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Finally, 5G Carrier Aggregation is Starting to Work OK

carrier aggregation Wikipedia 230 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.

4 or 5 channel 4G was faster than most 5G, which added little or nothing to throughput. The recent speeds of hundreds of megabits have nothing to do with 5G. The large volume of mid-band spectrum delivers high speeds in either 4G or 5G.

G.hn Over In-building Phone Wires: Great price, reported reliable. sales booming

TNO Ghn performance 230 "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)

Chano Gómez astonished the 2017 G.Fast conference with the claim G.hn could deliver similar bandwidth at half the cost and complexity. G.hn's much simpler interference cancellation brought the cost down. The retail price for G.hn Access Multipliers is $120-175 per port.

US Landline Net Adds Fall by Half as Fixed Wireless Becomes a Contender

FWA test by Eli Blumenthal 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.

At my apartment, T-Mobile wireless is faster than cable on the upstream, fine on the downstream, and $20 cheaper. I'd happily switch. Reporter Eli Blumental was able to try both Verizon and T-Mobile and found them to be reasonable choices, although still shaking out the system. He tested one service at 465 Mbps down and 445 Mbps up. (Illustration)

Is Boost Mobile Ripping Me Off Deliberately or Through Incompetence?

Boost offline 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.

US carriers, including the biggest, know the FCC won't do anything no matter how miserably they treat customers. That gives the companies incentive for "strategic incompetence." They make it so hard to get bill errors corrected many people give up.

50% FTTH in Chile

On Net Chile Half the ~6 million homes in Chile can get FTTH from On Net, CommsUpdate reported, to my amazement. That's better than Verizon and much better than AT&T, BT, or Deutsche Telekom. It passed 500,000 homes in the last six months and plans to pass another million in 2022. (The figure was confirmed by the company financials.

Private equity firm KKR net controls On Net, spun out from Telefonica Movistar. Like all private equity firms, it only invests where the capital return is high. The money is a very strong endorsement of a neutral fiber build from one of the most sophisticated investors in the world.

While so far On Net is only available from Movistar, CEO of ON*NET Jose Miguel Torres is confident other ISPs will use On Net.

Indian Gov Building 100 Edge Data Centers

Indian rail Railtel, a government agency, has announced it will build 100 regional data centers. It already operates 60,000 kilometers of fiber, connecting most of the country. It has large data centers for its own purposes and is selling services from Secundrabad and Gurugram. (below)

Indian Railway is a behemoth, carrying 8 billion passengers a year. It has 42,226 miles of routes and 1,254,000 employees. (Wikipedia) So it certainly has the assets to go into the cloud business.

But I also know that Indian government plans often don't deliver.

China's "Disappointing" 2021 5G 266M

China sold 266 million 5G phones in 2021, slightly less than my 280 million prediction and far under China Mobile's 350 million boast. That's almost half the world total. By the end of the year, > 80% of the phones sold were 5G.

Low prices are driving the growth, as I've been reporting for two years. The Vivo iQuo is down to 1000 yuan ($157). 5 major phone companies have models under $225 although the average price is higher.

They had slightly more than 430 million 5G phones on at the end of 2023. The country was 70+% of the world market in 2020 and a little less than half in 2021. The Chinese are on track for a billion 5G users around the end of 2023.

5G is also exploding in the US for the same reason: price. Q1 2022 US will probably be 75-85% 5G. Boost has the Celero at $139. I have one; it's a fine phone. T-Mobile offers a TCL at $200. All iPhone 13's are 5G and Apple has half the US market. I suspect > 75% of US phones sold today are 5G.

Facebook Needs People Like Verizon's Krista Bourne

krista bourne 230 Krista Bourne was just named Chief Operating Officer at Verizon Consumer Group with a budget in the tens of billions. She's in charge of tens of thousands of employees, Her first job at Verizon was mailroom assistant. She proved herself in job after job.

The big tech companies - Facebook in particular - are monocultures of people with similar lives and experiences. Zuckerberg hires people like himself. All seven top executives came from Harvard or Stanford. Is anyone surprised they are all white Americans?

That means Facebook is cutting itself off from many talented people who didn't bloom until later in life. If you weren't doing impressive things in high school, you had no chance of rising to the top at Facebook.

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