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Ericsson paying Nokia $96M in bribery damages

Vestberg becoming Verizon CEOEricsson paid $billion to the US for 17 years of bribery in at least 5 countries. (Below.) Ericsson was different from other companies; it got caught. It's ironic that Nokia is collecting almost $100 million. Nokia's Alcatel branch was responsible for a huge multinational bribery scandal, including the President of El Salvador. ZTE has been implicated in the Philippines and probably other countries. Cisco is relatively clean and avoided prosecution in a Russian scandal. Samsung's CEO went to jail. Huawei has been very rarely accused, although there was an incident in Algeria. 

Huawei was competing with Ericsson in far more countries than Nokia. It would presumably be entitled to substantially more compensation. Other companies should also be entitled. 

Few of the implicated managers have suffered. The sums involved were large enough that most senior people at the company surely knew. The most prominent was Hans Vestberg, who rose through the ranks to CEO. He was pushed out for disappointing financial results, not corruption.

 The Verizon board had no qualms about making Vestberg the CEO.

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100+ Mbps Mbps cable ** upstream ** ready to take off

Salmon swimming upstream 230Faster cable upstreams are in field tests and ready to deploy widely within a year. Because there is little construction, a large cableco can be mostly upgraded in 2-3 years. The cost should be about $200/home, a very small fraction of the cost of running fiber.

Cablecos need to choose between dedicating 85 MHz or 204 MHz to the new upstream. 85 MHz provides 440 Mbps shared and 204 MHz provides 1.4 Gbps shared. Sharing works very well in cable. Either choice will generally support 100 Mbps upstream for almost all users most of the time.

CommScope CTO Tom Cloonan believes that the upstream improvement will, "Allow the operators to move very deep into the future without issue for a long time because that gives them a lot of extra bandwidth capacity for the upstream." The proponents of the new infrastructure plan agree. Some want to specify 100/100. Others believe government should subsidize up to 100/20. (Cable downstream across most of the US is already 900 Mbps down. That could be inexpensively doubled if customers demanded it.)

DOCSIS 4.0 triples the possible bandwidth, to 684 MHz.

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Adtran: "Highest product bookings for any quarter in our history"

Adtran 10G 230The fiber boom, led by England, Germany, France, Spain, 4M at AT&T, and US regionals, is leading to remarkable results at suppliers. Adtran CEO Tom Stanton warns, "Supply chain constraints do present risk in the near-term or midterm. We continue to see lead times extend and expect that this will continue for some time into the future. "

Construction companies are raising prices, in some cases withdrawing bids and resubmitting at a higher figure. Government projects have to plan a 3-5 year ramp or waste an enormous amount of taxpayer money. The word is starting to get around Washington that spending more than $5-10 billion the next three years will be a very bad mistake. 

Adtran seeing demand for 10 Gbps fiber symmetric units. Some of the smaller regional carriers have made 10G their standard. The price is so close to the GPPON price they are going 10G in hopes of future demand. Adtran also has an order for 10G from a big cable company for backhaul. 

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LoRaWAN gains traction for in-building & campus

Adtran LoRaWAN 230

LoRa (Long Range) networks are optimized for low power, low-cost connections for the Internet of Things. The initial deployments were regional for applications like meter reading and pipe management. It works, but the takeup has been far less than hoped.

Adtran sees a better market serving individual buildings or campuses. It has just introduced the very small 7310-08 LoRaWAN IoT Gateway that can be mounted on a wall and powered over Ethernet. It can be managed by an iPhone using Bluetooth.

It should be able to transmit throughout most of a building, where 5G might need several units. The price hasn't been released, but it should be a heckuva lot less than 5G.

(Irrelevancy. The name comes from Harald Bluetooth, a king of Denmark in the 10th century. Some engineers have a sense of humor.)  

LoRaWan uses 900 MHz spectrum, free to use in many countries. The speed is only 0.3 kbps to 50 kbps, enough for even battery-operated devices to occasionally phone home. The protocol is optimized for, yes, long range. At low baud rates, it can be highly reliable.

There's a 60-minute video Everything you need to know about LoRaWAN if you want an introduction to the technology.

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India giant Jio, slower but profitable growth Q1

 Jio 230Selling a 30-gigabyte plan for US$4, Jio grew at ~10 million subscribers per month for three years. Q1 2021 added "only" 5 million per month to 428 million. Incumbent Bharti is invigorated and the pandemic is strong in India. (The pandemic in April and May is horrifying, with a toll that may match the Bengali famine of 1943.)

Perhaps even more amazing, Jio claims a generous profit of ₹ 3,508 crore, about US$500 million, up 47%. Some think a low depreciation rate has inflated the profitability, but that's still a remarkable achievement.

No figures were released for Jio Fiber. That's been actively promoted but the take rate apparently remains very low.

The next task is growing Jio Platforms: Movies, music, JioMart, and more coming.

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Verizon CTO: We have massive overcapacity

Malady capacity margin 230Verizon's wireless network is reliable and CTO Kyle Malady intends to keep it that way by enlarging capacity for unexpected changes. The chart at left shows he has more than doubled "capacity margin" despite capex being flat to down since 2013. 

(Among other things, this means Verizon has the capacity to bring 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up to at least two to three million currently unserved school kids. Probably more.)

Chess Grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch introduced the idea of "overprotection" in his classic My System. Nimzowitch recommended protecting an important pawn or square more than is apparently necessary. Your opponent may surprise you and need the "over" to respond.

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China Mobile 5G era: Profits Q1 up 2.3%, prices flat, traffic +37%

China Mobile logo 230Productivity at China Mobile increased 35-40% overall, confirming the trend at Verizon and AT&T. 37% more traffic was carried at flat ARPU (+0.9%.) Profit was up slightly, 2.3%, implying that overall productivity rose at roughly the rate of traffic growth. That's a very rough measure, of course, but it corresponds to numerous results from carriers around the world.

"5G Network Customers" were 92.76 million, compared to "5G Package Customers" of 189 million. Analysts around the world are cheering that we now have more than the very misleading "package customer" figure. 4G & 5G packages cost the same, so subscribers took "5G packages" even though they didn't have a 5G phone. Fortunately, MIIT releases monthly figures of phone sales, which I used for my figure of 5G subscribers in China.

Phone manufacturers shipped 27 million 5G phones in China in the month of March. The total 5G in 2021 should be over 300 million in China, about as much as the rest of the world combined. 

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$1 average worldwide cost/gig; 35% traffic growth 2020; US 4X world

Dollar per gig Strategy Analytics 230

This remarkable chart from Phil Kendall is worth intense study. (Larger below) It shows the wireless cost per gig has gone down 88% in 5 years.

Prices continue to fall rapidly except in the US, almost flat the last three years. In competitive markets, price drops should continue as Massive MIMO, carrier aggregation, and other tech improvements will continue driving costs down. 

Worldwide traffic growth is down to 35%; I've noted many developed countries are now below 30% and falling. The explosive growth is over in much of the world, although the pandemic may create some anomalies.

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More Articles ...

  1. 4G NB-IoT reading meters in India
  2. $152 Realme 5G Q2i
  3. Robin Mersh passes Broadband Forum on
  4. 5G tested peaks: 707/79 Mid-band, 3294/210 mmWave
  5. 5G China Price: $201-$262, sometimes $154
  6. G.Network raises £1bn to fibre London
  7. $300 5G OnePlus Nord N10 T-Mobile. The 5G explosion moves west.
  8. Farooq Khan and Jerry Pi's 2011! paper on 5G
  9. Broadcom's Wi-Fi 6E at 6 GHz is here
  10. Are 20% of Comcast Gigabit Homes Actually Not Gigabit?
  11. 5.5G Comes After 5G. 6G is a decade away
  12. 5 US Net Giants $7,000,000,000,000 Trillion
  13. Verizon's 25-50 ms "Mobile Edge" runs at 4G latency
  14. Carmakers' discredited spectrum claim
  15. Realme 5G again on sale for US$150
  16. Glenn Wellbrock of Verizon: 5 Questions
  17. Telefonica Brazil passes AT&T, Verizon with 16M FTTH homes passed
  18. In six weeks, wireless could reach 30%-60% of students without a connection
  19. AT&T killing DSL (Dave in USA Today)
  20. ASSIA Equipe Work-From-Home Manager
  21. Realme 5G down to $145
  22. Qualcomm 4 kilometer mmWave not close to Ted's 11 kilometers in 2016
  23. Marvell: 5 nm 20-40% better
  24. $400 TCL REVLL 5G at T-Mobile: Here comes 5G in the USA
  25. Zain Saudi Arabia: 5G 248 Mbps, ping 17 ms
  26. 5G Worldwide: Saudi first, USA last
  27. Sao Paulo 10T busiest Internet exchange; Traffic falling despite COVID
  28. Saankhya 5G SDR-based 5G RU for 2021
  29. GM V2X & 5G in China in 2022
  30. Korea's very high speed claims
  31. 5G Phones $199-260
  32. Coolpad $199 5G phone with Unisoc Ziguang Zhanrui Chinese chip
  33. US cable and especially telcos fail miserably on adding new customers
  34. Rakuten virtualized 4G now covers quarter of Japan
  35. Germany confirms: 4G faster than 5G
  36. China June & H1 2020: 63M 5G phones, 100M contracts
  37. 5G: 17M June in China. On track for 150M 2020
  38. Finally, Data: US 5G slower than Canada's 4G. Believe it
  39. Live conferences virtually impossible where Corona problems continue
  40. Madagascar, Vodacom get 5G pr

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