Tag Archives: Ericsson

Winning the 6G Race

In December, the White House issued a short Presidential Memorandum titled “Winning the 6G Race”. The document states that 6G technology will be “foundational to the national security, foreign policy, and economic prosperity of the United States. 6G will play a “pivotal role in the development and adoption of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and implantable technologies. 6G will also provide faster, more resilient, and more secure communication networks that can be utilized for national security and public safety purposes.”

The report begins with an interesting statement, “It is the policy of the United States to lead the world in 6G development.” This memorandum suggests that the path for the U.S. to achieve this goal is to play a significant role in the development of international standards and to identify a significant volume of spectrum that can be harmonized for 6G networks internationally.

The memorandum goes on to direct several federal agencies to make sure the U.S. gets involved in the development of standards. This is something that U.S. scientists and engineers routinely participate in. Congress already ordered the FCC to begin looking for 800 MHz of midrange spectrum to put to auction. This is the sweet spot for cellular traffic, and it seems likely that cellular companies will buy most of any such spectrum that hits an auction.

What I find most interesting about the memorandum is the use of the phrase ‘6G Race’. This brings back memories of the same rhetoric being used to tout the introduction of 5G. In looking back, I see that the term 5G race entered the vernacular in 2018. It was a phrase introduced by the big cellular carriers as part of a massive lobbying campaign to get the FCC to hold auctions for cellular spectrum. The 5G race was supposedly between the U.S. and China to become the leader in 5G technology.

The lobbying effort was intense, and you couldn’t go to any sizable industry event without being bombarded by discussions about the U.S. winning the 5G race. I wrote several blogs on the topic at the time, and there were articles in the industry press about the 5G race on a weekly basis. This reached such a fever pitch that by 2020, there was talk of the U.S. government buying either Nokia or Ericsson so that the U.S. would own a 5G company.

What’s funny is that there was no 5G race then, and there is no 6G race now. That’s not how technology advances. For both 5G and 6G, scientists and engineers from around the world first create the standards for a new technology. Once those standards are published, vendors begin seriously developing marketable technologies to sell.

Every vendor strives to make technology that meets the standards so that it can be used worldwide. Vendors like Huawei from China and Nokia from Finland want the cellular technology they develop to be able to communicate with cellphones manufactured around the world. While there are differences between vendors, the differences are fairly minor, and over time, any development touted by any one vendor will be picked up by the other vendors. The whole purpose of standards is to make sure that a new technology is compatible around the world.

What’s particularly funny is that the U.S. is a minor player in the development of cellular technologies. The vendors ultimately decide which features of a new technology get stressed and developed first. If there were a 5G or 6G race, it would be between China and Europe – but I’ve never seen competition between the vendors referred to as a race.

I think the term 6G race is just more rhetoric from the marketing folks at the big U.S. cellular carriers. While they already won half of the battle by getting Congress to require that the FCC find more cellular spectrum, the lobbying effort is to make sure that happens in a timely manner before Congress or the FCC has a change of heart.

So, in case you are late to the game, welcome to the 6G race. It’s a drama-free race, and there is no finish line. But if the cellular companies get what they are asking for, the phrase will disappear as quickly as it appeared.

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.

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 Need for Mid-Band Spectrum

5G Americas recently released its annual white paper discussing the lack of activity at the FCC in making more mid-band spectrum available for cellular broadband. The group is made up of large cellular carriers and various vendors or other companies associated with the cellular business.

Midband spectrum is an industry-defined term for the spectrum between 1 GHz and 7 GHz spectrum. This is the sweet spot for cellular broadband because these bands of spectrum can cover the distances needed for cell phone data along and carry a decent amount of bandwidth.

The paper laments that are no actions currently at the FCC to consider any new bands of spectrum in the range for cellular data. This is a concern for the cellular industry because it takes many years to open up a frequency for a new use. All parts of mid-band spectrum are currently in use. Any plan to free existing spectrum for cellular use means either relocating the current users to a different frequency or finding a way to accommodate them to coexist with cellular carriers.

The report does a great job of looking at the status of each mid-band spectrum block. Reading through the uses, it becomes quickly apparent that a lot of these spectrum bands are reserved for the U.S. government and includes uses like air traffic control, commercial and military radar, airplane altimeters, and numerous military applications.

I’m always instantly leery of any statistics, but the paper cites a report by Ericsson that the worldwide demand for cellular data is growing at 40% annually. Even if that number is true, I have to imagine that most of the increased demand comes in third-world countries where cellular is the predominant way to use the Internet and where the technology in many networks is still far behind what we have here. This statistic feels like a scare tactic, because 40% growth per year would mean a doubling of network demand every 2.5 years. If that growth was true in the U.S., we’d have heard a lot more about this growth outside of this whitepaper.

But I don’t know anybody who doesn’t think that we’ll eventually need more spectrum for mobile services. All uses of broadband keep growing, and it’s not hard to look out ten and twenty years and see a much larger demand for using wireless spectrum.

The report includes one statistic that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. It says that at the end of 2022 that North America had 108 million connections on the spectrum carriers have labeled as 5G and 506 connections that are still using 4G LTE. The initial goal for using the new mid-band 5G spectrum was to de-load 4G networks – the goal was never to move everybody to 5G. I would have expected more users of the 5G spectrum bands, but there still are a lot of cell sites that have not been upgraded to the 5G spectrum.

I think cellular carriers are going to have a challenge making their case to the public. The carriers have done a magnificent job, at least in cities, of increasing cellular speeds. According to the latest report from Ookla, the median nationwide download speed in March 2023 was over 81 Mbps, with speeds in cities over 100 Mbps.

It’s going to be more of a challenge since cellular carriers have lost some credibility with the public and politicians. They badly needed additional spectrum five years ago, but rather than openly plead that case, the carriers invented an imaginary 5G war with China and convinced the public that giving them more spectrum would transform the world. The dilemma for cellular companies now is that it’s clear that most of the public isn’t willing to spend more to get faster cellular speeds. There is no public outcry supporting more spectrum for cellular companies.

But the public has a short memory. Five years ago, a lot of markets were having huge cellular problems. It was so bad in some places that it was getting hard to make and hold mobile voice calls. The new spectrum bands that we’re labeling as 5G had a big role in solving that problem. As this whitepaper argues, we don’t want to wait until the networks degrade to have the conversation again.

Broadband Shorts – July 2017

Today I’m going to talk about a few topics that relate to broadband, but that are too short for a separate blog.

Popularity of Telehealth. The Health Industry Distributors Association conducted a follow-up survey of people who had met with a doctor via a broadband connection instead of a live office visit. The survey found that a majority of people were very satisfied with the telehealth visit and 54% said that they thought the experience was better than a live office visit.

Interestingly over half of the telehealth users were under 50 and they preferred telehealth because of the convenience. Many said that once they found their doctor would allow telehealth visits that they requested them whenever possible. Of course, many telehealth users live in rural areas where it can be a long drive to make a routine doctor office visit. The doctors involved in telehealth also like it for routine office visits. They do complain, however, that not enough insurance companies have caught up with the concept and that they often encounter reimbursement problems.

Explosion of Mobile Data Usage. Ericsson, the company that supplies a lot of electronics for the cellular industry, has warned cellular companies to prepare for an explosive growth in cellular data traffic over the next five years. They warn that within five years that the average cellphone user will grow from the average of today’s monthly usage of 5 gigabytes to a monthly usage of 26 gigabytes. They say the usage will be up to 6.9 gigabytes just by the end of this year – a 40% growth over last year.

They say that several factors will contribute to the strong growth. Obviously video usage drives a lot of the usage, but there is also huge annual growth from social media usage as those platforms incorporate more video. They also predict that by 2022, as we start to meld 5G cellular into the network, that users will feel more comfortable using data on their cellphones.

New Satellite Broadband. ViaSat just launched a new satellite that will allow for data speeds up to 200 Mbps. The satellite was recently launched and that has a throughput of 300 gigabits per second. The satellite is expected to be placed into service in early 2018 and will boost the company’s Excede broadband product.

The new satellite, dubbed ViaSat 2, will originally augment and eventually replace the company’s current ViaSat 1 satellite. The company currently serves 659,000 customers from the ViaSat 1 satellite plus a few it purchased from WildBlue in 2009. The new satellite will allow an expansion of the customer base.

The company expects that the majority of customers will continue to buy data products with speeds up to 25 Mbps, like those already offered by Excede. This tells me that the faster speeds, while available, are going to be expensive. This satellite will still be in a high earth orbit, which means the continued high latency that makes satellite service incompatible with any real-time applications. And there is no word if the larger capacity will allow the company to raise the stingy data caps that customers seem to universally hate.

Growth of Music Streaming. Nielsen released statistics that show that streaming audio is growing at an explosive rate and seems to have crossed the threshold to become the primary way that most people listen to music. Audio streams in 2017 are 62% higher than just a year ago. The industry has grown from an annual number of 113.5 billion steams to 184 billion in just one year.

Nielsen estimates that total listens to music from all media including albums and music downloads will be 235 billion this year, meaning that streaming video now accounts for 78% of all music listened to.

And this growth has made for some eye-popping numbers. For example, Drake’s release of More Life in March saw 385 million streams in the week after release. Those kinds of numbers swamp the number of people that would listen to a new artist under older media.

Technology and Telecom Jobs

PoleIn case you haven’t noticed, the big companies in the industry are cutting a lot of jobs – maybe the biggest job cuts ever in the industry. These cuts are due to a variety of reasons, but technology change is a big contributor.

There have been a number of announced staff cuts by the big telecom vendors. Cisco recently announced it would cut back as many as 5,500 jobs, or about 7% of its global workforce. Cisco’s job cuts are mostly due to the Open Compute Project where the big data center owners like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others have turned to a model of developing and directly manufacturing their own routers and switches and data center gear. Cloud data services are meanwhile wiping out the need for corporate data centers as companies are moving most of their computing processes to the much more efficient cloud. Even customers that are still buying Cisco boxes are cutting back since the technology now provides a huge increase of capacity over older technology and they need fewer routers and switches.

Ericsson has laid off around 3,000 employees due to falling business. The biggest culprit for them is SDNs (Software Defined Networks). Most of the layoffs are related to cell site electronics. The big cellular companies are actively converting their cell sites to centralized control with the brains in the core. This will enable these companies to make one change and have it instantly implemented in tens of thousands of cell sites. Today that process requires upgrading the brains at each cell site and also involves a horde of technicians to travel to and update each site.

Nokia plans to layoff at least 3,000 employees and maybe more. Part of these layoffs are due to final integration with the purchase of Alcatel-Lucent, but the layoffs also have to do with the technology changes that are affecting every vendor.

Cuts at operating carriers are likely to be a lot larger. A recent article published in the New York Times reported that internal projections from inside AT&T had the company planning to eliminate as many as 30% of their jobs over the next few years, which would be 80,000 people and the biggest telco layoff ever. The company has never officially mentioned a number but top AT&T officials have been warning all year that many of the job functions at the company are going to disappear and that only nimble employees willing to retrain have any hope of retaining a long-term job.

AT&T will be shedding jobs for several reasons. One is the big reduction is technicians needed to upgrade cell sites. But an even bigger reason is the company’s plans to decommission and walk away from huge amounts of its copper network. There is no way to know if the 80,000 number is valid, but even a reduction half that size would be gigantic.

And vendor and carrier cuts are only a small piece of the cuts that are going to be seen across the industry. Consider some of the following trends:

  • Corporate IT staffs are downsizing quickly from the move of computer functions to the cloud. There have been huge number of technicians with Cisco certifications, for example, that are finding themselves out of work as their companies eliminate the data centers at their companies.
  • On the flip side of that, huge data centers are being built to take over these same IT functions with only a tiny handful of technicians. I’ve seen reports where cities and counties gave big tax breaks to data centers because they expected them to bring jobs, but instead a lot of huge data centers are operating with fewer than ten employees.
  • In addition to employees there are fleets full of contractor technicians that do things like updating cell sites and these opportunities are going to dry up over the next few years. There will always be opportunities for technicians brave enough to climb cell towers, but that is not a giant work demand.

It looks like over the next few years that there are going to be a whole lot of unemployed technicians. Technology companies have always been cyclical and it’s never been unusual for engineers and technicians to have worked for a number of different vendors or carriers during a career, yet mostly in the past when there was a downsizing in one part of the industry the slack was picked up somewhere else. But we might be looking at a permanent downsizing this time. Once SDN networks are in place the jobs for those networks are not coming back. Once most IT functions are in the cloud those jobs aren’t coming back. And once the rural copper networks are replaced with 5G cellular those jobs aren’t coming back.