
Nationwide 5G to cover all 24 square miles of San Marino - urahara
http://www.rcrwireless.com/20170717/5g/nationwide-5g-san-marino-tag17
======
tgragnato
Telecom Italia is well-known to manage noteworthy pilot projects. But the
company often fails in making these excellences the norm.

For the mobile network:

\- the coverage of 4G is ... scarce

> In Italy, almost all of the population can benefit from mobile Internet
> connectivity services over the 2G network, namely Global System for Mobile
> Communications (GSM), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and EDGE (Enhanced
> Data rates For GSM Evolution). Next to the full coverage is HSPA (High Speed
> Packet Access) technology, while the implementation of HSPA + (HSPA
> Evolution) and 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) solutions is still to be
> completed. [[https://www.sostariffe.it/news/copertura-rete-mobile-in-
> ital...](https://www.sostariffe.it/news/copertura-rete-mobile-in-
> italia-140743/)]

\- the practice of trying to force users into accepting bundles that include
online streaming of music and/or movies, subscriptions to the fixed network,
newspapers, movie tickets, various amenities is hated by many.
[[https://www.tim.it](https://www.tim.it)]

\- not having a internet-dedicated monthly fee is a lack, especially given the
exaggerated costs in exchange for a low data threshold

For the fixed network:

\- having a guaranteed minimum bandwidth is a utopia and the real upload
bandwidth is around 20% of the declared

\- the depeering has been dictated by anti-competitive strategies rather than
technical reasons [[http://blog.bofh.it/id_432](http://blog.bofh.it/id_432)]

~~~
aruggirello
> For the fixed network: - having a guaranteed minimum bandwidth is a utopia
> and the real upload bandwidth is around 20% of the declared

Source? That's a rather bold claim. Are you talking about guaranteed
bandwidth, or rather connection speed? What's usually really bad here is the
"last mile".

In my (little) experience the upload bandwidth (connecting at 15M/768k) has
always been respected (Source: running an e-commerce business for 12 years).
Of course YMMV.

~~~
tgragnato
"YMMV" Indeed! As far as I know the business traffic is prioritised. That
doesn't mean it's the average for home connections (the majority of
users/customers).

> The transmission speed is up to 7 Mbps in download and up to 384 Kbps in
> upload. Pursuant to Article 7, paragraph 4 of AGCom 244/08 / CSP Resolution,
> the value of the minimum download speed for download of the service is 6.4
> Mbps. This value derives from measurements made in the second half of 2012
> on lines (1) which are between 1000 and 1500 meters from the central
> station. It should be noted that this value refers to the exclusive use of
> the ADSL connection for Internet access without the simultaneous use of VoIP
> or IPTV services. In any case, the value of the minimum transmission speed
> in download that represents the target value on which Telecom Italia
> contractually contracts is set at 2.1 Mbps. For the lines located in the
> areas included in the Anti-digital divide project (see www.telecomitalia.it
> in the Info Consumers section - Anti-digital project divides the list of
> municipalities with a rated transmission speed of 640 Kbps download and 256
> Kbps in upload ) Contract engagement is set at 300 Kbps in download and 100
> kbps in upload. For details, see the contractual terms.
> [[https://www.tim.it/offerte/fisso/internet-voce-e-
> timvision/a...](https://www.tim.it/offerte/fisso/internet-voce-e-
> timvision/adsl/internet-senza-limiti)]

"Are you talking about guaranteed bandwidth, or rather connection speed?" The
upload bandwidth I normally have is the guaranteed minimum. Whether it's
because of the last mile or the network congestion, I do not know.

Now, we are in the cloud era, suppose you try to upload an hd picture, or a
long document somewhere (side note: this is an average use case, not something
you should expect from a power user). For a file size of 10MiB [83886.08 Kb]
(again, nothing exaggerated) at a transfer rate of 100kbps the transfer will
take 838s: just slightly under a quarter of an hour !!! IMHO this is totally
unreasonable.

My position is that the company is what remains of a former state monopoly,
which still holds a dominant position in the telecommunications market.
Unfortunately for the users, this is why there has been no incentive to
improve the network over time (for everyone, doing some localised research
project is insufficient), and today the situation is not the best.

Telecom Italia is not a company like the others: it's allowed to do many
things that others cannot do, including harassing people at every hour of the
day for selling their new snake oil with a crazy new discount (taking the
money spent on the salaries of the people workin in the call centers and
investing them in improving the network is the first thing to do).

The 20% is what I'm experiencing in one of my connections, but you do not have
to take my word for it, a quick web search is going to show you relevant
results:

[http://forum.telefonino.net/showthread.php?t=402839](http://forum.telefonino.net/showthread.php?t=402839)
[https://www.tomshw.it/forum/threads/telecom-upload-
basso.247...](https://www.tomshw.it/forum/threads/telecom-upload-
basso.247557/) [http://www.evilripper.net/adsl-telecom-italia-1-megabyte-
in-...](http://www.evilripper.net/adsl-telecom-italia-1-megabyte-in-upload/)
[https://www.tomshw.it/forum/threads/banda-in-
upload.69639/](https://www.tomshw.it/forum/threads/banda-in-upload.69639/)
[http://forum.telefonino.net/archive/index.php?t-402839.html](http://forum.telefonino.net/archive/index.php?t-402839.html)
... and many others ...

------
DiabloD3
This is neat and all, but no LTE standard has been tapped for 5G. LTE Advanced
Pro (the third generation of the LTE spec) is the closest to having a spec
that can work for 5G, but has not yet been chosen for that.

In addition, it is implied that 5G will require usage of 28, 37, and 39 GHz,
which LTE Advanced Pro does not currently have profiles for.

What San Marino is doing is building a current gen 4G network (ie, 4.9G or
whatever they're calling it), allowing as many feature of LTE Advanced as
possible (including complex MIMO), so in a few years most cell phones will
have caught up to make effective use of it.

Also, as a side note, LTE Advanced Pro was introduced in 3GPP release 13
(early 2016), and anything that meets the requirements for 5G will not be
until release 15 (most likely next year).

------
zitterbewegung
This looks like a really cool testbed for 5G. No tall buildings for you to put
in 5G repeaters / femtocells. No bureaucracy for you to jump hoops. Small
enough that deployment wouldn't be that big of a problem. Large enough to
actually do real world tests with phones. Is Nokia (Alcatel-Lucent) doing the
deployment because I wouldn't be surprised if they did.

~~~
dublinben
I agree that this is a good test for 5G, but it's even more important that 5G
work well in dense urban areas where there are tall buildings, and hundreds
(if not thousands) of users connecting to each cell.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Your missing the point . They would do urban settings as a next step.

------
frik
Summary: _Nationwide 5G coverage in the microstate of San Marino, a 24-square-
mile microstate totally surrounded by Italy._

------
blue1
That's great. Even 3G/4G in San Marino has been rather flimsy so far.

------
mariuolo
It's not completely new, I live near San Marino and I remember that around
2010 they had set up a full WiMAX coverage.

ISTR it suffered from somewhat high latency though.

------
aelmeleegy
All 24 of them? How did they pull it off?

------
TokenDiversity
This is true 5G. Not the fake ATT 5G. I saw neowin.net taking a stance against
fakes by labelling ATT 5G as "fake 5G" clearly in their title. I hope we all
do the same until ATT & co stop misleading their customers leading to eventual
confusion for everyone.

------
Theodores
Meanwhile in the Tesla/SpaceX corner we have space based broadband just around
the corner:

[https://hackernoon.com/will-spacex-become-the-worlds-
biggest...](https://hackernoon.com/will-spacex-become-the-worlds-biggest-
telecoms-provider-probably-f1cdb22d00cc)

With nearby Tesla cars and SolarCity roofs giving your phone 5g with 25ms
latency. It could happen. Soon you will be able to buy a VPS in space to halve
that.

One day this space based network is going to come online and it will supercede
many terrestrial upgrades, making things like the TelCo 5G roll out not needed
after all.

~~~
Dylan16807
> Soon you will be able to buy a VPS in space to halve that.

Maybe if you migrate it every 5 minutes. Otherwise it's spending half its life
on the other side of the planet.

~~~
ajdlinux
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit)

~~~
mjg59
Geostationary orbit is more than 25msec away.

~~~
kees99
First hop on my ADSL connection is 43msec away (RTT).

~~~
Dylan16807
Yeah, that sort of thing is annoying, but it could be improved down to 4 if
they actually cared much.

The point here is that going to geostationary is at least a quarter second
round-trip, and blows the 25ms estimate out of the water. You can put servers
in orbit if you really want to, but you can't have a satellite that's both
fast to access and also in range for more than a few minutes at a time.

