DocAndersen
One of the things I often do is peak over the horizon at technology. I have talked a few times about the reality of 5g. Many pundits are calling it the 4th industrial revolution, and for the most part, it may be. It however also creates a much greater potential of the reality of what is called the digital divide.
What is the digital divide? It is the delta between people that have access, in fact, and people that don’t have access today. In any case, it is due to location (in the US, rural customers often lag far behind urban customers for internet speeds). It is also an issue of the reality of implementation.
What does the reality of implementation mean? It is the reality of how a nation or country deployed both land and cellular technology. South Korea and the US were leaders in the implementation of fiber optic cables. In the new world of 5g, those fiber optic cables become the make or break.
Have them in your country today, then 5g is fairly straight forward.
Don’t have them in your country, and 5g is a little harder.
The digital divide is an issue that is going to impact people but not as much as many of the futurists are saying.
LTE or long term evolution, sometimes called 4g, in particular, 4g LTE Advanced has a lot more bandwidth overall than people realize.
The issue of the digital divide is more going to be what are you doing with the device and what do you need to know.
4g LTE may be good enough for 90% of what people need from bandwidth.
But envy is a horrible thing!
The reality of what the digital divide may become is that countries that have Fiber Backbones in their networks are going to move to 5g reasonable quickly (by 2024). Other countries will move slower as they have two projects, Fiber, and 5g, to implement.
But, removing envy, 4g LTE is enough for most needs.
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Question of
have you heard the term digital divide?
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Yes
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No
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Question of
Are you comfortable with the term Digital Divide?
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Yes
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No
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Question of
Korea, the US and some parts of Europe are already experiencing 5g did you know that?
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Yes
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No
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China is already working on 6G, which is why tariffs have been placed on them.
um
no.
everyone is working on 6g. But until 5g is finalized, no one is working on anything other than 5g+
the tariffs on Chinese technology companies is wholly because of their IP theft and recently malware on various components they have shipped.
I’ve never heard of the digital divide and even 5g is not the clearest thing to me even though you already wrote about it if I remember correctly
it is all about those who have access to the internet (without restriction) at a high speed and those who do not
I have unlimited internet access, my friend
that is good, it makes a huge difference!
Q: have you heard the term digital divide?
Yes (3 votes) – 30%
No (7 votes) – 70%
Q: Are you comfortable with the term Digital Divide?
Yes (8 votes) – 89%
No (1 votes) – 11%
Q: Korea, the US and some parts of Europe are already experiencing 5g did you know that?
Yes (5 votes) – 50%
No (5 votes) – 50%
today’s post will further explain the digital divide!
India may have a different problem. Telecom industry has become sick offl ate with just 3 active players. Even they are not doing well. So who would have the courage to commit the investments needed for 5g?
India has much of the infrastructure so you may be ok in that respect. I suspect Orange or one of the other big EU telcos will slowly move into India.
Vodafone is already there but is neck deep in debts.
Vodaphone is there because it is deep in debt. sad. but true.
We are getting fibre optic cables installed in our place soon, should have ours installed next year.
NZ has a pretty modern infrastructure and honestly as an Island, 5g should be pretty quickly available.
Yes, well it is still continuing to be installed in various places.
You need fiber to replace the copper lines, for effective 5g. Literally 5g can be 5, 6 or even more times faster than either your existing network (home) or what you have on your phone.
Because of that you need the faster speed of light network (fiber).
We certainly do Doc, New Zealand is really behind in technology
that is the part I am going to talk about today, (not NZ specifically) but in general the concept of population density.
We do have fiber optic internet in our area, but it is not everywhere.
if you have fiber, 5g is possible. the fiber network is critical for the Telecos to deploy 5g.
That is very interesting and thank you for sharing the information,
you are most welcome! Thanks for reading!
since the US is so large and there are still vast areas of emptiness, setting up a fiber optic backbone is going to be expensive and in some areas mostly useless…
Today the backbones are in place (fiber) but, sadly as you point out there are vast areas that are not currently easily gotten to. The reality of the networks today is you are more likely to not get 5g in many western US locations today.
You always bring up the tough questions pal!!!
the east coast has a more evenly distributed population density, so running a fiber optic backbone makes sense there
you want a huge one between LA and SF, but between SF and Seattle, there’s a lot of nothing going on for a long time…
Seattle, though based on the reality of economics, has massive connections!
where the issues are, Montana, middle of Idaho, eastern Washington.
Colorado west of Denver.
Seattle needs something fat, but they could share with Vancouver. of course, that backbone needs to connect somewhere…
It does you would find a spider web (spider in Seattle) but the issue for some places is the dearth of LTE service.
The newest Satellite connections are 25 down, 5 up. Which is not bad (Gb). The digital device is still a huge issue though.
honestly, dish isn’t a bad solution for lots of places
The Hughes solution when adding in their commercial router (much more per month) is actually impressive.
small nations can do a centralized network, but the large ones are going to have to get creative
that having been said, the trans Atlantic cables are impressive!
if you think about countries (small) that didn’t integrate a copper telephone network it becomes interesting. In part because of the reality of cost (copper underground replaced with fiber is cheaper than no copper trenching and place a new cable).
The underwater cables are really interesting. If you consider it takes around 7 hours to fly from DC to Lisbon, that cable only ads about 10 MS of latency.
fiber optics transmit data at the speed of light. it might take longer to encapsulate and unpack then it does to send…
it does although the mux operates at the speed of light as well. It is more the front end and back end pack routing that takes time.
which is pretty damn cool when the network stack is the bottleneck
Honestly, when you consider Software Defined Networks (SDN) i wonder where the real bottleneck will end up.
if I can, intelligently take users’ applications and break them into critical, important and stop looking at web sites like facebook traffic what impact will that have on tomorrow?
not to mention smart routers using some sort of AI to keep the packets flowing
I have a complete design for a fully integrated network of tomorrow. Smart routers, smart applications – a bright future.
If it’s not for you, I wouldn’t know much about technology. I still don’t understand everything, but at least I know what I don’t know, haha.
you honor me with kind words! Thank you so much!
In our country, Internet speed is up to the operator. Also optical cable. I have an operator who has “wiring” through an optical cable.
In the US AT&T just lost a huge lawsuit about that very issue. It is ok to sell limited internet at a reduced price. It is not ok to sell unlimited internet and then limit it!
In Bulgaria, the main telecom started to build DSL lines, while smaller local operators switched directly to LAN.
This has given a very strong impetus to the larger cities for internet use.
Gradually operators began to cover the smaller settlements, which ranks us 20th place out of 108 countries monitored with an average internet connection speed of 15.6 Mbps.
that is not bad (average) but sadly DSL is copper not fiber…
These are events from nearly 10 years ago.
I have been using optics in my home for 2 years, but not everywhere is possible.
However, for a country with this relief and low population density in small settlements, we have good coverage.
the issue is the aging copper (DSL, and traditional telephone service). Over time as that is replaced, 5g is possible!
what is also interesting my friend is population density. I am covering that part today in my post!
Terrain relief is also not to be ignored!
In the Balkans, more than 1/2 are mountains, and small settlements are there! It is difficult to penetrate 4G now, and facilities are currently being built for 5G.
5g today does not do well with physical objects like windows, and walls. The mountains are much bigger!!!
Thank you for this informative post and I hope that Israel will also be at the forefront of the Digital Divide and get the 5g quickly, but that might mean that I would have to buy a new phone much more quickly, So , . . wait a bit. . .
It should be, the reality of 5g is national infrastructure. Israel has a newer more modern infrastructure so should move pretty fast.