They are giving you a core and a RAN (Radio Access Network). The RAN uses “lightly licensed spectrum,” (CBRS in the US), which I believe is supported in newer iPhones.

That’s enough to make bars appear on your phone. What’s missing is the IMS, which adds traditional calling, voicemail, SMS, etc. However, FaceTime, iMessage, etc. will all work.

Unsure. But private LTE is already a thing where you can install your own towers onprem and configure your devices to connect to those towers instead of the ones of your standard AT&T provider (or whatever). I don't think there's any magic voodoo involved. I assume there's a way to configure 5G capable devices to connect to some local physical network you set up at a factory.

I don't expect this is for telephony, but rather a faster (I guess it's faster...) wifi. But who knows. Maybe if you install your own telephony servers or whatever you could call people on that network. Unsure anyone would care about that unrealistic usecase.

Faster and more robust for the use case than wifi, I imagine. The wifi spec isn't really optimized for large-scale mesh networks, while this is precisely the use-case 5g was developed for.

Can you share a reference showing the support for mesh in 5G (large scale or not)? As in, the equivalent of IEEE 802.11s for WiFi? I can't find anything about that.

Or did you actually mean "cellular"? Mesh indicates a deployment where not all access points have a backbone connection. Cellular indicates a deployment where all access points have a backbone connection.

It can be either. You can have multiple antennas pointing to a single Base station or each antennas having their own base station. It all depends on the use case. Challenge is when you go from Home to Roaming and vice versa as the handsoff isn't ideal but this'll improve

Benefit is the cost for enterprises. You're paying for bandwidth which'll be much lower than the regular usage to telcos. You're however limited to data usage on this network and this focuses mostly on data

No, this is for private networks with lots of wirelessly connected devices where using Wi-Fi is not ideal (say, a building with a lot of 24/7 cameras). I cannot say for certain, but it’s unlikely Amazon would be interfacing with major telephone carriers given that 1) they are using low power radio units and 2) they are using unlicensed spectrum.

You're right and the biggest benefit is to companies with strictly using iOT

Starting from LTE, there's no distinction in the network level between data and voice or SMS, it's all just IP traffic. The voice call protocol is called VoLTE. As long as your handset can reach the VoLTE infrastructure via IP, you can make and receive calls.

This actually works already over WiFi too and that's called VoWiFi. That does not support handovers between networks though, so it is not that convenient. Specifically it means that if you walk outside the WiFI network, your call will drop. I suppose the different branding is due to this quality aspect, as there's no difference in the protocol.

To have VoLTE or VoNR (the 5G version) the SIP based software handling your calls needs to interact directly with the software stack managed by the operator via a bunch of other telco protocols. I don't think you will be able to support "regular" calls/SMS without if it is not supported by amazon.

looks like it might be possible?

https://open5gs.org/open5gs/docs/tutorial/02-VoLTE-setup/

Basically they give you a few Wi-Fi access points and a central server PC, but instead of those being Wi-Fi and standalone, it’s 5G and cloud controlled as should be in late 2021.

And unlocked phone should work provided it supports required frequency(tricky) and voice calls should be possible, but it probably can’t readily connect to PSTN and given actual “1-555-1234567” numbers, or make 911 calls for that matter. If you’re going to have Asterisk SIP VoIP server running on-prem, that is probably supported.

They wouldn't allow voice call but yes you can do OTT apps like Signal , Whatsapp etc.