Well mmWave was never for large areas. It's for ultra high density like in stadiums with 100k people. You know those cases where current networks are completely unusable because they saturate.
Its extremely limited range and penetration is a benefit there because you can put up thousands of cells without them interfering with each other.
It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
The speeds thing was just marketing BS as usual but mmWave did have benefits in niche scenarios.
> It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
It did not took off because the whole sales pitch was utter nonsense. Why would anyone put 3rd party 5G BTS inside their buildings and then pay for data, when they can use WiFi for free + they control the network so they can decide how data are shared between stations and which stations are allowed to be logged in.
I can see that 6G is pitching... exactly same thing. Which predictably is going to fail... on exactly same issue.
Data would have been unlimited at the company's own locations of course.
And it would have worked similarly to managed WiFi. Lots of companies outsource their WiFi and network. Many don't want to have that knowledge in house. Basically the provider would play the role of network outsourcing party inside the office and the outdoor connectivity would be more of a value-add.
The benefit would have been much higher speeds due to much more available bandwidth (way more than even 6Ghz WiFi), more security (people can't just poke at it with some packet injectors), less interference due to managed spectrum, higher density due to the beamforming and low penetration. Oh and it would have improved phone connectivity inside those buildings to boot. It could be combined with VPN/MPLS like connectivity so that laptops would always be behind the firewall even outdoors without having to run a VPN client.
This was also the pitch that led to those laptops with 5G built in that intel and Qualcomm were on about (Qualcomm was heavily trying to get into the laptop market back then). But it kinda stalled. I don't think it was a bad pitch though. It also came at a time when people weren't actually working in the office due to the pandemic and it lost momentum, beside the chicken and egg problem.
I could really see this taking off under the right conditions. But the whole laptop with mmWave isn't a thing anymore now. Perhaps 6G will bring a renewed push with it. Personally I don't think it's a bad pitch at all.
The problem is control of the network. If you don't control your network, then you don't know if network provider will go from "unlimited data" to "I am changing the deal now it is 1USD/GB" and you can either take it or be without connection which would likely collapse your operations. So the only logical step is to use network which you have full control over, like WiFi.
The much higher speed also does not hold together when you will look at it. When you have a device which is generating or processing a lot of data (GB/s ~ TB/s) such device needs substantial computational power to pull it off, so it is likely a stationary device connected to 230V. So why won't you drag a fiber there?
I don't agree. Enterprise contracts don't work that way, they don't give one party the ability to suddenly change terms. With consumer contracts yes but not for big business.
And like I said there's many companies that outsource their whole network. This isn't all that different. Not every company wants to deal with all that stuff. At work we do but we're an IT company.
They can renegotiate upon completion of the contract term yes. But during this term, usually 2 or 3 years, the terms are set. And the office will get a fiber uplink anyway. The access points will be hanging in the office but connected to fiber. Probably provisioned by the same provider that we have now for our WiFi uplink.
And it's easy enough to replace the provider with another one if they become too greedy. We'll do an RFP every 3 years anyway to get the best price every time. We recently changed WiFi access point manufacturer too for that reason.
And yes right now WiFi is sufficient for laptops but it might not always be this way. And don't forget the spectrum in office buildings is pretty crowded. And it's not the only benefit.
It may not be for everyone but I'd see this working out pretty well, really. Once there's another push from the industry and chicken and egg come together.
In fact I could even see this working out for consumers when endpoint devices with 5/6G become mainstream. Most customers right now just use the WiFi from the provider, they don't bother to change the password or the channel. Most people wouldn't even know that there's different WiFi channels. I could see a world where instead of a WiFi password they just get eSIM codes to scan.
For people like you and me this would probably be bad but on the other hand it would free up WiFi spectrum for us to use :)
Right now from my flat I see literally 100+ access points around me all hogging those few limited WiFi channels (big dense city). Compared to that the providers have a lot more bandwidth.
Its extremely limited range and penetration is a benefit there because you can put up thousands of cells without them interfering with each other.
It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.
The speeds thing was just marketing BS as usual but mmWave did have benefits in niche scenarios.