Tag: 5G

Dawson On The Government’s Role In 5G

Christian

I recently stumbled across a fantastic post by Doug Dawson about the government’s role in 5G. Here’s a bit of it (emphasis mine):

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…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…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…The carriers admit that the 600 MHz and the 850 MHz spectrum being deployed won’t result in faster speeds than 4G LTE…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.

I mostly agree with Dawson, and I strongly recommend the full post.

VerHIDEzon – Brought To You By T-Mobile

Christian

T-Mobile just started a satirical ad campaign criticizing Verizon. T-Mobile’s CEO, John Legere, kicked the campaign off with this tweet:

Tweet from T-Mobile's CEO

The ad campaign criticizes Verizon for its decision to charge a premium for 5G service without publishing a map of areas where 5G service is available. The website for the campaign, VerHIDEzon.com, has some entertaining content:

We believe in charging a premium for 5G, without telling you where you’ll have coverage.
Why do we do this? Because we’re VerHIDEzon, and we do whatever we want…Every day we wake up with one goal in mind: charge our customers as much as possible.

T-Mobile makes a good point. It’s silly for Verizon to charge for 5G service without publishing information that indicates the extent of Verizon’s 5G coverage. Still, I find the campaign kind of odd. Neither company has much 5G coverage at the moment. Almost no one is using 5G-compatible phones yet. It may make business sense for T-Mobile to run the campaign today, but more time will need to pass before 5G has a lot of relevance for typical consumers.

Sprint – Now Offering Nationwide 5G!??

Christian

Today I was looking at Sprint’s coverage map. By default, the map appears to be displaying Sprint’s coverage profile for 5G data:

Sprint barely has any 5G coverage, so the map surprised me.

If you change the selection in the dropdown menu, you’ll see that the area shaded for “Data coverage” is identical whether the 4G or the 5G option is selected. However, the shaded area changes when “Non-LTE” is selected on the dropdown. I think Sprint may have made an honest mistake, but it has the potential to confuse consumers.

As you scroll in on specific areas, the “Data coverage” entry in the legend disappears and more finely grained categories appear:

It’s odd that users can select specific types of coverage but still see a map that differentiates between multiple types of coverage.

We know AT&T is willing to mislead its customers into believing their 4G service is 5G. At the moment, I’m going to give Sprint the benefit of the doubt. After all, the legend doesn’t even appear until a user toggles its visibility.

5G: Awesome But Overhyped

Christian

5G network technologies have the potential to deliver far faster wireless speeds than 4G technologies. 5G will also enable data transfer with much lower latency (delay) than 4G. The technology is awesome. However, I’ve had a nagging suspicion that aspects of 5G are being overhyped to consumers.

Earlier this month, I attended the Big 5G Event in Denver. Many executives in the telecommunications industry spoke at the conference, including speakers from each of the major U.S. networks. While I felt like some network operators had been misleading consumers about 5G, I hoped statements network operators made at the conference would be more reliable. After all, most attendees of the conference were telecommunications professionals capable of seeing through bogus claims. Unfortunately, excessive hype and silly claims showed up in many of the presentations.

That said, a couple of folks deserve applause for calling out bullshit related to 5G. From the beginning of his presentation, Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO of the Canadian operator Telus, indicated that he was going to be unusually straightforward:

How the hell am I going to spend 20 minutes looking very smart and say nothing…I should abandon that…I think 5G is letting us down.

Gedeon didn’t pull any punches when discussing AT&T’s recent shenanigans:

I feel like we have to 5G something…Maybe we can find out from some of our peers how we can fake the 5G icon on the phone…That is the cheapest way to deliver 5G…I have nothing but the ultimate respect for good marketing.

5G use cases

Prior to the conference, I was skeptical about many of the proposed use cases for 5G. After the event, I’m even more skeptical.

Nicki Palmer, a senior vice president at Verizon, explained how 5G combined with machine learning could allow people with food allergies to scan items they pass in the grocery store to detect whether items contain allergens. It’s a neat idea. It might be technically impressive. However, 5G speeds aren’t required.

Some speakers mentioned that 5G could allow augmented reality technology to be used during surgical operations. Technology of this sort might be developed eventually, but I’m awfully skeptical that we’ll see next-generation wireless revolutionizing surgery in the next decade. There are hurdles in the way of that technology being used on a large scale well beyond limitations in wireless speeds and latency.

I also heard a lot about the potential 5G has to improve education. None of it made sense to me. Schools are buildings with wired internet. Wired internet can be awfully fast. Limitations in mobile speeds are not holding back education.

When I mentioned my skepticism about 5G use cases to Chris Pearson, president of 5G Americas, he emphasized that it might not be possible to predict many of the best use cases ahead of time. It’s a good point. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to think through new use cases that emerged after the 3G to 4G transition. A lot of existing applications improved in a predictable manner. E.g., video streaming became a lot better with 4G speeds. Were there a lot of new, unanticipated use cases enabled by 4G? I’m not sure.

While I have a lot of skepticism about proposed 5G use cases, I’m still awfully excited about 5G. One specific use case that the conference made me more optimistic about is fixed wireless (delivering internet to buildings via wireless transmission instead of wired transmission). In a future post, I’ll explain why I find fixed wireless so exciting.

5G & prices

Could 5G lead to drastic declines in the cost consumers pay for each gigabyte of data? Unfortunately, I heard almost nothing on the topic.

In a panel that included executives from Verizon and AT&T, the moderator asked about 5G monetization and pricing. Nicki Palmer of Verizon and Igor Glubochansky of AT&T both dodged the question with politician-like non-answers.

5G timelines

In several different presentations, representatives of U.S. network operators suggested that they would have large-scale 5G networks deployed within a year or two. If these claims are taken seriously, I think they should be interpreted as indicating that some 5G technologies will be deployed on a large scale (e.g., the 5G air interface) alongside 4G technology. I think we are still several years away from large-scale, fully 5G networks.