nanog mailing list archives

Re: 5G roadblock: labor


From: Ca By <cb.list6 () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2019 16:55:09 -0800

On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 3:51 PM Christopher Morrow <morrowc.lists () gmail com>
wrote:

Oh good :) someone coaxed cameron out of the holiday keg :)


I can only take reading how others imagine it may work for so long


On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 6:32 PM Ca By <cb.list6 () gmail com> wrote:



On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 2:41 PM Christopher Morrow <
morrowc.lists () gmail com> wrote:

On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 4:11 PM Brian J. Murrell <brian () interlinx bc ca>
wrote:

On Mon, 2019-12-30 at 09:50 -0500, Shane Ronan wrote:

Also, keep in mind that 10 years ago, you didn't know you would want
or
need 25mbits to your phone,

Who needs 25mbits to their phone?


this is the wrong argument to make... or at the least it distracts
from the conversation about: "Why 5g?" because everyone can come up
with a reason for/against N mbps to Xthing. (I think this is sort of
shane's point, actually)

4G/LTE:
  o started the migration/consolidation of voice/video/data to a
single bearer (well, IP anyway).
  o moved the (ideally) IP endpoint closer to the tower base
  o removed some latency, jitter, intermediaries between 'End-User'
and "thing on the network"

5G:
  o supposedly reduces latency 'more' (brings more of the IP
connection and routing closer to the tower/radio?)


Latency to what? Latency between your handset and a front-end web server
at Google or AWS is likely unchanged. Physic did not change for 5G.


good question... I think for any IP flow in previous deployments the
point where my ip packet went from 'radio' to 'ip networking' could
have been a fair distance away (super cell in 2g/3g worlds) from my,
bending my IP path significantly from me to the thing I'm talking to.
(introducing latency and other pokery from the carrier side swapping
around from radio/3gpp/etc to "ip on ethernet").

In the LTE world it's POSSIBLE that that transition could happen at
the tower base (unlikely, but possible, theoretically). So, given some
regional network and aggregation / etc my IP packet's path COULD be
'better'. That should enable better latency/jitter/etc. In practice
the 3g ~300ms to send a packet from 'reston virginia' to 'ashburn
virginia' has become ~20-40ms.

Note, I'm not super interested in point-to-point measurements, but the
general path being 'better' for user packets.


In order for mobility to work, there has to be a topology abstraction for
the notion of anchor point where the user always is. This anchor point in a
mobile network may have been 2 locations in the usa 15 years ago (all users
are anchored to 1 of these 2 places), but may be closer to 60 locations
now.  Ymmv depending on your carrier.  But, there are still only ~10 major
internet peering locations

Cell sites are normally a hub and spoke design in a metro area.   FB / GOOG
/ AWS only pick-up traffic from eyeball networks in  ~10 places in the usa.
Networks optimize for delivering of tonnage to those 10 places. None of
that fundamentally changes between LTE and NR. Cell sites aggregate in
buildings, those building connect to peering points.

Minimally, a 5g network is just hanging radios just like in LTE, and
backhauling those radios to hubs, just like LTE.  mmWave requires more
radios, low band less radios.

That said, things have improved in the last 15 years. All mobile traffic
for one carrier i know used to go to Seattle or Atlanta.  Which was
hilarious, since most people live in NY or CA.  Nowadays, generally,
packets from a handset start destination routing one hop (5-10ms metro-e)
up from the cell site... so  the packets don’t find themselves on a path of
indirection beyond your local metro area, and this is likely not a detour
along the path to internet peering.

Albuquerque packets will find their way to peerings in denver or dallas.
Birmingham packets will find their way to Peerings in Atlanta or Miami ...




Just random samples of what people post online....

Vzw 5g 19 ms

https://twitter.com/donnymac/status/1164491035503976448

19ms from 'georgetown' to <unknown> so I can't really tell what the
uplift on a straight ping from (for example) georgetown university
campus -> <thing> might be.
either way... maybe it's 12-14 ms (since the test seems to talk about
Annapolis which ought not be more than 3-4 ms from DC proper on fiber)
that's not so bad really.

Att 5ge 34ms
https://twitter.com/joelouis77/status/1196651360185462784


yea.... no endpoints specified so: "testing that the internet is on fire"
:(

Sprint , this guy shows 27ms on LTE vs 34ms on 5g
https://twitter.com/robpegoraro/status/1202705075535257600

i'm guessing he means: "north arlington virginia" to "washington
dc"... 34ms is 'long' :( much more uplift on that than I'd expect.




  o simplifies management? (maybe?)


Hahahaha. No. Because 5g does not replace anything. It is yet another
thing.


:) "long term, when you decom 3g and 4g for 5g! you know, when 6g
arrives..." :)
It's amazing to me that there's not a unified management system to
offer network management across radio technologies? and some
requirement from the carriers to push the vendors to provide a
standards based interface to keep that management system in play long
term? Maybe there is and it's running YANG/OpenConfig/etc ? Maybe it's
silly to want that though because the radio world is 'so very
different' from the plain-jim IP world? and/or there's enough
difference between 3/4/5g that using a single management system just
isn't practical?


There is talk of this... but these too are just more things. It is fun
reading all the press releases about open source stuff from at&t and then
trying to find the code and README file. Still looking.


keeping speed out of the conversation, the footprint for MANY 5g
deploymetns in the US (and elsewhere) is likely 'hundreds of feet
circles', where 4G is 'miles'.
(yes you can beam-form and make ovals and such...)


This is still a physics thing. Most purest will says 5G = new radio
(NR). NR can run in any band. And, the distance is a function of the band.
Tmobile is big on 600mhz NR, Sprint is big on 2500mhz NR and VZW has 28ghz
NR.


oh sure, who gets the 'right' spectrum is going to drive what each
carrier can 'do' with the 5g.
but generally speaking, particular carriers aside... "5g is beneficial
to users because?" (again, aside from speed increases).

"Lower cost, because more people on less equipment and lower
management costs" (pass that on to the users, right?)
"more reach into places where cell coverage is spotty?"
"new tech options over the network provided?"


Vendors are not interested in reducing costs to network operators, in
general. They may have replaced NPUs with x86 to reduce their own costs....

IMHO, operationalizing more spectrum into larger aggregation groups is the
thing NR gives over LTE.

Ask someone else, they may say talking cars and robot surgery and running
k8s on openstack.


There is an relation between the available spectrum bandwidth and the
mhz. Meaning, there is only little 600mhz but there is a lot of 28ghz
mmwave. That said, 600mhz can drive for miles, while 28ghz needs line of
sight.

Horses for courses. No silver bullet.  All the best mid-band spectrum ,
balanced volume and propagation, got deployed in the 90s as pcs / gsm, and
re-deployed in the 10s as umts and LTE.  Low band is great for penetration
and coverage with a few cells, mmwave is great with line of sight...
midband is the sweet spot in the middle.

The future requires all tools available.



It'd be nice to see what benefits 5g really has for carriers and
consumers/users... It looks, to me, like a bunch of the 5g hype is
really: "uhm, we need to sell these carriers on the G++ ... spin up
the hype machine about speed!" never mind the cost to deploy, range of
deployment, changes in handset/radio gear / etc... more $ to the
vendors!

-chris


NR does operationalize more spectrum and allows bigger aggregate pools
(like LACP) The new mmwave spectrum is the last to come to market because
it’s value is limited in the general case.


thanks!
-chris




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