Tag Archives: 5G

Is 5G Faster than 4G?

Ookla recently tackled this question in one of its research articles. Ookla compared the time it takes to load pages for Facebook, Google, and YouTube on cellphones using 4G LTE networks versus 5G networks.

Ookla thinks that page load speed is a great way to measure cellphone experience. The time needed to load a web page is directly impacted by latency, which measures the lag between the time a phone requests a website and that website responds. You might think that when your phone asks to see a website that the Internet just facilitates the connection. In reality, the web process is not perfect, and not every bit from a web site make it to your phone on the first try. In a normal web connection, the receiving ISP might need to make five to seven requests to resend missing bits until a connection is made between a web site and your phone. Latency measures the sum of the needed transactions.

Page load time is a critical statistic for eCommerce sites like Amazon. Ookla cites an article from Medium that quantifies the impact of slow page loads. According to the article:

  • 47% of users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less.
  • 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
  • Surveys have shown that a delay of 1 second reduces customer satisfaction for using a website by 16%.
  • 79% of shoppers who are not satisfied with a website’s performance are less likely to buy from the same site again.
  • This has a huge impact on eCommerce. According to the article, every 1 second delay in page load time costs Amazon $2.1 billion in sales per year.

Ookla also cited an older Ookla article which is a great primer on why latency matters.

So how did 5G compare to 4G LTE in the U.S.? According to Ookla, 5G improved page load times by 21% to 26% for the three popular web sites.

This will surprise some folks. I know several people who swear that 4G LTE is faster than 5G – and they might be right in their immediate neighborhood. Also note that measuring page load time is not the same as measuring speed on a speed test.

We should step back and look at the difference between 4G LTE and 5G. To a large degree, these are the same technology, and the difference is the frequency being used by the cellphone. The big carriers all established new bands of frequency they labeled as 5G, but initially operated these new bands with the identical specifications operating the 4G LTE networks. Over time, the carriers have introduced a few 5G improvements in the 5G portion of the network – but the long list of whiz-bang improvements that were promised by 5G have never materialized. Your 5G phone is still not using network slicing and other improvements that promised a big technology leap for 5G.

Also note that Ookla is reporting national statistics, and it’s likely that these statistics vary by market. It’s also likely that the performance of the two technologies differs during the day as the load on the two networks ebbs and flows. But the Ookla statistics show that, overall, there is better performance on 5G. Perhaps the article should have come with the traditional advertising warning: “Note that your performance might vary.”

The Future of the Last Mile

The last two blogs in this series looked at the broadband demand for speed and usage. The first blog predicted that demand in 25 years for broadband speeds could be as much as 100 times more than today’s definition of broadband of 100 Mbps download. The second blog predicted that demand for broadband usage in 25-years could conservatively be 12 to 15 times more than today, and could be a lot more.

Today’s blog looks at what that kind of future demand means for last mile technologies. The fastest broadband technology today is fiber, and the most common fiber technology is passive optical network (PON). This technology brings broadband to local clusters of customers. The original PON technology deployed in the early 2000s was BPON, which had the capability to deliver 622 megabits of speed to share in a cluster of 32 homes.

The next PON technology, introduced widely around 2010, was GPON. This technology uses faster lasers that deliver 2.4 gigabits of speed to share in a cluster of 32 homes. The industry has pivoted in the last few years to XGS-PON, which can deliver 10 gigabits of bandwidth to a neighborhood cluster of homes. Vendors are already working on a PON technology that will deliver 40 gigabytes to a cluster of homes. Cable Labs is working on a PON technology they have labeled as CPON that will deliver 100 gigabits of speed to a cluster of homes.

Consider the following table that shows the increase in last-mile fiber bandwidth that comes with PON technologies:

 

 

 

XGS-PON is a great upgrade, but has only 4 times the capacity of GPON. XGS-PON is not going to satisfy broadband needs in 25 years when demand is at least 12 to 15 times greater than today. By then, fiber ISPs will likely have upgraded to 40G PON, which has over 16 times the capacity of GPON. There will be a lot of talk in 25 years of upgrading to something like CPON, with a capacity of over 40 times that of GPON.

Something that cable executives all know but don’t want to say out loud is that cable networks will not be able to keep up with expected future demand over 25 years. The planned upgrade to DOCSIS 4.0 brings cable company technology close to the capability of XGS-PON. DOCSIS 4.0 will allow for multi-gigabit speeds over coax, but there is no planned or likely upgrade for coax to match the capabilities of 40G PON.

Any discussions about boosting the future capacity of cable networks is moot anyway. Most coaxial networks were built between the 1970s and 1990s, and in 25 years the copper will be between 60 and 80 years old. There is no question that the coaxial copper will be past its useful life by then.

A few cable companies have already acknowledged this reality. Altice announced a transition to fiber years ago but doesn’t seem to have the financial strength to complete the upgrades. Cox has quietly started to upgrade its largest markets to fiber. All big cable companies are using fiber for expansion. By 25 years from now, all cable companies will have made the transition to fiber. Executives at the other big cable companies all know this, but in a world that concentrates on quarterly earnings, they are in no rush to tell their shareholders about the eventual costly need for an expensive infrastructure upgrade.

There is no possibility for wireless technology to keep up with the increased demand that will be expected in 25 years. The only way to increase wireless speeds and capacity would be to greatly increase the size of wireless channels – which the FCC is unlikely to do – or use much higher frequencies. We’ve already learned that millimeter-wave and higher frequencies can deliver much faster speed, but don’t play well in an outdoor environment in an end-to-end wireless network. This doesn’t mean that wireless ISPs won’t be delivering broadband for decades to come – but over time, wireless last-mile technologies will fall behind fiber in the same way that DSL slowly fell behind cable modems.

Unless satellite technology finds a way to get a lot faster, it won’t be a technology of choice except for folks in remote areas.

Mobile data is always going to be vital, but there will be major pressure on wireless companies to finally deliver on the promises of 5G to keep up with future demand for speed and bandwidth.

Wireless Carrier Aggregation

T-Mobile recently announced that it was able to aggregate six channels of spectrum into one bandwidth signal to a customer. The ability to wed channels together was one of the promises of the original 5G specification. Verizon says it has been able to aggregate seven channels of spectrum for a single customer.

The test combined two channels of 2.5 GHz, two channels of PCS spectrum, and two channels of AWS spectrum, creating an effective 245 MHz of aggregated channels. T-Mobile worked with Ericsson and Qualcomm to make this work and was able to create a single 3.6 Gbps connection from a cell tower. The tests looked at using aggregated channels for download or upload.

The original 5G specifications envisioned that 5G could be used to give each customer exactly the amount of bandwidth that is needed for a transaction. If a customer is trying to download a gigantic file, the vision was they would be given the large bandwidth needed to get the job finished faster. The 5G vision was to minimize the impact on a cell tower by getting transactions done quickly, thus freeing up the spectrum to use for somebody else.

The original 5G specification also went the opposite direction with network slicing to be able to give a customer a tiny bandwidth channel if that is all that is needed. Currently, a customer gets a full channel assigned for a cellular connection even if they are barely using the bandwidth.

The primary purpose for both of these changes was to be as efficient at a cell tower as possible, which would mean that more customers could be connected at any time, particularly at busy times of the day.

It’s hard to imagine what T-Mobile and Verizon have in mind for this capability. The downside to combining six or seven channels for a given customer is that those channels are not available for anybody else. It’s a great solution for short bursts, but this would really eat into a cell site’s capacity if these connections were permanent or even for short periods of time. It is possible that a cell site could be used to make gigabit connections to large customers, but that seems like an expensive and wasteful use of valuable spectrum.

One of the possible uses of this capability would be at a small cell site that is constructed solely for the benefit of a large industrial or business customer. Large companies are always looking for a second or third source of bandwidth for redundancy and resiliency, and this open the possibility of using the cellular network for redundancy. This capability would allow a cellular carrier to make a high-bandwidth connection without having to introduce a different set of radios.

According to the original vision of 5G, all of these changes would have been integrated into cellular networks by now. We’re still only at the early stage of 5G, where carriers don’t do a lot more than provide a second set of frequencies to spread out network usage. However, it’s pretty obvious by now that none of the extra revenue streams that were envisioned for 5G ever materialized – and that means the carriers have lost the appetite for introducing expensive new features that don’t bring extra money.

This use of channel aggregation seems to be a way to use 5G to make money – at least in some limited circumstances. This implies that a cellular carrier could offer a fast (and expensive) broadband connection anywhere they have fiber and can place a small cell site.

The South Korea 5G Story

The U.S. cellular industry has never figured out a way to monetize 5G. I think back to the early days of the 5G pronouncements when the new technology promised to usher in an age of smart cities, self-driving cars, virtual reality, and the ubiquitous computer in the cloud that would follow us everywhere. It was an alluring vision, but almost none of those great things ever happened beyond the occasional demo.

The only place that might have swallowed the 5G story even more strongly than here was South Korea. Rather than just talk about 5G, the carriers there invested heavily and early into network upgrades that brought faster cellular speeds. In terms of deployment, South Korea is ahead of the world. The average 5G cellular speed in the country in 2022 was 896 Mbps download.

Like in the U.S., the original deployment of 5G was underwhelming. The three carriers in in the county – SK Telecom, KT, and LG Uplus – made claims about speed upgrades and applications that were slow to materialize. None of the companies wanted to go all-in for a technology for which there was no obvious revenue stream, so each was slow to make upgrades. The hype quickly outgrew the reality.

But over time, the companies made incremental upgrades to goose speeds to today’s near-gigabit speeds. Like in the U.S., one of the challenges was spectrum. 5G was kickstarted in Korea with 3.5 GHz mid-range spectrum. The industry then looked at 28 GHz millimeter wave spectrum for developing superfast speeds.

After a lot of trials, the carriers eventually rejected the widespread use of millimeter wave spectrum for the same reasons it’s not been used here. While the bandwidth potential is gigantic, the distance limitations for the spectrum in the wild limit the usefulness outside of unique situations like stadiums.

In a move that would never happen here, the Fair Trade Commission in South Korea fined the three wireless carriers almost $25 million for making exaggerated advertising claims. The claimed speeds could only be achieved with millimeter wave spectrum in controlled situations but were not available to the average customer. If that sounds familiar, think back to the Verizon ads on TV in the early days of 5G that showed a cell phone receiving gigabit-plus broadband speeds. While those speeds were real, a customer had to have a specialized phone and only use it outdoors in a tiny portion of several major city business districts.

The motivation for originally stressing 5G was different in both countries. In Korea, the original 5G craze was in response to a customer base that is fanatical about gaming. The carriers touted that 5G networks would provide fast, low-latency connections that would allow gamers to play from anywhere (at least in cities). Any public disappointment in 5G there is due to not meeting that claim.

I’ve speculated on the U.S. 5G craze for many years. The best explanation I’ve figured out is U.S. carriers had a huge bandwidth deficit and decided to create the 5G craze as a way to pressure the FCC into giving them more spectrum. I speculate that the companies didn’t want to openly talk about their networks being in crisis to protect their stock prices. And did they ever sell the story! I think the marketing folks took the 5G story and ran with it to a bigger extent than the carriers had envisioned. For a year or two, 5G was the primary topic in the industry.

U.S. carriers got what they wanted, and the FCC speeded up auctions for the new frequencies that we now refer to as 5G. While U.S. cellular speeds are nowhere close to the 900 Mbps in South Korea, in most U.S. cities the speeds are now between 150-200 Mbps.

You may wonder why speed matters since most cell phone functions don’t require a superfast speed. Faster speeds benefit of the network. Fast speed reduces the time that a given customer is using the cellular network, making the network available to make many more connections throughout the day.

U.S. carriers still need more spectrum to keep up with the mad growth curve for cellular demand. The industry has recently started hyping 6G as the solution for the future – but that means stepping into the millimeter wave spectrum that South Korea has already tried and rejected. I hope we don’t see the same overblown rhetoric that we saw with the 5G craze – but nothing the cellular marketers do would surprise me.

Industry Shorts September 2023

Following is a discussion of a few topics I found to be interesting, but which are not long enough for a separate blog.

Starlink is massively far behind its original business plan. Starlink ended 2022 with around 1 million customers, while its original 2015 plan projected 20 million customers by the end of 2022. The 2022 revenues were $1.4 billion, far under the original projection of over $12 billion. The original projection was for Starlink to make $7 billion in profits in 2022, but the company still had monthly operating losses last year – although the company now claims a small profit at the end of the first quarter of 2023. Starlink company currently has over 4,700 satellites in orbit. The FCC has approved the launch of over 30,000 satellites, and Starlink says that 11,000 are needed to complete the first full constellation.

The company is currently up to around 1.5 million customers worldwide, which is impressive. But Starlink has a new competitor in FWA cellular wireless in many rural parts of the country. T-Mobile and Verizon added almost 3.2 million customers in 2022 and another 1.8 million in the first two quarters of this year. Much of rural America should be getting faster broadband over the next four years from the many federal grants, and I have to wonder if Starlink will ever meet it’s rosy projections for rural America.

Starlink has also been delivering slower broadband speeds than it originally advertised. The company now claims the following speed capabilities on its website, which are slower than what was reported a year ago. For example, in September 2022, residential speeds were claimed to be between 50 – 200 Mbps with upload speeds of 10 – 20 Mbps.

Download                   Upload

Residential      20 – 100 Mbps            5 – 15 Mbps

Business          40 – 220 Mbps            8 – 25 Mbps

RV                  5 – 50 Mbps                2 – 10 Mbps

There is still a lot of pent-up demand for Starlink. In every county I’ve worked in this year, I’ve talk to people on the Starlink waiting list.

AT&T Internet Air. AT&T has not taken the same aggressive approach to selling FWA cellular broadband as Verizon and T-Mobile, which together had over 5.9 million FWA customers at the end of the second quarter of this year.

But AT&T recently announced that it is now installing several thousand FWA connections every day. The product will use the frequencies that AT&T has labeled as 5G for customers living in range of a 5G-enabled tower and will use LTE spectrum elsewhere. AT&T said customers could be provisioned with a combination of 4G and 5G.

Chris Sambar, the President of AT&T Networks, wrote a recent blog that says that the AT&T cellular network has seen a 30% annual increase in the amount of bandwidth used per cellular customer. Any network engineer will tell you that is a huge increase. Landline broadband usage has historically grown at a rate of about 20% annually. At a 30% annual increase, network traffic will double in less than three years.

Sambar also said that AT&T was starting to test what he calls standalone 5G. That means using cellular technology that incorporates the 5G standards. For the last five years, everything offered by cellular companies that has been labeled as 5G was actually 4G LTE delivered using a new set of frequencies. It will be interesting to see what 5G can actually do differently. The blog mentions network slicing, which is perhaps the most important 5G feature – it will allow a cell tower to match the bandwidth being delivered to a customer to match the demand – small bandwidth for simple uses, and bigger bandwidth when needed. If network slicing works as originally intended, the bandwidth at a cell site will be used far more efficiently and a cell site will be able to handle a lot more simultaneous connections.

Slowdown of Cellular Expansion

The broadband industry has always been cyclical. The industry has repeatedly gone through periods of booms and busts that have typically been exaggerated by the manufacturers of telecom equipment. When something new comes along, vendors jump on the new idea and drive up expectations for future sales. The stock prices of the vendors rise on the announced future expectations. But inevitably, the wave of enthusiasm comes back to earth, and the market returns to normal and vendor stock prices drop.

We’re now seeing the beginnings of the end of the boom of the big cellular upgrades to 5G. One indicator that the boom is slowing is that Ericsson and Nokia both recently lowered expectations for future equipment sales, and the stock of both companies instantly dipped around 10%.

For the last four years, the cellular industry has been in a boom as the big cellular carriers upgraded around 70% of their cell sites nationwide while also building new small cell sites. These upgrades meant huge sales for Ericsson and Nokia. It meant a big boom for tower climbers and crews who work on upgrading new cell sites. It has also meant a boom in fiber construction when carriers like Verizon and AT&T constructed fiber to replace costly leased transport for cell sites.

The improvement to the nationwide cellular networks has been impressive. The median cellular download speed nationwide measured by Ookla in 2017 was 22.6 Mbps, and at the end of 2022 had climbed to 193.7 Mbps. Most people think that fast cellular speeds are primarily for the benefit of customers. While this is an important issue, faster speeds are even more important for the best functioning of cell sites. Faster speeds mean a given customer uses the spectrum resources for a shorter time, thus freeing the network for other customers. Faster speeds alone have stretched the capability of cell sites to be able to handle a lot more traffic.

A slow-down of 5G construction will have a lot of repercussions around the industry. It will most immediately negatively affect firms and crews who have been working on upgrading cell sites for the last several years.

But there is an upside for the industry as a whole since some of the technicians who have been working on cellular projects can transition to the giant workload currently coming from building fiber. This won’t help technicians who only climb towers, but many of the other technicians already have fiber experience in their background.

These boom and bust cycles raise some interesting questions for the industry. The ones most harmed by the busts are the smaller construction and support companies that gear up to meet a specific industry demand – and these are usually the first ones cut when that demand slows.

I have to wonder what will happen to all of the cell sites that haven’t been upgraded. A lot of the remaining cell sites are rural, and I still see a lot of rural cell sites where carriers have not upgraded to FWA broadband. I recently cited the CEO of T-Mobile who described how the company rates rural markets. His rating system hinted that upgrades might not be coming soon for markets that the company rates low where the population is scattered.

I’ve worked in a dozen counties recently where 30% or more of residents told us on surveys that cellular coverage doesn’t work at their homes. This blog has largely concentrated on the lack of good broadband, but it’s just as devastating for a community when cell phones don’t function well. I’m not sure that DC policymakers fully grasp the hardships that come from lack of cellular coverage. One of my blogs earlier this year talked about a family killed by a tornado since they couldn’t be reached by cellular or broadband to warn about the coming storm. That’s an extreme example of problems that come from lack of cellular coverage – but the bigger tragedy comes in folks that can’t communicate in ways that the rest of us take for granted.

The Next Big Thing

I’ve always been somewhat amused to read about the colossally important technology trends that are right around the corner. These trends are mostly driven by the wishful thinking of vendors, and they have rarely come true, at least to the extent that is predicted. Even when the next big thing comes to pass, it’s almost never at the predicted magnitude. There has been at least one of these big trends announced every year, and here are a few of the more interesting ones.

I can remember when it was announced that we would be living in an Internet of Things world. Not only would our houses be stuffed full of labor-savings IOT devices, but our fields, forests, and even the air around us would be full of small sensors that would give us feedback on the world around us. The reality was not the revolution predicted by the industry press, but over a decade, most of us now have smart devices in our homes. But the fields, forests, and surrounding environment – not so much.

The IOT trend was followed by big pronouncements that we’d all be adopting wearables. This was not only devices like Google Glass, but we’d all have wearables built into our everyday clothes so that we could effortlessly carry a computer and sensors with us everywhere. This prediction was about as big of a flop as imaginable. Google Glass crashed and burned when the public made it clear that nobody wanted everyday events to be live streamed. Other than gimmicks at CES, there was no real attempt at smart clothes.

But wearables weren’t the biggest flop of all – that is reserved in my mind for 5G. The hype for 5G swamps the hype for all of the other big trends combined. 5G was going to transform the world. We’d have near gigabit speeds everywhere, and wireless was going to negate the need for investing in fiber broadband networks. 5G was going to enable fleets of driverless cars. 5G would drive latency so low that it was going to be the preferred method for connection by gamers and stock traders. There was going to be 5G small cell sites on every corner, and fast wireless broadband would be everywhere. Instead of 5G, we got a watered-down version of 4G LTE labeled as 5G. Admittedly, cellular broadband speeds are way faster, but none of the predicted revolution came to pass.

A few predictions came to pass largely as touted – although at a much slower pace. Five years ago, we were told that everything was going to migrate to the cloud. Big corporations were going to quickly ditch internal computing, and within a short time, the cloud would transform computing. It didn’t happen as quickly as predicted, but we have moved a huge amount of our computing lives into the cloud. Tasks like gaming, banking, and most of the apps we’ve come to rely on are in the cloud today. The average person doesn’t realize the extent that they rely on the cloud until they lose broadband and realize how little of the things they do are stored in the computers at their homes and offices.

This blog was prompted by the latest big trend. The press is full of stories about how computing is moving back to the edge. In case the irony of that escapes you, this largely means undoing a lot of the big benefits of going to the cloud. There are some good reasons for this shift. For example, the daily news about hacking has corporations wondering if data will be safer locally than in the cloud. But the most important reason cited for the movement to edge computing is that the world is looking for extremely low latency – and this can only come when computer processing is done locally. The trouble with this prediction is that it’s hard to find applications that absolutely must have a latency of less than 10 milliseconds. I’m sure there are some, but not enough to make this into the next big trend. I could be wrong, but history would predict that this will happen to a much smaller degree than being touted by vendors.

All big technology trends have one big weakness in common – the fact that the world naturally resists change. Even when the next big thing has clear advantages, there must be an overwhelming reason for companies and people to drop everything to immediately adopt something new, and that usually is untested in the market. Most businesses have learned that being an early adapter is risky – a new technology can bring a market edge, but it can also result in having egg on one’s face.

Ten Years

Today is the tenth anniversary of writing this blog every day. That equates to 2,527 blogs, and that got me thinking about why I write this blog. It also got me thinking about the things I have gotten right and wrong over the years in my daily musings about the broadband industry.

I give full credit for this blog to my wife Julie. Ten years ago, I told her that I was having trouble keeping up with the rapid changes in the industry. Julie suggested that I start writing a daily blog as a way to force myself to read and think about the industry. Writing a blog every day was incredibly difficult at first. I struggled to find topics, and I struggled to condense my thoughts into 700-word essays. But I stuck with it until writing became a habit. I now can’t imagine not writing a blog, and I usually have a longer list of potential topics than there are days to write about them.

Before writing this blog, I went back and read some of my blogs over the years to see what I got right and wrong. One thing about having a public blog is that you can’t escape what you’ve said in the past – it’s all still out there to read.

One of the first things I got wrong happened in the first year of writing the blog. I was highly skeptical of Tom Wheeler being named Chairman of the FCC. Mr. Wheeler had an interesting career as CEO of several high-tech companies but had also served as the President of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA). I assumed that his experience in lobbying for the biggest companies in the industry meant that he was going to bring a bias to the FCC strongly in favor of big companies over everybody else. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Tom Wheeler ended up being one of the most even-handed heads of the FCC during my career. He sometimes sided with large corporations, but he also was a champion of consumers and municipal broadband – something that I think surprised everybody in the industry. He was what you want to see in an FCC Chairman – somebody who independently supported what he thought was right instead of what was wanted by corporate lobbyists.

Another thing I got wrong was something I wrote near the end of 2019. By that time, I had heard for years from rural communities that despaired that they had no broadband and were being left behind. I wrote that I sadly didn’t see any real hope on the horizon and that rural communities were on their own to get creative and find a way to fund broadband – even though I knew that the financial lift was beyond most communities. There was no way to know that we were only a few months away from a pandemic that would change everything. We sent students and workers home to somehow cope with school and work without broadband, and the cry for better broadband could no longer be ignored. We’re now awash in broadband grant funding. It’s going to take a few years to see if the grant funding is enough to serve everybody, but broadband solutions are on the way for most rural communities that were unimaginable in 2019.

I also got some things right. From the first time that I heard about the supposed wonders of 5G, I was extremely skeptical because I couldn’t find a business case for the technology. Almost everybody in the country already had a cellphone, and it was hard to imagine that people would be willing to spend more to get the rather obscure benefits promised by 5G. If anything, the trend seemed to be in the opposite direction, with competition driving cellular prices lower. I watched in amazement as the power of large corporate lobbying invented a fervor for 5G out of thin air. The public and politicians were sold on the idea that 5G meant a broadband revolution, and the 5G message was suddenly everywhere. There is still no great business case for 5G and there has been very little actual 5G technology introduced into networks. Yet even today, I keep reading about how 5G will soon change everything.

I also got it right in predicting that broadband demand would continue to grow. Akamai reported in 2013, when this blog started, that the average broadband download speed in the U.S. was 8.6 Mbps. Pew said that 2013 was the year when home broadband connections hit a 70% market penetration. The digital divide was already evident in 2013 when 90% of homes that included a college graduate had broadband compared to only 37% for homes where the adults didn’t have a high school degree. From the beginning of writing my blog, I predicted that home broadband consumption would double every three years – and it has grown even faster. Amazingly, politicians and policymakers still act like broadband demand is static. In 2015, the FCC amazingly handed out $1.5 billion annually for six years of CAF II funding to support the rural DSL provided by the largest telcos. Even today, policymakers are ignoring the broadband growth trends by allowing BEAD grants to be given to technologies as slow as 100/20 Mbps. We embarrassingly still have a national definition of broadband of only 25/3 Mbps at a time when a large majority of folks are able to buy gigabit speeds.

People often ask me how long I’ll keep writing this blog, and my answer is easy. I’ll keep writing for as long as there are interesting topics to talk about – and for as long as it’s fun.

The Disappointment of 5G

Karl Bode recently wrote an excellent article highlighting the overhyping of wireless technologies. He’s right, and for the last twenty years, we’ve been told that a world-changing wireless technology is coming soon, but none ever materialized. No wireless technology has been a bigger flop than 5G when comparing the hype to the eventual reality.

The hype for 5G was amazingly over-the-top. The wireless carriers and vendors blitzed the country in a coordinated effort to paint 5G as the solution that would bring broadband everywhere. 5G was going to bring us self-driving cars. 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. And 5G was going to use millimeter waves to bring us gigabit-speed broadband everywhere, eliminating the need for investing in expensive fiber networks.

The hype fired up the general public, which bought into the 5G promises, but the public wasn’t the real audience of the hype. The cellular carriers did a non-stop blitz on federal officials, getting them to buy into the amazing wireless future. The cellular companies launched gimmick networks in downtowns to deliver gigabit cellular speeds using millimeter-wave spectrum as a way to sell the 5G vision. It’s clear in retrospect that the rhetoric and gimmicks were aimed at getting the FCC to release more mid-range spectrum for cellular usage – and it worked. There was pressure on the FCC to move more quickly with proceedings that were examining spectrum availability. The wireless carriers even talked the FCC into allowing cellular carriers to poach free WiFi spectrum in cities. The hype worked so well on elected officials that there was a serious discussion about the U.S. buying one of the big wireless vendors like Nokia or Ericsson so that the U.S. wouldn’t lose the 5G war with China.

The main problem with all of this hype is that the rhetoric didn’t match the specifications for 5G that were adopted by international standards bodies. The 5G specifications included a few key goals: get cellular speeds over 100 Mbps, allow for more simultaneous users at a given cell site, allow a cellphone to use two different spectrum bands at the same time, and allow a user to connect to more than one cell site if the demand needed it. The primary purpose of the 5G spec was to eliminate cell site congestion in places where there are a lot of people trying to simultaneously use the cellular network. Nothing in the 5G specification is earth-shattering. The specification, as a whole, seemed like the natural evolution of cellular to better accommodate a world where everybody has a cell phone.

I wrote several blogs during the height of the 5G hype where I was puzzled by the claims that 5G would bring about a broadband revolution because I couldn’t see those claims backed up by the technical capabilities of 5G. I also wrote several blogs asking about the business case for 5G because I couldn’t find one. We will likely never build a dense cellular network along the millions of miles of roads to support self-driving cars. The biggest business use of 5G touted by the carriers was to get people to buy subscriptions to use 5G to support the smart devices in our homes – but people will never buy a subscription to do what WiFi can do for free.

There is still not a good business case that can drive the new revenues needed to justify spending a lot of money on 5G. Because of this, most of the 5G specification has not been implemented. How many people are willing to pay extra for the ability to connect a cellphone to two cell towers simultaneously?

Instead of 5G that follows the specifications, we’ve gotten more marketing hype where the cellular carriers have labeled the new spectrum from the FCC as 5G. There is almost none of the 5G specification in this product, and the product labeled as 5G still uses 4G LTE technology. The introduction of the new spectrum has relieved the pressure on overloaded cell sites, and we’ve seen cellular speeds rise significantly. But that faster speed is wasted on most cellular customers who don’t do anything more data-intensive than watch video.

It was interesting to see how the rhetoric died down once the cellular carriers got access to more spectrum. The big winner from the marketing hype has been the handset manufacturers, which have convinced customers that they must have 5G phones – without really telling them why. Cellular customers are generally pleased that speeds have increased since this means stronger coverage indoors and in outdoor dead spots. But surveys have shown that only a minuscule percentage of people are willing to pay more for faster cellular speeds.

The most ludicrous thing about the 5G story is that the industry is now hyping 6G. This new marketing hoax is focusing on some of the mid-range spectrum that was originally touted as being part of the 5G war – but the marketers rightfully assume that most customers won’t understand or care about the facts. It seems like the industry has embarked on subdividing what was originally considered as 5G spectrum into small chunks so that the carriers roll out subsequent generations of 6G, 7G, and 8G – all of which were supposedly part of the original 5G revolution. I have no doubt that the public will buy into the hype and want 6G phones when they hit the market, but I also know that none of them will see any difference in performance. The formula seems simple – announce a new G generation every eighteen months and sell a lot of new handsets.

A New Definition of 6G

We now know how the wireless carriers are going to continue the string of new G generations of cellular technology.

5G was originally defined to include spectrum up to 90 GHz or 100 GHz. In the last few years, international standards bodies have been developing new 6G standards in what is called the terahertz wavelengths between 100 GHz and 1 THz. By definition, these higher frequency bands are the remaining part of the radio spectrum, and the so the 6G being defined by international scientists will be the final generation of G technology.

These super-high frequencies have a lot of interesting potential for indoor uses since this spectrum can transmit an immense quantity of data over short distances. But the high frequencies might never be used for outdoor broadband because the extremely short radio waves are easily distorted and scattered by everything in the environment, including air molecules.

Scientists have speculated that transmissions in the terahertz frequencies can carry 1,000 times more data than the current 5G spectrum bands. That’s enough bandwidth to create the 3D holograms needed for convincing virtual presence (and maybe my home holodeck).

But terahertz frequencies are going to be of little use to the cellular carriers. While cellular companies have still not deployed a lot of the 5G standards, the marketing folks at these companies are faced with a future where there would be no more G generations of cellphones – and that is clearly a lost marketing opportunity.

Several of the wireless equipment vendors have started to refer to bandwidths in the centimetric range as 6G. These are frequencies between 7GHz and 20 GHz. I have to admit that I got a really good belly laugh when I read this, because much of this frequencies is already in use – so I guess 6G is already here!

When 5G was first announced, the big news at the time was that 5G would open up the millimeter-wave spectrum between 24 GHz and 40 GHz. The equipment vendors and the cellular carriers spent an immense amount on lobbying and advertising, talking up the wonders of millimeter-wave spectrum. Remember the carefully staged cellular commercials that showed gigabit speeds on cell phones? That was done using millimeter-wave spectrum.

But now, the marketing folks have pulled a big switcheroo. They are going to rename currently used spectrum as 6G. I guess that means millimeter-wave spectrum will become 7G. This also leaves room for several more generations of G marketing before reaching the 100 GHz terahertz spectrum.

This will clearly cause a mountain of confusion. The international folks are not going to rename what they have already labeled as 6G to mollify the cellular marketers. We’re going to have articles, advertising, and lobbying talking about two completely different versions of 6G. And before the ink is dry, we’ll also be talking about 7G.

The cellular vendors also want us to change the way we talk about spectrum. The folks at Nokia are already suggesting that the newly dubbed 6G spectrum bands should be referred to as midband spectrum – a phrase today that refers to lower spectrum bands. That sets the stage to talking about upper bands of frequency as 7G, 8G, and 9G.

What is funniest about this whole process is that there still isn’t even any 5G being used in the world. The cellular carriers have implemented only a small portion of the 5G specification. But that hasn’t deterred the marketers who have convinced everybody that the new bands of spectrum being used for 4G are actually 5G. It’s a pretty slick marketing trick that lets stops the cellular carriers from not having to explain why the actual 5G isn’t here yet.