Monthly Archives: March 2019

Another Rural Wireless Provider?

T-Mobile announced the start of a trial for a fixed wireless broadband product using LTE. The product is being marketed as “T-Mobile Home Internet”. The company will offer the product by invitation only to some existing T-Mobile cellular customers in “rural and underserved areas”. The company says they might connect as many as 50,000 customers this year. The company is marketing the product as 50 Mbps broadband, with a monthly price of $50 and no data cap. The company warns that speeds may be curtailed during times of network congestion.

The company further says that their ultimate goal is to offer speeds of up to 100 Mbps, but only if they are allowed to merge with Sprint and gain access to Sprint’s huge inventory of mid-range spectrum. They said the combination of the two companies would enable them to cover as many as 9.5 million homes with 100 Mbps broadband in about half of US zip codes.

There are positive aspects the planned deployment, but also a number of issues that make me skeptical. One positive aspect is that some of the spectrum used for LTE can better pass through trees compared to the spectrum used for the fixed wireless technology that is being widely deployed in the open plains and prairies of the Midwest and West. This opens up the possibility of bringing some wireless broadband to places like Appalachia – with the caveat that heavy woods are still going to slow down data speeds. It’s worth noting that this is still a line-of-sight technology and fixed LTE will be blocked by hills or other physical impediments.

The other positive aspect of the announced product is the price and lack of a data cap. Contrast this to the AT&T fixed LTE product that has a price as high as $70 along with a stingy 160 GB monthly cap, and with overage charges that can bring the AT&T price up to $200 per month.

I am skeptical of a number of the claims made or implied by the announcement. The primary concern is download speeds. Fixed LTE will be the same as any other fixed wireless product and speeds will decrease with the distance of a customer from the serving tower. In rural America distances can mount up quickly. LTE broadband is similar to rural cellular voice and works best where customers can get 4 or 5 bars. Anybody living in rural America understands that there are a lot more places with 1 or 2 bars of signal strength than of 4 or 5 bars.

The 50 Mbps advertised speed is clearly an ‘up-to’ speed and in rural America it’s doubtful that anybody other than those who live under a tower could actually get that much speed. This is one of the few times when I’ve seen AT&T advertise truthfully and they market their LTE product as delivering at least 10 Mbps speed. I’ve read numerous online reviews of the AT&T product and the typical speeds reported by customers range between 10 Mbps and 25 Mbps, with only a few lucky customers claiming speeds faster than that.

The online reviews of the AT&T LTE product also indicate that signal strength is heavily influenced by rain and can completely disappear during a downpour. Perhaps even more concerning are reports that in some cases speeds remain slow after a rain due to wet leaves on trees that must be scattering the signal.

Another concern is that T-Mobile is touting this as a solution for underserved rural America.  T-Mobile has far less presence in rural America than AT&T and Verizon and is on fewer rural cellular towers. This is evidenced by their claim that even after a merger with Sprint they’d only be seeing 9.5 million passings – that’s really small coverage for a nationwide cellular network. I’m a bit skeptical that T-Mobile will invest in connecting to more rural towers just to offer this product – the cost of backhaul to rural towers often makes for a lousy business case.

The claim also says that the product will have some aspects of both 4G and 5G. I’ve talked to several wireless engineers who have told me that they can’t see any particular advantage for 5G over 4G when deploying as fixed wireless. A carrier already opens up the available data path fully with 4G to reach a customer and 5G can’t make the spectrum perform any better. I’d love to hear from anybody who can tell me how 5G would enhance this particular application. This might be a case where the 5G term is tossed in for the benefit of politicians and marketing.

Finally, this is clearly a ploy to keep pushing for the merger with Sprint. The claim of the combined companies being able to offer 100 Mbps rural broadband has even more holes than the arguments for achieving 50 Mbps. However, Sprint does have a larger rural presence on rural towers today than T-Mobile, although I think the Sprint towers are already counted in the 9.5 million passings claim.

But putting aside all my skepticism, it would be great if T-Mobile can bring broadband to any rural customers that otherwise wouldn’t have it. Even should they not achieve the full 50 Mbps claim, many rural homes would be thrilled to get speeds at half that level. A wireless product with no data caps would also be a welcomed product. The timing of the announcement is clearly aimed at promoting the merger process with Sprint and I hope the company’s deployment plans don’t evaporate if the merger doesn’t happen.

What Are Small Cells?

By far the most confusing industry term that is widely used today is ‘small cell’. I see at least a couple of different articles every day talking about some aspect of small cell deployment. What becomes quickly clear after reading a few such articles is that the small cell terminology is being used to describe a number of different technologies.

A lot of the blame for this confusion comes from the CTIA, the industry group that representing the large cellular carriers. As part of lobbying the FCC last year to get the ruling that allows the carriers to deploy devices in the public rights-of-way the CTIA constantly characterized small cell devices to be about the size of pizza boxes. In reality, there are devices that range from the size of a pizza box up to devices the size of dorm refrigerators.

There are a number of different kinds of deployments all being referred to as small cells. The term small cell brings to mind the idea of devices hung on poles that perform the same functions as the big cellular towers. Fully functional pole-mounted cellular sites are not small devices. The FCC set a limit for a pole-mounted small cell to be no larger than 28 cubic feet, and a cell tower replacement device will use most of that allotted space. Additionally, a full cell tower replacement device generally requires a sizable box of electronics and power supply that sits on the ground – often in cabinets the size of the traditional corner mailbox.

These cell-tower replacements are the devices that nobody wants in front of their house. They are large and can be an eyesore. The cabinets on the ground can block the sidewalk – although lately the carriers have been getting smarter and are putting the electronics in an underground vault. These are the big ‘small cell’ devices that are causing safety concerns for line technicians from other utilities that have to worry about working around the devices to fix storm damage.

Then there are the devices that actually are the size of pizza boxes. While they are being called small cells just like to giant boxes, I would better classify these smaller devices as cellular repeaters. These smaller devices re-originate cellular signals to boost coverage in cellular dead spots. I happen to live in a hilly city and I would love to see more of these devices. Cellular coverage here varies widely block by block according to line-of-sight to the big cellular towers. Cellular carriers can boost coverage in a neighborhood by placing one of these devices within sight of a large tower and then beaming from there to cover the dead spots.

If you look at the industry vendor web sites they claim shipment of millions of small cell sites last year. It turns out that 95% of these ‘small cell’ devices are indoor cellular boosters. Landlords deploy these in office buildings, apartment buildings and other places where cellular coverage is poor. Perhaps the best terminology to describe these devices is a cellular offload device that relieves traffic on cell sites. The indoor units use cellular frequencies to communicate with cellphones but then dump cellular data and voice traffic onto the broadband connection of the landlord. It turns out in urban downtowns that 90% plus of cellular usage is done indoors, and these devices help to meet urban demand cellular without the hassle of trying to communicate through the walls of larger buildings.

The next use of the term small cell is for the devices that Verizon recently used to test wireless broadband in a few test markets. These devices have nothing to do with cellular traffic and would best be described as wireless broadband loops. Verizon is using millimeter wave spectrum to beam broadband connections for a thousand feet or so from the pole-mounted devices.

The general public doesn’t understand the wide array of different wireless devices that are being deployed. The truly cellular devices, for now, are all 4G devices that are being used by the cellular carriers to meet the rapidly-growing demand for cellular data. The industry term for this is densification and the carriers are deploying full cell-tower substitute devices or neighborhood repeaters to try to relieve the pressure on the big cellular towers. These purely-cellular devices will eventually handle 5G when it is rolled out over the next decade.

The real confusion I see is that most people now equate ‘small cell’ with fast data. I’ve talked to several cities recently who thought that requests for small cell attachments mean they are going to get gigabit broadband. Instead, almost every request for a small cell site today is for the purpose of beefing up the 4G networks. These extra devices aren’t going to increase 4G data speeds, aren’t bringing 5G and are definitely not intended to beam broadband into people’s homes. These small cells are being deployed to divvy up the cellular traffic to relieve overloaded cellular networks.

Reality Pricing Coming for Online Video

I’ve been a cord cutter for many years and over the last few years, I’ve tried the various vMVPDs that offer channel line-ups that somewhat mimic traditional cable TV. I’ve tried Sling TV, DirecTV Now and Playstation Vue. In every case I’ve always scratched my head wondering how these products could offer prices that are lower than the wholesale price of the content from programmers. There are only two possibilities – either these companies have been setting low prices to gain market share or they had been able to negotiate far better deals for content than the rest of the industry.

Of course, the answer is that they’ve been subsidizing these products. And Wall Street is now pressuring these companies to end the subsidies and become profitable. There is probably no better example of this than AT&T’s DirecTV Now service. When DirecTV Now launched it carried a price tag of $35 per month for about a hundred channels of programming. The low price was clearly set as a reaction to a similarly low price from Sling TV which was the first big successful vMVPD.

Both companies offered line-ups including the channels that most households watch. This included the high-price programming from ESPN and numerous other quality networks. The initial pricing was crazy – a similar package on traditional cable was priced at $60 – $70.

The low pricing has worked for DirectTV Now. They are getting close to surpassing the Sling TV in subscribers. AT&T has featured DirecTV Now in its advertising and has been shuttling customers from the satellite-based DirecTV to the online product.

But AT&T company just got realistic with the product. They have collapsed from four options down to two options now priced at $50 and $70 per month. The company got ready for this shift by eliminating special promotional prices in the fourth quarter of last year. They had roughly half a million customers who were paying even less than their published low prices. When AT&T raised the rates they immediately lost over half of those promotional customers.

Not only are prices rising, but the company has significantly trimmed the channel counts. The new $50 package will have only about 40 channels while the $70 package will have 50 channels. It’s worth noting that both packages now include HBO, which is the flagship AT&T product. HBO is by far the most expensive programming in the industry and AT&T has now reconfigured DirecTV Now to be HBO plus other premium channels.

The new prices are realistic and also include a profit margin. It will be interesting to see how the DirecTV Now customer base reacts to such a drastic change. I’m sure many of them will flee to cheaper alternatives. But the company may also attract customers that subscribe directly to HBO to upgrade.

The big question is if there will be cheaper alternatives? The online industry has been around long enough that it is now out of its infancy and investors are starting to expect profits from any company in this space. The new realistic pricing by AT&T is likely to drive the other online programmers to also get more realistic.

These price increases have ramifications for cord-cutting. It’s been easy to justify cutting the cord when you could ditch a $70 per month traditional cable product for a $35 online one that has the channels you most watch. But there is less allure from going online when the alternative choice is just as expensive as the traditional one. There is always going to be some savings from jumping online – if nothing else customers can escape the exorbitant fees for renting a settop box.

It’s clear that AT&T is counting on HBO as the allure for its online offering. That product is available in a number of places on the web for a monthly rate of $15, so including that in the $50 and $70 product still distinguishes DirecTV Now from the other vMVPD providers.

What is clear by this move is that we are approaching the time when companies are willing to eat huge losses to gain online market share. That market share is worthless if customers leave in droves when there is a rate increase. These big companies don’t seem to have fully grasped that there is zero customer loyalty online. Viewers don’t really care who the underlying company is that is carrying their favorite programming – it’s the content they care about. The big cable companies have to break their long history of making decisions like near-monopolies.

Where’s the CAF II Success?

If you’ve read this blog you know I’ve been a big critic of the FCC’s CAF II program that gave over $10 billion in federal subsidies to the biggest telcos to improve rural broadband. My complaint is that the program set the embarrassingly low goal of improving rural broadband to speeds of at least 10/1 Mbps. My complaint is that this money could have done a huge amount of good had it been put up to reverse auction as was done with the leftover customers from this program last year – many ISPs would have used this funding to help to build rural fiber. Instead, the telcos are using the money mostly to upgrade DSL.

While I think the program was ill-conceived and was a giveaway to the big telco lobbyists, I am at least glad that it is improving rural broadband. For a household with no broadband, a 10 Mbps product might provide basic access to broadband services for the first time. We are now into the fifth year of the six-year program, so we ought to be seeing the results of these upgrades. USTelecom just published a blog saying that deployments are ahead of schedule and that CAF II is a quiet success.

The telcos have told the FCC they are largely on track – by the end of 2018 they should have upgraded broadband for at least 60% of the required households. AT&T and Windstream report that they have made at least 60% of the needed upgrades everywhere. Frontier says they are on track in 27 of the 29 states needing upgrades. CenturyLink says they are on track in only 23 of 33 states that are getting CAF II upgrades. According to USTelecom, over 2.1 million households should now be seeing faster speeds.

It’s also worth noting that the CAF II program should improve broadband for many more households that are not covered directly by the program. For example, when upgrading DSL for a CAF II area that surrounds a town, those living in the town should also see better broadband. The secondary benefit of the CAF program is that rural towns should be seeing speeds increasing from 6 Mbps or slower to as fast as 25 Mbps. By now many more millions of households should be seeing faster broadband due to CAF II.

What I find puzzling is that I would expect to see an upward burst of broadband customers for the big telcos because of CAF II. But the numbers aren’t showing that. There were four telcos that accepted more than $1 billion from the program, as follows, and three of them lost broadband customers in 2018:

Funding Households Per Household 2018 Broadband Customers
CenturyLink $3.09 B 1,190,016 $2,593 (262,000)
AT&T $2.96 B 1,265,036 $2,342 (18,000)
Frontier $1.7 B 659,587 $2,578 (203,000)
Windstream $1.07 B 413,345 $2,595 8,400
Total CAF II $10.05 B 4,075,840 $2,467

Windstream is the only telco of the four that gained customers last year. Windstream’s footprint is probably the most rural of the four telcos. We know that every telco is losing the battle for customers in towns where cable companies are increasing speeds on coaxial networks. Windstream seems to be offsetting those losses, and I can conjecture it’s because they have been selling more rural broadband.

AT&T is in a category all by itself. It’s impossible to know how AT&T is faring with CAF II. They are largely implementing CAF II using their cellular network (with the goal of tearing down rural copper). The company has also been deploying fiber past millions of homes and business in urban areas. They are clearly losing the residential broadband battle in urban markets to companies like Comcast and Charter. However, I can tell you anecdotally that AT&T hasn’t given up on urban copper. They have knocked on my door in Asheville, NC at least three times in the last year trying to sell DSL. I have to assume that they are also marketing broadband improvements in rural areas.

CenturyLink and Frontier are clearly bleeding broadband customers and each lost over 200,000 customers just in the last year. I have to wonder how hard these companies are marketing improved rural broadband. Both companies work in urban and suburban markets but also in numerous county seats situated in rural counties. Like every telco they are losing DSL customers in these markets to the cable company competitors.

Just like I have anecdotal evidence that AT&T is still pushing copper I hear stories that say the opposite for CenturyLink and Frontier. I worked in a few rural counties last year where the CAF II upgrades were reported as complete. And yet the communities seemed unaware of the improvements. Local politicians who bear the brunt of complaints from households that want better broadband weren’t aware of any upgrades – which tells me their rural constituents weren’t aware of upgrades.

I honestly don’t know what this all means. I really expected to find more positive evidence of the impact of CAF II. From what I know of rural America, households ought to leap at the opportunity to buy 10/1 Mbps DSL if they’ve had no broadband in the past. Are the upgrades being done but not being followed up with a marketing and public awareness campaign? Are actual upgraded speed not meeting the 10/1 Mbps goal? Are the upgrades really being made as reported to the FCC? We’re perhaps a year and a half away from the completion of CAF II, so I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Cord Cutting is For Real

It’s obvious in looking at the performance of cable companies in 2018 that cord cutting is now for real. The fourth quarter count of cable customers for the largest providers was recently reported by the Leichtman Research Group. These companies represent roughly 95% of the national cable market.

4Q 2018 4Q 2017 Change
Comcast 21,986,000 22,357,000 (371,000) -1.7%
DirecTV 19,222,000 20,458,000 (1,236,000) -6.0%
Charter 16,606,000 16,850,000 (244,000) -1.4%
Dish 9,905,000 11,030,000 (1,125,000) -10.2%
Verizon 4,451,000 4,619,000 (168,000) -3.6%
Cox 4,015,000 4,130,000 (115,000) -2.8%
AT&T 3,704,000 3,657,000 47,000  1.3%
Altice 3,307,500 3,405,500 (98,000) -2.9%
Frontier 838,000    961,000 (123,000) -12.8%
Mediacom 776,000    821,000 (45,000) -5.5%
Cable ONE 326,423    363,888 (37,465) -10.3%
  Total 85,136,923 88,652,388 (3,515,465) -4.0%

I’m thinking back to 2017 when most analysts were predicting perhaps a 2% drop in 2018 in total market share due to cord cutting. Since 2018 is only the second year with real evidence of cord cutting, the 4% loss of total market share demonstrates big changes in customer sentiment.

The big losers are the satellite companies which lost 2,361,000 customers in 2018. These losses are offset a little bit since the satellite companies also have the largest online video services. Dish’s Sling TV added 205,000 customers in 2018 and AT&T’s DirecTV Now added 436,000 – but the net customer loss for these companies is still 1.7 million for the year.

In 2018 Comcast and Charter didn’t fare as poorly as the rest of the industry. However, their smaller loss of cable customers is probably due to the fact that both companies saw more than 5% growth of new broadband customers (2.6 million in total) in 2018, and those new customers undoubtedly are shielding cord cutting losses by older subscribers.

It’s still too early to make any real predictions about the future trajectory for cord cutting. We know that price is a large factor in cord cutting and cable providers are still facing huge price increases in buying programming. That will continue to drive cable prices higher. The big cable companies have done their best to disguise recent price increases by shoving rate increases into local programming or sports programming ‘fees’. However, the public is catching onto that scheme and also can still see that their overall monthly payments are increasing.

It’s starting to look like online programming might cost as much as traditional cable TV. For the last few years there have been alternatives like DirecTV Now, Playstation Vue and Sling TV that have offered the most-watched networks for bargain prices. But the recent big rate increase from DirecTV Now is probably signaling that the days of subsidized online programming are over.

Further, the online programming world continues to splinter as each owner of programming rolls out their own online products. The cost of replacing what people most want to watch online might soon be higher even than traditional cable TV if it requires separate subscriptions to Disney, CBS, NBC and the many other new standalone packages that a cord cutter must cobble together. A family that really wants to save money on TV has to settle for some subset of the online alternatives, and the big question will be if households are willing to do that.

But at least for now it looks like cord cutting is roaring ahead. The average loss of traditional cable customers in 2018 is almost 300,000 per month, and the rate of loss is accelerating. At least for now, the industry is seeing a rout, and that has to be scaring boards rooms everywhere.

Predicting 5G CAPEX

If you ever want a bad headache, spend a few hours researching predictions about the future trajectory of capital spending by the big players in the telecom industry. It’s a topic worth following since the big ISPs all said that eliminating net neutrality and other regulation would unleash them to spend lavishly on new networks.

I was looking through projections over the past year that were forecasting capital spending for 2019. My main motivation in looking at these projections was to see if the big companies are actually planning on spending money yet on 5G. I figured the best way to get past all of the 5G hype is to follow the advice from the movie All the President’s Men, and “Follow the money”.

I started by looking at projections from the beginning of 2018. The headlines at that time centered around the big benefits to the industry from the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed in December 2017. That legislation created an annual benefit to AT&T of $2.2 billion and a benefit to Verizon of $4 billion annually. At the beginning of 2018 industry analysts predicted the companies would roll those savings into increased capital spending. However, like with most big corporations those savings were not rolled back into the business.

There were rosy predictions at the start of last year about 2018 and 2019 capital spending. For example, the analysts at Deutsche Bank Research said in February 2018 that capital spending by the wireless carriers would increase by 14% in 2018 and even more into the future. It’s not hard to understand the enthusiasm of the analysts because the carriers were fueling this story. Early in 2018 Verizon said they would be investing $35 billion in 5G and AT&T said they would invest $40 billion.

This enthusiasm was fueled all last year by promises from AT&T and Verizon to roll out 5G by the end of 2018. In June the analysts at Oppenheimer raised forecasts of capital spending for 2019 by $18 billion by Verizon and $25 billion for AT&T. However, at the end of last year we saw the 5G announcements had been nothing but hype when AT&T announced an imaginary 5G product and Verizon installed fixed wireless in a few hundred homes.

As recently as the fourth quarter of last year a number of analysts were still predicting greater capital spending for wireless this year compared to 2018. For example, MoffettNathanson LLC predicted 2019 capital spending would be up 3.3% in 2019. Most other analysts made similar projections.

As the books closed for 2018 it became obvious that the big wireless companies hadn’t spent nearly as much as expected for the year. For example, Verizon actual spending was $1.5 billion less than their own initial projections. AT&T came in $3 billion less than projected. When real spending materializes you start to understand the complexity of these budgets. For example, AT&T said that part of the reason for lower capital spending was due to delays in the deployment of FirstNet, the nationwide public safety network. I sit here wondering why FirstNet was even included in their capital budget since it’s not being funded from AT&T’s own revenues, but 100% by taxpayers.

By the time I got to looking at 2019 the picture gets incredibly muddled. There are still those predicting 2% to 3% more capital spending for 2019. But we also see the big carriers admitting to their investors that there will be little spending on 5G this year. This first big capital expenditure in 5G will be for the core electronics for 5G cell sites called the RAN. It doesn’t look like there will be a 5G RAN available for a few more years. Both cellular carriers admit that they are not spending much on 4G LTE infrastructure other than working on cell site densification in urban areas through the deployment of small cell sites aimed at relieving pressure on the big tower cell sites.

I’ll be honest that all I got out of this reading was the headache because I still have no idea about how much money these big carriers will spend this year. This is probably not abnormal in an industry under so much flux and I would imagine there are still decisions being made inside these companies every day that will change capital spending even in this year. The one thing I came away with was a clear picture that there will be very little spending in 2019 on 5G, which means that the announcements of the carriers to have 5G cellular products by 2020 are clearly still hype.

But there are still those in the industry with rosy predictions. The research firm IDC predicts that spending on 5G core equipment will increase worldwide from $500 million this year to $26 billion per year in 2022. Ericsson is predicting that 5G will account for 50% of mobile subscriptions in the US by 2023 along with a worldwide penetration at 20% that year. That seems to be in conflict with Cisco which recently predicted worldwide 5G penetration of 3% by the end of 2022. I have no idea which of these predictions is right, but I now know that we can’t put any faith in predictions about 5G spending or deployment, so perhaps all of this reading was not in vain.

Ending Bans on Broadband Deployment

The big telcos have been successful over the years in squashing competition. When there’s been an opportunity, they’ve marshalled through legislation to block local governments and cooperatives from entering the broadband business. There is no better way to protect legacy revenues than by legally barring those entities that might decide to compete by building better broadband.

A number of states have laws that ban electric cooperatives from offering broadband. It amazes me how such laws came into place. Some legislator wrote and got enough votes to enact a law that tells customer-owned companies that they can’t put fiber on the poles and the rights-of-ways that they already own. I find it hard to believe that politicians would directly oppose the rural citizens who own cooperatives. The only explanation for such laws is the lobbying and donations made to politicians by the big telcos.

If you’ve never looked at the locations of electric cooperatives, most are extremely rural – they were created to build bring electricity to the places where no commercial electric company would make the investment in infrastructure. It’s not a coincidence that these are the same rural areas where the big telcos stopped making investments decades ago, and these are the many of the same rural places with poor or nonexistent broadband.

The tide is turning, and a number of states are reversing these laws to enable electric cooperatives to get into the broadband business. Last June the state of Indiana passed the Facilitating Internet Broadband Rural Expansion (FIBRE) Act that enables electric cooperatives to build and operate fiber networks. Since that act, several Indiana Cooperatives such as Jackson County Rural Electric Membership Corporation, South Central Indiana REMC, and Orange County REMC have decided to deploy fiber networks to reach rural customers. A number of other cooperatives are considering broadband deployment.

In January of this year the legislature in Mississippi unanimously approved the Mississippi Broadband Enabling Act that allows the 25 electric cooperatives in the state to build broadband networks.

In Texas, Senator Robert Nichols introduced SB 14, legislation modeled after Indiana’s FIBRE Act to enable the electric cooperatives in the state to provide broadband.

It’s clear to me why the tide has turned in favor of electric cooperatives and municipalities building fiber networks. In the numerous rural counties I have visited in the last year the local politicians have been telling me that lack of broadband is the number one issue in their jurisdiction. Homeowners without broadband are demanding that local politicians find a broadband solution. Members of rural electric cooperatives are begging their Boards to build fiber.

I think it’s starting to dawn on many rural communities that nobody has plans to bring them broadband. I’ve talked to numerous rural households and farmers in the last year who describe the agony of raising school kids in a home with no broadband or in operating a farm that’s at an automatic disadvantage to farms that have broadband. Rural communities are starting to realize that they must find their own broadband solution.

It’s easy to draw a parallel between what’s happening today and what happened a century ago when these same rural areas figured out a way to bring electricity to their communities. They looked then in envy at the towns with electricity in the same way that rural residents today can see broadband just out of their grasp.

We recently conducted a survey for a rural electric cooperative where every respondent to the survey was in favor of bringing fiber – even those households who didn’t own a computer or want broadband in their own homes. I’ve never before seen a survey where everybody supported fiber broadband.

These laws are passing because rural residents are fed up with the inaction of the big telcos. It’s just as extraordinary to see the Mississippi law passed unanimously to oppose the big telcos as it is to see every resident of a community support broadband. The tide has definitely turned.

Are You Ready for 6G?

The first 6G summit convenes this coming weekend in Levi, Lapland, Finland, sponsored by the University of Oulu. The summit will end with a closed-door, invitation-only assembly of wireless researchers and vendors with the goal to create a draft vision statement defining the goals of 6G research. Attendees include all of the major wireless vendors like Huawei, Ericsson, Samsung, and NTT, along with researchers from numerous universities and groups like Nokia Bell Labs.

As you would expect, even as 5G standards were being finalized there were already private and academic research labs working on what will come next. So far, some of the vision for 6G includes concepts like:

  • Use of higher frequencies between 100 GHz and 1 THz, introducing the world to the idea of terahertz spectrum. The upper end of this range lies between radio waves and infrared light. The FCC just approved research above 95 GHz.
  • Researches believe this next generation wireless will be needed to finally enable 3D holograms needed for lifelike telepresence.
  • The higher frequencies would also allow for densification and for the simultaneous transmission of multiple large-bandwidth transmissions. Researchers already believe that with the higher frequencies that the capacity of a wireless network could be as much as 1,000 times that of 5G – but even 10 times faster would be a major breakthrough.
  • Scientists anticipate within a decade that we’ll have advanced far enough with artificial intelligence to enable AI-powered routing that will choose the best path in real time for each packet and will significantly decrease latency.
  • Various researchers from Brown University and universities in Australia have said that 5G will be inadequate to satisfy our future needs for both bandwidth and for the overall number of IoT connections. One of the goals of 6G will be to increase the number of connected devices from a given transmitter by one to two magnitudes.

The higher frequencies will allow for even faster data transmission, as much as 10 times faster than the gigabit speeds envisioned for point-to-multipoint 5G using millimeter wave radios.

There are a number of issues to be overcome with the higher frequencies, the primary being that radio waves at those frequencies won’t pass through any barrier. However, scientists already think there might be strategies for bouncing the waves around obstacles.

The other shortcoming of the frequencies is the short distances before the signal dissipates. This is likely to limit the higher frequencies to indoor use allowing for indoor wireless networks with speeds as fast as 10 Gbps.

Interestingly, researchers in China say that this vision of 6G is the end of the line in terms of major platform upgrades and that there will never be a 7G. After 6G the goal over time will be to improve the performance of the various aspects of the technologies involved. Apparently, the Chinese have never met any AT&T and Verizon marketing staff.

Many of the group researching these topics are already talking about having a 6G set of standards by 2030. But there is a lot of research to be done including fundamental steps like developing chips capable of handling the higher speeds. We also will hit regulatory barriers – governments all regulate the use of radio waves, but it might be harder to regulate the use of the light-like frequencies at the base of the infrared spectrum.

5G vs. WiFi

The big cellular carriers envision a future where every smart device is connected to their cellular networks rather than to WiFi. They envision every home having to pay a monthly subscription to maintain connectivity for their wired devices. They envision every new car and truck coming with a subscription to cellular service.

I notice that the cellular providers talk about generating IoT revenues, but they’re never specific that the real vision is for everybody to buy additional cellular subscriptions. Most IoT applications will be low-bandwidth yet the carriers have been spreading the false message that 5G is all about faster broadband. I just saw another ludicrous article yesterday predicting how 5G was going to bring mobile gigabit broadband to rural America – a pure fantasy that is being fed by the public relations machines at Verizon and AT&T.

We aren’t seeing much press about the most important aspect of the new 5G specifications – that each cell site will be able to make up to 100,000 simultaneous connections. This isn’t being done for cellphones. It’s rare these days except in a few over-crowded places for a cellular call not to be connected. Placing a few small cell sites at the busiest places in most cities could solve most cellular bottlenecks without an upgrade to 5G.

The 100,000 connections give the wireless carriers the tool that can make a connection to every smart TV, smart washer and dryer, home video camera, burglar alarm sensor and every other wired device in a home. The big carriers are launching a direct challenge to WiFi as the wireless technology of choice for connecting our devices.

AT&T and Verizon envision every home having a new $10, $20 or $30 subscription to keep all of the devices connected. They also envision becoming the repository of all IoT data – moving them in front of Google and others in the chase for collecting the big data that drives advertising revenues. This is something they definitely don’t talk about.

It doesn’t take much of a thought exercise to understand that 5G is not about faster cellular service. Cellular subscribers will gladly take faster cellular broadband, but they probably aren’t willing to pay more for it. T-Mobile is already making that clear by announcing that they won’t charge more for 5G. The carriers are not going to spend tens of billions to implement 5G cellular technology that doesn’t drive the new revenues needed to pay for it. 5G is about IoT, plain and simple.

Today all of our home devices use WiFi. While WiFi is far from perfect, it seems to do an adequate job in connecting to the video camera at the front door, the smart TV, and the sensors in various appliances and devices around the home. WiFi has a few major advantages over cellular broadband – it’s already in our homes and connected to our devices and doesn’t require an additional monthly subscription.

I think people will resist another forced subscription. HP recently reported that the vast majority of their customers that buy 4G LTE-enabled laptops disable the cellular connection almost as soon as the new computer is out of the box. In this day of cellphones, very few car owners sign-up for the cellular subscription for OnStar when the free trial expires. I know that I personally would not buy a home device that eventually needed another cellular subscription to function.

The cellular carriers make a valid point in saying that WiFi is already growing inadequate for busy homes. But there are already short-term and long-term fixes on the way. The short-term fix is the upcoming migration to WiFi 6 using the 802.11ax standard. The new WiFi will better use MIMO antennas, frequency slicing and other techniques to allow for prioritization of devices and a more reliable connection to multiple devices.

The ultimate indoor broadband network will be a combination of WiFi and millimeter wave, or even faster spectrum. Higher frequency spectrum could provide bandwidth for the devices that use big bandwidth while keeping other devices on mid-range spectrum WiFi – getting the best from both sets of spectrum. That combination will allow for the easy integration, without interference for the connection of gigabit devices and also of tiny sensors that only communicate sporadically.

This is not the future that AT&T and Verizon want, because this is a world controlled by consumers who buy the wireless boxes that best suit them. I envision a future indoor-only wireless network that won’t require licensed spectrum or a cellular subscription since the millimeter waves and other higher frequencies won’t pass outdoors through walls.

The cellular carriers will have a monopoly on the outdoor sensor market. They will undoubtedly make the connections to smart cars, to smart agriculture, and to outdoor smart city sensors. But I think they will have a huge uphill battle convincing households to pay another monthly subscription for something that can be done better using a few well-placed routers.

One-Web Launches Broadband Satellites

Earlier this month OneWeb launched six test satellites intended for an eventual satellite fleet intended to provide broadband. The six satellites were launched from a Soyuz launch vehicle from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana.

OneWeb was started by Greg Wyler of Virginia in 2012, originally under the name of WorldVu. Since then the company has picked up heavy-hitter investors like Virgin, Airbus, SoftBank and Qualcomm. The company’s plan is to launch an initial constellation of 650 satellites that will blanket the earth, with ultimate deployment of 1,980 satellites. The plans are to deploy thirty of the sixty-five pound satellites with each launch. That means twenty-two successful launches are needed to deploy the first round.

Due to the low-earth orbits of the satellites, at about 745 miles above earth, the OneWeb satellites will avoid the huge latency that is inherent from current satellite broadband providers like HughesNet, which uses satellites orbiting at 22,000 miles above the earth. The OneWeb specifications filed with the FCC talks about having latency in the same range as cable TV networks in the 25-30 millisecond range. But where a few high-orbit satellites can see the whole earth, the big fleet of low-orbit satellites is needed just to be able in see everywhere.

The company is already behind schedule. The company had originally promised coverage across Alaska by the end of 2019. They are now talking about having customers demos sometime in 2020 with live broadband service in 2021. The timeline matter for a satellite company because the bandwidth license from the FCC requires that they launch 50% of their satellites within six years and all of them within nine years. Right now, OneWeb and also Elon Musk’s SpaceX have both fallen seriously behind the needed deployment timeline.

The company’s original goal was to bring low-latency satellite broadband to everybody in Alaska. While they are still talking about bringing broadband to those who don’t have it today, their new business plan is to sell directly to airlines and cruise ship lines and to sell wholesale to ISPs who will then market to the end user.

It will be interesting to see what kinds of speeds will really be delivered. The company talks today about a maximum speed of 500 Mbps. But I compare that number to the claim that 5G cellphones can work at 600 Mbps, as demonstrated last year by Sprint – it’s possible only in a perfect lab setting. The best analog to a satellite network is a wireless transmitter on a tower in a point-to-multipoint network. That transmitter is capable of making a relatively small number of big-bandwidth connections or many more low-bandwidth connections. The economic sweet spot will likely be to offer many connections at 50 – 100 Mbps rather than fewer connections at a higher speed.

It’s an interesting business model. The upfront cost of manufacturing and launching the satellites is high. It’s likely that a few launches will go awry and destroy satellites. But other than replacing satellites that go bad over time, the maintenance costs are low. The real issue will be the bandwidth that can be delivered. Speeds of 50 – 100 Mbps will be welcomed in the rural US for those with no better option. But like with all low-bandwidth technologies – adequate broadband that feels okay today will feel a lot slower in a decade as household bandwidth demand continues to grow. The best long-term market for the satellite providers will be those places on the planet that are not likely to have a landline alternative – which is why they first targeted rural Alaska.

Assuming that the low-earth satellites deliver as promised, they will become part of the broadband landscape in a few years. It’s going to be interesting to see how they play in the rural US and around the world.