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Why telco small cells can't cover highways.

Tokyo highway 30 MPH traffic would require a prohibitive number of small cells for carriers to do it themselves. Wi-Fi First is not a complete substitute for LTE towers. There will always be spots not covered because small cells, especially in higher frequencies, have very short range. Below, the CEO of American Tower puts forth his opinion why highways and moving vehicles are particularly difficult to cover. James Taiclet via Seeking Alpha.

Taicet. The handoff requirement from places where our towers serve people, which are often around highways and other transportation corridors, suburban or rural, you've got people traveling 30 miles an hour to 60 miles an hour. You can't really have sufficient handoff capability over a very large stretch of multi-mile roadway to economically provide those handoffs.

Taicet, thinking of carrier small cells, went on to say the economics become dubious with densities of less than 10,000 people per square mile. Wi-Fi First changes that, of course.

"Rules of the road" for unlicensed spectrum

U.S. spectrum When Michael Marcus and others at the FCC created the "unlicensed bands," they had little idea about how it would go. Wi-Fi has been a major game changer but that wasn't clear at the beginning. It's yet one more example of what creativity makes possible. Today, we see some congestion in the "commons," as well as proposals to squat on a large share. We need some "rules of the road" to manage the congestion fairly and efficiently. But they need careful design to have minimal impact on innovation.

Fred Goldstein reminds me that the band is used for more than Wi-Fi.

2022 or later for high GHz 5G

5g alcatel delay

Could the "2019" World Radio Conference be pulled up to 2017 to get product to market sooner?
Decker Anstrom will lead the U.S. Delegation to the 2015 World Radio Conference in November, a major event that sets international spectrum rules. He told an open meeting of the State Department ITAC that the meeting after that might be advanced from 2019 to 2018 for scheduling reasons. I spoke up with a suggestion that it be moved to 2017 if possible. Otherwise the standards process will delay the deployment of a potentially important technology, 5G in high GHz millimeter bands.

Engineers I respect are convinced gear could be ready by 2017. However, if the spectrum decisions aren't made until 2019, that gear won't get to the field before 2022-2023.

Dan Warren of GSMA, who works closely with almost all the major telcos, believes regulation delays will be a major factor. "We need a spectrum allocation from the ITU World Radio Conference, likely 2019. The standard will take a year or two after that. Then it will probably be a year or two more for gear to get into the field in volume."

Satoshi Nagata of NTT DOCOMO is looking for 5G "demonstrations" in 2018 and "deployments" in 2020. NTT's early 5G will use frequencies below 6 GHz. They will not use high frequencies before 2022 or 2023.

Gig for $25/month in Bakersfield, CA

Attractive real estate come-on. Rent any of 224 apartments in a new real estate development and automatically get connected at a gigabit. Natural prices for a gigabit are $40-$100, Google's $70 +- $30. Gigabit Internet is a very attractive amenity. One proponent believes "fiber to the home increases the value of a $300,000 home by $5,300 to $6,500," (below)

A $40/month discount is a modest marketing concession on apartments that rent for $1100-$1400. Bakersfield is 120 miles and 3 hours by train north of Los Angeles. It's a desert town dependent on imported water and probably a hard place to sell apartments in a drought.

Randall Stephenson literally 10 years ago told the street that AT&T was already installing fiber in all new developments. After all, glass is cheaper than metal. It was the right thing to do even back then but in practice AT&T was doing nothing of the sort. Carriers without high speeds are just leaving themselves open for folks like this to jump in.

George Soros has put £50m behind Hyperoptic, an English company doing the same.

$40/port VDSL Baby DSLAMs with new Lantiq system

Cheap 8 50-100 megabits so cheap it can go everywhere. Lantiq's new VINAX dp8 is designed to lower the price of an 8 port DSLAM to $20/connection. Include the hookup cost and it's only about what the customer pays in a single month. Lantiq says similar units today cost more than twice that. The nominal speeds in the lab are 200 down, 100 up; 50+ megabits down, 25+ up will often be practical for 500 meters. In small buildings, performance will be much better, often 100/50. While larger buildings can be served with multiple cheap units, the interference in the binder becomes a crucial factor. With vectoring, the rate reach would often double, but that's a more expensive and complicated system.

The unit is based on their existing 8/16 port VDSL chips, controlled by an inexpensive network processor Lantiq originally designed for their GPON system on chip. Eliminating the high-performance network processor simplifies design, further reducing cost.

Review: Millimeter Wave Wireless Communications

High Frequency wireless (millimeter wave) can deliver speeds well into the gigabits. At millimeter wavelengths you can aggregate hundreds o Millimeter wave textbool f MHz of spectrum compared to the 20 MHz typical of today's wireless networks. High frequency antennas are very small, so it's practical to put 50 of them on a chip for massive MIMO.

Rappaport, Heath and colleagues are world leaders in research in millimeter wave high frequencies and MIMO. Rappaport's NYU Wireless Center has been sending teams out to get empirical data on frequencies like 28 GHz. They are testing in two of the toughest locations for a wireless network: Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. Heath at the University of Texas built one of the first MU MIMO testbeds.

With literally $billions going into 5G wireless research you need the latest information and best sources.

Death of Gigaom: This one really hurts

NY Times, WSJ, WP: You need to make offers to Stacey at staceyhigginbotham dot com, Kevin Fitchard at gigaom.com (or via me if that email is shut down.) In the day, Om Malik and Saul Hansall (NYT) were the only reporters who consistently beat me to major broadband stories. Soon after Gigaom began, Saul was disappointed. We expected Gigaom would do well and now Saul would never have the chance to hire Om for the Times. To a large extent, Best Bits in the Times was based on what Gigaom was doing.

"Just watch. Stacey is going to be incredible," Om said to me when he hired her. He was right. Kevin Fitchard was in a tough spot just before Stacey & Om hired him, virtually singlehandedly trying to report every story in the business as Telephony dropped almost all the reporters. He remained productive at Gigaom while dramatically upping his game.

10 GHz spectrum for many gigabits

Brian Hinman of Mimosa, an old friend, has led the drive to open a massive 500 MHz of the 10 GHz band now used for amateur radio. That would almost double the total WiFi spectrum. 10 GHz has limited range except with line of sight. A natural use of the band is for backhaul for wireless ISPs, who often design networks around line of sight possibilities. The alternative use, which is mentioned in early U.S. proposals to the ITU, is for earth sensing satellites.

2.4 GHz WiFi is already often crowded and 5 GHz is starting to fill up. An ISP engineer implementing WiFi gateways tells me his company already has to bring down energy levels in apartment buildings or performance suffers. The telcos are trying to steal a big hunk of WiFi spectrum for their own (very expensive) networks.

The FCC has a powerful incentive to stop LTE-U, beyond the obvious harm to WiFi. Giving the free spectrum to telcos lowers their incentive to bid in the 600 MHz spectrum auction, soon come. The FCC is promising a great deal of money to the treasury from that auction. A failure would be a major political problem.

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