5G

5G adoption begins a slow ramp up in the U.S. in 2020

7 January 2020 by Steve Blum
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Cta 5g projections 5jan2020

Source: CTA

Mobile 5G broadband service adoption starts to grow in the U.S. in 2020, but it won’t be a breakout year. A couple of near term 5G market predictions were offered at CES in Las Vegas over the past couple of days, by the show’s organiser, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and by Qualcomm, which is the mobile industry’s primary chipmaker. Taken together (and at face value), the picture that emerges is of a global 5G market that 1.… More

We’ll know in 2020 what kind of service and customer enthusiasm lies beneath U.S. 5G hype

29 October 2019 by Steve Blum
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Small cell lacc 22oct2019

5G service will begin to enter the mainstream consumer market in the United States next year. Senior technology officers from all four major U.S. mobile carriers talked about their plans for moving beyond test markets and technology demonstrations last week at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Los Angeles. With consumer devices – smartphones, particularly – on the market and cell site construction and upgrades picking up pace, success will finally be judged on subscriber uptake and revenue, rather than on whose marketing pitch is the cleverest.… More

Mobile video viewing outruns desktops, is network capacity the next casualty?

22 October 2019 by Steve Blum
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Brightcove 2q2019 global video index

Demand for mobile bandwidth continues to boom, as mobile devices overtake desktop computers as the streaming video device of choice for the first time, according to a study by Brightcove, a maker of online video tools and platform services which also makes a habit of tracking such things.

Their Global Video Index for the second quarter of 2019 shows that more than half of global video viewing they can monitor is done on a smartphone (mostly) or tablet (not so much).… More

5G phone prices start high while 5G availability is low

18 September 2019 by Steve Blum
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5g mwca 12sep2018

The first 5G capable smart phones are beginning the hit the market, and already there’s wailing about sticker shock – a Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus 5G will cost $1,300 and only be available through Verizon, at least for the next few months. That’s a lot of money for an Android phone (although not exactly nosebleed territory for iOS fans). But it doesn’t say much about what it’s going to cost the average consumer to upgrade to 5G, by the time the average consumer can find 5G service.… More

5G phones must clear economic, technical hurdles before breaking into the mass market

8 July 2019 by Steve Blum
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The market for new smartphones is slowing. The global market is approaching saturation, where everyone who might use one has one, and annual sales are dropping. The pace of improvements is slowing, too. The marginal attraction of new apps and more powerful and faster hardware is diminishing.

According to a story in Digital Trends by Andy Boxall, the tide turned last year…

In 2018, smartphone sales numbers stopped growing, according to two data analysis companies, Strategy Analytics and Counterpoint Research.

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Top mobile execs let air out of the 5G balloon, which will “never reach rural America”

19 June 2019 by Steve Blum
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Deflating balloon

It’s one thing to promise the moon to customers and city councils, but quite another to mislead Wall Street. Creating outrageous expectations there can land you in jail. Which, presumably, is why two top executives from Verizon and T-Mobile are walking back expectations of a universal 5G wonderland.

According to a story by Sean Hollister in The Verge, it’s about the new frequency bands that mobile companies plan to use for high speed, low latency 5G service.… More

5G hype gets a reality check in 2020

19 April 2019 by Steve Blum
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It looks like 2020 will be the year that genuine 5G smartphones will finally be in the hands of consumers. Two developments this week cleared away significant uncertainty about who will be offering 5G phones, when it will happen and whose technology they’ll use.

The two companies settled a long running legal dispute over intellectual property rights to core 5G technology, including a deal for Apple to buy modem chips, which do the heavy processing work of wrangling radio waves into data streams at one end and reading them at the other.… More

AT&T hides 4G digital divide behind 5GE facade

29 March 2019 by Steve Blum
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Opensignal att 5ge 22mar2019

AT&T’s 5GE scam is unravelling. Measurements taken by an independent testing company, OpenSignal, show that slapping a phony 5G label on upgraded 4G LTE service does not make the user experience any faster.

According to OpenSignal’s blog post…

Some AT&T users in the U.S. have recently seen “5G E” appear on the status bar of their existing smartphones, replacing 4G. This move has sparked controversy because AT&T is using updated 4G network technologies to connect these smartphone users, not the new 5G standard…

Analyzing Opensignal’s data shows that AT&T users with 5G E-capable smartphones receive a better experience than AT&T users with less capable smartphone models…But AT&T users with a 5G E-capable smartphone receive similar speeds to users on other carriers with the same smartphone models that AT&T calls 5G E.

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Is AT&T too big and scattered to succeed?

20 February 2019 by Steve Blum
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Att vans

With the acquisition of Time Warner’s movie and TV production companies, AT&T theoretically has the assets to become a vertically integrated content creation, packaging and delivery behemoth. But not all of its assets – including its management team – are necessarily well suited to the task.

AT&T’s challenge is to avoid outrunning its ability to manage three very different types of businesses: entertainment production, subscription-based linear video distribution and a huge heterogeneous telecoms network. Two of those businesses – subscription video and telecoms – are changing rapidly, and AT&T needs both vision and capital to stay in the game.… More

Pai talks up rural 5G, but puts his money on 4G subsidies

12 February 2019 by Steve Blum
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Salinas windmill cell site

5G technology has a role to fill in rural broadband service, but it won’t be the kind of 5G that mobile carriers are hyping. That’s according to Federal Communications Commission chair (and Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award winner) Ajit Pai. He was speaking at rural broadband trade show in New Orleans last week.

There’s no makable business case on the horizon for densified 5G mobile networks in rural communities. AT&T dismisses rural 5G as an “infill” technology, and it and other carriers are not leaning on rural cities and counties for pole access, as they are in richer and more populated parts of California.… More