agreements. customer management. internet breakout
tesla and other vehicle makers may see value owning the service side but very unlikely they want to maintain a network
The second comment. The telecoms via 5G have been positioning themselves to rent their infrastructure on-demand. The AWS partnership is this but Amazon then re-extending it to developers on their platform as part of their "Cloud" offerings.
I doubt Amazon has many towers of their own here and are almost entirely through one of the telecoms.
Isn’t this service nothing related to using existing infrastructure?
It looks like Amazon is sending you base stations to set up a private network in one location.
>_I doubt Amazon has many towers of their own_
Their offering page specifically says that AWS _"delivers your network hardware (small cell radio base-station and servers) Attach power and internet connectivity to smart cells and servers"_
They are not using telco partnerships here, or at least if they are, it's not on the level of carving out a chunk of the telco network for private use.
I struggle to see how this remains a "cloud" offering rather than a hardware rental.
But this doesn't use telco towers? Amazon is literally selling antenae.
I think this is more like long haul wifi for your corporate campus, factory, port, university etc. Maybe even for things like parking meters (san francisco's parking meters are famously being updated/upgraded because they're ending EDGE network used by the modems in the parking meters)
_>Uber offering free fast Internet to their drivers_
Amazon is talking about installing actual local hardware infrastructure here though. It seems like that only makes sense where there is no existing 5G, otherwise it's probably just cheaper to use the telco's infrastructure since, as you said, they could work directly with the telco to get their own slice.
Sort of like the difference in price between a dedicated hosted server (the AWS 5G) and a VPS (a slice of the telco's 5G)
I'm sure I'm misunderstanding some aspect of this whole thing though.
It's actually cheaper if you already have access to cheap broadband such as fibre internet where the GB can be as little as 10 cent/gb. But if you're reselling the telco bandwidth then it doesn't make sense
_> This could be extremely useful for security. Maybe even the death of VPNs._
You can already get this - if you think you need it, you should google 'Private APN'. It's been available for years, assuming you're a corporate user looking for a few hundred SIM cards.
Actually telecom don't have their own infra. They lease the infra from tower companies, here telcos will get hit as well as the tower lease companies
About the payment, we're working on a model to compensate the users. Email me if you're interested
> This could be extremely useful for security. Maybe even the death of VPNs.
You can already get plans from the existing cellular providers to drop you onto a private secure network that behaves like a VPN though... that's common for people who need secure OOB access to their network gear: but install routers with 3g/4g/LTE expansion cards, get the SIMs on one of these plans, and voila -- OOB remote network access that isn't exposing your devices to the internet
You can take this a step further and make the telecom as a service entirely decentralized: Earn "tokens" by providing wireless area coverage & data backhaul, spend "tokens" to transmit data.
This is exactly what the Helium (HNT) project is doing. They started with LoRa coverage (super low datarate but long range for IOT) and are moving into other protocols such as WiFi and CBRS 5G (same as this offering) via the FreedomFi project.
> 5G isn't really like 4G upgraded. It's more its own thing.
This is my understanding as well, but I have no idea about any of the details. I know there's something cool about "beams". Do you (or anyone) have a good "entry-level" article/doc that outlines some of the major features that makes it so different than 4G?
Search Massive MIMO, Beamforming ( Which isn't really new ), Small Cells, NR.
That is about it really. You can ignore mmWave which is pure hype. Most of the other enhancements are on the carrier / operation side and not consumer.
You can also ignore all the 5G Self Driving Vehicle crap.
_>5G Self Driving Vehicle crap._
I live in a dense suburb of a large city and 5G coverage seems not that great. I'm not sure why self-driving requires or gains much benefit from 5g anyway, but I wouldn't want to rely on it. You can certainly do car-to-car communication & coordination without it, and you wouldn't want a minor network outage turning the system into chaos.
Because certain vendor from certain country have a huge patent portfolio on Autonomous vehicle (AV) and wanted it to rely on 5G so that everything is centralised and could easily be controlled in the name of traffic shaping (_cough_). And somehow (_cough_) EU was brought into the whole thing until a Saint appeared, after being banished to hell he finally came back and convinced enough people AV with 5G would need to total state surveillance. I think, if I remember correctly EU finally abandoned that idea. But as with everything it may come back someday. ( Hope not )
Any reason for the obfuscation?
Those who knows it would instantly understand. Those who dont could fact check it themselves.
>Those who dont could fact check it themselves.
That's me, and no they can't. At least not without searching the full breadth of possible players looking for a set of facts that matches. If I could figure out who you meant, I wouldn't have commented.
Seems unlikely many firms would want to scale out the hardware of their own network - rented from Amazon no less- instead.
> This could be extremely useful for security. Maybe even the death of VPNs.
If that's true, I wonder if this affects Tailscale's business and how.
It's not new. You can get private address space that's routed into your network, but if you trust telco network security, you probably don't have anything worth protecting (or run a VPN over the top and only use the private APN for persistent IP addressing).
For example, AT&T's private APN service has been around since the 3G days:
https://www.business.att.com/products/private-mobile-connect...
This requires a physical cell tower and 5G receiver so it’s not as flexible as running a VPN client on your laptop.
_Short-term, things like "Tesla Free Network" could exist for their self-driving cars. Or, Uber offering free fast Internet to their drivers or a truly private device._
So like WhisperNet, except 5G, and anyone can make their own?
Let me put my perspective, coming from a guy who is involved in private Cellular networking (US as well as other countries):
1) Private 5G can be deployed either with licensed operator (Cellular provider) or in CBRS band (CBRS band is opened by FCC for the private cellular deployment). It can be used free or paid, different options. (Fees is minimal).
2) CBRS still doesnt support 5G. No idea how AWS will provide. But even if it is private 4G, for the end user it doesnt matter.
3) Your available bandwidth is limited by the air waves bandwidth you are using, nit by 4G or 5G. Per enterprise, CBRS band is limited to LTE equivalent band (20MHz). Total CBRS band is 200MHz, if I am not wrong). You are not going to get giga speed just because its 5G.
4) Not all phones support CBRS band. You will be limited to CBRS band support in handset feature.
5) Each end device will need SIM (SIM card either physical or virtual). Its not like your laptop will be connected with private 4G or 5G. You will need modem as well as SIM card (unless your devices support these features).
6) Its really for small geographic reason. Its not that easy to take the equipment with you and start using. (like in car or train etc).
7) There is a concept of SAS server, that's why AWS device needs to be connected to this server in cloud (There are SAS license holders, to them). Once you install the system and that is connected to the SAS server, first you get the frequency band which is open in your area. If some one using that band (another CBRS player), you are out of luck (ask me , who has to call different teams when deploy in lab). PLus, there are scenarios when these licenses can be revoked (if you are using free band). The law enforcement can ask FCC to use the band temporarily. GCC can revoke your lic and stop the system.
What AWS did is big, but for enterprises.
Is thei FAQ in line with your understanding? You might be more capable than me at parsing it for all I can understand is: "You will receive all the AWS Private 5G hardware (including SIM cards) and software you need to deploy your private cellular network and connect devices to your applications."
I translate that to: we sell 5G access points as an alternative to wifi access points. Am I wrong? Cause if I am right I fail to see the bigness of it. I just see it as something reasonable.
https://aws.amazon.com/private5g/faqs/
You are on right path. Its of no use for consumer. Private 5G cant compete against WiFi with current ecosystem. The end devices dont support 5G modem (or 4G). It cant compete against WLL (Wireless in Local Loop) (Means Wireless based broadband service). As you need dedicated internet service to configure p5G (private 5G) and to let it remain active, there is no business case for p5G for broadband service/WLL. There is another service, FWA/Fixed Wireless Access, by different 5G provider where you get a receiver which is connected to home router.
Good question is, what this hype of p5G:
1) Industrial area coverage: Where you need 50 WiFi radio unit, you can provide service with 3-4 p4G/p5G radios.
2) Hazardous areas: where you cant provide the networking at all the corners or areas, one p5G radio blast area (esp with beam technology) can provide the coverage.
3) Security: Mobile phone systems are based on shared secret and proven to be secure in terms of access compare as well as on air to other technology.
4) Packet loss: Less packet loss compare to WiFi (believe me, its big deal in Industrial world)
5) Compatibility: what's a negative for 5G modem (not many devices are available), is positive to some extent. Once investment is made with 5G modem, the device can be on road too. THink like, acting like enterprise node in p5G area and limited services outside (or device consumer).
6) Edge computing: With new standards, the applications can run at the edge. Those can be done currently with WiFi too. But WiFi has limitation of devices counts (too many needed), path reliability and geographic coverage. Whole factory or port or airport can be covered with small p5G footprint with specific applications running at the Edge (I live in this world :) )
p5G will be game changer in enterprises with large complexes with moving assets.
Concerning your point 3) - Few years ago I was a bit excited about Local 4G, but commercial units sold back then could not handle tower handovers, and were very limited in bandwidth(5MHz/~10Mbps down, if I remember right). Has it improved, or if it hasn't, is it going to really offer significant advantages over Wi-Fi...?
As I mentioned, bandwidth is proportional to available access/RF bandwidth (Shannon's Theorem). Current available band in US (CBRS) is limited to 20MHz per user/enterprise 9I think for enterprise you can go higher, but its still limited). FCC hasn't updated the standards (CBRS) for 5G. Germany is way ahead in p5G (trying to keep the leadership in Industry 4.0/Industrie 4.0, I am not sure what's the available band there. Search for Hannover Trade fairs private 5G where its deployed for Edge computing and secure industrial app ecosystem).
In terms of bandwidth, p5G will not provide any advantage over WiFi esp WiFi6.
Its the enterprise level ecosystem where its going to be huge differentiator.
Regarding your point of tower level handover, that will not be an issue. It should not be in pLTE (p4G) too. But I can understand in earlier versions, the systems might be feature limited.
Are you sure it was local 4G service line p4G or Femto service where operators provide small device to cover either indoor no-RF spots or to move the traffic load from network to public internet/network.
Isn't there a huge debate going on for the 6Ghz band between WiFi vs 5G? [1] This could end up being used for home & private networks
[1]
https://www.gsma.com/spectrum/resources/6-ghz-for-5g/
That's the different domain. 5G standards are defined for Licensed, unlicensed as well as non-mobile world (means the core network can support all the different access technologies). CBRS is licensed band, just free to use but you have register.
6GHz is new band opened for unlicensed spectrum. It will mostly be used by next generation WiFi (may be WiFi 6 too). Any other technology can use that band too and 5G standards may enhance to support this band or may define other technology too. Just last month, ITU accepted the DECT (remember cordless phones) technology to be part of 5G ecosystem (5G core will be able to support devices with DECT air interface).
But CBRS band is different and its more about similar to current mobile ecosystem but in private domain.
CBRS cant be used for WiFi or other technology (only 4G in US at this point, most probably 5G in future.. 3GPP defined OFDMA based air interface). 6GHz is unlicensed and mostly will be used by WiFi.
I'd love to see _some_ pricing estimates. There's a good amount I'd pay to get something like this for some rural communities, but it's unclear if I'm anywhere near able to afford it.
I have some experience building rural cellular networks (4G and starting to work on 5G), and can say that the core network part of the network is usually not the biggest challenge. There are open source cores available that actually work quite well for basic Internet access (magma has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread), and open5gs is another one. They can be deployed on lightweight edge infrastructure or in the cloud, since the computational overhead for the core is not huge for a small network (10s-100s of devices). SIM cards can be purchased pretty easily online from a variety of sources. There are even already existing turnkey solutions with a core network hosted in the cloud providing a management portal that integrates directly with like-branded radios (see Baicells).
Getting outdoor radios for rural access installed though is a bit more challenging, and I would be surprised if AWS was offering an outdoor solution here in the short term. Directional antennas and radio planning become a lot more important. There are a couple different players who will sell outdoor CBRS radios in small volume who all have pluses and minuses. CBRS is great for rural areas since there are often GAA channels available, but depending on the terrain may or may not provide huge area coverage. CBRS limits the height above average terrain and power you can deploy at. There are limits to the types of equipment and locations you can deploy without getting a professional installer certification. Getting the certification slightly raises those limits, but they are still something you need to take into account for wide-area access. You can actually get the CPI certification pretty easily via online classes offered by the different SAS (spectrum access service) providers. If you’re seriously considering founding a cellular wisp, there are some Facebook (unfortunately haha) groups out there that are pretty active and where you can get shoptalk questions answered about specific radios and technologies!
IMO the main value add from the AWS solution here is the access control, monitoring/auditing, and QoS management they are offering, which would be essential in an industrial setting, especially if running sensitive services over the network.
Just dropped you an email.
Probably a small outpost deployment + RF gear, so (guessing) $500K up front and $10-20k/mo. I don't know if it's possible to get RDOF grants for individual communities but that might cover some of it.
In addition to the gear, would you have to license the spectrum from someone? I think the fcc already auctioned it all off? Or does that not apply here? Any idea what that would cost?
I don’t know the details there. Presumably there would be at least be cost for someone to maintain the paperwork and equipment certification. There’s a couple comments in here about this being on CBRS, possibly more info there.
Per
https://aws.amazon.com/private5g/faqs/
it is, indeed, CBRS. And it seems like if you have other frequencies in your possession, you can use those, too.
That's not the way AWS typically prices things--my guess is the hardware and setup costs will be baked into the monthly service charges.
Generally yes but outpost is a little different:
https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/
Either way this is just a guess :)
Even with Outposts you're not "buying" the rack (Amazon still owns it and takes it away at the end of the term), you're just committing to keeping it long enough for them to make money on it. The choice of paying upfront or paying monthly is roughly the same money management strategy available with any AWS service (e.g. EC2 Reserved Instances), and likely is more about lining up with capex/opex decisions than actual cost savings.
Totally agree 100%. Text communication sucks sometimes, if we were talking over beers it would have taken 3-5 seconds to clear up.
I think it'll be cheaper. We're looking to get the home unit cost to $499 & zero fees
best thing is that you dont own the antenna, so Amz will prob rent out the remaining capacity.
Aren't small cells significantly cheaper?
I would love to connect on this. Do you've any rural communities in mind ?
What's next? Own your own island as a service™? I really like the direction AWS is headed and I like how they're opening up access to hard to setup hardware.
Prices starting at ONE BILLION DOLLARS.
I wonder which smart TV provider will be the first to use this instead of home wifi where people can disable or black hole connectivity.
Don't think that's the use case. how would AWS deploy a base station to my home?
But you have a real point, and AWS already solved that with the 3G enabled Kindles by having carrier agreements. Why not doing that with Smart TVs?
> _But you have a real point, and AWS already solved that with the 3G enabled Kindles by having carrier agreements._
Amazon regretted that pretty soon after they did it, people hacked their kindles to be hotspots and it became an arms race amazon didn't wanna play.
Was that a big problem? I thought it was a single-intern sized problem.
Yeah tbh not hard to search for high bandwidth users abusing system and dealing with it on a case by case basis
5G E2E Slicing will prevent such scenarios. The SIM will be bound to a network slice and restrictions will be dictated by the carrier.
> how would AWS deploy a base station to my home?
The TV company will deploy base station(s) in my town. Embed SIM cards in TVs they ship. No need to connect to my home WiFi to send personalised data back to their servers, or to upgrade firmware etc.,
DirecTV already does this for their 'wireless' offering - you get a huge LTE modem and a bunch of receivers with sim cards in them.
It may interest you to know ATSC 3.0 has specifications for a "return path" to the broadcast station in it.
> Don't think that's the use case. how would AWS deploy a base station to my home?
Unless I'm misunderstanding how this works, it wouldn't need a base station in your home, just a commodity cellular modem with a network-specific SIM, and an uplink tower somewhere within range.
yup, the only thing in the past that was keeping companies from popping a sim into every product to report back home (above a certain price) was that there was nothing stopping you from pulling the sim and just using their plan in other devices, at least for a short while until the company realized what was up (if they cared to check (they usually didnt))
now they have complete control over the end-to-end, and can cheaply provision sims that only talk to their local tower for example, and reject non-company provisioned IMEI (if they need it anymore?) etc
working on building blocking for this :)
This is a platform AWS is providing to make it easier for those who have private 5G networks to run/maintain those networks.
You seem to be interpreting this as "AWS is going to put 5G towers everywhere and smart TVs are going to connect to them to send data they collect!". That's not what this is at all.
This is one of the many reasons it's beneficial to read the actual article/post and comprehend the information, rather than reflexively reacting to keywords you notice in the title.
Exactly, it's more of a b2c thing. Actually in one of my previous gigs (at a energy company that had oil rigs in very remote areas), they wanted to quicken the provisioning of 5g to some of the places they operate in.
AWS was one of the companies they were negotiating with - I never realized they had not yet announced this service.
Amazon Sidewalk is already available...
They don't need this for that. Instead they are using rings and echo devices that allow devices to connect and send small data out. You can't black hole them without black holing the ring/echos (making them useless). You can disable this feature but it's opt-out, and it may just connect to your neighbor's instead.
I dont' remember the exact feature name though.
I believe you're referring to Amazon Sidewalk. It's more for their own devices like cameras and not for TV ad tracking (at least for now.)
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/
Yeah that's it, but on the blog post at
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/introducing-amazon-...
they say
> For device makers, we plan to publish protocols that any manufacturer can use to build reliable, low-power, low-cost devices that benefit from access to long-range, low-bandwidth wireless connections. In the meantime, you can sign up to be notified when more information is available.
So the intention is definitely there that device manufacturers can pay to delvier data over the network.
I don’t think enough people use pihole for smart TV manufacturers to care, and encrypted DNS breaks that anyway so setting up a 5G base station in your house would be overkill
What does a smart TV have to do with a private 5G network? People just upvote any meaningless comment on this site as long as it sounds mildly controversial.
Smart TVs scan what's on the screen to get data on what people are watching and sell that data to anyone who wants it
The idea is to make sure they can keep that data flowing even if someone intentionally disconnects the TV from the internet
So they can (and sometimes already do) insert a SIM card in the TV and use any of the consumer 4G/LTE/5G networks out there which your phone connects to. Why are people hypothesizing that Vizio will ship a $250K 5G base station to your house?
because if setting up private 5G networks becomes cheaper and open to any business then the chance TV manufacturers consider putting 5G base near enough your house.
But it’s cheaper and easier to just embed a normal 4g modem and SIM card
Every device will have 5G instead of Wifi. Remember Wifi dongles ?
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." - The Hacker News Guidelines (
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
)
Given that there's an extremely simple and straightforward answer to your question (smart TV manufacturers sell data obtained from spying on users, and they need a way to get that data from the TV to their servers), I would encourage you to give some thought before making such an empty and vapid comment about voting habits on HN.
One response to this problem is to perform mild electronics surgery and install fine copper mesh around anything that looks like it moves electrons as part of its normal function. It really doesn't take a whole lot to completely fuck up an RF signal.
Alternatively, you could maybe do the same to your drywall if you are looking at new home construction... If every room is effectively a faraday cage, you are back in control over what can talk to what on a much more granular level. This clearly creates challenges for your own wireless/mobile signals, but presumably you also have the ability to hardwire additional access points if you are going to this extent.
Some smart TVs already ship with sim cards. It just requires a deal with AT&T/Tmo/etc.
I immediately thought of alarm companies like ADT or Vivant who I believe currently partner with cellular providers for access. How much cheaper would it be to swap to 5G as a service versus whatever their current cost model is.
Are they using Magma[1]? I couldn't tell from their sparse FAQ[2]. The Magma community is strong and they're making great progress on the open standard.
1 Magma - Facebook built 5G hotspot platform:
2 AWS FAQ -
https://aws.amazon.com/private5g/faqs/
They don't.
As a matter of fact i'm here to see if the name company involved in this project is going to leak.
How is a private 5G network different from wifi from a consumer/business perspective? Does it have a superior range?
(Honest question)
- Massive bandwidth (up to 50 Gigabit/s in certain configurations).
- Allows real concurrent connections (one "antenna" can connect simultaneously multiple clients vs. the switch that Wifi does for each client).
- The above improves latency, and you can achieve 1ms latency in private networks with multiple connections.
- The stack allows slicing which can help to isolate networks or devices.
5G has the ability to run on licensed and unlicensed frequencies too. Unlicensed spectrum is highly interfered and is a reason WiFi performs so poorly sometimes. Using licensed spectrum means you control the RF environment and therefore have much better control of network performance.
Digital Trends has a good article about this. You can read it here:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/5g-vs-wi-fi/
I had the same question as the parent poster, so thanks for the link.
Still, I'm confused. The article says that both WiFi 6 and 5G have similar theoretical max speeds. The main difference in the article seems to be that 5G operates on licensed spectrum. But if I understand correctly, this AWS service uses an unlicensed spectrum, so I'm still not sure why would I choose this over WiFi.
5G can handle more clients. WiFi (vaguely) slows down if a slow client connects to the same network as you, rather than a fast client using all the bandwidth.
Cellular ISPs also don't do routing the way wifi/wired ISPs do, so your IP address isn't tied to your physical location anymore. That wouldn't apply to private 5G so much though.
+1 authentication is much smoother and quicker
It's not really a good article in terms of answering my question what makes 5G a better wireless communication platform than Wifi (besides having a different spectrum - how much does it matter?).
When I think about creating a high speed wireless network for my factory/campus I don't think of 5G first, since it appears like it has the speed of Wifi, the range of Wifi (the power efficiency of Wifi?) and way more associated cost for stations, modems and SIM stuff while Wifi APs are pretty cheap and Wifi modems virtually free.
Most of articles comparing 4G/5G and Wifi are focusing just on bandwidth and latency.
That is somehow like comparing cars in just how fast they can go.
3G/4G/5G are standardized and built for operators that are used to manage huge amount of users.
A lot of effort is put in avoiding congestion, providing guaranteed bitrate/latency for dedicated services (like your phone calls), smooth handovers between different antennas, a lot of of security features, and obviously, an excellent user tracking in order to charge the customers.
the article doesn’t answer the question. Why setup an expensive private 5G network instead of a private wifi lan, also considering wifi maturity and wide support?
Because if you need a private 5G to solve your own supply chain problems, why not set it up so you can also make money off of it.
so I guess the question is: why can’t one use wifi for these “supply chain problems” ?
I wonder if this is a product that was built on top of something they needed to use internally. Makes me wonder how Amazon is using this technology for themselves... Anyone care to speculate?
I would guess it's more aimed at use in large factories, warehouses and yards, where WiFi is not going to be practical.
I did a stint as a (software) architect for a large Norwegian engineering company, and at the time they were looking at getting a private 4G network setup, as their facilities were absolutely huge. I did a little research, and quite a few mobile operators actually offer private 4G networks for exactly this use case.
Could you explain what makes this tech better than Wifi? Does it have better range/deal with interference better?
My impression was that the high speed profile of 5G was basically the same as that of Wifi, with exactly the same issues. Am I wrong/is it better in lower speed modes?
Here are the key differences between 5G and Wifi:
1. Dedicated vs shared spectrum. Though all big countries have shared spectrum initiatives for 5G too but it is still not a free for all like Wifi. So interference-wise 5G might be better for some use cases. Have heard about that in several shipping ports where Private 5G is deployed
2. Security. Due to the usage of SIM but Wifi security is good too
3. Range - though most of 5G is in comparable frequency ranges with Wifi, there is a huge range of powers at which 5G base stations can transmit so range is possibly larger for 5G
But it all depends on use-case and there is no clear winner for all situations.
You could imagine them using it in their warehouses. I imagine getting good coverage with wifi in a huge warehouse could be pretty expensive, maybe 4G/5G works better?
I see a potential use of it from IoT devices. An eg. a tractor wants to communicate with a central server for commands.
I fear what this means in larger scale. All Amazon manufactured physical IoT and hardware could have sidechannel in the future to escape network isolation. They already have this "feature" which expands your home network for neighbor Amazon devices if they need Internet access. And default setting is "ON", not off. How many consumer is aware of that?
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b/?node=21328123011
It's worth noting that the behavior of Amazon with its commodity consumer products has been notably different than AWS with its customers. The stain on reputation if AWS were to, say, mine data from private S3 buckets would be very hard to remove.
This capability is considered in the design of 5G, see NB-IoT and LTE-M
Why would you buy a consumer IoT product and not connect it to the internet? If you’re the kind of person who fears that, you’re probably not the person who uses something like Alexa and smart home stuff.
If the device has not easily removable battery, it starts to be impossible to tell when it collects the data and shares it. Many devices are useful in the local network only, but still they want all-time internet access without real need.
Using direct 5G links make it also harder to filter traffic. I don't know, I just don't like the idea that all information must be collected by any means.
> Many devices are useful in the local network only
no amazon-made device is local only.
> I just don't like the idea that all information must be collected by any means.
I agree with your sentiment, but most devices don't really have access to much data of concern. I'd be more worried 5g bullshit is used in screens that can send ads over a smart bulb or something.
You describe a great use case for LoRaWAN:
https://lora-alliance.org/about-lorawan/
One of the podcasts I listen to had AT&T as their sponsor and they would talk about using IoT to make factories and warehouses "smart", so it's possible amazon uses this in their warehouses instead of wifi to connect to the bots and hand terminals.
No internal use. This is a hype driven white labeling.
The first major client using this service is Boost Mobile, which was acquired by Dish Network from Sprint as a condition of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger:
https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/dishs-rouanne-says-aws-5g-...
Nokia has been the pioneer in Private wireless networks. They have already deployed production ready private LTE / 5G systems in ports and factories.
For more info:
https://dac.nokia.com/private-wireless/
Disclaimer: I work for Nokia.
Surely the problem is access to spectrum, or is the idea to rely on unused spectrum bands reserved for local experimental use?
In the US, the FCC has specifically allocated 3.5ghz for open use[0]; paying for a license just gives you priority access to the spectrum. Use of the band requires checking in with a server to lease spectrum at a granularity of about 4 minutes. This is akin to if your Wi-Fi router could ask the FCC to give it a channel known to not have any users within a certain radius of itself.
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Broadband_Radio_Servi...
If I want to deploy a custom 5G base station on this band 38, what hardware do I need? Are there free software solutions?
It's Band 48 and there are 321 FCC approved devices as of today
> Convenience of CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service) in the US with no need to acquire spectrum licenses.
From:
https://d1.awsstatic.com/reInvent/re21-pdp-tier1/private-5g/...
With 5G, many countries have reserved space and/or licensing mechanisms to get spectrum access for small local deployments.
Which other countries have such free spectrum ?
There is a ton of bandwidth up in the millimeter wave area if line of sight is not too obstructed. One whole GHz is nothing while with legacy WiFi it could be almost half the actual carrier frequency.
it's probably CBRS based system. there are a SAS (spectrum access system) administrators that in charge of managing spectrum so different users won't sit on same frequency. kinda like this
https://www.comsearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cbrs-sa...
I'm curious to find out where this would be available. I spent about two years in an ISP provider and any service you wanted to add that involved telecom services required a million and one licenses and government permissions, most of which took months if not years.
It's available across US
I think people are missing the point on what this is about. It's not about telecom at all. 5G is being looked at as an alternative to WiFi in certain environments - large retail stores, warehouses, ...etc. Basically anything where you need large scale WiFi mesh setups and the devices are controlled by a single entity.
Authentication, security & efficiency. Handoff time between multiple Wi-Fi nodes is terrible, security can be compromised much easier since by end of the day it's just a password
Why though? What's the advantage of this over Wi-Fi?
If you need consistently low latency, high uptime, have security requirements, or need extended range. And don't mind paying more. ATMs, credit card machines, alarm systems, EV chargers, phones, etc. are often on cellular connections.
so i'm guessing this means they use 5g in their warehouses for the their robots/cameras/etc and they've turned it into a product?
it's still a little unclear to me when 5g becomes a better option than 802.11. the standard bands are just a little faster than lte (which 802.11 outperforms) and the mmwave high bandwidth stuff requires line of sight with no occlusion. 802.11 seems better all around, it can work at high bandwidth without the line of sight requirements... especially considering that most mobile devices are designed to switch between 802.11 and mobile.
Think of the scenarios where Wi-Fi performance suffers. A sports stadium or music concert with thousands or tens of thousands of people. You make a phone call over Wi-Fi and the other person complains "you're breaking up." A convention floor with hundreds of booths. An auditorium with hundreds of people with an open laptop.
LTE and 5G have much more consistent latency, and can provide true quality of service mechanisms. Wi-Fi has 802.11e that moves VoIP packets to the front of a series of queues but this is only a probabilistic process not a guaranteed time slot every 20ms. Of course licensed channels are an important part of this carrier grade experience and Wi-Fi on a low duty cycle 5GHz channel is often good enough.
Probably worth noting that the regular cell providers can also provide SIMS that dump the end device into your existing, normal private network rather than the internet.
I don't know how this service differs in pricing, so it's hard to quantify when this AWS service would be a better idea outside of coverage issues.
Dedicated base stations are the difference here. There's a huge need for private communication networks outside of urban areas where there is bad cell coverage – think oil fields, docks, industrial estates, ranches, war zones.
Yes, sure...that's what I meant by "coverage issues". I wasn't sure everyone was aware of the route-to-my-private-network option that doesn't require a VPN, etc.
I would assume that'd be so nickle and dimed by CISPs (probably trying to milk the enterprise cow) that nobody either knows or cares about that.
They do have to compete with one another, and potential customers usually already have leverage with other things they do with the same carrier, like WAN links, MPLS, corporate owned mobile contracts, etc.
This is such a dick move. Ex-AWS superstars built
, made AWS folks aware, who balked at a deal. Example 1198170892703973...
Amazon is known for doing this to early startups. They "partner" with a small team, learn what they do, and then copy it which screws the original team.
They have teams of lawyers so suing them does no good.
EDIT: I assumed this was a partnership. I have no clue if they partnered here. Just speaking broadly after watching a couple of my founder friends get screwed by Amazon.
Have they "partnered" with Soracom?
https://partners.amazonaws.com/fr/partners/001E000001In3e0IA...
.
Maybe it doesn't count as partner, maybe it does.
Tons of companies are in this space, e.g.
https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-business-launches...
So it seems odd to call out AWS that they should have partnered with soracom or they aren't being ethical.
I think the idea is that AWS is slimy for rejecting a deal with a startup and then launching a competitive product. There's a difference between independently coming up with an idea versus transparently copying someone else's idea. Of course, we can't be certain that the AWS folks who launched Private 5g were even aware of the Soracom deal offer, but the optics certainly aren't favorable.
... a startup founded entirely by prior successful team members, all friendlies.
I don’t really follow you here. Is soracom entitled to 100% market share?
It seems odd that some HN folks think idea is patentable
Soracom's offerings look to resemble those of Particle's[1]. How are they related to AWS Private 5g?
1.
Interesting, didn't Soracom end up going to KDDI in 2017? Is KDDI even getting rid of them / are they even for sale now or was this an old deal?
$187M for an exit is not that large. Were they offering a price in that range to AWS?
It feels a bit like some of the AWS IoT offerings are throw stuff at wall style.
No, the balk happened then, in 2017 AFAIK.
Disclosure: I work for AWS, but I don't work directly on AWS Private 5G.
I mean, it sounds like they / their investors were shopping and the KDDI offer of what was reported [1] to be $180 million won? Who's to say if AWS participated in that or not (I, speaking only for myself, have no knowledge on this). I don't understand at all why you think that this is anything unusual or nefarious, and it seems like the founders got a good exit regardless?
[1]
https://thebridge.jp/en/2017/08/kddi-to-acquire-soracom
OK, that makes sense. That exit was not huge, would be interesting to compare price they wanted from AWS vs market price they got. AWS may have missed out if they were willing to go with AWS for less than they got.
I'm not THAT blown away by AWS offerings, they feel like copies of a couple of players offerings and at least when I last looked not THAT polished up. That said, plenty of folks will use AWS because they are already there. But it does feel like space for other still here maybe.
These aren’t even the same offering. AWS’s main selling point here is that they provide the 5G hardware like antennas, etc and create your own 5G network. Soracom just provides you a SIM and piggybacks off of existing 5G networks.
As in, I'd love to see how much english from the marketing/docs/etc are just straight lifted from Soracom.
Well for one Soracom's homepage doesn't mention 5G (or private 5G) once...
Probably not as inexpensive, and not a great deal, as the original Redshift was, I guess.
Yup, Ken is not an ignorant negotiator. Happily they had a very good exit with KDDI, but it just sits with me wrong. Hugs Simone!!
Amazon is the scummiest of the major tech companies, this is well known.
Once again 5G's brand overloading leads to as much confusion as clarification.
Yes, just as with LTE, CBRS is one of the bands (specifically n48) allocated for 5GNR. The GAA tier is pretty open for anyone to use, with all the good & the bad that comes with that. Apple added n48 with the iPhone 11, and a lot of other popular phones support either LTE or 5G on that band.
In effect, CBRS 5G is like WiFi with better range.
I'd love to set this up for my rural community. I've got a good connection but many people have no cell service, no dsl lines, no cable...literally nothing. Until something like starlink is ubiquitous i feel like this could go a long way to solving their problems.
I don't think this solves the last-mile problem. You still have to provide (get) internet connectivity; Amazon just relays that landline to 5G.
And in rural areas, 5G probably doesn't give you enough range anyhow. Have you considered mesh revenue-share networks like Althea (
)? There's a nonprofit one too operating in several cities, but I can't remember what it's called.
5G can operate at lower frequencies, from my notes I do not remember where I copied it from.
"In quick summary, the bands work as follows in the real world. One low band (600-700MHz) tower can cover hundreds of square miles with 5G service that ranges in speed from 30 to 250 megabits per second (Mbps). A mid band (2.5/3.5GHz) tower covers a several-mile radius with 5G that currently ranges from 100 to 900Mbps. Lastly, a high band (millimeter wave/24-39GHz) tower covers a one-mile or lower radius while delivering roughly 1-3Gbps speeds. Each of these tiers will improve in performance over time."
My understanding is that 5g can operate at the same or similar frequencies as 4g, and actually then has slightly better range and throughout than 4g.
Starlink could be that backhaul. Future terminals will have 1Gbps.
You don't even need that much bandwidth. I had no problem doing LTE over WiFi with a 1Mbit DSL line, with like 256k up on a good day.
Man, all that work to get worse voice quality than the 1900s... on a good day.
Oh I mean for an whole village
Came here to say exactly this. Out in rural Canada (Ontario) it is extremely difficult to find reliable, fast, unlimited access.
With Starlink delaying a good deal of preorders, something like this could be great.
It isn't replacement to Starlink because you need a backhaul. You can however take one Starlink and use it to distribute among others. Bottleneck is the backhaul
Do they've the requirement for super high speed internet or they just want a decent internet ?
Doesn't look like this will give you phone/SMS service.
You have to put in their SIM, so unless you have a dual SIM phone that can intelligently roam, doesn't seem like the right solution.
It can be used in a modem to provide home internet. Also dual SIM phone are easier to find than laying cables.
Can you email me haseeb@haseebawan.com - I would love to talk about it since we're working on solving this
I feel like this has come off the back of Amazon creating their own 5G for their warehouses and robots. Can any Amazon employees confirm this?
Can confirm there’s no internal use. It’s a fresh project to capitalize on 5g hype.
They’re working with a partner for hardware but redoing their software. So it’s a pretty low-touch white label job.
They have internal use planned but it was started explicitly for sale to external customers not internal.
From the conversation I had, you don't need a spectrum license and Amazon ships you the equipment. The killer app is that there is no per device costs and you pay based on your usage.
Unfortunately, no mention of actual pricing.
I still don't get why AWS keeps using images to display textual content. It's inaccessible and it looks terrible on mobile devices.
They could've called it AWS Infinidash Mobile.
There has never been any humor in Amazon's culture.
How does this work from a regulatory standpoint?
Most countries license frequency bands to dedicated operators under very specific conditions. These operators usually pay a lot of money for that and need to provide a certain degree of public coverage.
I wonder how do they link back to the main network? Would it require a fiber backbone in place as a prerequisite? Or through satellite uplink? i.e., would somewhere really remote, say, the oil rig in the North Sea, be out of luck for such installation?
It works over a regular IPSec tunnel I believe.
So is this basically an alternative to lots of spread out WiFi routers? Like a university could get rid of all the routers in all the buildings and just have one or two of the "towers" Amazon would provide?
Open Source software stack to run private LTE/5G with SDR
https://github.com/srsran/srsRAN
For folks who have actually set up srsRAN for anything besides a trivial configuration w/ one eNB and manual management of most things (and even then), the value-add of having Amazon worry about most of that stuff is clear. It's, ah, ... complicated.
This is a bit like responding to, say, the original announcement of EC2 with a link to download a Linux distribution.
Not sure how big the market will be for something like this; apart from, well, drug cartels in Mexico </joking>.
5G uses multiple bands, and the most useful, and highest throughput one, doesn't have a great range (high band, 24 GHz and up). So, perhaps you use 5G tech/devices but not use that, and instead focus on low band (600–900 MHz, few kilometers of range)? Would a mining company use this to oversee a large property? Would a large cattle operation benefit?
Tacoma, WA is planning on deploying a private 5G network to make port operations more efficient.
You can imagine containers coming in and out of ports are slowed when someone has to physically inspect them for damage. There are a few companies using AI to detect damaged containers and having a higher bandwidth allows those images to be more clear which in turn allows the AI to be more accurate.
But it wouldn't use high band! So, why not just stick with 4G devices (cheaper, more tested), and existing solutions?
Not sure I agree here. 5G offers lower latency and more bandwidth. Also, what I've outlined is just one use case. If we're talking about a port there are multiple layers of operations in which a high speed network could make things move more efficiently. So while 4G might be less expensive it also would only incrementally improve current operations. I would imagine this is the same for other use cases in which there are multiple layers of needed high bandwidth.
I guess the downside of lower frequency is more potential for interference and contention for bandwidth. Having smaller cells could help solve that.
It's been said that every dollar on the internet has been made by unbundling and rebundling products. In the US, cellular started as a service that was dominated by regional players and now it's essentially a 3 company monopoly. In the same way FinTech's have gone after traditional banks, I can see business models of providing regional or niche cell phone services.
Intriguing - but the first three questions that immediately came to mind didn't seem to have an immediate answer. (1) What range/power, (2) Pricing (3) Density/Number of connections? I'd love to see a network architecture that shows how they hop from antenna to antenna as well, and whether it's guaranteed with no interruption to service.
Q: What spectrum does AWS Private 5G support?
By default, AWS Private 5G uses shared spectrum like Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) in the US.
Now imagine a future where every device you buy is connected to the internet wirelessly, whether you like it or not.
Now imagine a future
- where every device you use belongs to a private company
- connects wirelessly through a network owned by a private company
- to services owned by a private company
- that loans you even more stuff owned by a private company
- and entertains you with content owned by a private company
- and all the websites and news and games and podcasts and chats are hosted on servers owned by a private company
and the democratic power that helps you control this private company is funded by the success of such a private company.
I fear a world where we have neither individual nor collective control of our everyday lives.
Not relevant to this, which is about physically placing antennae at a location, to provide a local service.
Is that time already here? Fridges, washing machines, dishwashers, TVs etc.
Don't they require wifi? This effort (and Amazon Sidewalk) are trying to bypass that.
Not yet. All of those still require wifi or bluetooth. They ask the user to do the setup.
Yes. Many devices will ask for a network or create a mesh network over wifi/bluetooth/zigby if one isn't presented to them.
No.
Automobiles is the one you're looking for.
Then we start jailbreaking them to use as free modems and cost people who make that huge amounts of money, then they will stop.
You assume a future where internet is ubiquitous and fee and not a future where every device you own comes with the burden of a perpetual subscription in order to function.
That's what pliers are for.
Besides the fact that your average user will not be able to open these devices. Removing connectivity will probably irreversibly brick them.
So what? You can always isolate these things by removing the antenna or if all else fails putting them in a faraday cage
Yeah I can totally imagine the average consumer opening the back of their TV to find an antenna or setting up a faraday cage in their living room /s
What's the business case for a service like this? Is there anyone on HN that would order this for example?
Private LTE/5g is huge in the energy sector. You'll find it deployed for various IoT and end user devices at oil fields, offshore rigs, and even in parallel to the major carriers in large metro areas. The latter is fairly common with energy utility providers. One of the US's largest energy suppliers in the South operates what is probably the largest private LTE deployment in North America, using their own transmission towers to cover a majority of two states in the US Southeast. In addition to using this to support their own ops, they lease access out to other businesses.
It's also increasingly common to see private LTE/5g deployed to support municipal government operations.
One use-case is that LTE/5G are becoming increasingly attractive as a replacement for land-mobile radio. It used to be sort of common for major cities to have commercial MotoTRBO/OpenSky/iDEN networks for all kinds of business users that wanted LMR without having to pay to install their own equipment. Most of them died out due to stagnation of the technology and competition from cellular providers. There's a bit of excitement that that business sector could be coming back, as cellular equipment gets less expensive and increased data-centric usage has made quality of service on the mainstream cellular networks much more variable.
Almost all major cities operate a private LTE network for city agency use, for example. But for various reasons it's mostly been out of the reach of private ventures. This could be one piece of changing that (5G brings a number of the other pieces).
There's use cases further down the page. A fair amount of companies have existing applications that are on-prem and could be made to work with mobile devices this way without having to expose endpoints to the internet. Things like mobile barcode scanners, iot sensors, roving employees with tablets, etc.
Edit: Though there are other options:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395370
There's a _ton_ of research applications with small sensors.
They outline a few cool business cases. I imagine it could be used by mining corps who are often in the middle of no-where. Set up your own cellular tower and give everyone Amazon branded sim cards and it will be a hell of a lot better than Wi-Fi in specific buildings and/or radio only communications.
They talk about it on their webpage, but I've heard this described as the ability to offer an SLA on a wireless network. This means that rather than using hard wired ethernet, company's can instead use a 5G network under their control and offer equivalent level of reliability.
I would imagine that Amazon is already using this service internally to support their Amazon.com marketplace effort. If I were to take a stab at Amazon's internal use case for a private 5g network, I would bet they are using it to manage the communications of the Amazon Logistics applications.
Amazon has come to not be held hostage and rely on outside companies for services all throughout their vertical including Fulfillment, Cloud Computing, and Logistics and Delivery. They have abstracted out their core operational dependencies into their own service offerings, so why not a private 5g network next?
If only the linked-to page had a section clearly headed "Use cases"
/s
I completely missed that
anything big enough that connecting it using wifi might be challenging. E.g. Port, factories, airports, ...
Run a smart manufacturing facility
Enable business-critical applications
I'm not sure what manufacturing facility are they talking about but at the places I know you will get ridiculed for even entertaining the idea of controlling infrastructure over anything but good old copper or fiber.
And they are right.
There are a lot of places that use RFID, Bluetooth and WiFi for equipment tracking, tote tracking, part tracking etc. Each has its pros and cons so I imagine there is space for 5g as well.
An obvious use case would be controlling a fleet of AGVs; forcing them all to be tethered could be very limiting.
Why? There are undoubtedly wireless components to the infrastructure's network already. If everything could just beam to a single tower what's the issue?
>undoubtedly wireless components to the infrastructure's network already.
Yeah, the free guest wifi in the meeting rooms. Believe me, out in the field it's all copper and fiber, held together by mountains of cisco switches. The facility in question is an oil refinery.
Yeah… but why? You’re telling me what is the case currently but I’m wondering why the copper, fiber, and switches can’t be replaced by the 5G solution.
Amazon has deployed wirelessly controlled KIVA robots in the warehouses for over a decade.
Curious if anyone is familiar: if you could purchase these for your home and all your devices that have wifi chips also have 5g chips, how do you choose between 5g and wifi for your home? Would 5g make sense in wifi-like deployments? Any reason this tech hasn’t merged?
You test them
I wonder what the range is for their small cell towers. Would be interesting for off-grid/remote communities (pair with Starlink?).
edit: Reading more, it might not be the right use case - doesn't sound like something you use for your phone.
It's usable for phone but the biggest use case is data - Do you have any communities in mind
You can put the SIM in your phone but then you'll only be part of the private network. I didn't see anything about phone calls/SMS.
AWS for telecom will be really opex heavy, though its a boon for small players,MVNO etc but who wants to keep paying aws every month for something they are going to run for ever.
This would be useful in oil and gas fields that have a ton of IOT on them.
So who does all the necessary spectrum licensing and allocation?
Is this a competitor to Twilio's managed SIM card service? That's been my go-to in recent years whenever we need to provide cell data connectivity to a small number of devices.
No this is a Antenae-as-a-service
How does this compare to Helium 5G?
Helium is (initially) focused on shipping a LoRaWAN[0] network with a crowd sourced model for Lora RF hotspots that uses blockchain for to pay incentives to those supporting the network (via hardware, power, bandwidth). LoRaWAN focuses on low power, very low bandwidth, long range devices like sensor networks and simple controls.
Nearest competitor to Helium's LoRaWAN deployment that I'm aware of is The Things Network[1] which has no incentive model and instead people often host an access point for their personal use and sometimes for the use of those nearby.
Helium is expanding to CBRS[2] 5G service which will offer traditional higher bandwidth services, but this deployment is very early and the first units are shipping next month from FreedomFi[3].
Coolest thing about the Helium LoRaWAN offering is that you can buy a $20 ESP32 microcontroller with Lora radio on Amazon, write some software, buy Helium data credits and use it anywhere helium has coverage. No contracts, no special hardware. And if it sucks you could switch your application to use another LoRaWAN offering (The Things Network). That said, I think the coverage of Helium vastly outpaces anything else because of the crypto incentives fueling the madness and growth. [4]
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
[1]
https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Broadband_Radio_Servi...
[3]
[4]
https://explorer.helium.com/coverage
> Coolest thing about the Helium LoRaWAN offering is that you can buy a $20 ESP32 microcontroller with Lora radio on Amazon, write some software, buy Helium data credits and use it anywhere helium has coverage.
Or just go with the free TTN. But I do agree that it's good to have icentives and I'm quite glad somebody is rolling out a large scale LoRaWAN.
Helium has better coverage than TTN by orders of magnitude. I have an environmental sensor which reports every 15 minutes and $1 pays for years of data transfer.
The biggest difference seems to be that aside from dropping some buzzwords like blockchain that page gives no description for what Helium 5G actually is or what the intended use cases for it are.
Kind of interesting how it stops being a buzzword when you understand why the word is being used, more interesting to watch other people be allergic to some words.
That landing page is sparse but Helium and other wireless networks are using blockchains as a rollout strategy.
Basically people invest in radio hardware because they think they can earn more in the blockchain token, don't worry as the radios are low power and most networks especially Helium's doesn't allow people to hoard radios, you earn less if there are other radios in the coverage zone. Other radios are the nodes which report your adherence to the network rules, the blockchain automatically pays out. Thats the supply side. The demand is people and organizations buying the token to buy send data over this network. With Helium I believe thats a one way conversion: Helium tokens -> data. But the receiving radio gets paid in new Helium from the blockchain's issuance, if it received any data then thats a bonus added to its payout allowance (but its not 1:1 to the amount of Helium tokens burned). So its kind of fun to think that the availability of this wireless network will have some service buying this digital commodity as an overhead cost and extending service to people that don't know Helium is one of the network routes behind the scenes. There are some IOT device that use the Helium network, I think some of the rideshare scooters use it already for over a year.
Helium 5G will become a large neutral host carrier for mobile using CBRS bands. Meaning that major network operators, or MVNOs, are the real customer.
The way this works is Helium hardware owner/operators deploy CBRS radios in whatever real estate assets they have at their disposal, then Helium or the Helium OEM partners with MNO/MVNO to offload data at a very cheap rate, and suddenly the carrier can grow network coverage at zero capex and low opex and the Helium node owner has a new source of revenue which was never before possible.
They also open the door to become a semi-private network infrastructure too, which would be in competition with this new Amazon product.
> wireless network supported by the Helium Blockchain.
The fuck
I mean it's very obvious how it's different: helium is not private. It's also obvious that you just wanted to namedrop Helium even though it has nothing to do with the use case for Amazon's product.
I beg to differ: it's a competitor for custom devices needing to transfer small amounts of data without regulatory hurdles, with the drawback of spotty connectivity given the current coverage map.
But for a moving device (ex: truck) transmitting locally stored data without latency concerns (ex: IOT temperature readings for a frozen cargo) I think it would be much more efficient, with far more coverage: you could have a $20 LORAWAN ESP32 built in individual boxes.
Think of this like Apple airtags, using a mesh network to intermittently transfer data on a best effort basis, but hooked to custom sensors so you fully control the payload
> Blockchain
Hard pass
It's actually not that bad. It's basically just a payment for providing verifiable wireless coverage to an area. If you want access to the network you buy it with VerizonBucks and people who provide coverage get them.
In this case the only reason for the blockchain is really because global payments are hard.
It is similar concept but for AWS, you need to own your spectrum ($$).
Helium is a useless concept (in practice) that is now getting on the 5G trains for marketing purposes. Their IOT is super-low data rate for anything useful. It is good for people to thinker and speculate but no use for real life applications that demand actual throughput.
Heard it may not launch soon because the project is so stressful employees may quit before it’s done. Lots of weekend work and lying management.
What radio spectrum does it use for a private 5G network? Isn't it all expensively purchased by the phone companies already?
AFAIK, this is CBRS as a Service, which means it uses the 3.5GHz PAL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Broadband_Radio_Servi...
https://www.fcc.gov/35-ghz-band-overview
Thank you
Sounds like they are selling Wifi++ - what confuses me is how/why Amazon is involved, apart from selling the hardware. Is there a subscription piece?
The implication of this product concerns me, although maybe it's just a communication issue. Amazon is selling this as an Amazon product, but wifi isn't an Amazon product, nor is 5G. They are retailing the gear to put up a 5G network - so why call it a "product" and roll it out like this?
The 5G architecture (and LTE for the most part, but 5G was designed ground-up this way) makes very heavy use of remote resources. An actual 5G base station (and most new LTE base stations) is somewhat like an SDR with very little actual protocol logic locally, it connects to a remote controller that handles all of the "business logic." It's an important change because for various reasons, some good and some not so good, the architecture of these networks is really quite complicated and a base station needs a lot of "support services" to function. Making them all remote is basically the change that allowed cell base stations to go from 120sqft concrete huts to the "microcells" we have today where the equipment fits in a pole-mount cabinet.
So the value proposition here is that Amazon is operating the actual network, which is not a small thing. You just have to install the radio hardware.
Thanks for the clarifications! I still have questions - there is no "business logic" in my wifi router, so why would there be such a thing in a 5G base station?
What is the analog to a wifi router calling out to a "remote controller" to handle "business logic"?
A base station needs "support services" to function - what are those?
Presumably the complexity of 5G vs Wifi comes from it's cell nature, and the nodes need to know about each other and connected devices to deal with a handoff (which implies at least limited multiplexing). But I don't see why this behavior would require a server-side component and a subscription. Shouldn't the 5G nodes be smart enough to deal with this without phoning home?
A simple explanation is that the nature of a cellular network requires that all base stations have a relatively large amount of shared state (which can get as fine as TDMA synchronization) and the ability to exchange information with each other in realtime. WiFi generally doesn't have this requirement, especially now that roaming extensions have mostly obsoleted AP virtualization (which is what pricey enterprise WiFi systems with a dedicated controller used to add).
An even simpler explanation is that the architecture of the cellular network is both old and comes out of the telecom industry, which both mean that it has many layers and strict requirements for QoS, traffic engineering, etc.
In a little more detail (given that this is not a topic I'm an expert in and it can get confusing): most of the magic in 5G happens in a component called the RAN or radio access network. The RAN is basically everything between your phone and the "core network" that provides actual services like telephony and IP access (which is going to be in a data center). The RAN can be fairly complex as in newer technologies it involves things like making intelligent heuristic decisions about which base station a given device should be communicating with.
Historically base stations were expected to be largely independent and handle basically everything between the phone and the existing ISDN network, which just sort of dated back to how analog radiotelephones had worked. This required a lot of equipment to provide the entire RAN on-site. The new direction has been to absolutely minimize what is located in the field, both for size and power savings but also to simplify management since there's less field equipment to upgrade and maintain. This means that a typical 5G gNB, the actual radio station, basically does nothing but encode/decode to/from binary, which it then sends to a "virtual RAN" or vRAN running in a data center somewhere. All of the actual protocol implementation, access control, traffic engineering, etc. is done in the vRAN. This adds a lot of flexibility since the vRAN can be maintained and iterated on more easily and can flexibly allocate resources between sites. It also simplifies field installation because the site only needs connectivity back to the vRAN, which is a little simpler to arrange (via VPN, fiber, metro ethernet, ISDN, whatever) than getting the site connectivity into an actual mobile exchange, and to IP capabilities, etc.
Or in other words, your WiFi AP does contain the business logic of IP switching and 802.11 session management. But that's relatively simple and done for a relatively small number of clients compared to a cellular base station, and WiFi has (mostly) always been designed with the idea of minimal to zero requirements for inter-AP communication beyond existing IP capabilities.
Not only is there some additional network logic to help handoffs go smoothly, there's a lot more complicated business logic going on with cellular APs than home WiFi APs. On top of that, you're going to want to try and control potentially thousands of APs and have them orchestrate and you may not want to rely on RF links to propagate changes.
A home WiFi AP is doing a pretty straightforward relation of SSID to some Ethernet-like network. Anything talking on the Ethernet network addressing a client goes out the radio, things coming from the client to the Ethernet network goes in. Even with this, it can make sense to have the management of these systems centralized, most enterprise systems do this already.
Cellular networking gets a lot more complicated with various APNs and other advanced networking concepts. There is a lot more going on than just doing a handshake, pulling an IP address, and starting to talk networking.
My understanding of 5G and modern cell phone protocols is there isn't really an idea of "handoff". With CDMA multiple towers in an area all get the same signals from your phone and are all transmitting on the same frequencies as well. It is kind of a "mesh" like thing.
it's sort of like asking whether for self driving cars whether it is prudent to have cars that strictly know to act based on what they sense (in a reactive way), or if it is better to collect maps of sensed environments and figure out how to proactively figure out the best optimal approaches in given situations conditioned against various environments and push out updates.
the answer is that _both_ are prudent. There is enough cooperation and coordination challenges that both offline and online approaches are important.
Basically Modern 5G ( allows ) moving most of the compute, controller to the cloud. That is why 5G is much more cost effective from Carrier's POV.
For something truly like WiFi it would be Standalone NR-U ( New Radio Unlicensed ).
I am just wondering if it will ever be cost effective for consumers.
_>moving most of the compute, controller to the cloud_
And when I hear that I think "SPOF, intense vendor lock-in".
Presumably they sell network management/operation/maintenance/... as a service. (Similar to how cloud-managed wifi stuff is a thing, except mobile networks are more complex)
This seems a lot like competition for 'Azure for Operators' offering from Microsoft.
This is fantastic, I wonder what the pricing will be. Cellular stuff is always expensive it seems.
Will this let me build out a 5G network near my mom's house in the sticks?
Can I just use this as a cheaper (hopefully) home internet connection?
Does this need an "id" (phone number) to communicate in 5G?
Almost certainly not a phone number. I think 3G/4G use IMSI[1] as the customer identifier. You only get a phone number if you're going to be doing voice calls over the carrier's network.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_mobile_subscribe...
Would be awesome to see them make a proposal to authenticate to the Helium network, I believe they intend to also support private 5g?
anyway Amazon could handle the logistics to rollout hardware much better than existing manufacturers on the Helium network.
How long until Amazon takes on the existing cell companies?
Doesn't have the margins to make it attractive. An M2M/IoT MVNO though? That'd be cool to see, more competition in the space drives down prices.
Yea because amazon isn't used to entering markets with small margins.
/s
If mean, if AWS is dragging retail fulfillment around, do they need more anchors around their neck? Operating a nationwide cellular carrier is HARD, even when dumping the capex on tower management REITs and outsourcing all of your cellular infra to Ericsson. Seems easier to write a check and plug into someone else doing the schlep (ATT is best suited for this imho), maybe buy Twilio and have them do it.
Retail is basically cost-neutral at this point. I have a theory that they operate at a loss just to avoid taxes (because that delta is basically free) and spend that to stay extra competitive.
Amazon's whole MO is huge CapEx and selling it for cash flow. If they have the credit, why not finance it. They're already building satellite ground stations and a fleet to beam internet down to earth, this could easily supplement or build a market for that.
They'd probably benefit from lots of cheap and available internet for their logistics network, but its probably not expensive enough to justify alone, but maybe by leveraging AWS sales they can prop up cash flow enough to cover costs.
Not that they're doing this, of course, just that i don't think it should be ruled out.
Which telecom would really want to partner with Amazon?
Finally! Toll quality ATM PVCs to the desktop!
The number of people completely missing what this service does either means they did not read the article, or the article was very poor in clairity.
For those who were mistaken, which was it?
Relevant XKCD:
Which seems to be true for me. Despite having semi-pro levels of wifi gear and a "fiber" provider at home, I can often get transfers work by turning 'off' the wifi and going to LTE.
If I were a campus IT administrator, it probably makes a lot of sense to get rid of wifi costs.
Which countries???
Everyone quick, Amazon now wants us to pay to help build out its cellular infra. Jump on the inflated prices, quick!
They love 5G because their mesh neighborhood spyveillance BS works even better without the need for WiFi permissions.
Super excited about the new edge usecases this could potentially enable
Such as?
Why would telecoms offer a service that could compete with their own?
Spectrum questions aside (which obviously one of the biggest one), could this enable running Helium 5G on AWS?
-- Edit: I don't own any Helium, just curious from tech side what this new AWS service could offer. Not sure the downvotes are particularly about Helium or any crypto related discussion.
Probably not if the Helium 5G offering is similar to their LoRaWan stuff.
Due to some security issues with the Helium LoRaWAN proof-of-coverage, only authorized hotspots/access points are allowed to participate. Helium manages this by issuing keys or certificates (IDK which it is) via the Decentralized Wireless Alliance[0].
I think it's highly unlikely Amazon would deploy Helium enabled 5G radios.
[0]
Why do peole care about helium so much?
People care about the value of their magic tokens and are spamming them in every online discussion in an effort to bring in more bag holders.
Agree. "awareness" drives people to own their token which will make them money.
Or because it solves an incentive problem which has kept millions of people with sub par networks to choose from.
I wonder how many CISOs and CTOs trust Amazon.
I'm not sufficiently technical on this front and so I'm probably being a little on the side of paranoia but I don't trust Amazon with my cellular infrastructure.
CTOs of like half the companies on the planet (and 90% of the Fortune 500) which use AWS seem to trust it just fine.
What makes you trust telcos more?
Who said I trust telcos more?
Waveform.com is worth looking at.
I'd guess mostly their (telcos) incompetence.
They tend to have a track record, where this is a new offering and anyone signing up is ultimately the guinea pig?
Catching up with Azure, I see. Edge Zones has been available since May.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/private-multi-ac...
I think that is the same as AWS Wavelength which launched in 2019.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/announcin...
Different products, Azure offering competes against AWS Wavelength.
See Azure Private Edge Zones, part of the full product. Azure is offering both network-provided and private 5G as options in the same service.
