Tag Archives: 5G hotspot

Be Wary of 5G Hardware

We’ve now entered the period of 5G competition where the wireless carriers are trying to outdo each other in announcing 5G rollouts. If you believe the announcements, you’d think 5G is soon going to be everywhere. Device manufacturers are joining the fray and are advertising devices that can be used with the early carrier 5G products. Buyers beware – because most of what the cellular companies and the manufacturers are hyping as 5G is not yet 5G. Any first generation hardware you buy today will become quickly obsolete as future 5G upgrades are introduced.

5G Cellular. Cellular carriers are introducing two new spectrum bands – CBRS spectrum and millimeter wave spectrum – as 5G. The actual use of these spectrums is not yet technically 5G because the carriers aren’t yet using much of the 5G specifications. These two specific spectrum bands come with another warning in that they are only being used to produce faster outdoor broadband. Customers who live in places where they can receive the new frequencies, and who compute outdoors might see value in paying extra for the devices and the 5G data plans. Most people are not going to find any value in what these plans offer and should not get sucked into paying for something they can’t get or won’t use.

Cellphone manufacturers are already starting to build the CBRS spectrum into high-end phones. By next year there should be a 5G version of every major cellphone – at a premium price. Within a few years this will be built into every phone, but for now, expect to pay extra.

The question that users need to ask is if faster cellphone data is worth the extra hardware cost and worth the extra monthly fee that will be charged for 5G browsing. I’ve thought about the cellphone functions that would be improved with faster broadband and the only one I can come up with is faster downloads of movies or software. Faster broadband is not going to make web browsing any faster on a cellphone. Cellphones have been optimized for graphics, which is why you can scroll easily through a Google map or can flip easily between videos on social media. The trade-off for faster graphics is that cellphones aren’t good at other things. Cellphones crawl when trying to process non-cellular websites or when trying to handle spreadsheets. Faster broadband is not going to make these functions any faster, because the slowness comes from the intrinsic design of the cellphone operating software and can’t be improved with faster broadband.

I also think customers are going to face a huge challenge in getting a straight answer about when CBRS spectrum or millimeter wave spectrum will be available in their local neighborhood. The carriers are in full 5G marketing mode and are declaring whole metropolitan areas to have 5G even if that only means new spectrum is in a few neighborhoods.

Finally, beware that both of these spectrums only work outdoors. And that means on foot, not in cars. Millimeter wave spectrum is likely to always be a gimmick. Folks testing the spectrum today report that they can lose the connection simply by rotating their phone slightly or by putting their body in the path from the transmitter. CBRS spectrum will be much more well-behaved.

Laptops.  Lenovo has already announced a 5G-capable laptop coming in 2020 and others will surely jump on the bandwagon soon. The big issue with laptops is also an issue with cellphones. It might be reasonable in an area with good CBRS spectrum coverage to get a 100 Mbps or faster cellular connection. This is going to tempt a user to use a laptopas if it was on a home broadband connection. However, this is still going to be cellular data supplied on a cellular data plan. Unless the carriers decide to lift data caps, a customer using a CBRS spectrum laptop might find themselves exhausting their monthly data cap in a day or two. It’s also worth repeating that these are outdoor spectrums, and so only students or others who regularly use computers outdoors a lot are going to find this spectrum potentially useful.

5G Hotspots. A 5G hotspot is one that broadcasts bandwidth in millimeter wave spectrum. Sprint is already marketing such a hot spot. This takes us back to the early days of WiFi when we needed a dongle to use WiFi since the spectrum wasn’t built into desktops or laptops. A 5G hotspot will have that same restriction. One of the primary reasons to consider a millimeer wave hotspot is security. It will be much harder to hack a millimter wave connection than a WiFi connection. But don’t select the millimeter wave hot spot for speed because a millimeter wave connection won’t be any faster than the WiFi 6 routers just hitting the market.

In future years, 5G hotspots might make sense as millimeter wave spectrum is built into more devices. One of the biggest advantages of indoor millimeter wave spectrum is to avoid some of the interference issues inherent in WiFi. I picture the ideal future indoor network to be millimeter wave spectrum used to provide bandwidth to devices like computers and TVs while WiFi 6 is used for everything else. There is likely to be an interesting battle coming in a few years between millimeter wave and WiFi 6 routers. WiFi already has a huge advantage in that battle since the WiFi technology will be included in a lot more devices. For now there won’t be many easy ways to use a 5G millimeter wave hotspot.

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.