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U.S. Cable: "The Wireless Future is Us."

51JxDTVIwdL. SX258 BO1204203200 April 13, some of the best engineers in the world will come to New York and plant cable's flag at the heart of the wireless world. After the event, no one should doubt that cable be a player. Featured speaker Ted Rappaport leads perhaps the world's best wireless research center at NYU. Rahim Tafazolli at Surrey and Gerhard Fettweis at TU Dresden have groups that are contenders for that title. CableLabs is organizing the event and sending their best.

I call Ted, "The Prince of 28 GHz." Ted's group convinced the industry that 28 GHz mobile can work by taking a test rig around Manhattan and Brooklyn for thousands of tests. He's a dynamic speaker and a reason 5G high frequencies lead the discussion. Possibly the toughest question in future wireless is whether millimeter wave or many antenna MIMO will dominate. Both will be the right choice some places. High demand and concentrated customers call for the capacity of millimeter. The greater reach and probable lower cost of many antennas (MU MIMO) in lower frequencies are more likely in less dense regions.

Top analysts Jonathan Chapin and Paul de Sa will discuss ways cable could become the best wireless networks in the United States. Day One, they can have over 10,000,000 cell sites simply with the WiFi in home gateways.

Gigabit+ Upstream Cable Possible with Full Duplex

Full Duplex DOCSIS Years away, while DOCSIS 3.1 can do an upstream gigabit today. If the wireless guys think they can go both upstream and downstream on the same frequency, why can't cable? Alcatel has already demonstrated a DSL full duplex prototype. Belal Hamzeh at CableLabs believes the answer is probably yes. (Blog below.) Cable worldwide is excited, as the comments below from Australia's NBN CTO Dennis Steiger, demonstrate.

Full duplex cable won't be delivered to most customers soon, even if things go well. "If all signs remain positive, the project will transition from an innovation effort into an R&D project, open to all interested participants," Hamzeh reports. I expect it will take months even to begin the research project and more time after that for the research to yield a reliable standard. Upgrading the equipment, including the subscriber boxes, will take additional years. We all know projects like this often take longer than hoped.

Meanwhile, Verizon is winning away customers with 50 and 100 megabit upstreams. BT has begun deploying 15M lines of G.fast, also capable of hundreds of megabits. AT&T is deploying 12M lines of fiber home or G.fast. France, Spain, Korea and Taiwan are moving rapidly to G.fast and fiber home.

Cisco Confirms Slower Mobile Traffic Growth

The telco problem is how to sell all the capacity coming online. Cisco's Visual Network Index offers the best data anywhere on current mobile trends as well as respected future forecasts. You can spend hours on the report. Skip quickly over the discussion at the top, which emphasizes select data points suggesting growth. Jump into the charts and tables. Here're some of the first things I noticed.

Growth in the U.S. is down to 50%/year and predicted to fall below 40%. Traffic soared as people first acquired smartphones, over 100% for a couple of years. 75% of the devices in the U.S. today are smart. "Average smartphone usage grew 43 percent in 2015. The average amount of traffic per smartphone in 2015 was 929 MB per month, up from 648 MB per month in 2014." The smartphone conversion still has a way to go, perhaps to 95% in a few years. The new users will continue to raise the growth rate, but much less than in the past. On the other hand, only 12% of the devices in the Middle East and Africa are "smart." $50-$100 smartphones are already changing that rapidly. Cisco expects the percentage to rise to over 50% by 2020, driving traffic growth rates much higher. Africans are buying so many smartphones there will be more Africans on the web than Americans around 2018. Detailed table below

The economic impact of wireless growth will approach insignificance in the developed world.

Full Duplex in the Field at Telecom Italia; Verizon, Cisco Putting Money Behind Kumu

Columbia Harish chip Within the year, hoping to increase fixed wireless speeds 50+%. Telecom Italia deployed a Kumu unit in Turin for LTE backhaul using the full duplex bandwidth. The 3GPP standard has included "LTE Relay" since 2009 but that hasn't been practical. Qualcomm is sampling the Snapdragon 820 Cat 12 LTE chip, capable of 600 megabits. TI thinks they've found a backhaul solution.

World-leading engineers believe wireless capacity will grow at least 50x in coming years. They include Marconi Prize winners Marty Cooper, Arogyaswami Paulraj, Henry Samueli and Vint Cerf. MIMO will yield at least a 10X improvement. AT&T and Verizon both have enough unused spectrum to double or triple current LTE capacity. Full duplex has the potential to double everything, and the researchers are confident of at least a 50% improvement most places. Back of the envelope, I believe a 25X increase in wireless capacity is possible without raising capital spending.

4G LTE: $11 for 10 Gigabytes Across 90% of India from Ambani & Reliance

Ambani Khan Nearly 50% price drop with new entrant into the world's most competitive market. Update 5/11 ET points to October for the full launch http://bit.ly/1Tac78M Mega-billionaire Mukesh Ambani has built a 4G network to 70% of India, with 90% expected by the official launch. Reliance Jio will bring in lower prices, $60 LTE phones and should be the most important telecom event of 2016. Reliance Jio is already running a large beta with employees and setting up dealers.

To fill that network, Ambani is offering one of the lowest prices in the world. He's already taken delivery on half a million SIM cards and requesting proposals for $50-75 mobiles in the tens of millions. The other big Indians telcos (Bharti, Vodafone and Idea) have responded by moving up their own 4G buildouts, which will soon take over the country. The increased investment is yet another confirmation that competition, not company profits, is the key determinant of investment. They will presumably reduce prices soon as well.

Ambani initially will concentrate on fixed wireless for broadband rather than mobile voice.

"IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment"

" IP-V6 penetration Added half a percent of the Internet's users each year over the past two decades." Iljitsch van Beijnum has captured the status in a great headline. There is no unifying force that implements Internet rules. Each of the network of networks takes its time.

While the world average is about 10%, Google's data finds the U.S. at 25%.

Cox Gigabit Creeps into Virginia; AT&T Counts on Halo Effect

The Halo Effect: Announce you're offering a gig to a few thousand people and a million become more positive about your company. The pr is working well. AT&T discovered signups increased across 10X or even 100X more homes than they actually reached. At AT&T, ~5% have the option - and the large majority never will.

AT&T explains to Wall Street they believe 45-70 megabits is enough to compete with cable while teasing consumers with what's mostly a token rollout.

Possible Correction: AT&T Says "All-Fiber," Not Fiber to the Basement and G.fast

If so, my article that AT&T will use 400-700 megabit G.fast to five million is a mistake. AT&T's press release I just read (below) promises "Within 4 years, AT&T will offer its all-fiber Internet access service to at least 12.5 million customer locations, such as residences, home offices and very small businesses." It may well be that the pr people at AT&T don't understand the technology being used and much of the build will in fact be Fiber to the Basement and copper, probably G.fast, to the apartment. But if I may have an error, it's my job to issue a correction.

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