Tag Archives: millimeter wave spectrum

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.

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.

Is the Line Between Wireless and Wireline Blurring?

In the Bernstein Strategic Conference in May, Ronan Dunne, Verizon CEO and EVP for Verizon Consumer talked about his vision for the future of 5G. During that presentation, he made a statement that has been bugging me for weeks, so I finally had to write about it. He said that he can foresee a day when consumers will purchase home broadband in the same way that they buy wireless service today. He said that will happen because the line between the wireless and wireline business are blurring.

Dunne is talking about a future when 5G is ubiquitous and where people won’t perceive a difference between landline broadband and 5G broadband. In a term used by an economist, Dunne foresees a day when wireless broadband is a pure substitute for landline broadband – where a customer won’t perceive a functional difference between the two products.

Verizon offers several wireless products, so let’s talk about them individually. The predominant Verizon product that is in every market is cellular broadband. This uses cell sites to beam voice and data traffic to cellphones or other devices that are connected to a cellular data plan. Those cellular plans are incredibly stingy in terms of the amount of broadband that can be used in a month, with the unlimited plans offering a little more than 20 gigabytes of data before a user has to pay more or become restricted. The specifications for 5G set a goal of 100 Mbps for cellular broadband speeds within a decade. That kind of speed might be a substitute for landline broadband today from a speed perspective. But networks are not likely to achieve these speeds for at least five more years, and by then I think cable companies will be considering increase urban broadband speeds to something like 250 Mbps. I have to question if cellular broadband speeds can keep up with the speeds provided by landline connections.

Of more importance is that cellular speeds drop when entering a building. Anybody who has walked into a large building using their cellphone understands that cellular signals don’t perform as well indoors as outdoors. By the time I walk 100 feet into my neighborhood grocery store, I often have zero bars of data. While speeds don’t drop that drastically in most homes, when outdoor cellular speeds hit 100 Mbps, indoor speeds in most homes might hit half that number. With slower speeds and incredibly stingy data caps it’s hard to see cellular broadband as a pure substitute for a landline broadband connection.

I also don’t think that the gimmick product that Verizon and others are selling in urban city centers that offers gigabit speeds using millimeter wave spectrum is a landline substitute. The product requires closely spaced small cell sites fed by fiber – but the big gotcha is that the millimeter wave spectrum won’t penetrate a building and barely even make it through a pane of glass. This is an outdoor product for which I still struggle to understand a willing market. It’s certainly not a substitute for landline broadband, except perhaps for somebody who is always outdoors.

The newest wireless product is Verizon’s fixed wireless access (FWA) that beams a broadband signal into the home from a pole-mounted transmitter at the curb using millimeter wave spectrum. I have to suspect that this is the product Dunne is talking about. I would agree with him that this is a pure substitute for landline broadband. But that’s because this is just another variation of landline broadband. This technology has historically been referred to as fiber-to-the-curb. Verizon is using a wireless transmission instead of a fiber line for the last hundred feet to reach a home – but this technology requires building the same fiber into neighborhoods as fiber-to-the-home. This is not a wireless technology since 99% of the network is still comprised of fiber. Anybody using this service can walk to their curb to see the fiber that is carrying their broadband. This technology is a clear substitute for a landline fiber drop – but it’s not a wireless network other than for the last 100 feet to a home.

The other way to challenge Dunne’s vision is by comparing the volume of traffic used by landline and wireless networks. The vast majority of data traffic is still carried over wires and the gulf between the data carried by each technology is widening every year. Consider the following chart from Cisco from 2019 that shows the volumes of monthly data traffic in North America by type. This is expressed in exabytes (one billion gigabytes).

Monthly Exabytes 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
Homes 35 43 53 64 75 90
Cellular 1.3 1.8 2.5 3.4 4.5 5.9
Business 6.5 8.3 10.3 12.8 15.5 18.5
Total 43 53 66 80 95 114

Both home and business broadband are carried on wires. In 2020, only a little more than 4% of all of the data traffic in North America is carried wirelessly. For wireless technology to be a pure substitute for wireline data, wireless networks would have to be capable of carrying a much bigger share of data – many times what they carry today. The laws of physics argue against that, particularly since landline data usage is growing at an exponential rate. It’s hard to envision wireless networks in our lifetime that can handle the same volumes of data as fiber-based landline networks.

This is not intended as a major criticism of what Dunne said. The country will be better off if Verizon offers a competitive alternative to the cable companies. However, Verizon is like the other cellular companies and can’t talk about 5G without overstating the potential. I know has to keep hyping 5G for Wall Street and I sympathize with that need. But we are still very far from a day when the average household will view landline and wireless data to be pure substitutes.

Finding a Business Case for 5G

We are now more than a year into what the carriers are labeling as 5G. If you read this blog regularly you know by now that I don’t think we’ve seen any 5G yet – what has been introduced so far is new spectrum. A new band of spectrum can improve broadband performance in crowded markets, and so the carriers are getting some praise for this development. But these new spectrum bands are operating as 4G LTE and are not yet 5G.

However, we’re getting closer to 5G. Within another few years we will start to see some of the innovations contained in the 5G standards hit the market. This won’t be spectacular at first. Remember that the carrier’s primary short-term goal for 5G is to improve the capacity of cellular networks to get ahead of the exploding demand curve. Cellular data traffic is growing at an astronomical 36% annually and that is stressing cellular networks to keep up with demand. 5G is part of a 3-prong approach to increase capacity – introducing small cells, introducing new spectrum, and finally introducing 5G features. These three changes ought to brace cellular networks for another decade, although eventually, the networks will hit a wall again if growth stays on the current growth curve.

Over the last two and three years, the cellular carriers and the press were full of stories of the wonderful ways that 5G would transform our world. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile spun stories about having gigabit cellular, having fleets of self-driving cars, and having big broadband with us wherever we go. You may not have noticed, but those stories have disappeared. The carriers are not talking much about 5G capabilities other than faster speeds. They are no longer trying to soothe investors with stories of huge future 5G revenue streams.

I think the reason for this is that cellular carriers don’t have any grand visions of future 5G revenues. They still have not built a business case for 5G that justifies the cost of deploying dense networks of small cells.  Consider some of the ideas that were highly touted just a year or two ago.

Millimeter wave spectrum that can deliver gigabit broadband speeds is likely to remain a novelty. The carriers have introduced this in downtown urban neighborhoods to produce a marketing wow factors with TV commercials showing broadband speeds faster than a gigabit. But millimeter wave networks only work outdoors., and even that is funky since everything including a customer’s body can block the signal. There is no business case for spending the money for dense fiber-fed networks since cellphones are not designed for big bandwidth applications. Urban 4G is already pretty good, and there is no benefit other than bragging rights for a customer to shell out extra money for a millimeter wave phone and data plan.

There was talk for a while that 5G would displace WiFi inside homes and businesses. The idea was that 5G could do a better job of keeping data private while also bringing blazing speeds. However, the FCC has approved new WiFi spectrum that when coupled with WiFi 6 technology promises a magnitude improvement in WiFi performance. Once people start using the new WiFi there is going to be little interest in paying a monthly subscription for something that can be done well with off-the-shelf routers.

There still is talk about using 5G in medicine, touting things like the ability of surgeons to perform remote surgery. But is that ever really going to be a thing? It’s taken fifteen years and the COVID-19 crisis to get doctors to finally try telemedicine. There can’t be many doctors ready to tackle performing surgery in another city using robots. It’s also hard to think that insurance companies are going to support surgery that could go off the rails due to a fiber cut or electronics failure. 5G has also been touted as making it easier to monitor patients away from hospitals. But that’s a small bandwidth application that can be handled fine with the ever-improving 4G LTE.

There has been the hope of using 5G technology to help automate factories, and that sounds like a legitimate use of 5G. Factories that need high-precision and low latency are perfect for 5G. This will avoid any interference issues that might come with WiFi. But are there going to be enough new factories using this technology to move the financial bottom line of AT&T or Verizon?

For several years there was a story spun about how self-driving vehicles would communicate with the cloud using 5G. This never made any sense because for this to work there would have to be a dense cellular network built along every road. If the fleets of self-driving cars are developed before the 5G network, they’ll find a solution other than 5G. There also came the ugly realization that networks crash and the image of all the cars coming to a halt in a city because of a broadband outage means this may never become a reality.

Finally, there was talk of how 5G would free people from the monopoly power of the cable companies for broadband. People could have their entertainment with them at all times everywhere. However, most people are smart enough to know that the big cellular companies are also ugly monopolies. They have been engaging in bad behavior such as selling customer location data, even after being told by the FTC to stop the practice. The cellular companies are not going to win an argument that they have the moral high ground.

I have been trying to figure out the 5G revenue stream for several years and I’m no closer to it today than I was three years ago. Some people are willing to pay extra money to get faster cellular broadband speeds, but most customers think they are already paying for this in their cellular subscription. If Dish is successful in launching a new 5G network, the price pressure for 5G will likely be downward rather than increasing. The cellular carriers are going to introduce 5G even without new revenue streams because it’s the only way to keep their networks from crashing in a few years. But what they do after that is still a mystery to me.

 

Just a quick personal note. I’ve now published 1,800 blogs since I started in March 2013. That’s about 1,600 more than I thought I would be able to do. I tell myself once in a while that I’ll stop writing this blog when I run out of topics – but that doesn’t seem like it will be happening any time soon. I thank those of you who have been reading my musings. Onward to 1,800 more!

The 5G Experience in 2020

The cellular carriers are in full 5G marketing mode. If you believe the TV commercials, you’d now think that the country is blanketed by 5G, as each cellular carrier claims a bigger coverage area than their competitors. However, almost all of their claims are marketing hype. What’s the reality of 5G coverage in 2020?

What does it mean when the carriers claim wide coverage of 5G? In 2020 there will be no cellular deployment that can be legitimately called 5G. Full 5G will not arrive until the carriers have implemented the bulk of the new features described in the 5G specifications. For now, none of the important features of 5G have been developed and introduced into the market. 5G deployment will come in stages as each of the 5G features reaches markets – the same thing that happened to 4G. For now, all of the major 5G improvements are still under development in the labs.

Then what are the carriers calling 5G? Most of what is being called 5G is the introduction of new bands of spectrum. New spectrum does not equal 5G – the 5G experience only comes with 5G features. Existing cellphones cannot receive the new spectrum bands, and so the carriers are selling new phones that can receive the new spectrum and labeling that as 5G.

What does the new spectrum mean for cellular performance? At first, anybody lucky enough to grab new spectrum will likely have a great experience. This will mostly be because almost nobody else is using the spectrum at a given cell site. We will see some early claims of blazingly fast speeds that will fade away over time. As more phones can use the new spectrum, the performance will drop back to normal 4G speeds – and maybe even a little slower. Much of the first wave of spectrum being released is in lower frequency bands such as 600 MHz for T-Mobile and 850 MHz for AT&T. These lower frequency bands don’t carry as much data as higher frequencies, and in the long-run these lower frequencies will be used to bolster voice traffic.

Why are the carriers claiming widespread 5G? I can only guess that carriers have gotten so caught up in 5G hype that they feel compelled to show something new to the market. The carriers don’t like to talk about it, but their 4G networks are in big trouble in urban areas. The amount of cellular data being used by customers is doubling every two years. You don’t have to be a network engineer to understand that continuous doubling of traffic can quickly swamp any network and degrade performance. Most of the carrier activity in 2020 is aimed at propping up the 4G networks until 5G is a mature technology.

When will we see 5G features? From what I read in the IEEE forums, most of the 5G features are 2 – 5 years away. The same thing happened with 4G and it took most of a decade to see 4G fully implemented – in fact, the first US cell site fully meeting the 4G standards was not activated until late 2018. Over time we’ll see a new 5G features implemented as they are released from labs to field. New features will only be available to those that have phones that can use them, so there will be a 2 to 3-year lag until there are enough phones in the market capable of using a given new feature. This means every 5G phone will be out of date as soon as a new 5G feature is released.

What about millimeter wave spectrum – is that 5G? No, it’s just another new frequency band. The characteristics of millimeter wave spectrum are so different from traditional cellular frequencies that it’s even hard to call this a cellular frequency. The frequency is 10-30 times faster than traditional cellular frequency. It only travels short distances, mostly under 1,000 feet from a cell site. It needs line-of-sight and can be easily blocked by any impediment in the environment. It’s not going to pass from outdoor transmitters into buildings. It’s easier to understand millimeter wave spectrum if you think of it as a broadband hotspot that is mounted outside, and which can be received by special phones designed to use the frequency.

Does all of this mean a better cellular experience in 2020? It will for some people. Those who buy new phones that can receive the new frequency bands, and who live or work within two miles of an upgraded cell site will likely see improved performance – no drastically so, but a little better. Anybody who wants blazing data speeds on a cellphone and who lives or works in the urban city centers might be able to get outdoor broadband from millimeter wave hotspots. The rest of us are going to see a gradual degradation of our 4G experience as existing cell sites grow busier. This means more dropped calls, fewer bars. Until the cellular carriers have deployed a lot of small sites and started to implement the 5G features our cellular experience is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Finally, what about rural America in 2020? It’s going to still be more likely for a rural caller to snag a 3G connection than a 5G one using the new frequencies. The FCC figured out last year that the cellular carriers had greatly exaggerated their rural 4G coverage areas – something that is not news to rural residents. Rural cell sites aren’t under the same stress as urban ones due to fewer customers trying to use a given cell site, so calling should remain the same this year. There is hope over the next 2-4 years to see money from the FCC’s 5G Fund bring better 4G coverage to rural areas. True 5G features will make little noticeable difference in rural America for many years to come.

The Government’s Role in 5G

It’s been really interesting to watch how much the federal government talks about 5G technology. I’ve not seen anything else like this in my adult lifetime, although there may have been times in the past, such as the advent of railroads or electricity that the federal government took such an active interest in new technology.

The government gets involved to some extent in many new technologies, but with 5G there has been a steady and persistent dialog about how 5G is vital to our economic future, and pronouncements of why we must implement 5G as quickly as possible to stay ahead of the rest of the world. As I’ve watched the way the government talks about 5G, it makes me wonder why we never heard the same urgency for breakthroughs like personal computers, the world wide web, or understanding the human genome.

A good example of what I’m talking about came in November when a bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to Robert O’Brien, the current national security advisor asking for a better government strategy for 5G. They claimed they are concerned that China is winning the 5G war, which they believe creates a security threat for the US.

I’ve been hearing about the 5G war for a few years now and I still don’t know what it means. 5G is ultimately a broadband technology. I can’t figure out how the US is harmed if China gets better broadband. If there is now a 5G war, then why hasn’t there been a fiber-to-the-home war? I saw recently where China passed us in the number of last-mile fiber connections, and there wasn’t a peep about it out of Congress.

The market reality of 5G looks a lot different than the rhetoric from the politicians. Cellular carriers worldwide are crowing about 5G deployment, yet those deployments contain none of the key technology that defines 5G performance. There is no frequency slicing. There is no bonding together of multiple frequencies to create larger data pipes. There is no massive expansion of the number of connections that can be made at a website. Cellphones can’t yet connect to multiple cell sites. What we have instead, for now, are new frequencies layered on top of 4G LTE.

New frequency does not equal 5G. The millimeter wave spectrum is faster in the handful of neighborhoods where people can go outside in the winter to use it. The carriers admit that the 600 MHz and the850 MHz spectrum being deployed won’t result in faster speeds than 4G LTE.

AT&T recently announced a significant cut in its capital budget for 2020 – something that is hard to imagine if there is an urgent need to deploy 5G faster than the Chinese. The reality is that the big cellular companies are struggling to find a business case for 5G. They are starting to realize that a lot of people aren’t willing to pay more for faster cellular data. Some of their other big uses for 5G such as using it for self-driving cars, or for supplanting WiFi as the technology to handle IoT devices are still years into the future and may never come to fruition.

The other Washington DC talking point is that 5G networks will be 100 times faster than today’s cellular data. That may be true in the tiny downtown urban areas that get saturated with outdoor millimeter wave broadband. I have a hard time thinking this is anything more than a gimmick that will never become widespread. A dense fiber network is needed to support the millimeter wave transmitters, and it’s hard to think that the revenues from millimeter wave broadband will ever justify building the needed network.

It’s starting to look like the real reason for the talk about a 5G war is to drum up sympathy for the big cellular carriers as a justification for big government giveaways. The FCC has been generous to the cellular carriers in the last few years. They killed broadband regulation and net neutrality. They gave the cellphone carriers the right to place cellular equipment anywhere in the public right-of-way. Just recently the FCC created a 5G Fund to give $9 billion to the cellular carriers to expand their networks in rural areas. The FCC has been freeing up every imaginable band of spectrum for 5G.

That sounds like that ought to be enough, but since these giveaways are behind us, I wonder why I’m still hearing the rhetoric, such as the recent letter from Senators. Are we going to be seeing other big giveaways? Is the government perhaps going to give billions of dollars to build urban and suburban 5G networks so that we don’t lose the 5G war? I’m at a loss to think of anything else that the government could do to push 5G beyond what they’ve already done.

There doesn’t seem to be anything that the US government can do in terms of developing 5G technology faster. Corporations all over the world are furiously working to implement the many new aspects of the 5G specifications. Many of the corporations doing the key research are not even American, and labs at Nokia and several Chinese companies are among the leaders in developing the core equipment used to transmit 5G. It’s hard to think there is anything the US government could do to help us win the 5G war from a technical perspective.

I must admit that I’m starting to cringe when I hear federal officials talk about the 5G war. It makes me believe that there more big handouts coming to the cellular carriers. I hate the idea of the federal government handing billions to these big carriers while we continue to have lousy rural broadband – which is largely the fault of these same big carriers. My response to these Senators is that we shouldn’t be trying to win the 5G war if that means losing the landline broadband war.

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.

Unlicensed Millimeter Wave Spectrum

I haven’t seen it talked about a lot, but the FCC has set aside millimeter wave spectrum that can be used by anybody to provide broadband. That means that entities will be able to use the spectrum in rural America in areas that the big cellphone companies are likely to ignore.

The FCC set aside the V band (60 GHz) as unlicensed spectrum. This band provides 14 GHz of contiguous spectrum available for anybody to use. This is an interesting spectrum because it has a few drawbacks. This particular spectrum shares a natural harmonic with oxygen and thus is more likely to be absorbed in an open environment than other bands of millimeter wave spectrum. In practice, this will shorten bandwidth delivery distances a bit for the V band.

The FCC also established the E band (70/80 GHz) for public use. This spectrum will have a few more rules than the 60 GHz spectrum and there are light licensing requirements for the spectrum. These licenses are fairly easy to get for carriers, but it’s not so obvious that anybody else can get the spectrum. The FCC will get involved with interference issues with the spectrum – but the short carriage distances of the spectrum make interference somewhat theoretical.

There are several possible uses for the millimeter wave spectrum. First, it can be focused in a beam and used to deliver 1-2 gigabits of broadband for up to a few miles. There have been 60 GHz radios on the market for several years that operate for point-to-point connections. These are mostly used to beam gigabit broadband in places where that’s cheaper than building fiber, like on college campuses or in downtown highrises.

This spectrum can also be used as hotspots, as is being done by Verizon in cities. In the Verizon application, the millimeter wave spectrum is put on pole-mounted transmitters in downtown areas to deliver data to cellphones as fast as 1 Gbps. This can also be deployed in more traditional hot spots like coffee shops. The problem of using 60 GHz spectrum for this use is that there are almost no devices yet that can receive the signal. This isn’t going to get widespread acceptance until somebody builds this into laptops or develops a cheap dongle. My guess is that cellphone makers will ignore 60 GHz in favor or the licensed bands owned by the cellular providers.

The spectrum could also be used to create wireless fiber-to-the-curb like was demonstrated by Verizon in a few neighborhoods in Sacramento and a few other cities earlier this year. The company is delivering residential broadband at speeds of around 300 Mbps. These two frequency bands are higher than what Verizon is using and so won’t carry as far from the curb to homes, so we’ll have to wait until somebody tests this to see if it’s feasible. The big cost of this business plan will still be the cost of building the fiber to feed the transmitters.

The really interesting use of the spectrum is for indoor hot spots. The spectrum can easily deliver multiple gigabits of speed within a room, and unlike WiFi spectrum won’t go through walls and interfere with neighboring rooms. This spectrum would eliminate many of the problems with WiFi in homes and in apartment buildings – but again, this needs to first be built into laptops, sart TVs and other devices.

Unfortunately, the vendors in the industry are currently focused on developing equipment for the licensed spectrum that the big cellular companies will be using. You can’t blame the vendors for concentrating their efforts in the 24, 28, and 39 GHz ranges before looking at these alternate bands. There is always a bit of a catch 22 when introducing any new spectrum – a vendor needs to make the equipment available before anybody can try it, and vendors won’t make the equipment until they have a proven market.

Electronics for millimeter wave spectrum is not as easily created as equipment in lower frequency bands. For instance, in the lower spectrum bands, software-defined radios can easily change between nearby frequencies with no modification of hardware. However, each band of millimeter wave spectrum has different operating characteristics and specific antenna requirements and it’s not nearly as easy to shift between a 39 GHz radio and a 60 GHz radio – they requirements are different for each.

And that means that equipment vendors will need to enter the market if these spectrum bands are ever going to find widespread public use. Hopefully, vendors will find this worth their while because this is a new WiFi opportunity. Wireless vendors have made their living in the WiFi space and they need to be convinced that they have the same with these widely available spectrum bands. I believe that if some vendor builds indoor multi-gigabit routers and receivers, the users will come.

Is There a Business Case for Fast Cellular?

We’ve gotten a glimpse of the challenges of marketing faster cellular usage since the two major cellular providers in South Korea made a big push in offering ultrafast cellular broadband. South Korea has two primary cellular carriers – SK Telecom and KT – and both have implemented cellular products using millimeter wave spectrum in Seoul and other dense urban areas.

The technology is nearly identical to the technology introduced by Verizon is small sections of major US cities. The technology uses millimeter wave hot spots from small cell sites to beam broadband to phones that are equipped to use the ultra-high spectrum. In South Korea, both companies are selling a millimeter wave spectrum version of the Samsung Gallery. In the US there are still barely any handset options.

5G hotspot data is not the same as traditional cellular data. The small cells blast out gigabit broadband that carries for only short distances of 500 to 800 feet. The signals can bounce off buildings in the right circumstances and can be received sporadically at greater distances from the transmitters. Millimeter wave spectrum won’t pass through any obstacle and the broadband signal reception can be blocked by any obstacle in the environment, including the body of the person using the cellphone.

Even with those limitations, the speeds delivered with this technology are far faster than traditional cellular data speeds. Verizon has reported peak speeds as fast as 600 Mbps in trials being deployed in US cities. That’s an amazing amount of bandwidth to deliver to a cellphone since a cellphone is, by definition a single user device. Since the average 4G LTE data speed is less than 25 Mbps, our cellphone apps are not designed to be bandwidth hogs. Current 4G speeds are more than adequate to stream video, and with the small screens, there’s no benefit to streaming in 4K or even in 1080p. All of the major cellular carriers already chop down the quality of video streams and thus use only a fraction of the bandwidth used to deliver a single video stream to homes. Cellphones are also not designed to multitask and handle multiple simultaneous tasks.

For now, the biggest benefit of millimeter wave spectrum for cellphones looks to be the ability to quickly download big files like movies, apps or software updates. There is certainly an appeal to downloading a big movie to watch later in less than 30 seconds rather than the more normal 10 minutes. But with data caps on even most unlimited plans I have to wonder how many people routinely download big movie files when they aren’t connected to WiFi.

Another way that faster cellular speeds could be beneficial is for faster web browsing. However, the slow cellphone browsing we experience today is not due to 4G LTE speeds, which are adequate for a decent browsing experience. The painfully slow browsing on cellphones is due to operating systems in cellphones that favor display over functionality – the cellular companies have chosen to downplay browsing speed in favor of maximizing the display for phone apps. Faster millimeter wave spectrum won’t overcome this inherent and deliverate software limitation.

There is another use for faster broadband. South Korea likely has a much higher demand for high-speed cellular because the country is game-crazy. A large majority of the population, including adults, are heavily involved in intensive gaming. There is obviously some appeal for having a fast gaming connection when away from a desktop.

South Korean market analysts are looking at the cost of millimeter wave deployment and the potential revenue stream and are already wondering if this is a good investment. SK Telecom expects to have 2 million customers for the faster broadband by the end of this year. In South Korea, sales of millimeter wave spectrum phones are going well. (these can’t be called 5G phones because they don’t handle frequency slicing or the other slew of 5G features that won’t be introduced for at least three more years).

If the analysts in South Korea don’t see the financial benefits, it’s much harder to see the benefits here. Remember that in South Korea that urban homes can already buy gigabit broadband at home for the equivalent of $30 per month. Moreover, the two big ISPs are in the process of upgrading everybody to 10 Gbps within the next five years. This is a country where everybody has been trained to expect an instant response online – and the faster cellular speeds can bring that expected response to mobility.

The business plan here in the US is a lot more challenging. In South Korea, a lot of people live in dense urban city centers unlike our spread-out population with far-stretching suburbs around cities. The network cost to deploy the millimeter wave technology here will be significantly higher to achieve the same kind of coverage seen in South Korea. At least for now, it’s also a lot harder to paint a picture in the US for large numbers of users willing to pay extra for faster cellular data. Several recent surveys indicate that US consumers think faster 5G data speeds should be offered at the same high prices we already pay for cellular broadband (the US has some of the highest cellular data prices among industrial countries).

I can’t see a major play here for ultra-fast cellular broadband outside of dense city centers and perhaps in places like stadiums and convention centers. It’s hard to think that somehow deploying this technology in the suburbs could ever be cost-justified. We are likely to upgrade cellular data to the more normal 5G using mid-range spectrum, and that’s going to nudge cellular data speeds in time up to 100 Mbps. I think most users here will love somewhat faster speeds but won’t be willing to pay extra for them. It’s hard to think that there are enough people in the US willing to pay even more for millimeter wave speeds that can justify the cost of deploying the networks. This is further compounded by the fact that these millimeter wave networks are outdoors only and the spectrum doesn’t penetrate buildings at all. The US has become an indoor society. At least where I live you rarely see teenagers outdoors in their home neighborhood – they are consuming broadband indoors. Does anybody really care about a fast outdoor network?

Protesting 5G

There were over 90 protests nationwide recently against the coming 5G technology, mostly related to health concerns. The protesters have some of the facts wrong about 5G and that makes it easier for policymakers to ignore them. It’s hard to fault anybody about getting the facts wrong about 5G since the carriers have purposefully filled the press with misleading 5G rhetoric. I would venture to say a lot of people in our industry have the same misunderstandings.

I watched a few news reports of the various protests, and protesters cited the following concerns about 5G. They say that it’s already being installed and will be active in most cities by next year. They say that in the near future that cellular speeds will be 100 times faster than today. They say that the FCC has blessed 5G as safe when it’s not. Let me address each of these issues:

What is 5G? Many of the protestors don’t realize that 5G is the marketing name of several different technologies. 5G can mean improved cellular service. 5G can mean high-speed wireless broadband loops like is being tested by Verizon in Sacramento. And 5G can mean gigabit radio connections made between two points, similar to traditional microwave backhaul. Protestors have conflated the claims for each technology and assume they apply to 5G cellular service.

Is 5G Being Installed Today? Cities everywhere are seeing permit requests for small cell sites and often believe these are requests to install 5G – I just talked to a fairly large city the other day who made this assumption. For now, the requests for small cell sites are to bolster the 4G cellular network. The cellular companies aren’t talking about it, but their 4G data networks are in trouble. People are using so much data on their phones that cell sites are getting overwhelmed. The amount of data being used by cellphones users is currently doubling every two years – and no data network can handle that kind of growth for very long. The cellular carriers are quietly beefing up the 4G networks in order to avoid the embarrassment of major network crashes in a few years. They are hoping that within 3 -5 years that 5G can relieve some of the pressure from cellular networks.

Will 5G Be Here Next Year? It might be a decade until we see a full 5G cellular installation. There are 13 major specifications for improvements between 4G and 5G and those will get implemented over the next decade. This won’t stop the marketing departments of the cellular carriers to loudly claim 5G networks after one or two of these improvements have been partially implemented.  What the cellular companies never bothered to tell the public is that the first fully-compliant 4G cell site was just implemented last year – 5G is going to require the same slow steady introduction of changes until full 5G gets here. Starting a year or two from now we might see some 5G improvements, with more 5G upgrades introduced each year thereafter. The carriers will loudly announce every time they make a 5G trial and will make the world think they are the improvements will be immediately installed everywhere.

Will Cellular Speeds be 100 Times Faster? The 5G specification calls for cellular speeds to be improved over time to 100 Mbps, about 6 times faster than 4G cellular speeds today. Speeds won’t improve overnight and this certainly isn’t going to be here in a year or two.

The public thinks that we’ll see gigabit cellular speeds for several reasons. First, Verizon recently introduced a trial for fast cellular using millimeter wave spectrum in small portions of a few downtown areas. Millimeter wave cellular is not going to make sense for wide deployment because the fast data speeds only carry perhaps 200 feet from the transmitter. Millimeter wave spectrum in this application is blocked by almost everything in the environment. This trial was mostly to grab headlines, not to portend a real product. Confusion also came when AT&T recently announced a 2 Gbps connection made to an outdoor hot spot. This is using point-to-point technology that can never apply to cellphones – but the AT&T announcement made this fuzzy on purpose.

What About the Health Impacts? Most 5G cellular service will use the same spectrum, or some new bands that are similar to today’s cellular spectrum. The primary concern for 5G cellular (and 4G) is the introduction of small cell sites into neighborhoods. It’s concerning to citizens when a cell site is on a pole at their curb instead of at the top of a tall tower outside the neighborhood. The neighborhood cell sites are going to be broadcast at a lower power level than the current big cell sites, so theoretically the amount of cellular radiation ought to be similar to today. But to give credit to the protesters, we’ll only know that’s really true after small cell sites have been installed.

The real health concern that is troublesome is not related to 5G cellular using the same frequencies as today, but rather about the use of  millimeter wave spectrum. A significant percentage of the world’s scientists that work in this area recently warned the United Nations that some past research of millimeter wave spectrum shows negative impacts for plant and animal life. The scientists admit that much more research is needed and they pleaded with the UN to not use the general public as guinea pigs. Belgium recently banned millimeter wave spectrum deployment until the health risks are understood. The FCC joins with almost every other country in allowing the deployment of millimeter wave spectrum and is in the process of licensing more of the spectrum.

As mentioned earlier, Verizon recently did a few trials of sending millimeter wave spectrum to cellphones. This was viewed mostly as a gimmick because this doesn’t seem to have real-life market potential due to the limitations for the spectrum and cellphones. I just saw an estimate that it would take over 300,000 small cell sites to blanket Los Angeles with small cells that are close enough to deploy millimeter wave spectrum – that doesn’t sound like a plausable or profitable business plan.

The technology where the protesters should be focused is millimeter wave spectrum wireless loops. Verizon deployed this to a few hundred homes in Sacramento and a few other cities, delivering about 300 Mbps broadband to homes. Verizon says they have plans to deploy this widely. This is the spectrum use that the scientists warned about. A deployment of millimeter wave loops means constantly bombarding residential neighborhoods with millimeter wave spectrum from poles on the curb. The other planned use of millimeter wave spectrum is for indoor routers that will transmit gigabit bandwidth inside of a room. People can clearly decide to not use millimeter wave routers, but have no say about a carrier introducing it into the neighborhood. Protesters have a valid concern for this technology.