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by jauntywundrkind
531 days ago
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The availability of hardware seems semi moot, since afaik there's basically no way to get spectrum short of big national auctions. But now that T-Mobile is renegging their promise & not going to meet the minimum deployment size they promised, they have been saying the FCC should find a way to sell by area some of that spectrum sitting dormant in such a wide wide % of America (personally I think it makes their bid invalid & they should forefeit their bid for such egregious dirty lying).
https://www.lightreading.com/5g/t-mobile-relinquishes-mmwave... I think some of the analog tv spectrum has some precedent for being sold per-area rather than nation wide, but I'm not sure how that's been going. In terms of hardware, there's some fascinating stuff. Facebook's SuperCell large-tower project showed awesome scale out possibility for large towers. Their Terragraph effort is spun out, and seems to have some solid customers using their hardware. Meta spun off their EvenStar 5G system, which has a strong presence at Open compute now.
https://www.opencompute.org/projects/evenstar-open-radio-uni... But it's hard to tell how acquireable such a thing really is. There's plenty of existing nodes out there too. It is unclear to me though how acquireable such things really are- there not being an open market, since there's no usable spectrum feels like a conundrum for the market, even though these are extremely high volume amazingly integrated advanced wireless systems that you'd think would be visibly prolific. |
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You can run 5G in the unlicensed spectrum. AWS can rent you hardware for it: https://aws.amazon.com/private5g/ - it's $5k a month per site. I know a plant that switched to that because they couldn't get WiFi to work reliably for them.
But even if you want to run within the licensed spectrum, local licenses for a couple of bands are cheap. I was involved in setting up a private network in the licensed spectrum around 10 years ago (based on https://aviatnetworks.com/ ), and a local site spectrum license was something ridiculously small (in the range of a hundred dollars).
It's expensive if you want to do it nation-wide.