Connectivity
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Introduction
There are two different approaches how decentralisation can increase in connectivity
Municipal/(Enterprise) model
Crowdsourced approach
Earlier we discussed how to build indoor coverage with neutral host and how important indoor is as most people already live in cities and spend most of the waking hours indoors. That’s an example where property developers could be the driving force organising most of the world’s connectivity and how existing (and new) operators could tap into that resource.
But that’s not all.
Municipal model
The municipal model can be built around light poles. Wherever there are people in densely populated areas, municipalities raise light poles to increase security and safety for people. Light poles can act as small towers hosting antennas and they already have a supply of electricity. Light poles are also structures that can be used to attach solar panels to reduce or eliminate need for external power. And they can be used to house different sensors for air quality, temperature, cloud and lighting detection, even as platforms for drones if suitable use cases are found with charging stations for those drones.
The service being offered can be WiFi or some recent generation of mobile networks like 4G or 5G.
The data still needs to be transported from the light pole forward towards network core. This connection is called the backhaul. 5G has defined self-backhauling where the same spectrum is used for communicating with mobile devices and between base stations to transmit data. As alternative microwave links can be used for building meshes where small base stations forward traffic between light poles. This means that the data amounts aggregate as data flows towards destination where it finally is routed to an optical high-capacity connection.
The networks created thus can cover the whole city (wherever street lightning and other city fixtures are) and provide a networks carrying both consumer data and measurements from sensors to the city. It does not necessarily have to be the only network and street lights naturally can house radio equipment from multiple vendors either in same or different poles.
This way cities can build a network for themselves and offer own employees free calls and data. In addition, it allows cities to fully take advantage of placing sensors, automation and analytics (smart city concepts) as there no longer is need to think about subscription costs. Sensors can be placed wherever they make sense to help new services or lower costs for existing services.
Cities can offer this capacity via neutral host architecture to several commercial carriers. Users would in these cases select operators based on additional services, pricing and customer service type of issues, not on network quality.
The designs of street light structures should be open sourced so any other municipality can pick them up, localise and start manufacturing locally.
Another street fixture is the bus/tram stop that can also be made from an open design, have solar powered info tables, embedded base station and a variety of sensors (air quality, temperature, humidity, lighting detector and such).
Apart city infrastructures, one possible trend is to embed connectivity into all kinds of different structures. For example, a small mobile base station can be designed as part of a health clinic, school, café, store or into residential buildings. The builder can use this to differentiate their product, customers get good coverage.
These two things together can provide connectivity to relatively dense areas both outdoors and inside (real estate owners indoors and cities outdoor in densely populated areas). How about elsewhere?
Crowdsourced model
The second option is a crowdsourced network and it makes perfect sense in less dense areas (but not restricted to them, of course)
Here individuals and enterprises purchase the needed telecommunications kits, install and operate them themselves. Sharing of the network to other users and visitors will be incentivised with rewards (tokens for example). If you share your network, you will get additional income from passers-by and the project/DAO that you join will grant you governance tokens (voting rights). These tokens you can use to steer the future development, hold passively waiting for price increases or cash-in when you need additional funds.
Private enterprises want to restrict access to own staff in most cases. In in purely private network case, owner might want to charge subcontracts and even visitors. In a modern airport for example there are dozens of different companies with employees on site. Visitors could be workers temporarily building extensions, truck drivers etc. A private network can white-list some users and give them a different charging policy (own staff use for free, subcontracts pay a set fee).
Recently people have started calling this model of building and maintaining infrastructure as decentralised physical infrastructure (DePIN).
Radio resources are limited, if two base stations talk on the same frequency at the same time nearby, this causes interference and poor reception for users. Traditionally this was solved by regulation where nationwide licenses were sold or given to a few operators leading to oligopolies. Trend is now towards less regulation. For example, by making some frequency bands freely available or via a light process (upcoming unlicensed 5G and CBRS in the USA as examples), and by regulators being more accepting towards geographically limited licenses to enterprises or communities. This may well lead to operators being more open to sub-licensing their frequencies (better get some revenue than none at all in areas where we cannot operate profitably).
When multiple radio transmitters are close to each other on the same frequency, they cause interference. Today operators use centralised services to analyse the cause and recommend parameter changes for solving (adjusting power levels, center frequencies and other technical parameters). Such a system is called organising networks. To foster crowdsourced connectivity build-up, the public side could offer this as a service to any micro-operator whether using licensed or unlicensed bands. This could be a free service or charged at some low rate. Or DePIN projects could finance this as an own industry activity (somewhat wishful thinking here).
These options are not mutually exclusive. Cities can set up their own neutral host networks and at the same time individuals and enterprises can build partially overlapping coverage with private networks. These crowdsourced nets can be private, open to select parties or allow visitor subscriptions.