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Follow That Drone! Arizona State tracks with mmWave

arizona drone 230 Video here. Ahmed Alkhateeb and his students has advanced mmWave beam prediction which they are using to track and communicate with drones. That isn't easy; 3GPP 5G requires a robust back channel to conform the cell signal to the receiver. That's hard with a small, fast-moving drone.

3 years ago, Vodafone, Saudi Telecom, and I believe Verizon all promised drone tracking in the near future. None of them seem to be close to delivering it. But look at the video of the work a team of grad students has done.

They use visual and GPS tracking to optimize the coding. This reduces the computation required and the heat generated.

$5: All the Mobile I Need at Free.fr

Free 1 gig 230 It won't be right for most people, but the French $5 1 gigabyte plan would meet my needs. I don't do much video on the go. I spend most of the time at my house or Jennie's and have robust Wi-Fi.

Away from home, I mostly use my mobile for looking up bus schedules, checking my email, or similar. None of that requires much bandwidth. I can keep my use below the gig and would be able to save money.

Qualcomm 8K, 3 Camera, Almost Unbelievable Phone Chip

Snapdragon 230 Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 will allow Android phones to do more than the best iPhone. Apple has hundreds of engineers trying to match the features, while Qualcomm has hundreds of engineers planning to stay ahead. (Apple lovers will never believe this.)

Today's phone cameras can do things Jennie's $3,000 video camera can't, but this processor goes far beyond. It can run three cameras simultaneously. One can capture 8K video while a second optimizes high-quality stills.

"The deterministic service capability is indispensable." Huang Yuhong, China Mobile

Huang Yuhong 230 Opposition to deterministic networking guaranteed performance may be tilting at windows. I was one of the few to oppose it at the ITU 6G Focus Group, where Verizon and the European carriers gave the Chinese proposal strong support. The US government blocked it at the ITU Study Group 13, but IRL it has perhaps unstoppable momentum.

"New IP" has been dropped from the proposal, which now is limited to performance guarantees. That means the US government and allies are spreading misinformation that this is still a "New IP" proposal. Changing TCP/IP would invite far more problems than it would solve, I believe. It will be very expensive to implement across networks the near total control needed, and I see little demand for that except security agencies.

Updated 2022: Wireless Abundance is here: What Gig LTE, Massive MIMO, mmWave, and more can mean (2)

Dave 20GBPS "Technology on the market can deliver 10X to 25X at reasonable cost" I wrote in 2017. In 2022, I can see another 8X to 15X improvement from technologies already on the market. Traffic growth is all the way down. It was only 15% across 38 OECD countries in 2021.

Verizon CTO Kyle Malady reported that capacity margin was doubling even before putting mid-band spectrum to use and 5G. Putting mid-band to use with Massive MIMO is typically raising the capacity per cell by 3-7X.

Massive over-capacity is why nearly all telcos are offering fixed wireless and seeking to move customers to unlimited plans. Investors focus on sales, particularly postpaid, knowing that more customers can be accommodated

Outside of China and Korea, few telcos have reached even 50% with mid-band spectrum and massive MIMO. 5G carrier aggregation is just coming out of the labs. Telcos will put to use fallow lower frequencies. Moore's Law is continuing to bring down the cost of switches and routers. Automation and cloudification are just starting to pay off.

Here is what I wrote in 2017. It was on target, although I should have emphasized mid-band spectrum as well.

The Right Funding: NYU Wireless $2.5M for terahertz testing

NYU Wireless, founded by Ted Rappaport, may be the World's most respected research site In wireless. Tom Marzetta, whose Massive MIMO may be the most important advance in wireless this century, joined from Bell Labs. There are a dozen senior researchers and a slew of grad students and postdocs.

Ted, the Prince of Millimeter Wave, was the first in the US to believe mmWave would work for 5G mobile. His teams took mmWave gear to really tough terrain, the buildings of Manhattan. Their results astounded the industry. A year later, everyone in wireless was investigating mmWave.

Marzetta and Rappaport now are doing leading research on "terahertz" for 6G. (Mostly actually a few hundred GHz,) We need that kind of work from academia, ten and twenty years ahead of what's being deployed.

Mobile traffic grows only 15% in 2021 (OECD)

Mobile traffic growth rates have been declining inexorably for more than a decade. By now, most people are watching as much TV as they want. Back in 2012, I wrote:

Confirmed: Wireless Data Growth Rapidly Slowing. The growth rate drop will continue as the once in a generation surge due to the introduction of smartphones is winding down. The growth rate drop will continue as the once in a generation surge due to the introduction of smartphones is winding down.

40% growth rates are long gone. Across 38 OECD countries, mobile data rose by 15%, far lower than ever before. (OECD represents almost all affluent nations. China is not included.) Some of the decline is probably pandemic related.

Fiber passes DSL & Cable

Cable passes DSL 230 Fiber (green line) passed DSL (blue line) in 2020 in OECD countries and cable (yellow line) in 2021. The OECD is primarily developed countries, ignoring India, China, and Africa,

The gap will increase rapidly, with the US passing well over 10 million homes/year. England, Italy, and Germany are accelerating fiber builds. People often take years to switch. Most homes passed with fiber the last few years have yet to convert.

Consumers choose fiber, even when cable is a perfectly good alternative.

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