5G

Mobile industry moves ahead, but mobile trade show backslides

15 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Ten years ago this week, I went to what was then the CTIA MobileCon show in San Francisco for the first time, and began this blog. My first post was about an app that turned a smart phone into a mobile hotspot – an unremarkable standard feature now, but back then it was controversial.

Carriers – particularly AT&T, which had an early lock on the iPhone market – were dead set against it. Networks were a mix of 2G and 3G technology, and capacity was severely constrained, compared to today’s 4G infrastructure.… More

5g, of a sort, coming to “parts of” two Californian cities in October

13 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Verizon grabbed what media spotlight was shining yesterday at the opening of the second Mobile World Congress Americas show in Los Angeles. Its announcement that it would be first to market with 5G fixed wireless service wasn’t a surprise – it’s been talking about it for months – but putting a price tag and a launch date on it makes it much more real. Whether it’s really a big deal or not is a matter of how you look at it.… More

U.S. mobile capacity still trailing demand

28 April 2018 by Steve Blum
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U.S. mobile network speeds dropped during 2017 when operators went all in with unlimited data plans, according to an analysis done by OpenSignal, a London-based mobile metrics consultancy. Carriers responded well, although speeds weren’t back up to pre-unlimited levels. But you can forget about mobile as a replacement for wireline service.

In the first half of 2017, AT&T and Verizon responded to competition from T-Mobile and Sprint and went back to offering unlimited data plans.… More

Truth is the first casualty of small cell deployments

5 March 2018 by Steve Blum
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Mobile broadband companies are increasingly getting it when it comes to aesthetics, but pledges made on the front end aren’t always fulfilled by construction and operations staff or backed up by management. Wireless lobbyists and public relations people understand that they need to speak the right words to massage away concerns about how small cell installations will look as they proliferate along urban and suburban streets. But those oh-so-sincere promises, accompanied by beautifully rendered conceptual drawings, don’t always survive the descent into contract language, let alone appear on poles.… More

Self driving cars will need wireless broadband, but not for heavy duty computing

21 February 2018 by Steve Blum
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There will be a flood of bits swirling through self driving cars, and virtually all of that data will be processed by onboard computers, even where 5G networks are deployed.

“Autonomous vehicles are software defined”, said Deepu Talla, vice president of autonomous machines at Nvidia, a high end chip maker, speaking at CES. That software will run on onboard computers, and won’t be processed served from the cloud via mobile broadband networks, he said. There are four reasons for that:

  1. Latency.
… More

The planning-optional Trump administration has no plan to nationalise U.S. telecoms

30 January 2018 by Steve Blum
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The proposal to build a national, federally owned and operated 5G network grabbed a lot of attention early yesterday morning – it was a better wake-up jolt than a double espresso – but as the day went on it became clear that it was an out of the box analytical exercise by low level staff and not an actual plan. Axios broke the news on Sunday night, posting a slide deck and white paper prepared by national security staff that made the argument for clearing off 500 MHz of spectrum in the 4 GHz range and deploying a coast-to-coast, made-in-America 5G network that’s presumably more secure than off the shelf infrastructure made abroad.… More

Is it time for mobile carriers to scrap unlimited plans and bring back caps?

28 January 2018 by Steve Blum
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Pricing has a major impact on mobile data usage, and when marginal bits are free – as with unlimited plans – traffic jumps significantly. That’s the conclusion of a study by NPD Group, a market research firm that covers a number of industries, including telecommunications.

Subscribers with unlimited plans use 67% more mobile data than subs who have caps. Interestingly, though, people with capped plans consume 8% more data overall, when WiFi offloading is factored in.… More

$351 billion U.S. consumer tech 2018 forecast built on broadband

8 January 2018 by Steve Blum
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Source: Consumer Technology Association, 7 January 2018. Click for the full presentation.

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) predicts that connectivity, particularly via mobile networks, will fuel industry growth, with total U.S. retail sales hitting $351 billion in 2018, up 3.9% from last year. .
Traditional consumer hardware categories are flat or declining, while connected devices and services are booming – for example “smart speakers”, which are tied to artificially intelligent, voice recognition services such as Amazon’s Alexa, are predicted to hit $3.8 billion in 2018, a 93% increase.… More

Verizon's Sacramento 5G deal is about R&D and politics now, mobile service later

28 December 2017 by Steve Blum
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The City of Sacramento’s 5G deployment deal with Verizon will expand the broadband service choices consumers have by a little bit, and pave the way for faster mobile service in the future.

The deal allows Verizon to use city assets to install what will initially be an experimental 5G network that’ll provide fixed service, presumably into homes and businesses, in competition with AT&T and Comcast. But it’s immediate value is as a development project, with technical and political benefits.… More

5G now a matter of national security, Trump administration decides

26 December 2017 by Steve Blum
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Telecommunications is one of the sorts of infrastructure that the Trump administration wants to improve, but its interest seems limited to upgrading wireless infrastructure for eventual 5G service. That support might only include regulatory reform, particularly federal preemption of state and local laws and property rights, rather than money.

It’s hard to tell exactly what the Trump administration means when it puts out statements about spending plans, telecommunications or otherwise. And it’s impossible to know what congress will ultimately do.… More