Brooklyn in April is the Center of the 5G Universe

Many of the best coming April 8-10 for Ted Rappaport's Brooklyn 5G Summit. 5GW News was conceived at last year's event. AT&T's #2 John Stankey, the CTO of NTT DOCOMO Seizo Onoe, and many of their peers spoke at the 2014 first event. I was then a doubter but these guys are serious. Folks at that level wouldn't have flown from around the world unless 5G was closer than i thought,

In 2015, everyone's rushing to promise 5G despite no one knowing just what it will be. 5G performance will be 10-100 times faster than today's wireless. The three most important technologies are Massive MIMO & MU MIMO; millimeter wave high frequency cells; and bottoms-up small cells, especially WiFi from everyone's home gateway.

I've pasted in the speaker list below. It's a veritable who's who of 5G research.

 

1) High frequencies have enough spectrum available to easily deliver gigabits.

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10 Gig WiFi demo from Quantenna

It's a pr stunt for now but not that far off. 20 years after Paulraj invented MIMO, a company founded by his Stanford colleague Andrea Goldsmith is using 8 antenna MIMO to show the way to 10 gigabits on WiFi. Broadcom is promising similar. The real world results of "1.3 gigabit 802.11ac" so far are 400-500 megabits and the early results of "10 gigabit" will probably suffer similarly. But in 2-3 years, some homes will have effective WiFi speeds in the gigabits.

These speeds are based on 160 MHz of spectrum, only possible if few neighbors are using the band. 8 antennas will provide 8 separate streams in some locations but little more than 1 stream in others. MIMO separates signals by slight differences in reflection. That has the surprising result that the worst performance is when you have perfect line of site. Hakan Ericsson of Ericsson explained to me that MIMO gains would be very small in much of rural Australia because the terrain is flat.

IEEE has a very active standards group, 802.11ax, working on multi-gigabit WiFi.  There's a wealth of information at the .11ax page. IEEE has a free mailing list that lets you track what's going on.

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300 Megabit 3 Band LTE in Korea

The world is on the way to gigabit LTE. Using 40 MHz, Korea's largest mobile company is upgrading 26,000 cell sites over the next few months. The maximum speed is 300 megabits, shared; if the cell site is crowded or you're far from the tower, the speed is lower. 95+% of the time if you are well connected to the cell site, you can expect 50-100 megabits. SK is using 20 MHz in the 1.8GHz band, 10 MHz in the 800MHz band, and 10MHz in 2.1 GHz band. 

SK claims this is the first commercial 3 band deployment, but there are dozens to come. Update 2/20 There are so few triband phones available some think the announcement is premature. But they are coming

LG, Korea's #3, intends to deploy next month and KT is in trials. http://bit.ly/1BoDP7N. SK's 26K cellsites for 51 million people is about three times  the density of AT&T or Verizon's network. The American giants have < 50,000 cellsites for 315 million people.

Verizon was first, after Scandinavia, to LTE but now has a distinctly inferior network. While Germany has peak speeds often at 100 megabits, Verizon is still advertising 5-12 megabits. England, France, Finland and many others soon roll out common speeds of > 100 megabits.

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John Cioffi: WI-Fi’s extraordinary future: The Impact on Wireless Connectivity

Stanford Professor John Cioffi offers some thoughts. WI-Fi’s extraordinary progress needs smart policy to thrive. Wi-Fi physical-layer technology is improving remarkably. Peak speeds are a gigabit or more. Several chipmakers (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Quantenna, MediaTek, Marvell, and others) advertise 1.3 gigabit (peak-speed) .ac chips, while reports of tests cite raw peak speeds as high as 10 Gbps. While these heroic physical-layer speed demonstrations attract attention, the reality of the situation suggests smart policy will be necessary for even small fractions of these peak speeds to be enjoyed in use by consumers of internet data. 

 

These high peak Wi-Fi speeds often use much of the existing unlicensed Wi-Fi 5 GHz spectrum to achieve the high advertised speeds (along with several spatial paths of that spectrum). However Wi-Fi uses a “collision protocol.” Collisions are attempts by more than one user/device/thing to use Wi-Fi on any of the access points at the same time. In this case, both “things” must wait a random period of time before attempting to transmit the same data again, leading to significant speed loss and delay in delivery of data. The more devices active, the more rapidly the performance decays. It is not unusual for the latest Wi-Fi systems advertised at Gbps speeds to actually provide only a few Mbps to devices in real use.

 

Wi-Fi speeds can be expected to drop very significantly in neighborhoods and buildings where several Wi-Fi access points are in use with typical numbers of Wi-Fi-capable devices connected.

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Gigabit WiFi: Broadcom, Qualcomm, Marvell & MediaTek chasing Quantenna

Real world tests at 400-500 megabits. Sebastian Anthony at Extremetech tested the Linksys 1900/Quantenna getting 449 Mbps, as you can see in the picture at right. Reviewers at Amazon tested at similar speeds. Swisscom and several cable guys are very happy with the Quantenna chips; anecdotally, 9 times out of 10 Quantenna-based gateways connect the whole house at TV speeds. The full rated speed of 1.3 gigabits is actually possible if you have two of these units connected with 4 antennas each and the right environment. Update 2/23 John Cioffi reminds me that .ac achieves the highest speeds by using 160 MHz. In any crowded environment, that won't be possible.

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10 Gig - repeat, 10 gig - to 800K apartments in Hong Kong

Soon, the cost to the telco for 10 gigabits will be little different than the cost of ten megabits.  1 gig service over fiber costs the carrier very little more than 10 or 100 megabits. Equipment going in today is almost all ready for a gig. There's rarely any savings using obsolete gear that tops out at lower speeds. PCCW's Hong Kong telco has now upped the ante, bringing a ten gig - presumably XGPON - to all 800,000 fiber customers. Trials have begun and they expect to cover nearly all 800K by the end of 2015. 

Hong Kong consumers are among the luckiest in the world. Despite wages often as high as the U.S., prices both for wired and wireless service are typically half what they are in the states. Pricing for the gig service isn't announced and will be determined by what the market requires. Even with the low revenue base, HKT is going fiber or vectored VDSL to nearly all the city while investing less than 10% of revenue. Their LTE is going to 300 megabits.

Hong Kong HKT's cost should be somewhere between $400 & $1,000 per home - probably closer to $400.

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Verizon, T-Mobile, Ericsson Want WiFi Spectrum for LTE

Vint Cerf, Megan Smith, Marty CooperWith congestion already a problem, do we want more traffic from telcos? Is it smart to give up 25%-75% of the bandwdith for telco LTE? "LAA" is seeing a huge push in 3GPP and elsewhere. Giant telcos want to make this happen incredibly fast although no one has done field trials to prove the sharing can work. They want to create "facts on the ground" before the regulator, much less the public, even know what's going on.

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray says they will deploy in 2015, Verizon's Tony Melone is not far behind and AT&T is working in standards. SK in Korea and all the equipment guys are jumping on. More than half of traffic now goes on WiFi but the telcos can't charge for it in most countries. So they are moving the free WiFi calls to LTE "Assisted Access" so they can charge. If they clobber WiFi in the process, better for them. If all the current uncharged WiFi traffic moved to LTE, most phone bills would double or triple. 

Kevin Smithen and Will Clayton of Macquarie broke the story, which was picked by by Fierce, Jan Brodkin and Kevin Fitchard. Telcos grabbing a big hunk of WiFi is about as important a mobile story as I can imagine, but I couldn't find even a single report in a major newspaper. WSJ, NYT, WP and the Guardian haven't even mentioned LAA.   

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Goodbye, Lantiq. Hello, Intel

Late arriving chips push DSL pioneer into Intel deal. Intel is back in the DSL business more than a decade after losing about $2B without bringing a DSL chip to market. Lantiq is a solid company with excellent engineers around the world.

Not long ago, CEO Christian Wolff was planning for a $1B IPO. Imran Hajimusa was exhibiting spectacular demonstrations of world-beating performance WiFi, some of the first publicly shown vectored VDSL and more. The chips haven't made it to market. Update 3/03 Vectored VDSL chips for modems are shipping, although other chips are not. 

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