The China Mobile/China Broadcast network has enough bandwidth will have enormous capacity, more than enough for likely demand for many years. Zhang Yunyong of China Unicom believes duplicating that network is wasteful. He made the request at China’s major political event, the Two Sessions. China Unicom’s main 5G network is a joint build with...
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Need to Know: 5G: 10% performance, 0 new apps
20 Gbps and 1 ms latency is possible in the lab but a fever dream in the real world. At Verizon, the median speed of 5G is the same or less than 4G. The latency is rated at 30 ms, little better than most 4G. Even on the better 5G networks, delivering 150-400 Mbps...
Continue reading250M 5G Subscribers End 2020 150M Q3
230-250 million 5G yearend as phone prices fall to US$199-260. 5G subscriber numbers are exploding. 100-120 million 5G phones will sell in Q4, many of them Apples. China will add at least 50 million. 70% of the phones selling in China are 5G and likely over 90% by mid-2021. I’m reworking my 2021 &...
Continue reading5G Need to Know: Sales exploding, performance poor, 0 new apps
147 million subs September 2020, 117 million in China. Yearend likely 230-250 million, including 30-50 million iPhone 12. Decent 5G phones cost US$200-250 in China, with 6.5″ screens and multiple cameras. As China prices move West, 2021 will blow out. Forget gigabit speeds and 1 ms latency. Mid-band speeds mostly 100-400 Mbps. Low-band typically...
Continue reading562,656 Koreans go back to 4G
5G has so few practical uses that half a million Koreans have gone back to 4G. The saving is modest; otherwise, millions would have gone back. 4G speeds averaged over 50 Mbps in 2019. 4G is probably much faster today. 5G averages 300 Mbps across about a third of the country. So what? What...
Continue readingNeed to know: Real 5G speeds and spectrum (3 minute read)
Takeaway: 95+% of 5G is lowband (< 1800 MHz or mid-band (2500-4200 MHz.) Asia, TMobile US, and much of Europe is mid-band.80-200 MHz of spectrum usually delivers 100-400 Mbps. Low-band (AT&T, much of DT & other European, runs at 4G speeds and sometimes lower. See AT&T data below.Millimeter wave often does 500 Mbps and...
Continue readingNeed to Know: 5G Spectrum – Think mid-band
Takeway: Decent 5G until around 2025 will be mostly mid-band, 2500-4200 MHz. Frequencies lower than 2100 MHz essentially deliver 4G capacity. Millimeter wave, 20 GHz and above, can deliver gigabits but will be rare until the middle of the decade or later. It’s expensive, and the carriers don’t see much market. Heretical but true:...
Continue readingAnalysis Branch: 100 million 5G subscribers in August, 84M+ in Q2, prove 5G is real.
210 million 5G yearend as phone prices fall to US$199-260. New York August 31, 2020 Contact: Dave Burstein, 347-603-6442 daveb@dslprime.com 5G use is exploding. At the end of June, China had ~67 million 5G phones, Korea 7.35 million, the U.S. 4-5 million, and the rest of the world perhaps 4 million. 5G fixed wireless...
Continue readingPrimary: Cost per bit of wireless is falling at a ferocious rate
Even experts are skeptical that Verizon’s cost per bit is falling at 40-50% per year, but I’ve confirmed it to my satisfaction. Three well-established datapoints: Traffic was growing at 60-80% per year and only now is growth falling below 40% Capex has been flat to down Speeds have been going up consistently and congestion...
Continue readingMoffett’s Remarkable Insight: Low marginal cost means nothing if you can’t sell it
The low cost per bit of 5G means almost nothing if you can’t sell the bandwidth. I’ve been warning for at least five years that telcos’ biggest problem is overcapacity. In 95% of locations, most of the time, major telcos have excess capacity. The tech is moving incredibly fast, driving cost per bit down...
Continue readingAT&T, Ciena,…”5G’s attractive, transformative services will likely introduce threat vectors not yet seen or experienced”
5G Americas has a new paper reflecting the almost universal opinion among security experts that 5G has important vulnerabilities that can’t be ignored. 5G systems are perhaps an order of magnitude more complicated than 4G and correspondingly hard to protect. They are also massively distributed, from your home IoT up. That huge attack surface...
Continue readingChina is > 70% of 5G as subs pass 80M
At the end of June 2020, China had ~65 million 5G phones, Korea 7.5 million, the U.S. 5-6 million, and the rest of the world perhaps 4 million. In June 2019, Minister Miao Wei told the giant Chinese telcos “accelerate” and the results are extraordinary. China has upgraded 415,000 base stations and are adding...
Continue readingUS Q2 5G 4-5 million. Year-end 15-25 million
According to Ken Hyers at Strategy Analytics, 3.4 million 5G phones shipped in Q1 in the U.S. and 2.7 million in Q2. Stores were closed and promotion limited. Some of the 6.1 million shipped were in transit or store inventory, hence the total of 5-6 million plus (modest) carryover from 2019. Update August 10...
Continue readingJune 2020 H1 5G subscribers 84M (82M-92M)
210 million 5G yearend as phone prices fall to US$199-260. 5G use is exploding. At the end of June, China had ~65 million 5G phones, Korea 7.35 million, the U.S. 4-5 million, and the rest of the world perhaps 4 million. 5G fixed wireless added perhaps 4 million more. As Chinese phone prices (US$199-260)...
Continue reading5X Advance for Africa with Massive MIMO, Spectrum
In 2014, Stanford Professor Paulraj told me MU MIMO would be the most effective way to deliver the capacity Africa needed. In 2016, the first Massive MIMO systems were deployed by Softbank Japan and China Mobile. The results were excellent. Softbank reported “up to a 10X improvement.” Huang Yuhong of China Mobile told me...
Continue readingOur analysis
5G: The Facts and the Future is probably the best current review publicly available. It’s free. 60 pages, loaded with data and projections. No hype. Worldwide coverage, updated weekly. tl;dr unless you’re really interested in wireless. 80M 5G subscribers in Q2, 100M August prove 5G is real. (August 18)China is > 70% of 5G...
Continue readingAT&T, Verizon Praying People Won’t Switch to T-Mobile’s Better 5G
The U.S. 5G market is T-Mobile’s to lose. The golden 2.5 GHz Sprint spectrum will give T-Mobile the best network in 40-60% of the U.S. over the next 4-9 months. Speeds will typically be 100-300 Mbps, occasionally higher. Verizon may have triple the speed in their millimeter wave network, but that’s only in about...
Continue reading5G: The Facts and the Future
A global analysis from 2020 to 2025, with estimates that cut through the hype. “I will tell you, there’s a lot of units coming.” Liam Griffin, CEO Skyworks 5G is not going to change the world, no matter what you hear from Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, or Angela Merkel. None of them...
Continue reading5G Flavors: mmWave is good, low & mid-band closer to 4G
Wireless has been getting better at a ferocious rate since at least 2013. Verizon calculates its cost per bit has been going down 40%-50 every year and expects that to continue. This has been true and is a good thing. “5G” has become a meaningless marketing term; most of the big advances happened in...
Continue reading210M 2020 5G Estimate Restored as Sale Prices Fall to US$200
China will almost definitely reach its 150 million 2020 target and some estimates are 180 million. 20 million 5G subs are likely in the U.S. 3.4 million 5G phones shipped in the U.S. in Q1 even though the U.S. 5G build in very small. T-Mobile is going to promote 5G strongly around August and...
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