About to head off to bed but thought I might as well update my blog before doing so. I’m in the process of selling off the Pixel 4 XL – tried TradeMe and that didn’t work so I’m going to find another way and if that doesn’t work then I’ll give it to my mum as a late Christmas/early birthday present. Don’t get my wrong, it is a great phone and all but someone like me who is heavily invested into the iCloud ecosystem so using an iPhone is pretty much an inevitable.
Oh, and the whole hype about 5G is giving me a good laugh – been following people on twitter who regularly test the latest and greatest technology – the net result? 5G is marginally better than 4G with 5G coverage only really present in built up big cities such as the Wellington CBD. As I’ve noted on an Arstechnica reply I made a while ago, the focus that the carriers in NZ are using it for is in the area of delivering broadband as an alternative to fibre/ADSL/VDSL. At the moment RSP (retail service providers) pay Chorus (or a local fibre company like Enable Networks, Northpower etc) where as the big three want to move as many of their customers onto their wireless network thus leaving business and high demand users on fibre – increased margins and higher profits so the net result is the they see 5G as a way of achieving that.
When it comes to Spark their big obstacle has been their reliance on Huawei which has come under scrutiny from the security services so in the end they had to settle for using Nokia’s own 5G solution (link). Reading through that press release the part that interested me was:
Nokia will also deploy other products and services from across its end-to-end portfolio including digital design and deployment services.
Which indicates that although Nokia is providing the infrastructure for 5G they will also provide a lot more equipment going into the future which raises the question whether we’re going to be seeing Spark move over to a Nokia completing and adopting their SingleRAN solution. 2 Degrees Mobile is another unknown as well because they too are heavily dependent on Huawei but has less cash flow than the big players which make me wonder what their plan is going froward given that Huawei equipment tends to be pretty damn competitive in terms of pricing.
Ubiquiti has released the UniFi Dream Machine Pro but it hasn’t arrived in New Zealand yet but when it does I’m going to replace my USG, UniFi Cloud Key and switch with it but there is no great urgency since the setup that I have is already doing a pretty good job. I have heard rumours that the UDM (UniFi Dream Machine) was going to be ported to the USG but I guess we’ll need to wait and see.
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