5G could be fibre's biggest competitor in South Africa

Geoff.D said:
No longer a given. One has to check the technology before making claims like this. In essence, anything that does not require excessive processing or minimal sharing will have lower latency. What everyone forgets is that there are NO wireless networks anywhere that do not rely on fibre!. If the backbone fibre networks (with sufficient capacity to eliminate contention) are not there, what is the point of a good last mile solution?

All this is the normal hype around whatever the flavour of the month is. This month it is a focus on 5G because of the ITU conference ........ Everyone has to lay an egg to ensure that the market is aware of their interest in 5G.
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Any cellular tech will suffer from added latency due to the way it works. Wireless tech still suffers from the "only one at a time" (half duplex transmission), which they are trying to make better with MIMO. Problem with that is still that you can only place a finite amount of antennae on a tower to achieve this. If you are serving 100 people at the same time, that connection degrades quickly, and you have to wait your turn on the tower.

Fibre is still used on the backing infra, because it's the best at handling a lot of traffic from one point and it's full duplex with multi spectrum modulation. I don't share my fibre with anyone, hence why my local ping is a mere 1ms. You are gonna have a ridiculously hard time beating that one wireless, and even when running Speedtest over WiFi that shows.
 
Joseph matane said:
You noticed that he didn't say expect current FTTH price on fixed 5G Vodacom never beat prices, in fact uncapped 100mbps FTTH cost less than R1500 and 5G promise user throughput 100mbps as minimum speed so if Vodacom offer capped data for more than R1500 PM is a robbery
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You can get 100gig for R999.00 pm on Vodacom lte now. 100gig
 
NeoAcheron said:
Any cellular tech will suffer from added latency due to the way it works. Wireless tech still suffers from the "only one at a time" (half duplex transmission), which they are trying to make better with MIMO. Problem with that is still that you can only place a finite amount of antennae on a tower to achieve this. If you are serving 100 people at the same time, that connection degrades quickly, and you have to wait your turn on the tower.

Fibre is still used on the backing infra, because it's the best at handling a lot of traffic from one point and it's full duplex with multi spectrum modulation. I don't share my fibre with anyone, hence why my local ping is a mere 1ms. You are gonna have a ridiculously hard time beating that one wireless, and even when running Speedtest over WiFi that shows.
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Exactly! The question was asked, I responded that one needs to evaluate the technology before drawing a conclusion, but in essence a fixed line connection with no capacity sharing will alwys beat any setup that is other wise.
And note GPON etc ARE shared technologies,. You do not have exclusive access to the fibre or the capacity. So that is why one needs to evaluate the technologies before claiming fibre will be better than wireless.
 
Ockie said:
You can get 100gig for R999.00 pm on Vodacom lte now. 100gig
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That's nice... I can get uncapped unshapped no fup for the same price from Cool Ideas depending which fibre network I use.
 
Won't ever happen. And here is why.
Aside from the greed of the cellphone cartels, the fact remains that it would require too many towers and that is not going to happen, the people will complain.

As for radio... its true... half-duplex, and even worse.. TDMA. How the hell can that compete with Fibre.
Radio was never meant to be a replacement for high-performance optical links
 
I was merely pointing out that you can now get large amount of data on 4G for a reasonable price. Imagine what 100GIG on Vodacom would have cost 5 years ago. Now, this is on 4G, so hopefully when 5G comes prices will come more in line with fibre.
 
Ockie said:
I was merely pointing out that you can now get large amount of data on 4G for a reasonable price. Imagine what 100GIG on Vodacom would have cost 5 years ago. Now, this is on 4G, so hopefully when 5G comes prices will come more in line with fibre.
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Woosies.
 
Before it would be a competitor we first need to get more uncapped lte packages
 
Remember when these articles came out claiming the same about 4G?
Yup.. how did that turn out?
 
Unless 5G can travel faster than light, I doubt I'll be switching anytime soon...
 
daffy said:
Remember when these articles came out claiming the same about 4G?
Yup.. how did that turn out?
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They are lobbying for more spectrum, the same speech.

Spectrum is a limited resource and bandwith utilization cannot increase indefinitely (actually we are approaching theoretical limits), while extending fiber speed is just a matter of adding another cable or upgrading technology.
 
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5G: shared spectrum, limited capacity, shared between all subscribers.

Fibre: Light is the limit.

Think about it....
 
Dolby said:
I've understood any wired connection be to have better latency than a wireless.

Still true ?
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Latency is only one of the minor issues with wireless. Packet loss and jitter are more pronounced with wireless Vs wired
 
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