Updated 2022: Wireless Abundance is here: What Gig LTE, Massive MIMO, mmWave, and more can mean (2)
"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.
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,
4G has been approaching 2 Gbps for several years, combining signals from 5 spectrum bands, typically 20 Mbps each. Most networks stuck with 3 or 4 channels because since ~2014, most telcos have had more bandwidth than they could sell. Most phones couldn't handle 5 channels until recently. The technology worked but was rarely put into production.
"It's fantastic," Alex Moulle-Berteaux, COO of Starry, tells me. Starry uses an innovative wireless-to-the-rooftop signal to bring bandwidth to an apartment building and then uses Positron G.hn to serve the individual units. (TNO performance graph at left and below)
Consumers have spoken: there is no doubt fixed wireless is a reasonable alternative for many. 532,000 of the 1,065,000 of broadband net additions in the first quarter were wireless, according to Bruce Leichtman, whose work has proven reliable.
Charlie Ergen's company wants $50 I don't owe and has turned off my phone even though I am prepaid in full through October 2022. Even more infuriating, they want a $3 fee even to talk to someone to get this corrected. As I type this, I've been waiting on hold for 32 minutes for a supervisor. Update: I was cut off. I called back in.