this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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59
It’s Time To Rethink 6G. (spectrum.ieee.org)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Cities probably have a higher density of towers, or the towers in cities have more capable antennas. Point-to-point microwave links can be pretty damn fast and reliable. They have their limitations, but even low-end systems like some of Ubiquiti's 60ghz stuff can form full duplex 5Gbps links at 10+ kilometers. Fiber is still king, but I'm guessing the backhaul isn't the issue.

I'm guessing that the issue is congestion on the client radios. 5g is supposed to be much better at dealing with this thanks to time sharing improvements, but it seems likely that there just aren't enough towers. One scenario that seems reasonable is that your telco (incorrectly) assumed that they wouldn't need as many towers when upgrading, so they only upgraded a subset of their towers and removed old ones once 4g was deprecated.

edit: you might be able to get better information about wtf is going on by using a community-sourced site like https://cellmapper.net/

I believe you can use that site to get info about how many towers there are and what the client-side congestion is like.

EDIT: ew, cellmapper is closed source. OpenCellid or beaconDB seem to be open source equivalents.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

That's a cool resource. Ty