Tag Archives: 5G

Let the 6G Hype Begin

In case you haven’t been paying attention, wireless vendors are busy working towards the introduction of 6G starting around 2030. The industry has introduced a new generation of cellular technology every ten years since the first 1G network was introduced in 1981.

I’ve been reading a lot of industry press on the upcoming 6G generation of cellular. I have to admit that some of the claims gave me a good laugh, because the vendors in the industry are touting a lot of potential applications for 6G that seem to be a stretch, just like happened during the lead-up to 5G.

Before describing a few of the promises I’ve been reading for 6G, let me remind you of some of what we were promised with 5G that never really materialized. 5G was touted to be bringing:

  • A superfast network since 5G will enable clusters of 5G small cell sites that will bring the network close to everybody.
  • Super-low latency of 4 milliseconds, even in moving vehicles. It was promised that 5G would be able to compete with fiber for functions like real-time gaming and stock trading.
  • Speeds up to 10 Gbps by the widespread introduction of frequencies between 20 and 60 MHz.
  • A greatly increased capacity for simultaneous connections that would mean 5G subscriptions for cars, smart watches, and the many 5G-enabled smart devices in the home.
  • 5G would enable new technologies like stores having 5G-enabled hologram displays throughout a store. Experts envisioned a 5G network strung along every street and road to enable smart self-driving cars. There was even talk about being able to use 5G to enable medical operations using robots conducted by remote doctors.

The coming introduction of 6G also includes a lot of claimed benefits. 6G will:

  • Enable immersive communication and human-machine interactions. Use cases include immersive eXtended Reality (XR), remote multi-sensory telepresence, holographic communications, haptic sensors and actuators, and multi-sensory interfaces.
  • Lower operator costs will mean affordable and meaningful connectivity for all. This means universal coverage, including sparsely populated areas. 6G will create a seamless interface between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks.
  • Be able to connect to a massive number of devices that will enable smart cities, smart cars, environmental monitoring, and sensors for agriculture. (Sounds like the same claim made for 5G).
  • Will enable connections to smart machines for the remote operation of robots, autonomous factories, and the creation of digital twins for factories, health care, and other complex use cases.
  • Peak data rates between 50 and 100 Gbps.
  • A target air interface latency between 0.1 ms and 1 ms.
  • Terrestrial-based locating technologies to locate objects within 1 to 10 centimeters.
  • AI-related capabilities to support distributed data processing, distributed learning, AI computing, AI model execution, and AI model inference.

Just like with 5G, the real-life implementation of 6G will be determined by the functions that wireless carriers can monetize. 5G is outperforming the hype in some areas, and most urban 5G networks today are considerably faster than the 100 Mbps goal included in the early 5G hype, yet most of the promised 5G functionality never materialized when carriers found that customers prefer free WiFi to paying for more cellular subscriptions. The same is going to be true with 6G. It’s hard to imagine that introducing 6G will automatically trigger widespread use of multi-sensory telepresence or somehow bring cell towers to rural America. But you can’t blame the vendors who want to get carriers excited about 6G and be willing to pay for the upgrades.

AT&T Adds New 5G Spectrum

AT&T recently agreed to purchase the 3.45 GHz spectrum from EchoStar and was able to deploy the new spectrum in 23,000 AT&T cell sites in a matter of weeks. The company will use this spectrum to beef up 5G speeds and to also power its FWA cellular home broadband product it markets as AT&T Air. While the spectrum sale still needs to be officially recognized by the FCC, the agreement between EchoStar and AT&T allows for an immediate lease of the spectrum to AT&T.

Anybody following the cellular industry knows that AT&T’s 5G speeds have significantly trailed the speeds being delivered by Verizon and T-Mobile. This should also strengthen AT&T’s recent decision to seriously market its FWA product. AT&T was several years behind Verizon and T-Mobile in marketing wireless home broadband, and just started to seriously market the product in 2024. AT&T had its best quarter of new FWA sales in the third quarter and added 270,000 new customers to bring it to almost 1.3 million FWA customers.

The most interesting thing about this upgrade was the short time required for the upgrade, with 23,000 cell sites upgraded in weeks. Just a decade ago, an upgrade like this would have taken fleets of technicians visiting each cell site, and the update would have normally taken more than a year. I recall stories about the challenges AT&T and the other carriers faced in implementing the first wave of 4G LTE. The LTE upgrades weren’t a one-time event, and every six months to a year there would be new 4G improvements.

AT&T was able to make the upgrade quickly today for several reasons. First, AT&T already owns 3.45 GHz spectrum in some markets, so it has already built the spectrum into its handsets and headends.

But the real news is that AT&T has upgraded cell sites over time to make it easy to make software upgrades remotely. Starting in 2017, AT&T used the required upgrades needed to implement FirstNet, the nationwide first responder network, as an opportunity to also update hardware and software at cell sites for its own purposes. Upgrades were made to hardware and software to prepare cell sites for the next decade of likely upgrades.

It’s easy to think that a company like AT&T probably has a relatively generic configuration at cell sites, but that was never the story historically. AT&T and the other cellular carriers deploy different spectrum in markets depending on the cell licenses they hold in each region. The company operates a range of sizes of cell sites, from tiny rural ones to monster sites in major metropolitan areas. This now also includes a number of microcell sites in markets that are used to serve a large building or a particularly busy neighborhood. AT&T cell sites also vary widely by the age and specific type of electronics at each cell site. The complexity of the historical cellular network makes it easy to understand why it was so challenging to implement a nationwide upgrade.

But AT&T clearly invested a lot in software that can be triggered quickly for a large number of cell sites. This AT&T announcement is good for AT&T, which can instantly realize the benefits of a change like adding new spectrum. It’s good for customers, who see faster speeds immediately. It’s not so good for the many folks who used to travel and make this kind of upgrade.

I’m an AT&T cellular customer, and I took a cellular speed test as I wrote this blog. My download speed is almost 100 Mbps faster than some tests I had taken in the spring. That increase may not come from this upgrade, but it might.

Here We Go Again

It looks to me like history is repeating itself. We’re seeing the same hype cycle for 6G that we saw for 5G. The big push for 5G was mounted on several fronts. Telecom vendors preached the wonderful new features that 5G would bring to the market. The big cellular carriers got on board and pushed for 5G as the easiest path to get the FCC to award them new spectrum. To be fair to the carriers, they definitely needed new spectrum because the 3G/4G networks were becoming badly overloaded. The government was brought on board to push for 5G with the story line that the U.S. was losing the 5G war to the Chinese.

5G proponents promised a lot of amazing improvements, which were largely dependent on two claims. First was that 5G would bring gigabit speeds that were ten times faster than 4G through the use of millimeter wave spectrum and new technologies like network slicing. There was a promise that latency would fall to less than 1 millisecond, significantly better than fiber. The hype for 5G was over-the-top. 5G was going to bring us self-driving cars powered by ubiquitous 5G networks along every road. 5G would enable doctors to perform surgery remotely from across the country. 5G was going to fuel an explosion of smart factories that would bring complex manufacturing back to the U.S. 5G speeds were going to eliminate the need for investing in expensive fiber networks.

We’re starting to see the same hype cycle starting for 6G. The carriers have been making a huge pitch over the last year to get more spectrum, and have already won the first half of that battle when the H.R. 1 legislation instructed the FCC to find 800 MHz of new mid-range spectrum for the carriers. The lead-up to that bill included policy lobbying claiming that the U.S. is losing the battle for 6G to the Chinese (sound familiar?).

Vendors are also leading the charge again. It’s not hard to understand their motivation since they will benefit tremendously from a new round of major upgrades to cell site electronics. When vendors make claims of future technologies, it’s as much to lobby the carriers as it is any policymakers. Today’s blog talks about the claims of upcoming technologies being made by Hemanth Sampath, Vice President of Engineering at Qualcomm in an interview with FierceNetwork.  In the interview, Sampath was asked about the user experience he expects to become mainstream in the next 5-10 years. His response not only requires a nationwide upgrade to 6G but also would mean a ubiquitous, constant connection between devices and AI data centers.

Sampath envisions a migration during the coming decade away from today’s technology that is app-based, and smartphone-centric or screen-centric. He believes we’ll quickly migrate to what he calls a more natural environment where people will pair smart glasses and a smartwatch to interact with AI agents. He said, “instead of just carrying one device like a phone, you’ll now have multiple devices that you’ll be carrying and you’ll be able to seamlessly work across these different devices by speaking to them, or the glasses see what you see.”

He admits that existing 5G can’t enable that future and that we’ll need an upgrade to 6G, which will have “the extra capacity, the foundational technologies to squeeze more capacity in the existing bands as well as provide new spectrum”. He believes new 6G standards will enable better AI-friendly protocols.

Along with 6G, his vision means that users would be constantly connected to a digital twin in the cloud that will process the inputs from smart glasses and other devices. A constant connection to an AI datacenter will be needed so that computing is done in the cloud to protect the battery life of personal devices.

It’s a bold vision, and one that will require huge capital investments from cellular carriers. The carriers had no choice but to make the upgrades to 5G to prevent a collapse of the 4G network. But in doing so, carriers realized that there was very little new revenue to be derived from increasing cellular bandwidth and capacity. The carriers recognized this quickly and all stopped far short of implementing the full set of 5G features. Carriers are going to be skeptical about making huge investments that depend on millions of people willing to foot the monthly bill that would enable Sampath’s vision. The one wildcard in the vision is that AI companies will support the idea, because just like the cell carriers, they are searching for a recurring revenue to support AI.

John Deere’s Private 5G Network

FierceNetwork recently published an article talking about the private 5G network implemented by John Deere for it’s campuses and factories. Having a secure private wireless network is allowing the company to implement 5G technology onto the manufacturing floor.

The company got started on this solution when it spent $546,000 to buy CBRS PALs licenses in 2021 in five counties in Illinois and Iowa, that included its headquarters in Rock Island County, Illinois. John Deere has more than twenty facilities in the five counties.

The key to making this work was the exclusive use of spectrum, meaning that Deere can always rely on the wireless bandwidth free of interference or use by others. That assurance allows the company to establish a wireless network to communicate directly with manufacturing equipment in its factories.

It’s taken four years for the company to make the transition to wireless broadband, with the company having to find a 5G interface for each piece of equipment. Jason Wallin of John Deere is quoted that the company adopted an 80-10-10 model where 80% of broadband needs are covered by the private 5G networks, 10% by WiFi, and 10% with hard-wired Ethernet. The company says it is spending $1.7 million this year on updated smart tools to take advantage of the wireless network.

The company was quoted in 2021 about seeking the same wireless solution in its other factories around the world. But adopting this in other locations would require working with a cellular license holder to somehow carve out spectrum for each factory.

The creation of 5G private networks was one of the original big promises for 5G. There have been some notable examples of private 5G networks created around the world for Airbus, Shanxi Coking Coal, Group, Tesla, Lufthansa Technik, and NEC. However, this has not been the booming business for cellular carriers they hoped for. If you look back at industry press five years ago, you’d see the carriers touting this as a major opportunity. However, like other business lines based on 5G, the performance badly underperformed the expectations. The John Deere example showed a corporation that found it better to buy the spectrum and tackle this on its own rather than partnering with a carrier.

The CTO of John Deere says the company expects to use the newly created wireless network far into the future. This sounds like a relatively small investment to gain the benefits of fully automating the factory floor by connecting all machinery to an integrated network.

When Does 4G Sunset?

No large cell carriers have announced specific long-term plans for phasing out 4G cellular. However, all of them have commented in various forums that 4G will eventually be retired, as happened to 3G.

Looking at the lifespan of 3G might be a decent barometer for the lifecycle of 4G. The phase-out of 3G happened in 2022, about twenty years after its introduction. Interestingly, the 3G phase-out was delayed by the pandemic and might have otherwise occurred a little earlier. 4G was introduced into networks around 2010, and that might presage retirement of the technology starting around 2030.

When I researched the question online, I ran across numerous predictions that a 4G phase-out in the U.S. will likely start around 2030. All predictions are that 4G and 5G will continue to coexist until a phase-out begins.

One of the factors that favors 5G is that more customers every year are changing to cell phones with 5G capability. You might think that almost everybody upgrades phones, but when 3G finally was ended, there were still millions who didn’t have a 4G capable phone. Cell phones are increasingly expensive, and there is a significant portion of the public who hangs on to a working phone as long as possible.

One of the problems with phasing out 4G is that a lot of hardware and services are hard-wired to use 4G. For example, there are numerous IoT devices and vehicle systems that only look for a 4G connection. Any device you’ve purchased without a 5G capability will become a brick when 4G is finally retired.

One of the biggest issue of retiring 4G is that the lower frequencies used for 4G carry for greater distances in rural markets. If 4G was cancelled today, a lot of rural neighborhoods and households would lose cell coverage to some extent, and some would lose it totally. It’s possible that carriers will repurpose lower frequencies to 5G, but none of them have announced such plans.

The transition to 5G has been successful. My consulting firm has looked at cellular coverage in several markets, and 5G connections have grown to be roughly two to one over 4G connections in the markets we studied. Interestingly, as more customers migrate to 5G, those networks get busier, particularly at peak time. Conversely, speeds on 4G network seem to be climbing over time as the demand decreases.

There was hope that 4G spectrum could be leveraged to last longer by using Dynamic Spectrum Sharing that allows 4G and 5G to share the same spectrum band. However, an article in LightReading last year says the technology has now been abandoned in the U.S. since the technology did not mitigate signal interference between the uses.

A Spectrum Crisis?

CTIA, the trade association for cellular companies published a recent blog titled, “The Looming Spectrum Crisis”.  The blog quotes a study from Accenture that concludes that a lack of spectrum for 5G is reaching a point of crisis. The Accenture study says that cellular networks will be unable to meet nearly one-fourth of peak-period requests for connection as soon as 2027.

My first reaction to this headline was, “Here we go again”, because this feels like the giant industry drama eight years ago when the wireless industry told everybody who would listen that the U.S. was losing the 5G war to China. That effort was also aimed at getting more spectrum to support 5G. In retrospect, it turned out that nobody cares what China does with wireless inside their own country.

The other original promise was that 5G was going to revolutionize connectivity. Cell sites were going to be upgraded so that customers could get huge amounts of bandwidth by combining signals from multiple small cell sites that were going to be on every corner. 5G was going to unleash self-driving cars, virtual reality, and even the ability for doctors to do remote operations. It turns out that none of those things were ever implemented because cell carriers quickly realized that people weren’t willing to pay extra for a faster cell signal or for the bells and whistles.

However, the scare tactics worked, and the carriers got the new spectrum. The public didn’t get the bells and whistles, but we got faster cellular networks that work better, and that’s okay.

The CTIA blog seems to be rehashing the same old claims. The blog says that without new spectrum, consumers won’t have access to next-generation products and services like remote robotics, extended reality devices, and autonomous vehicles. Lack of spectrum also means that AI will be stifled.

The biggest threatened consequence of not getting more spectrum is that competition will suffer. By that, CTIA means that the carriers want more spectrum to expand 5G FWA home broadband. That’s interesting because the CEOs of the cellular carriers have all publicly been saying that 5G home broadband is a sideline and was implemented to use up excess capacity in the network. This is the first time I can recall seeing FWA as the justification for needing more spectrum. I can understand why the carriers want more FWA – they had grown the business in only a few years to over 11.6 million customers at the end of 2024. However, wanting more spectrum to sell more FWA customers is not a looming crisis.

It is true that cellular traffic usage has been growing rapidly and likely will continue to do so. Ericsson says the rate of growth of cell phone data usage in North America will be 16% per year through 2030. That prediction must be tempered by the fact that OpenSignal says that 85% of cell phone traffic is now handled by WiFi and not with cellular spectrum.

I guess the wireless industry saw that crying wolf worked eight years ago, and are adopting the same tactic again. The industry clearly needs more spectrum in the future, but it’s not particularly believable that cell networks will be unable to complete huge numbers of connection requests only a year and a half from now.

If the industry is really going to run out of 5G spectrum by 2027, you would think there would have been a much louder stink about this before the second quarter of 2025. You also might think that an industry that was facing that kind of crisis wouldn’t have connected 11.6 million FWA home broadband customers to scarce 5G spectrum in the last few years – particularly since the average FWA customer uses up to 100 times more cellular data in a month than the average cell customer. I am sure that the real purpose of this kind of headline is to give cover for the FCC to give more spectrum. But it’s so damned dramatic.

Rural 5G

The FCC voted last year to launch the 5G Fund for Rural America to expand 5G coverage into the many parts of country with poor cell coverage. It may turn out that market forces might mean that some of that subsidy won’t be needed since the big carriers are expanding into rural areas. A recent blog from Ookla documents the rural expansion of 5G. Ookla concludes that fierce nationwide competitive pressure is driving the carriers to look harder at rural areas to gain every possible customer.

Ookla, which collects a huge volume of speed tests, is one of the few companies that can look at carrier expansion using its own data. When Ookla sees multiple speed tests on 5G, it has definitive proof that coverage is present in an area. Ookla looked at the recent rural expansion from each of the three primary carriers.

T-Mobile. Ookla shows that T-Mobile has the largest rural 5G footprint today. T-Mobile claims it covers 323 million people, or 98% of U.S. households with 5G using its low-band 600 MHz spectrum. This low-band spectrum carriers for a greater distance than the spectrum used by other carriers. The company was required to expand coverage to 97% of the population as part of the agreement with the FCC when it purchased Sprint. I have to wonder about the 98% coverage. If you look closely at the FCC cellular maps, T-Mobile shows coverage of very slow speeds over a lot of rural America, and you have to wonder if this coverage is real enough to even use for voice calls.

T-Mobile also is the fastest carrier in much of the country, which came from the deployment of the 2.5 GHz spectrum that the company acquired with the Sprint purchase. The company has used the 150 MHz band of the spectrum to increase speeds in the top 100 markets in the country. We know that T-Mobile has rural plans since the company announced in 2024 that it is hoping to achieve a 20% market share in rural America by the end of 2025. That claim is bolstered by the pending close of the purchase of 30% of the spectrum and all 4.5 million customers of UScellular.

AT&T. A lot of the company’s rural expansion comes from FirstNet. This is a nationally funded program to create a nationwide first responder network. AT&T was awarded $6.5 billion to build the network and also given 20 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum. FirstNet brought AT&T a 25-year contract with the government. There is an expected $2 billion additional investment to upgrade the network to 5G everywhere.

One of the key requirements for FirstNet is that it must be made available to first responders in rural areas. This led AT&T to install FirstNet on all of its own towers and to build over 1,000 rural towers. AT&T announced in October 2024 that it has 6.4 million connections and 29,000 public safety agencies on the network. AT&T has also invested heavily in spectrum auctions and spent $37 billion the FCC’s C-band and 3.45 GHz auctions.

Verizon. Verizon doesn’t own much low-band spectrum that would give it coverage in rural areas. Instead, the company relied on a technology called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) that allows one spectrum band to toggle between 4G LTE and 5G  in 1 millisecond increments. While it works, this didn’t give the company the boost it was hoping for.

Verizon’s rural strategy seems to be through acquisition, and the company has bought cell carriers operating in Kentucky, Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Montana. Verizon is also buying $1 billion of 850 MHz, AWS and PCS spectrum from UScellular.

Verizon is betting on the C-Band spectrum that it purchased in 2021 for $52 billion. It’s hoping that the 161 MHz band of spectrum will carry it into the future. The company has announced it intends to deploy more rural spectrum,

None of the carriers are likely to expand into sparely populated rural areas where coverage is often nonexistent. But the current expansion plans likely will bring cellular relief to a lot of rural areas, long before any solution might come from the FCC.

Fixing Urban Cellular Coverage

Anybody who lives in an urban or suburban area know that cell coverage is not the same everywhere. There are neighborhoods with great cell coverage, neighborhoods with so-so  coverage, and neighborhood with little or no coverage. Nobody understands this better than first responders and city employees who work in all parts of a city.

This is all due to the physics of cell coverage. The FCC has purposefully restricted cell towers to low power levels in order to create discrete coverage areas or cells. This was done so that neighboring towers don’t interfere and cancel each other out. Coverage is also affected by the specific frequencies being used by cell carriers, with some of the higher frequencies used for 5G having shorter coverage distances. Another important factor that affects cell quality is the number of users in a neighborhood. Anybody who lives close to a busy road or a high school knows there are certain times of the day when coverage gets worse due to heavy cell usage.

The final factor that creates cellular deserts is the placement of cell sites. The big tall cell towers  were located years ago to largely take cover highways – not where people live. This was done due to a compensation system where carriers got wealthy from carrying vehicle roaming traffic for other carrier networks. Cell towers have also often been forced to locate on taller hills or away from residential neighborhoods who didn’t want a giant unsightly tower in backyards. Unfortunately, cities are now largely stuck with the original cell tower configuration.

A lot of the poor coverage can be solved with the placement of additional small cell sites to fill in neighborhoods with poor coverage. You might recall five years ago when the carrier industry promised to build a million small cell sites. For various reasons that never happened. The primary reason came when carriers realized they weren’t going to make any incremental new revenues from 5G, and they lost interest in investing in cell site infrastructure.

The good news is there is a way for cities to tackle the cellular coverage issue. My consulting firm recently helped a city in a major urban area that knew it had poor cell coverage. Using various tools, we were able to fully map all of the important factors that measure cell phone call quality.

We were able to create separate coverage maps for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, which is important because every carrier has distinctly different coverage areas based on the specific cell sites and frequencies they are using. Probably the best result of this study was a map that showed the unfortunate neighborhoods where all three carriers have poor coverage. A map overlaying poor cell coverage and household incomes was also eye-opening.

There are a lot of consequences of poor cellular coverage. The national statistics show that about 11% of homes have no home broadband and must rely on cell phones as the only source of broadband. Folks who live in neighborhoods with weak cell coverage can’t use their cell phone indoors. First responders struggle in these communities. Delivery companies struggle to find addresses when they lose cell and GPS coverage. Folks who can’t afford home broadband and who live in cellular deserts have the worst of all worlds for connectivity and are stuck having to seek out public WiFi for connectivity.

We think cities will find a cellular mapping study to be invaluable. For the first time, they’ll be able to visualize cellular coverage in ways they can understand. Armed with coverage maps, cities can have conversations with carriers about addressing some of the worst coverage. A next logical step might be forming public-private partnership or economic development initiatives to help fund improved cell coverage. But none of that can be contemplated until a city knows the facts.

Devaluing Spectrum

Mike Dano recently wrote an article for LightReading that talks about the plummeting value of 5G millimeter wave spectrum. The FCC started the process of auctioning this spectrum in 2018, and Verizon, T-Mobile, Echostar, AT&T, and smaller carriers paid almost $10 billion for the 24 GHz millimeter wave spectrum. The unique aspect of the auction was the huge size of the channels and the first auction offered two blocks of 425 MHz, while the second auction offered seven blocks of 100 MHz.

At the time, this was touted as the spectrum that was going to supercharge 5G. Verizon launched a public trial using the spectrum in 2019 in downtown Chicago and Minneapolis. Customers with special phones enabled for the new spectrum were able to get speeds of 500 Mbps. Soon after, there were more trials in more cities by multiple carriers. You may remember the TV commercials at the time showing gigabit speed tests on cellphones.

Unfortunately, the trials showed the real-world limitations of the millimeter wave spectrum. The signal didn’t carry far, and small cell sites were needed every few thousand feet to provide coverage. While the spectrum could bounce off buildings to extend coverage, any object in the direct path of a cell tower blocked the signal, even the human body and glass windows. It also became quickly clear that, other than the novelty of being superfast, cell customers had no real need for gigabit speeds which greatly exceeded the computing capacity of cellphones. The real issue that made this unfeasible was the cost of a network. In this same time frame, carriers were all collectively touting they would deploy a half million small cell sites, but that effort died quickly when it became clear that there wasn’t any new revenue stream to pay for the new networks.

Interestingly, the rest of the world never put much faith in millimeter wave spectrum. Currently, many phones in the U.S. can still receive this spectrum band, but it’s not included in phones sold in the rest of the world.

Carriers have started the process of walking away or devaluing the millimeter wave spectrum. In July, T-Mobile walked away from 520 licenses for the spectrum, something that is almost unheard of in the carrier world. UScellular recently cut the value of the spectrum by half in its books.

This is not to say that there is no value in the millimeter wave spectrum. Verizon thinks this is the right spectrum to use in places like stadiums and other crowded outdoor venues. This is also a powerful spectrum to use indoors to carry gigabit speeds. The need of the millimeter wave spectrum became obsolete for cellular when the FCC auctioned C-Band spectrum in 2021, which behaves much better outdoors.

This is not the first spectrum sold at auction to be a bust. For example, the FCC auctioned Multipoint/Multichannel Distribution Service (MMDS) spectrum in 1995 and 1996. This was spectrum between 2.3 – 2.5 GHz that was touted as wireless cable TV. In the U.S. this was auctioned in 31 separate 6 MHz channels, each intended to carry one channel of cable TV. A handful of small cable companies made this work, but the idea quickly lost interest when channel lineups grew to hundreds of channels. The most memorable thing about this spectrum was a number of scams where license holders resold the spectrum to unsophisticated buyers.

The FCC also auctioned Local Multipoint Distribution Service (LMDS) spectrum in 1998. This was spectrum in the 27.5 – 31.3 GHz range that was touted as the future of point-to-multipoint wireless. The first gear was promoted as theoretically being able to deliver up to 100 Mbps for 1.5 miles, a remarkable speed at the time. However, the spectrum quickly fell out of favor when only a few vendors tried to market the radios – and all of the radios had been rushed to market and had big problems when deployed to customers.

FCC Launches 5G Fund

On August 29, the FCC released a Second Report and Order that officially kicked off the process of launching the 5G Fund for Rural America. The FCC says in the order that there are 14 million Americans without access to 5G, and they are going to provide a $9 billion subsidy fund to bring better rural cellular coverage. Today’s blog will look at the key aspects of the order. There is a second blog today that talks about the possible need for quick action by communities in response to this order. There will another blog tomorrow discussing some of the issues with the order.

The idea of the 5G Fund has been around for a while. The idea was floated to create a $4.5 billion fund in 2019, and in 2020 the FCC announced it would increase the fund to $9 billion and use a reverse auction. The 2020 effort came to an abrupt halt when it became clear to the FCC that the maps of coverage provided by the largest cellular carriers were highly inaccurate. The FCC has taken steps to make better maps, and cellular carriers must now report cellular coverage data to the FCC twice a year in a process that parallels the collection of broadband data that this blog has often discussed. In this new order, the FCC says that it believes the cellular maps are now adequate to enable the launch of the 5G Fund.

The funding will be awarded using a reverse auction that is only open to cellular carriers. The 5G Fund can be awarded to areas of the country that don’t have at least one carrier with a 5G mobile wireless speed of at least 7/1 Mbps, is not in an urban area, and contains at least one home or business and some portion of a road. In practical terms, that means funding for rural areas that have no 5G today (just 4G LTE) or that have 5G claimed to be slower than 7/1 Mbps. Areas that don’t have any 5G today will get extra weighting in the reverse auction.

There is a further nuance that an eligible areas can’t already be getting a benefit from an existing FCC cellular subsidy. Many folks probably don’t realize it, but there has been a rural subsidy paid to cellular providers for years from the Universal Service Fund. Mobility Fund Phase II has been providing up to $500 million per year of support to rural cellular carriers. Unfortunately, the FCC’s cellular map doesn’t identify the areas that are being subsidized.

There will likely be changes made to the existing FCC maps before an auction. For example, both T-Mobile and Dish have to meet build-out requirements due to negotiated agreements with the FCC that have not yet all been completed – the final 5G Fund map should remove areas where that will be upgraded.

Winners of the reverse auction must upgrade 40% of the area in each state by the end of 3 years, 60% by the end of 4 years, 80% by the end of five years, and 85% by the end of six years. Completion means achieving a median speed of at least 35/3 Mbps with a minimum cell edge speed of 7/1 Mbps. It also means offering at least one service that includes a minimum monthly data allowance equal to the average U.S. subscriber data usage. That’s going to mean a data cap at some amount of data usage and possibly also a limit on voice and texting.

$765 million of the fund will be reserved for tribal areas. $900 million will be used as a 10% award additive to anybody willing to guarantee the use of Open RAN technology.

Service areas will be made up of hex-9 areas aggregated into census tracts. Bidding will be done using dollars per square kilometer.

The FCC might only issue the eligible area map 30 days prior to the start of the bidding. There will be a preview map issued earlier based upon vintage BDC mapping data.