Europe to Decide If 6 Ghz Is Shared Between Wi-Fi and Cellular Networks

There are others ways to coordinates european countries than EU institutions

It's not obvious at all actually, since there are many European things that also affect Island, Norway and Switzerland for being part of EFTA, but an equally high number of things that don't.

And even the EU itself is pretty fragmented with various overlapping areas with different rules.

As someone who's studied European relations, I can tell you that it's a real mess, and the fact that journalists don't accurately reporting the facts definitely isn't helpful.

Context matters; you can generally tell whether someone's talking politics or geography.

Whenever I go to the UK, people there seem to consistently refer to EU or the rest/continental europe in general as "europe", esp in political/economic context. My impression is that the UK is just too important to be grouped together with other countries.

It likes to believe it is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Ask two different people and get three different answers.

In my personal experience, people from Latin American countries will sometimes point out that they are American because they come from North or South America.

Which is, of course, true; however, in English conversation, it's often nothing more than pedantry. In Spanish it makes more sense, since there is a separate demonym for a US person that doesn't co-opt the term "American."

Outside of Romance language speakers born on the American continents, I agree that everyone seems fine calling US-born persons "Americans" without much confusion nor gnashing of teeth.

It is normal in Spanish-speaking countries (and probably others) to consider the entirety of North and South America to be one continent called “America”.

One of the most famous soccer teams in Mexico is even called “Club América”, obviously this doesn’t refer to the US.

"In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America" is a sentence I've certainly heard before, but he didn't at any point land on any area covered by the United States of America (except maybe Panama)

That ambiguity disappears if you call it "the Americas", but many places see America as one continent (including Latin America, parts of Europe and the Olympic flag)

Maybe in English. In Spanish (and we’re a bunch, the native Spanish speakers) I guarantee that if you say “América” you’re referring to the continent. The country is “Estados Unidos” (United States) or its abbreviation, EEUU. And its citizens, “estadounidenses”, not “americanos”.

Suez Canal exists and cuts off Africa from Eurasia

Tell me more how Europe is separated by a canal from Asia ? There are benefits splitting America in two, splitting Africa from Eurasia, splitting Australia from Eurasia. What's the benefit of splitting Eurasia into Europe and Asia, besides catering to europeans who believe they're unique in the world ? It only creates more problems

Even when the phones on both ends use IP calling technology, the interconnection between phone companies is usually not IP.

It's easy to make the switch in a rich country with less than 10 millions of inhabitants, mostly living in big cities.

Interestingly, my country turned off 3G before 2G.

I think the reasoning was that the heavy data 3G users had already upgraded to 4G and beyond, and low data 3G users could fall back to 2G, so retiring 3G would have negligible impact - while opening up a lot of bandwidth for 4G and 5G.

On the other hand, there were plenty of 2G-only low data users around, so retiring that early would break stuff for a lot of people. Keeping it around longer gave people more time to upgrade.

It's not that simple. There are a ton of legacy systems that upgrading would cost a lot of money and it's not the fact or replacing a 100 euros smartphone. A lot of these systems have a critical (safety) function, and thus if they stop working there would be consequences (I've mentioned the elevator alarm, but consider alarms for plants in remote areas that use 2G to send out alarms, let's say a pumping station for sewer, remote sensors in the mountains, dataloggers, electronic bracelet given to people that has restrictive sentences, etc).

This is the same reasoning why they keep active the "old" analog telephone network, why not everyone is switched to VOIP, because there are situations where it's still used by stuff that is critical or too expensive to replace.

> with 3G/4G/5G on higher frequencies as optional bandwidth booster.

There are 5G bands in the ~700MHz bandwidth (that was recovered by switching to more efficient encoding for DTV) that could be used that are even lower than 2G that is around 900MHz.

They could (and probably will) dismiss 2G for consumer use, but keep some frequencies that are used by operators that provide MTM SIM.

> Give them a reason to switch and they will adopt it - they both ditched their land lines.

I've tried to make my grandma learn how to use a phone to send SMS multiple times and failed. If she uses a mobile phone (rare situation) she uses it as a landline phone, that is type the number that she wants to call, not even using the contacts in the phone. To be fair I had difficulties explaining how to use a cordless landline phone.

Speaking of elderly, there are a lot of them that have dedicated devices that they can use to make emergency calls to registered numbers, that probably use 2G network (some other use even landline). Since these devices are even provided for free by the national healthcare system, I see that there is not much money to spend to upgrade them.

BTW, are we sure that all the smartphone out there support VoLTE? If not, to make phone calls they need to fallback to 3G/2G, it was a common problem not many years ago, with some providers (Iliad) that even started supporting VoLTE like less than 2 years ago...

My Android phone has a feature to not ring unless the number is in my contacts OR they call twice in 15 minutes and my voice mail message tells people to call me twice to reach me. The scammers never do.

Wow, I have about 2 or 3 per year. It's always a robot voice telling me the police is looking for me.

Yes they do? Just like WiFi needs way more channels than it has available to work well inside a Stadium, which is why it doesn't work well inside a stadium or airport at all. Heck, I would never even bother trying WiFi in such a setting - between 5G and WiFi, 5G is much better designed for handling such dense cells.

It's important to note that "they" are not trying to fix calls, they are trying to improve cellular connectivity. Getting calls to work is easy, and traditional calls have become a niche use of smartphones. Many already have excellent internet connectivity on their devices and would like that to just remain seamlessly available in all situations rather than having to switch technologies and maintain multiple subscriptions.

While I'm quite happy with my fiber at home, I only really use WiFi on my phone at home is to access local devices. In other situations, especially in corporate or public settings, WiFi is not only inconvenient but often a way worse and slower experience than just staying on 5G - after all, my phone gets gigabit on 5G with a public IPv6 address, and the latency is pretty good too, which can't be said for overcrowded WiFi and crap enterprise network solutions. If it wasn't for casting, 5G + tailscale would alleviate most needs to WiFi.

Heck, for the smartphone-native generation it might even seem weird that they need another internet subscription for their home when they pay for on for their phone, "just because" 5G or whatever wasn't allowed to step on a spectrum - a quite literal tax.

(Don't get me wrong, I like my WiFi, but cellular is not the enemy. We just need to hand out more spectrum to both.)

Back in the day, it was better to upscale netflix's 720p to 1080p than to stream 1080p.

But your home NAS should be on ethernet? Who would buy a NAS and then not wire it in??

The point here is that only devices like a TV, mobile, tablet or laptop should be on WiFi and it's pretty hard to notice the difference between say 50Mbps and 500Mbps on any of those except maybe if you are moving files around on your laptop.

> I count approximately twice as many channels available on 6ghz than 5ghz

Isn't this mostly arbitrary? Eg what frequency range one defines channels over and thus how many channels? Eg in the wikipedia link that "6GHz" goes up to ~7.1GHz. Because otherwise channels seem to be more or less spread centered 20MHz apart in each case.

That’s true. I hadn’t realized that 6ghz has 500mhz of extra spectrum over 5ghz and also doesn’t have to contend with DFS.

> 5GHz effectively has 3ish channels, and 6GHz adds another 3-7 to that.

It would be useful if vendors shipped with 40Mhz channels by default.

A 1x1 40Mhz using 802.11ax will give you a max PHY of 287Mbps:

* https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

* https://superuser.com/questions/1619079/what-is-the-maximum-...

Even if you half that, that's (IMHO) probably sufficient for the vast majority of online activities. And if you have a 2x2 client you double it anyway.

> would a fixed line in India typically be above that speed?

My family lives outside of a tier 2 city border, in what used to be farmland in the 90s.

They have Asianet FTTH at 1Gbps, but most of the video/streaming traffic ends at the CDN hosts in the same city.

That CDN push to the edge is why Hotstar is faster to load there - the latency on seeks isn't going around the planet.

WISP can do 1Gbps in 6GHz now, reliably, with Tarana. The technology is staggering.

"Mobile doesn't scale in cities" is the exact reason they need 6Ghz (because higher frequencies enable much higher density of cells, reducing terminals per cell). 6Ghz will penetrate buildings terribly, I agree, but it's honestly just not that simple, for example it's now becoming really common for carriers to be doing in building deployments; shopping centres, sports stadiums, the transit network (e.g 4g in the subway) hospitals, the list goes on. Secondly by lifting terminals off of say 800Mhz or 1.8Ghz band and into 6Ghz outside where you can, you free up capacity on those lower frequency bands that do penetrate buildings or reach weird areas like the middle of a park that has tree cover (or whatever).

5-6Ghz, certainly, lower frequencies do though. This is why T-mobile offers home broadband using their 5G network (which can support up to 1M devices per square km) in the US; they overbuilt, and have many smaller cells with lots of capacity and are undersubscribed, and monetize the remaining capacity using lowest priority fixed broadband.

One could see India deploying the same density compatible infrastructure in the usual "leapfrog" model of skipping lesser technology implementations in this space.

The most efficient way to extract money from people is to sell off the spectrum to the highest bidding rent seeker, I agree.

As for most efficient use of the resource, well, consulting my spectrum analyzer, ISM bands are winning by a mile and we should want more of them.