Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budget unwisely

Re:Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budge... by ocdtrekkie on Monday November 09, 2020 @05:38PM (#25040815)

I guess... but like, that's what Wi-Fi AX is supposed to cater to. Apart from voice traffic, which isn't extreme, it's hard to imagine why cellular (which is carrier-specific) would be preferred over Wi-Fi deployment. If the cell towers are in the facility, they need to provide the fiber backhaul either way.

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Re:Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budge... by cogman10 on Monday November 09, 2020 @06:28PM (#25041237)

The major difference is that for wifi, you need to setup your connection to whatever wifi network is provided. With your cell data service, that happens automatically for you. You don't need to go in and explicitly join some guest network and sign their ToS.

Maybe if there was some "cell->wifi" standard that could happen, but I'm somewhat doubtful about the benefits there. You'd also have to be super careful, for the same reason you wouldn't really want to join a random open network.

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Re:Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budge... by seraphsf on Monday November 09, 2020 @09:17PM (#25042234)

The WiFi industry is working on a new "cell->wifi" standard called OpenRoaming. Pixel phones turned on OpenRoaming support with Android 11.

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Re:Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budge... by lttlrck on Monday November 09, 2020 @08:31PM (#25041979)

LTE WiFi offload takes care of securely transiting voice over untrusted networks (like your home network) to the telcos core network using IPSec.

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Re:Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budge... by Dylan16807 on Monday November 09, 2020 @09:01PM (#25042140)

5G has a bunch of frequencies in the same range as wifi, too. They can handle a good chunk of density.

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Re:Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budge... by reaperducer on Monday November 09, 2020 @05:43PM (#25040865)

Doesn't 5G have the ability to be carrier agnostic, so that multiple carriers can be on the same antennae? Or am I sniffing glue again?

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Re:Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budge... by cogman10 on Monday November 09, 2020 @06:33PM (#25041272)

Nope, carriers buy broadcasting bands. Phones are designed to be able to take in and process the various frequencies that all the carriers use.

Whenever there is a bandwidth auction, you'll have the potential of your phones not having access to your new network's bands.

How we've been handling this is that new purchases often go to newer tech. However, there has been some cannibalism of really old bands (For example, taking a 2g band and turning it into a 5g band). That happens per carrier.

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Re:Pixel 5 review: Google spends its bill-of-materials budge... by Dylan16807 on Monday November 09, 2020 @09:10PM (#25042198)

3G is already in the process of being shut down.

Which makes it a little annoying how long they kept making phones that had 4G support but still depended on 3G for calls. Still, it seems like we're on track to get those bands reclaimed at a significantly better pace than 2G.

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