[LINK] Don’t believe the hype: We’re a long way from 5G

Paul Brooks pbrooks-link at layer10.com.au
Wed Jun 6 12:58:04 AEST 2018


On 6/06/2018 9:36 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:
> ThOn 5/06/2018 12:19 PM, David wrote:
>
>> This "smart city" ... sensors monitoring everything from air quality
>> to pedestrian traffic, even the flushing of toilets. ...
>
> This doesn't add up to enough data to need 5G or even 4G. Sydney's Green Square,
> which is projected to have a future population density exceeding Hong Kong, 3G data
> rates would do.
>
> For each toilet you would need a few bytes of data transmitted every few hours.
>
> For air quality you would need a few bytes of data every few minutes for each city
> block.
>
> For pedestrian traffic you would need a count for each footpath for each road on
> each block every few minutes.

Tom, I admire your optimism about finding competent software and protocol design
people who have awareness of efficiency in this regard. In a world where developers
think a gigabyte-sized 'Hello World' app is OK with drag-and-drop module  development
tools, the chances of getting those few bytes of information encoded into less than
several megabytes of cruft included by default by a library the developer has no
knowledge of is slim.

Paul.






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