What’s the opposite of a NIMBY?
How about IMBYP...
In My Back Yard, Please!
If EE was being its normal hype-filled self, it would call its latest mobile trial in Cumbria 5G. Its restraint is admirable – and the technology even more so. Putting up cell sites is one way of solving rural mobile not-spots, but getting data from those sites back to the network is an increasingly thorny problem. Building …
When you're over two miles from the nearest exchange (or even cabinet) 2mbit is good going, so anything that provides more bandwidth than that is a real bonus.
Plus of course there's the bonus of usable mobile reception when you're out and about (and for when Openreach take weeks/months to replace downed overhead lines)
Sounds like a good idea, but...
one of the problems in many rural areas isn't so much the lack of coverage, but the lack of strong signals. Many people in rural areas live in lovely old houses, with thick stone walls (mine are 18 ins thick!), and small windows. There may well be mobile coverage on the map, but not once you go indoors, so landlines rule. I also need two wifi repeaters to enable coverage throughout the house. Will someone please come up with a useable solution to this? I suspect even a femtocell may not work!
This article talks about four or five hops, but says nothing about the number of nodes.
Over at ThinkBroadband the ever-reliable MrSaffron says "The area covered by this initial trial is 0.5 square miles with three or four antenna"
Four hops doesn't sound very plausible with three nodes (I make that two hops, probably).
So, which is it ?
Still, kudos to EE for having a go.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/6737-ee-starts-new-trial-with-mesh-technology-for-rural-broadband.html
For additional boxes, I would imagine that when they fire up and connect, they need to register with the gateway box so that they can be establish some form of IPSec tunnel between them. Then there will probably be a proprietary handshake or two to set up the link - perhaps over the daisy chain of site, or perhaps direct, but nonetheless there will be plenty of authentication, possibly also against a list of device serial numbers that are expected to be installed.
None of the above is much different to the macro network infrastructure.
At the end of the day, GCHQ heavies can still lean on the operator to give them access - whether via a Legal Intercept gateway, or one of those mysterious black boxes that do pukka DPI
When I ventured from not-very-yokel Surrey up to slightly-less-yokel London a few weeks ago I was amazed to see a symbol on my phone that looked like the number three followed by the letter 'G'. Although this mysterious sigil was something I had heard of, as an EE customer outside of the M25 I had never seen any evidence of its existence.
As the saying goes: "Everything Everywhere except for phone signal in your phone."