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by cogman10 897 days ago
All this is true, but there is a bit of nuance. Long range isn't always desirable for wireless communication. Certainly if you are talking about low population areas then it's king. But when you start talking about heavily populated areas the long range becomes a detriment for the network stability. You can end up with cell towers servicing too many people (streaming youtube) which can ultimately overload a node but also cause a lot of signal disruption.

As population density goes up, the higher frequency bandwidths become much more desirable. This is part of the reason why the WiFi standard has been pushing up into 5ghz and 60ghz frequencies. Because you don't want your wifi signal to be yelled over to the neighbor.