Hi Bob,
technically attractive, but the "charge per radio head" and :virtualize the AP"
are show stoppers for me... I like my ISP, but I have a clear understanding
that my ISPs goals and my goals are not perfectly aligned so I would never give
them control of my in house network and even less if they start moving things
into the clown^W cloud. That means running important functions on some one
else's computers, giving that some one else effectively too much power.
Regards
Sebastian
P.S.: The technical side you propose will also work just as well with me in
control, even though that lacks a business to make it attractive for ISPs ;)
> On Mar 14, 2023, at 18:06, Robert McMahon via Bloat
> <bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> The ISP could charge per radio head and manage the system from a FiWi head
> end which they own. Virtualize the APs. Get rid of SoC complexity and costly
> O&M via simplicity. Eliminate all the incremental engineering that has gone
> astray, e.g. bloat and over powered APs.
>
> Bob
> On Mar 14, 2023, at 9:49 AM, Robert McMahon <rjmcma...@rjmcmahon.com> wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>
> I'm thinking more of fiber to the room. The last few meters are wifi
> everything else is fiber.. Those radios would be a max of 20' from the
> associated STA. Then at phy rates of 2.8Gb/s per spatial stream. The common
> MIMO is 2x2 so each radio head or wifi transceiver supports 5.6G, no queueing
> delay. Wholesale is $5 and retail $19.95 per pluggable transceiver. Sold at
> Home Depot next to the irrigation aisle. 10 per house is $199 and each room
> gets a dedicated 5.8G phy rate. Need more devices in a space? Pick an RRH
> with more cmos radios. Also, the antennas would be patch antenna and fill the
> room properly. Then plug in an optional sensor for fire alerting.
>
>
> A digression. A lot of signal processing engineers have been working on TX
> beam forming. The best beam is fiber. Just do that. It even can turn corners
> and goes exactly to where it's needed at very low energies. This is similar
> to pvc pipes in irrigation systems. They're designed to take water to spray
> heads.
>
> The cost is the cable plant. That's labor more than materials. Similar for
> irrigation, pvc is inexpensive and lasts decades. A return labor means use
> future proof materials, e.g. fiber.
>
> Bob
> On Mar 14, 2023, at 4:10 AM, Mike Puchol via Rpm <r...@lists.bufferbloat.net>
> wrote:
> Hi Bob,
>
> You hit on a set of very valid points, which I'll complement with my views on
> where the industry (the bit of it that affects WISPs) is heading, and what I
> saw at the MWC in Barcelona. Love the FiWi term :-)
>
> I have seen the vendors that supply WISPs, such as Ubiquiti, Cambium, and
> Mimosa, but also newer entrants such as Tarana, increase the performance and
> on-paper specs of their equipment. My examples below are centered on the
> African market, if you operate in Europe or the US, where you can charge
> customers a higher install fee, or even charge them a break-up fee if they
> don't return equipment, the economics work.
>
> Where currently a ~$500 sector radio could serve ~60 endpoints, at a cost of
> ~$50 per endpoint (I use this term in place of ODU/CPE, the antenna that you
> mount on the roof), and supply ~2.5 Mbps CIR per endpoint, the evolution is
> now a ~$2,000+ sector radio, a $200 endpoint, capability for ~150 endpoints
> per sector, and ~25 Mbps CIR per endpoint.
>
> If every customer a WISP installs represents, say, $100 CAPEX at install time
> ($50 for the antenna + cabling, router, etc), and you charge a $30 install
> fee, you have $70 to recover, and you recover from the monthly contribution
> the customer makes. If the contribution after OPEX is, say, $10, it takes you
> 7 months to recover the full install cost. Not bad, doable even in low-income
> markets.
>
> Fast-forward to the next-generation version. Now, the CAPEX at install is
> $250, you need to recover $220, and it will take you 22 months, which is
> above the usual 18 months that investors look for.
>
> The focus, thereby, has to be the lever that has the largest effect on the
> unit economics - which is the per-customer cost. I have drawn what my ideal
> FiWi network would look like:
>
>
>
> Taking you through this - we start with a 1-port, low-cost EPON OLT (or you
> could go for 2, 4, 8 ports as you add capacity). This OLT has capacity for 64
> ONUs on its single port. Instead of connecting the typical fiber
> infrastructure with kilometers of cables which break, require maintenance,
> etc. we insert an EPON to Ethernet converter (I added "magic" because these
> don't exist AFAIK).
>
> This converter allows us to connect our $2k sector radio, and serve the $200
> endpoints (ODUs) over wireless point-to-multipoint up to 10km away. Each ODU
> then has a reverse converter, which gives us EPON again.
>
> Once we are back on EPON, we can insert splitters, for example,
> pre-connectorized outdoor 1:16 boxes. Every customer install now involves a
> 100 meter roll of pre-connectorized 2-core drop cable, and a $20 EPON ONU.
>
> Using this deployment method, we could connect up to 16 customers to a single
> $200 endpoint, so the enpoint CAPEX per customer is now $12.5. Add the ONU,
> cable, etc. and we have a per-install CAPEX of $82.5 (assuming the same $50
> of extras we had before), and an even shorter break-even. In addition, as the
> endpoints support higher capacity, we can provision at least the same, if not
> more, capacity per customer.
>
> Other advantages: the $200 ODU is no longer customer equipment and CAPEX, but
> network equipment, and as such, can operate under a longer break-even
> timeline, and be financed by infrastructure PE funds, for example. As a
> result, churn has a much lower financial impact on the operator.
>
> The main reason why this wouldn't work today is that EPON, as we know, is
> synchronous, and requires the OLT to orchestrate the amount of time each ONU
> can transmit, and when. Having wireless hops and media conversions will
> introduce latencies which can break down the communications (e.g. one ONU may
> transmit, get delayed on the radio link, and end up overlapping another ONU
> that transmitted on the next slot). Thus, either the "magic" box needs to
> account for this, or an new hybrid EPON-wireless protocol developed.
>
> My main point here: the industry is moving away from the unconnected. All the
> claims I heard and saw at MWC about "connecting the unconnected" had zero
> resonance with the financial drivers that the unconnected really operate
> under, on top of IT literacy, digital skills, devices, power...
>
> Best,
>
> Mike
> On Mar 14, 2023 at 05:27 +0100, rjmcmahon via Starlink
> <starl...@lists.bufferbloat.net>, wrote:
>> To change the topic - curious to thoughts on FiWi.
>>
>> Imagine a world with no copper cable called FiWi (Fiber,VCSEL/CMOS
>> Radios, Antennas) and which is point to point inside a building
>> connected to virtualized APs fiber hops away. Each remote radio head
>> (RRH) would consume 5W or less and only when active. No need for things
>> like zigbee, or meshes, or threads as each radio has a fiber connection
>> via Corning's actifi or equivalent. Eliminate the AP/Client power
>> imbalance. Plastics also can house smoke or other sensors.
>>
>> Some reminders from Paul Baran in 1994 (and from David Reed)
>>
>> o) Shorter range rf transceivers connected to fiber could produce a
>> significant improvement - - tremendous improvement, really.
>> o) a mixture of terrestrial links plus shorter range radio links has the
>> effect of increasing by orders and orders of magnitude the amount of
>> frequency spectrum that can be made available.
>> o) By authorizing high power to support a few users to reach slightly
>> longer distances we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to serve the
>> many.
>> o) Communications systems can be built with 10dB ratio
>> o) Digital transmission when properly done allows a small signal to
>> noise ratio to be used successfully to retrieve an error free signal.
>> o) And, never forget, any transmission capacity not used is wasted
>> forever, like water over the dam. Not using such techniques represent
>> lost opportunity.
>>
>> And on waveguides:
>>
>> o) "Fiber transmission loss is ~0.5dB/km for single mode fiber,
>> independent of modulation"
>> o) “Copper cables and PCB traces are very frequency dependent. At
>> 100Gb/s, the loss is in dB/inch."
>> o) "Free space: the power density of the radio waves decreases with the
>> square of distance from the transmitting antenna due to spreading of the
>> electromagnetic energy in space according to the inverse square law"
>>
>> The sunk costs & long-lived parts of FiWi are the fiber and the CPE
>> plastics & antennas, as CMOS radios+ & fiber/laser, e.g. VCSEL could be
>> pluggable, allowing for field upgrades. Just like swapping out SFP in a
>> data center.
>>
>> This approach basically drives out WiFi latency by eliminating shared
>> queues and increases capacity by orders of magnitude by leveraging 10dB
>> in the spatial dimension, all of which is achieved by a physical design.
>> Just place enough RRHs as needed (similar to a pop up sprinkler in an
>> irrigation system.)
>>
>> Start and build this for an MDU and the value of the building improves.
>> Sadly, there seems no way to capture that value other than over long
>> term use. It doesn't matter whether the leader of the HOA tries to
>> capture the value or if a last mile provider tries. The value remains
>> sunk or hidden with nothing on the asset side of the balance sheet.
>> We've got a CAPEX spend that has to be made up via "OPEX returns" over
>> years.
>>
>> But the asset is there.
>>
>> How do we do this?
>>
>> Bob
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