Tag: 4G LTE

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Technology The Industry

Finally, a 5G Feature in the Field

We are finally starting to see a glimpse of some of the 5G specifications being introduced into cellular networks. AT&T announced recently that it was going to be testing dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) in the network, introducing one of the major benefits of 5G. The company will be testing the technology somewhere in north Texas.

DSS technology allows a cellular carrier to use a block of spectrum for both 4G LTE and 5G customers. Currently, each carrier has set up entire separate spectrum blocks for 5G customers that are only used for 5G. As more people buy 5G phones, those new spectrum blocks will get crowded and could eventually perform worse than 4G.

With DSS, a carrier can use any block of spectrum in the manner being requested by a customer handset. A handset seeking a 4G connection will get a traditional 4G channel of bandwidth. If a handset asks for a 5G connection, then that phone can connect as 5G and can provide whatever 5G features are available at a cell site.

I can’t say for sure because I may have missed announcements, but this is the first introduction of a 5G feature that I have noticed. Until now there has been no true 5G. There have been 4G LTE phones that used traditional bands of spectrum and 5G phones that have used new bands of spectrum – but the 5G phones don’t yet benefit from any of the upgrades due to the 5G specifications that will make 5G superior to 4G. Instead, customers have been reporting a good 5G experience because their phone grabs a relatively unbusy band of new spectrum that isn’t as crowded as 4G has become.

DSS is important to cellular carriers because it will make all of their spectrum available to 5G customers. This will allow for a smooth transition over time where 5G customers can address 5G features from any spectrum band and where 4G LTE customers continue to use those same spectrum bands in the traditional manner.

This is only a trial, and most trials uncover issues that need to be tweaked, so it’s likely to be much later this year or next year before AT&T is ready to roll out DSS in other markets.

We are still waiting for the most important 5G features to be introduced. The most powerful feature is going to be frequency slicing where a cell site can easily tailor the transmission path to meet the demands of a customer. This is the feature that will be able to devote a large data path to a heavy data user. The real benefits of 5G can’t be realized until the 5G features have been widely introduced and also loaded into cellphones.

The timing of getting features into cellphones is one of the biggest challenges for the cellular carriers. For the DSS trial to work there has to be sufficient handsets in north Texas that can use the feature. This means that carriers need to introduce features into handsets in advance of introducing them in the field, and I have to imagine that phones blessed by AT&T already have some version of DSS software included.

Something that the cellular carriers aren’t going to be talking about is that for many years the feature sets in the software for handsets will differ by carrier. It’s not going to be an easy transition to move a 5G phone between AT&T and T-Mobile for a while since they will use 5G differently. Eventually, everybody will provide all of the features, but until they do there will be differences in 5G performance between carriers.

The primary advantage of DSS is that the carriers don’t have to keep turning up new bands of spectrum to keep 5G customers happy with the experience. No matter where a customer is, with DSS a 5G phone will be able to grab spectrum – although if they grab 4G spectrum they end up back in the same crowded pot of traditional spectrum with all of the 4G customers. If carriers decide to give 5G customers any sort of priority in traditional spectrum bands, then we’ll see performance start to degrade over time for people with 4G LTE handsets. That sounds like a good strategy to get people to upgrade phones.

From a customer performance perspective, this is not an exciting announcement. This early 5G feature doesn’t give anybody faster performance. The only real benefit is to the carrier to let them use their full range of spectrum for a 5G customer.

Meanwhile, the 5G marketing machine that has snowed every politician in Washington DC will continue to crow about how great 5G is for America, while at the same time complain how we’re losing the 5G battle with the Chinese. Those are both false narratives because there aren’t yet any customers in the US getting a real 5G experience. Even folks in center cities that are using the fast millimeter wave spectrum don’t have 5G – they just have handsets that use the faster millimeter wave spectrum.

But the introduction of a 5G feature into the wild means the day will come when real 5G will hit the network and customers will begin to see a difference between 4G and 5G. By then, the marketing machine will probably be off talking about 6G.

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The Industry

FCC Reports on Poor Rural 4G Coverage

The FCC released a report in January that shows that the cellular networks of the major carriers underperform in rural America. This is no news to anybody who lives and works in a rural county. The tests allowed the FCC to conclude that the national coverage maps for 4G LTE are largely fiction in rural America.

The FCC conducted 25,000 tests in twelve states to verify the coverage maps of Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular. The majority of tests were done in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Vermont, Alabama and Montana. Speeds were tested from both stationary locations and in a moving vehicle. AT&T and Sprint weren’t tested because the maps they provided to the FCC showed only the combined upload and download speeds – something that is meaningless to test. The other three carriers reported what they claimed were actual upload and download speeds, shown separately.

The FCC undertook the testing in response to numerous complaints filed in the FCC’s docket for the Mobility Fund Phase II grants. The intention of this fund was to improve 4G coverage in rural areas with little or no cellular coverage. Smaller cellular carriers and the public complained to the FCC that the cellular data coverage claimed by the large cellular carriers was overstated. Small cellular carriers worried that the overstatements would stop them from asking for funding for areas that need upgrading. Local governments were worried that the overstated coverage meant that their areas wouldn’t see upgrades and they’d be doomed for another decade with poor cellular coverage.

The tests were conducted in areas where the carrier maps showed cellular data coverage. The results of the testing were rather bleak. 16% of all calls tried on Verizon were unable to make a data connection. The failures to connect were 23% on T-Mobile and 38% on US Cellular.

Overall, the three carriers met the FCC’s minimum requirement of 5 Mbps download for 4G only 62% of the time. That was 64% on Verizon, 63% on T-Mobile and only 45% for US Cellular. However, even within those reported results, the testers said that they experienced intermittent dropped calls on all three networks.

The FCC responded to these tests by revamping the reporting of cellular data speeds in the future, asking for far more granular speed data by location. The FCC also convened a group of experts to recommend to the FCC how to better test cellular speeds. Finally, the FCC issued an Enforcement Advisory on the accuracy of the cellular data on form 477. That’s a step short of issuing fines and likely will have little impact on the carriers. It doesn’t appear that any of them have pared back their national coverage maps that still claim coverage across most of rural America.

There are significant real-life implications of overstated cellular coverage maps. Just like with the RDOF grant program that will rely on faulty maps of landline broadband, poor maps of cellular coverage mean that many areas with overstated cellular coverage won’t be eligible for federal grants to help fix the problem.

The big downside is that many rural households have no 4G LTE coverage, or at best have slow and intermittent 4G data available. These are often the same areas where landline broadband is slow or non-existent. As hard as it is to live without good cellular coverage or good landline broadband, homes without both are cut off from the rest of the world. To make matters worse, there is still 3G coverage in a lot of rural America and all of the carrirs have plans to cut that dead over the next few years.

The FCC has revamped the Mobility Fund II grant program by doubling the amount of funding to $9 billion and renaming it as the 5G Fund. That’s a silly name because the goal of the program is to bring at least minimal 4G coverage to rural areas, not 5G. Remember that the grant program was originally aimed only at areas that showed no coverage by the carriers. Ideally the FCC would also  direct funding to the many areas where the carriers were lying about their coverage – but It’s doubtful that they have any meaningful maps of real 4G coverage.

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The Industry

The Upcoming 5G Confusion

Until now the 5G industry has spread a lot of hype, but it hasn’t affected customers. That’s all starting to change as the cellular carriers are starting to offer 5G phones. Many customers who spend extra for 5G phones are going to quickly be frustrated and disappointed as they try to participate in the new 5G world.

Consider both AT&T and T-Mobile. Both companies are introducing both a low-band and a high-band 5G phone and customers who want 5G will have to choose one of the two options because the carriers don’t offer a phone that handles both new sets of spectrum.

In AT&T’s case, the low-band phone will introduce 850 MHz spectrum while the high-band phone will use millimeter wave spectrum. The T-Mobile low-band phone will use 600 MHz spectrum with the high-band phone will use millimeter wave spectrum.

Customers buying any of these phones are likely to be disappointed. The high-band phones only work outdoors and when a customer is within range of a handful of millimeter wave hotspots, which are mostly in downtown areas of major cities. Unless somebody has a job that keeps them outside within a small downtown urban footprint, the new high-band phones will default to 4G LTE. Even where a customer is within range of the millimeter wave spectrum it’s been reported that the signal gets easily blocked when a customer turns a corner around a building or even sometimes when the customer’s body blocks the path to the cell site.

Customers of the low-band phones are also likely to be disappointed. The two new low-band spectrums being used are great at penetrating buildings, and so data coverage might improve indoors. However, low-band spectrum, by definition, doesn’t carry a lot of bandwidth. A customer with a low-band 5G phone will likely get data speeds similar to 4G LTE. That is predicated upon living or working close to cell sites that have been upgraded to the new low-band spectrum – because many cell sites won’t yet carry the new spectrum.

There might be a short period of time where a customer with a low-band phone sees better performance – but that will be because they will be one of the few users of the new spectrum. As the more people use the new spectrum bands, the performance will look like that in similar bands of spectrum. I remember how early customers with 4G LTE praised the fast speeds, but those fast speeds fell back to normal within a short period of time.

The real bang with low-band spectrum will come in a few years after the cellular carriers perfect and integrate dynamic spectrum sharing into the 5G architecture. This is one of the new 5G features that let the cellular carriers combine multiple frequencies into a single data path to a customer. Today, a customer with one of the low-band phones will either be using the new low-band spectrum or traditional 4G LTE spectrum – but not both at the same time. The other benefit of the lower spectrum bands is that the spectrum will travel farther from a cell site, albeit at slower speeds.

The new phones will be confusing to customers for another reason – customers won’t be able to use these new phones to change carriers. A phone that can receive AT&T’s 850 MHz spectrum is not going to receive T-Mobile’s 600 MHz spectrum. A customer changing carriers with one of the new phones is going to only get traditional 4G LTE at a different carrier. This is going to become the new norm for the next decade as the carriers start using drastically different bands of spectrum.

Unfortunately, the cellular companies aren’t being straight with customers and are touting these new phones as high-performance 5G. The phones are not yet 5G since they don’t incorporate the best new features of the 5G standards – instead, they are 4G LTE phones that are adding new choices of spectrum. Perhaps the new phones can be labeled as 4.1 G, but I think even that would be generous.

The other big problem with the first generation of phones is that they will be obsolete once the carriers start adding the new 5G functions. 5G has a lot of great features coming including dynamic spectrum sharing (combines multiple frequencies), frequency slicing (gives each customer a data connection to match what they are trying to do), and the ability to connect to more than one cellular tower. This is going to be a problem between now and the time that 5G is mature – any 5G phone already in use won’t be able to handle any new feature as it’s introduced. Every 5G phone sold for the next decade will almost instantly be obsolete in terms of not being able to use new features.

I’m not sure why anybody would shell out extra to buy a 5G phones today. There might be a few people that have a specific reason to use the new spectrum and who happen to live in the right place to be able to use it. However, the vast majority of people are going to be disappointed since they are likely to have paid extra for a phone that’s still going to be 4G LTE. I know people like bragging rights by having the latest tech toy – but somebody buying a 5G phone is more of a sucker than an innovator. They will have bought into the carriers’ 5G hype – hook, line, and sinker.

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Regulation - What is it Good For?

FCC to Create 5G Fund

On December 4, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced a plan to create what he is calling the 5G Fund. This new fund will replace the already planned $4.5 billion Mobility Fund Phase II Fund and adds another $4.5 billion. The fund has been renamed to suggest that 5G will bring faster broadband to rural America.

The original goal of the Mobility Fund II was to expand 4G LTE coverage to the most rural parts of the country where there is no cellular coverage today. While preparing to award that fund, the FCC figured out that the 4G coverage maps for the biggest cellular companies were significantly overstated. This caused the FCC to pause the Mobility Fund Phase II awards, and they are now rolling that money into this larger new fund. There are things to both love and hate about this announcement.

Some of the Things to Hate:

I hate that the 5G hype got rolled into this announcement. Consider the following from Pai’s announcement:

5G has the potential to bring many benefits to American consumers and businesses, including wireless networks that are more responsive, more secure, and up to 100 times faster than today’s 4G LTE networks. . . . We want to make sure that rural Americans enjoy these benefits, just as residents of large urban areas will. In order to do that, the Universal Service Fund must be forward-looking and support the networks of tomorrow.

That statement is incredibly misleading. The only new technology that is 100 times faster than 4G LTE is the use of millimeter wave spectrum. Millimeter wave spectrum is only faster when the transmitters are fiber-fed. This fund is not going to be used to build the fiber needed to bring millimeter wave hot spots to the most rural parts of America. That technology only broadcasts fast broadband for less than 1,000 feet, so it’s likely to never be economically viable to bring this technology to remote places. Unfortunately, the Chairman’s statement is going to make rural people think they might be getting broadband that is 100 times faster.

I also hate that Chairman Pai used this same announcement to announce that AT&T and Verizon have massively overstated their 4G coverage maps. One would expect there to be some sort of regulatory repercussion for those companies exaggerating their coverage areas. The big carriers have been accused of overstating coverage to limit how much of the Mobility Fund Phase II went to smaller carriers. Instead of punishing the big carriers, this announcement glossed over the bad behavior and instead rewards them by doubling the size of the fund. I’m guessing that the fund doubled in size to cover the areas that the carriers had erroneously claimed as having cell coverage. At the end of the day, this fund is another big dollar giveaway to the biggest carriers in the country. I know this money should greatly improve rural cellular coverage – it’s just getting a bit tiresome watching this FCC hand everything imaginable to the biggest carriers.

I also hate that this order is not likely going to require that any new fiber built using federal money be made available to others. These billions will be used to construct a lot of fiber to rural cell towers and that fiber would be a great launching point for competitiors that want to bring better broadband to rural areas. You might recall that the broadband grants that came from the stimulus program required all fiber constructed with federal funds be made available to ISPs at affordable rates. However, when money is given to the big carriers – in this program and in the CAF II program – there is no such requirement.

Some of the Things to Like:

This reconstituted fund still keeps the primary goal of the original Mobility Fund Phase II, which is to bring better cellular coverage to areas that don’t have it today. I visit rural America regularly and it’s not hard in rural places to drive out of cellular coverage. Hopefully, this fund fills many of those coverage gaps. I’m always amazed when I come upon a small community in an area with zero cellphone coverage. We talk all of the time about the broadband gap, but for many folks, there is a more fundamental connectivity gap.

I also like that some of this money will go to the smaller cellular carriers that already serve in rural America. I have faith that they’ll use the money more wisely than the big carriers. The fund will operate as a reverse auction, and I hope that the many smaller cellular carriers can win the money in places where they already have better networks than the big carriers.

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The Industry

Existing 4G Spectrum

I suspect that most people don’t realize the small number of frequencies that are used today to support cellular service. Below is a list of the frequencies used by each US cellular carrier for providing 4G LTE. Except for Sprint, they all use the same basic frequencies.

Frequencies (in MHz)

AT&T  – 1900, 1700 abcde, 700 bc

Verizon – 1900, 1700 f, 700 c

T-Mobile – 1900, 1700 def, 700 a, 600

Sprint – 1900 g, 850, 2500

The letters represent separate licenses for specific sub-bands of the various frequencies. For example, the 1700 MHz band has been licensed in bands a through f and the carriers own rights to various sub-bands rather than to the whole spectrum. The same is also true for 1900 MHz and 700 MHz spectrum. In many cases, the licenses for the various spectrum bands are not nationwide. This means the frequencies used in Cleveland by one of the carriers might be slightly different than the spectrum used in San Francisco.

The carriers are using these limited spectrum bands today to support both 4G voice and data. In metropolitan areas, the carriers are in big trouble. They are finding it impossible to satisfy customer requests for data service, which is resulting in customer blockages or greatly reduced broadband speeds.

One of the primary reasons that the carriers are running into blockages on 4G data is that they aren’t deploying enough different bands of spectrum for broadband. The carriers have three remedies that can be used to improve cellular data – use more bands of spectrum, build more cell sites (small cells), and implement 5G which will allow for more simultaneous connections.

The CTIA, the lobbying group for the wireless carriers has been heavily lobbying the FCC to allocate 400 MHz of additional mid-range spectrum for cellular data. The FCC is considering repositioning numerous bands of spectrum and the CTIA wants to grab everything possible for data purposes.

Unfortunately, spectrum alone is not going to provide the solution the wireless carriers are hoping for. One of the primary reasons that the cellular carriers only use a few different bands of spectrum today is to simplify handsets. There is a huge price to pay for using multiple bands of spectrum in a cell phone. The more bands of spectrum, the more antennas that must be supported and the more power that is used.

If the cellular companies try to load many more bands of mid-range spectrum onto cellphones they will have majorly overstressed the battery life of phones. Most cellphone customers are not likely going to want to trade faster data speeds for shorter battery lives. As I look forward at the strategies of the cellular carriers, the battery life of cellphones might be their biggest limitation. The question is not so much about how much data a cellphone can handle, but rather how much battery life must be sacrificed to gain broadband  performance. The only solution for this is likely some new battery technology that is not yet on the horizon.

I don’t believe that the average cellphone user values cellular data speeds in the same way that they value fast landline data speeds. 4G today is easily capable of streaming video and there’s no reason on a cellphone to stream more than one video stream at the same time. 4G is reasonably okay today at operating most celular apps. The one group of cellphone users that always want more bandwidth are gamers – but there is no way that cellphones are ever going to be able to match the capabilities of gaming systems or gaming computers using landline broadband connections.

I scratch my head every time I hear 5G claims about providing gigabit cellular service. I don’t want to sound like an old-timer who sees no need for greater speeds. But I think we need to be realistic and ask if superfast cellular bandwidth is really needed today – after all, there are still no landline applications for homes that require anything near to a gigabit of bandwidth. The primary reason homes need faster download speeds is to handle multiple big bandwidth applications at the same time, something that is not today a requirement for cellphones.

The idea of gigabit cellular is mostly coming from the imagination of the cellular company marketers. The 5G standard calls for eventual ubiquitous 100 Mbps cellular speeds. Even achieving that much speed is going to require tying together multiple mid-range bands of spectrum. I’m having a hard time seeing the additional revenue streams that will pay for the massive upgrades needed to reach the 100 Mbps goal. The cellular companies all know this but aren’t talking about it because that would dilute the message that 5G will transform the world.

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Technology The Industry

Is There a Business Case for 5G Cellular?

Readers might think I spent too much time writing about 5G. However, I’m asked about 5G almost every day. Existing ISPs want to know if 5G is a real threat. Potential ISPs want to know if they should pause their business plans until they understand 5G’s impact. Cities want to know what to expect. The cellular companies have made such a huge deal about 5G that they’ve spooked the rest of the industry.

Today I ask perhaps the most fundamental question of all – is there a business case for 5G cellular? I’m not talking about 5G wireless loops to homes – I’m just asking if there is a financial justification for the cellular companies to upgrade their cell sites to 5G?

Before answering that question, it’s good to remember that the cellular companies badly need to implement 5G because their 4G networks are facing a crisis. After years of training customers to be stingy in using cellphone data, they are now encouraging users to stream video. The result of this shift is that total cellular data usage is now doubling every two years. Any network engineer will tell that that is deadly growth, particular for a cellular network. The existing 4G network can’t handle this growth for more than a few more years. While some of this growth can be temporarily mitigated by inserting small cell sites into the network, that doesn’t look like it is more than a band-aid fix if broadband keeps growing at this fast pace. Small cell sites will be overwhelmed almost as quickly as they are built.

The carriers need 5G because it will expand the capacity of each cell site by allowing many more customers to use a cell site simultaneously. By taking advantage of frequency slicing and the ability to mix and match multiple frequencies a 5G cell site will be a huge step-up in efficiency. The cellular carriers have not publicly admitted that they need 5G just to keep their networks running – but they really don’t have a choice.

The question, though, is if there is a new revenue stream to help pay for the 5G upgrades? To be honest, I can’t find any early 5G cellular application that will generate much revenue in the near future. The obvious new revenue source would be to charge a premium price to use 5G data on a cellphone. There might be some people willing to pay extra in the early stages of the 5G roll-out, but as 4G morphs over time into 5G, any willingness to pay more for data will melt away.

I also wonder if customers will really value faster cellular data speeds. First, we aren’t talking about a ton of extra speed. Forget the recent trials of millimeter wave 5G – that’s a gimmick for now that will not be available anywhere other than in dense urban centers. The 5G specification that matters to the real world is the goal for 5G speeds to increase over a decade to 100 Mbps.

Good 4G data speeds today are in the range of 15 Mbps and that is more than enough speed to stream data while performing any functions we want from a cellphone. Faster speeds will not stream video any faster. Over time perhaps our cellphones will be able to create augmented reality universes, but that technology won’t be here for a while. Faster data speeds are vitally important in a home where we run multiple large data streams simultaneously – but a cellphone is, by definition, one device for one user.

The real advantage of 5G is the ability to make large numbers of connections from a single cell site. It’s also hard to see an immediate path to monetize that. I talk to a friend many mornings as he commutes and he always gets disconnected at the Eisenhower bridge on the DC beltway – there are not enough cellular connections there to allow for handoffs between Maryland and Virginia. 5G will finally fix that problem, but I can’t see anybody paying extra to not be cut off on the bridge – they will finally be getting what they’ve always expected.

Eventually 5G will have big potential as the connection for outdoor sensors, IoT devices, smart cars, smart streetlights, etc. There is also likely to eventually be a huge market for wearables that might include fitness monitors, medical monitors, smart glasses, and even smart clothes. However, all of these applications will take time to come to market – there is a bit of chicken and egg in that these technologies will likely never take off until there is universal 5G coverage. There is very little revenue likely in the next few years for outdoor applications – although this might eventually be the primary new source of 5G revenue.

I look back to last fall when Ronan Dunne, an EVP of Verizon Wireless, made his case to investors for the potential for 5G. He included the outdoor sensors I mention above. He also cited applications like retail, where holograms might spring up near merchandise in stores. He talked about stock trading that takes advantage of the low latency on 5G. He mentioned gaming, which would benefit from lower latency. Most of these applications offer eventual potential for 5G. But none of these applications are going to produce giant revenues over the next three or four years. In the short run it’s hard to imagine almost any immediate revenue from these applications.

Predicting technology is always a crap shoot and perhaps new applications will arise that need 5G that even Verizon hasn’t imagined. The list of applications that Verizon gave to investors is underwhelming and reflects the fact that there is likely no 5G application that will significantly add to the bottom line of the cellular carriers in the immediate future.

This really brings home the idea that as a nation we are not in a worldwide 5G competition. The carriers need 5G soon to stop the collapse of the 4G data networks in busy neighborhoods. I have a hard time thinking they need it immediately for anything else – although eventually we will be surrounded by 5G applications.

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Technology

The Impending Cellular Data Crisis

There is one industry statistic that isn’t getting a lot of press – the fact that cellular data usage is more than doubling every two years. You don’t have to plot that growth rate very many years into the future to realize that existing cellular networks will be inadequate to handle the increased demand in just a few years. What’s even worse for the cellular industry is that the growth is the nationwide average. I have many clients who tell me there isn’t nearly that much growth at rural cellular towers – meaning there is likely even faster growth at some urban and suburban towers.

Much of this growth is a self-inflicted wound by the cellular industry. They’ve raised monthly data allowances and are often bunding in free video with cellular service, thus driving up usage. The public is responding to these changes by using the extra bandwidth made available to them.

There are a few obvious choke points that will be exposed with this kind of growth. Current cellphone technology limits the number of simultaneous connections that can be made from any given tower. As customers watch more video they eat up slots on the cell tower that otherwise could have been used to process numerous short calls and text messages. The other big chokepoint is going to be the broadband backhaul feeding each cell cite. When usage grows this fast it’s going to get increasingly expensive to buy leased backbone bandwidth – which explains why Verizon and AT&T are furiously building fiber to cell sites to avoid huge increases in backhaul costs.

5G will fix some, but not all of these issues. The growth is so explosive that cellular companies need to use every technique possible to make cell towers more efficient. Probably the best fix is to use more spectrum. Adding an additional spectrum to a cell site immediately adds capacity. However, this can’t happen overnight. Any new spectrum is only useful if customers can use it and it takes a number of years to modify cell sites and cellphones to work on a new spectrum. The need to meet growing demand is the primary reason that the CTIA recently told the FCC they need an eye-popping 400 MHz of new mid-range spectrum for cellular use. The industry painted that as being needed for 5G, but it’s needed now for 4G LTE.

Another fix for cell sites is to use existing frequency more efficiently. The most promising way to do this is with the use of MIMO antenna arrays – a technology to deploy multiple antennas in cellphones to combine multiple spectrum together to create a larger data pipe. MIMO technology can make it easier to respond to a request from a large bandwidth user – but it doesn’t relieve the overall pressure on a cell tower. If anything, it might do the exact opposite and let cell towers prioritize those that want to watch video over smaller users who might then be blocked from making voice calls or sending text messages. MIMO is also not an immediate fix and also needs to work through the cycle of getting the technology into cellphones.

The last strategy is what the industry calls densification, which is adding more cell sites. This is the driving force behind placing small cell sites on poles in areas with big cellular demand. However, densification might create as many problems as it solves. Most of the current frequencies used for cellular service travel a decent distance and placing cell sites too close together will create a lot of interference and noise between neighboring towers. While adding new cell sites adds additional local capacity, it also decreases the efficiency of all nearby cell sites using traditional spectrum – the overall improvement from densification is going to be a lot less than might be expected. The worse thing about this is that interference is hard to predict and is very much a local issue. This is the primary reason that the cellular companies are interested in millimeter wave spectrum for cellular – the spectrum travels a short distance and won’t interfere as much between cell sites placed closely together.

5G will fix some of these issues. The ability of 5G to do frequency slicing means that a cell site can provide just enough bandwidth for every user – a tiny slice of spectrum for a text message or IoT signal and a big pipe for a video stream. 5G will vastly expand the number of simultaneous users that can share a single cell site.

However, 5G doesn’t provide any additional advantages over 4G in terms of the total amount of backhaul bandwidth needed to feed a cell site. And that means that a 5G cell site will get equally overwhelmed if people demand more bandwidth than a cell site has to offer.

The cellular industry has a lot of problems to solve over a relatively short period of time. I expect that in the middle of the much-touted 5G roll-out we are going to start seeing some spectacular failures in the cellular networks at peak times. I feel sympathy for cellular engineers because it’s nearly impossible to have a network ready to handle data usage that doubles every two years. Even should engineers figure out strategies to handle five or ten times more usage, in only a few years the usage will catch up to those fixes.

I’ve never believed that cellular broadband can be a substitute for landline broadband. Every time somebody at the FCC or a politician declares that the future is wireless I’ve always rolled my eyes, because anybody that understands networks and the physics of spectrum can easily demonstrate that there are major limitations on the total bandwidth capacity at a given cell site, along with a limit on how densely cell sites can be packed in an area. The cellular networks are only carrying 5% of the total broadband in the country and it’s ludicrous to think that they could be expanded to carry most of it.

Categories
The Industry

Trusting Big ISP Data

The FCC has finally come to grips with the fact that big ISPs are supplying bad data to the various FCC mapping efforts that are then used to distribute FCC funding and to set national policies. The latest mapping snafu come from one-time data collection from the cellular carriers last year showing rural cellular coverage. These maps were to be used to establish a new federal fund called the Mobility Fund II which will distribute $4.53 billion for the expansion of 4G cellular coverage to rural parts of the country that have little or no cellular coverage.

The big cellular companies have been lying about their cellular coverage for years. If you look at the nationwide 4G LTE coverage maps from AT&T and Verizon you’d think that they have cellular coverage virtually everywhere except in areas like deserts and mountains. But anybody living or traveling in rural America knows better. It’s not hard to drive very far off main highways and hit areas that never see a bar of cellular coverage. And even where there is coverage, it’s still often 3G or even older technology.

When the FCC collected data for the Mobility II funding the big carriers stuck to this same flawed mapping data. It turns out that overclaiming rural cellular coverage will keep funding from going to the smaller cellular companies that still serve in many parts of rural America. Luckily the FCC effort included a challenge process and the FCC was flooded with challenges showing that cellular coverage is far worse than is claimed by the big carrier maps. There were so many challenges that the FCC put the Mobility II award process on hold until they can sort it out.

This is just one of the mapping efforts from the FCC that have been used to award billions of dollars of funding over the last decade. The FCC relied on mapping data from the big telcos to establish the areas that were eligible for the billions of dollars of CAF II funding.

Since rural areas served by the biggest telcos have been neglected for years, and since the big telcos deployed very little rural DSL outside of towns it’s not hard to identify huge swaths of rural areas that have little or no broadband. But the big telco broadband coverage data contains a ton of inaccuracies. For example, there are numerous smaller rural towns that are listed in the telco databases as having decent broadband, when the reality on the ground is broadband speeds of a few Mbps at best. It looks like the big telcos often reported marketing speeds rather than actual speeds. This inaccuracy has stopped others from seeking federal grants and loans to upgrade such towns.

I fear that rural broadband mapping is on the verge of the next crisis. As a blogger I am contacted a lot by folks in rural America describing their broadband situation. I’ve heard enough stories to convince me that the big telcos have made only a half-hearted effort at implementing CAF II. I think many homes that should have seen CAF II broadband upgrades will see zero upgrades while many others will get upgraded to speeds that don’t meet even the measly CAF II goal of 10/1 Mbps.

The big telcos are not likely to come clean about having pocketed CAF II funding rather than spending every penny to make upgrades, and so they are going to claim that the CAF II areas have been upgraded, regardless of the actual situation on the ground. Rural households that didn’t see the promised upgrades will then be counted by the FCC as having better broadband. That will make these areas off limits to future federal funding to fix what the telcos botched. We already see the newest federal grant programs having a new requirement that no more than 10% of the homes covered by federal funding can have broadband today. Because of the falsified mapping, many homes without broadband are going to be deemed to be covered and it will be a massive challenge for somebody else to get funding to help such areas. These communities will be harmed twice – once by the telcos that aren’t upgrading speeds and second by the inaccurate mapping that will stop others from funding assistance to fix the problem.

The big telcos and carriers have huge incentives to lie about rural broadband coverage. None of the big telcos or cellular carriers want to spend any of their own money in rural areas, but they love the revenues they are receiving by a captive rural customer base who pays high prices for poor broadband. The big companies are fighting hard to preserve these revenues, which means they don’t want anybody else to get funding to improve broadband. To make matters worse, the big telcos continue to eliminate technicians and maintenance budgets in rural America, making it nearly impossible for customers to get repairs and service.

I unfortunately don’t have any easy solution for the problem of crappy mapping. Perhaps the FCC could entertain challenges to the broadband maps in the same way they are accepting challenges in the Mobility II process. I know a number of rural communities that would make the effort to create accurate broadband maps if this might bring them better broadband.

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The Industry

AT&T is Not Launching Mobile 5G

AT&T recently took the next step in the 5G hype race by announcing that it is releasing the first mobile 5G device. The announcement was made at end of the year to cover past AT&T announcements that the company would launch mobile 5G in 2018. The company can now say that they beat Verizon and Sprint to the market.

The AT&T announcement is referring to the device they are calling a puck. It’s a small Netgear modem that is being touted as a 5G mobile hotspot. The puck is based upon at least a few aspects of the 3GPP NR standard, allowing AT&T to claim it’s 5G. AT&T has not been fully forthcoming about how the device works. Where available the device will supposedly grab bandwidth from AT&T’s 5G cellular network – but since the 5G network is mostly still imaginary, in most places it will grab signal from the existing 4G LTE network. Within a home the puck will transmit WiFi, just like any other WiFi router.

There is no real product here. For at least three months AT&T will be giving away the puck and service for free to selected users. After that they’ve said the pricing will be $499 for the puck plus $70 monthly for bandwidth with an incredibly stingy 15 GB data cap. My prediction is that this product never makes it to market because it’s hard to envision anybody in an urban area willing to pay $70 a month such a small amount of WiFi bandwidth. The only market for the puck is possibly a few early adapters with money to burn who want to be able to say they owned the first 5G devices.

This announcement sets a new low for 5G hype. What I found most disturbing is that dozens of news sites picked up the story and basically spit back the AT&T press release and called it news. Those dozens of articles give the public the impression that 5G mobile is right around the corner, which is exactly what AT&T intended – they want the public to equate 5G and the AT&T brand name together. To be fair, there are several industry articles that didn’t buy into the AT&T hype.

The AT&T announcement also made this sound like a breakthrough technology by implying that this will deliver faster cellular speeds. There is a lot needed before there is a faster 5G cellular network. First, AT&T would need to install 5G transmitters on residential streets, requiring them to build neighborhood fiber networks. For the puck to work with millimeter wave spectrum AT&T would need to put a small antenna on the outside of a home to receive the signal since millimeter wave bandwidth won’t pass through the walls of a home. A network that will deliver residential millimeter wave cellular bandwidth is nearly identical to a network that would deliver 5G fixed broadband.

AT&T is not taking any of those needed steps. In fact, AT&T’s CTO Andre Fuetsch spent the fall repeatedly taking potshots at Verizon’s 5G deployment, saying that Verizon is making a mistake chasing the ‘fixed’ 5G market.

To further deflate this announcement, AT&T’s CFO John Stephens recently told AT&T investors to not expect any 5G revenues in 2019. He admitted it will take many years until there are enough 5G phones in the market to make a noticeable difference in revenues. It seems the only cellular carrier being truthful about 5G is T-Mobile which says it will begin introducing some 5G characteristics into their cell sites starting in 2020.

The bottom line is that AT&T just announced the release of a WiFi router that works off their 4G LTE network, but which supposedly will incorporate at least some aspects of the 3GPP NR standard. The company isn’t planning to charge for the product and it’s hard to envision anybody buying hotspot bandwidth at the prices they announced. But AT&T got what they wanted, which was dozens of news articles declaring that AT&T was the first to market with mobile 5G. I bet a decade from now that’s exactly what the Wikipedia article on 5G will say – and that’s all AT&T was really shooting for.

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Technology The Industry

Private 5G Networks

One of the emerging uses for 5G is to create private 5G cellular networks for large businesses. The best candidates for 5G technology are businesses that need to connect and control a lot of devices or those that need the low latency promised by the 5G standards. This might include businesses like robotized factories, chemical plants, busy shipping ports and airports.

5G has some advantages over other technologies like WiFi, 4G LTE and Ethernet that makes it ideal for communications rich environments. Cellular network can replace the costly and bulky hard-wired networks needed for Ethernet. It’s not practical to wire an Ethernet network to the hordes of tiny IoT sensors that are needed to operate a modern manufacturing factory. It’s also not practical to have a hard-wired network in a dynamic environment where equipment needs to be moved for various purposes.

5G holds a number of advantages over WiFi and 4G. Frequency slicing means that just the right amount of bandwidth can be delivered to every device in the factory, from the smallest sensor to devices that must upload or download large amounts of data. The 5G standard also allows for setting priorities by device so that mission critical devices always get priority over background devices. The low latency on 5G means that there can be real time coordination and feedback between devices when that’s needed for time-critical manufacturing devices. 5G also offers the ability to communicate simultaneously with a huge number of devices, something that is not practical or possible with WiFi or LTE.

Any discussion of IoT in the past has generally evoked discussion of factories with huge number of tiny sensors that monitor and control every aspect of the manufacturing process. While there have been big strides in developing robotized factories, that concept of a concentrated communications mesh to control the factories has not been possible until the 5G standard.

We are a few years away from having 5G networks that can deliver on all of the promised benefits of the standard. The big telecom manufacturers like Ericsson, Huawei, Qualcomm and Nokia along with numerous smaller companies are working on perfecting the technology and the devices that will support advanced IoT networks.

I read that an Audi plant in Germany is already experimenting with a private cellular network to control the robots that glue car components together. Its robot networks were hard-wired and were not providing fast enough feedback to the robots for the needed precision of the tasks. The company says it’s pleased with the performance so far. However, that test was not yet real 5G and any real use of 5G in factories is still a few years off as manufacturers perfect the wireless technology and perfect the sensor networks.

Probably the biggest challenge in the US will be finding the spectrum to make this work. In the US most of the spectrum that is best suited to operating a 5G factory are sold in huge geographic footprints and the spectrum will be owned by the typical large spectrum holders. Large factory owners might agree to lease spectrum from the large carriers, but they are not going to want those carriers to insert themselves into the design or operation of these complex networks.

In Europe there are already discussions at the various regulatory bodies on possibly setting aside spectrum for factories and other large private users. However, in this country to do so means opening the door to allowing the spectrum to be sold for smaller footprints – something the large wireless carriers would surely challenge. It would be somewhat ironic if the US takes the lead in developing 5G technology but then can’t make it work in factories due to our spectrum allocation policies.

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