Fast Net News - Fast Net.news

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.

Maybe True "Impossible" Performance By Cohere, Tarana

LTE and 5G are so close to Shannon limits you can't get a major performance gain from a traditional connection without breaking the laws of physics. There's only so much you can load on a single signal. The big advances in the last five years have come from using multiple antennas and multiple signals. (MIMO.)

Ronny Haraldsvik claims Cohere's "Spectrum Multiplier software can effectively double network capacity and the capabilities of existing spectrum, supporting twice as many users and devices." That sounds like the kind of bs claim I'd normally ignore. But Cohere has convinced top engineers at major telcos they may have something.

Similarly, Tarana Wireless may have some exciting technology. Neil McRae of BT says

“After just one day of running our pilot on G1, customers are saying ‘please, you’re not going to turn this off for years, right!?!’ It’s a very sticky product.”

MTN in South Africa is in production with Tarana.

Telstra Tests Gigabit Upstream mmWave

Sculpture at Wombat NSW by Bidgee 230 I was startled to discover Verizon's mmWave network is stuck around 50 Mbps upstream, when mmWave systems should be designed to deliver upstream 300 Mbps - 1 Gbps. I can get 90 Mbps upstream with T-Mobile mid-band on a cheap phone.

I've seen 5G mmWave in the lab that can do 10 gigabits upstream or down. So I initially yawned when Paul Milford at Telstra sent a Linkedin that he was getting almost a gig upstream on a real network. I put the photo of his test on the latest US data. Verizon may have been the first rabbit with 5G in 2018, but the wombat may be overtaking.

Verizon Super 5G Only 57 Mbps Upstream, 500 Foot Radius

Paul Milfords gigabit upstream at Telstra 230 Earl Lum tested 74 Verizon 5G millimeter wave sites and found an average upstream speed of 57 Mbps. The typical cell radius was 500 feet, less than 200 meters. I believe this was all outdoors, tested with a Samsung phone.

To compare, I just recorded 68 Mbps upstream with my T-Mobile 5G phone, using mid-band rather than mmWave. Telstra just tested 986 Mbps upstream.

I have to do more research to understand what is wrong. There may be an undiscussed limit of the equipment. But these results are not even close to what the CEO expected from mmWave.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam told Wall Street in 2018 about much better range

"The distances that we shared are and the throughputs are very consistent up to about 2000 feet" and also "We were at 2000 feet from the receiver in Samsung's Technology Park, we were delivering 1.8 gigs.

More Articles ...