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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.

Traffic growth NA 2016 2020Growth 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.

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

Columbia Harish chipWithin 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. 

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

Ambani KhanNearly 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.

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

"IP-V6 penetrationAdded 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%. 

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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.

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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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Mobile: "Huawei Kirin 950 Takes Performance Lead"

Shenzhen 280 wikiopediaMarket for mobile chips disappearing. When Henry Samueli shut down Broadcom's cellular baseband business, I happened to be visiting one of the founders. Many of the 3,000 engineers affected were his friends and the pain was apparent. However, I could see why the decision was necessary. Apple and Samsung dominate the mobile phone business and each made their own chips. Those two companies had growing market share and there just wasn't enough merchant business to sustain the chip vendors. Qualcomm's scale gives them a major advantage and the very efficient Mediatek has also grown.

Huawei, #3 or #4 in cell phone sales, is taking a similar path. Top analyst Linley Gwennap (quote in the headline) is enthusiastic about the new Huawei chip. He believes, "The new chip will outperform both the Snapdragon 810 and the Exynos 7420 on most mobile benchmarks, setting a new bar for smartphone performance."

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Spain Leading the West with 15M Fibered Homes Passed (75%)

Flamenco-DancerFT/Orange Spain going to 10M & 14M. Without much publicity, Spain has pulled far ahead of other large nations in fiber homes. The U.S., Italy and France have passed fewer than 25%, Germany and England less than 10%.

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More Articles ...

  1. 2018: More African, Indian Net Users Than Americans
  2. 2-3 Gigabits Spectrum Unused at Dish, Verizon, Sprint & AT&T (AO)
  3. 400M Indians, 50M French Going LoRa. Is LTE Obsolete for IOT
  4. Verizon 2017?: 5-10x Faster 5G M-MIMO
  5. Verizon 2017?: 5-10x Faster 5G M-MIMO
  6. "Go Massive," Says the Texas MIMO Man - and Verizon
  7. Verizon Ready to Try Massive MIMO and Beamforming
  8. Massive MIMO Explained. What the heck is it? (Updated September 2016)
  9. Nokia's Moiin Believes Massive MIMO/Interference Cancellation is Ready to Come Out of the Labs
  10. Beamforming Explained: What the Heck Is It?
  11. DSL "Reference Noise Cancellation" from Broadcom
  12. Why U.S. Mobile Sucks: 50% Fewer Cell Sites
  13. 14,000 Tests Support Indoor High Frequencies for 5G
  14. Ericsson: Microwave Fine for 5G Backhaul. Needs Proof.
  15. France Telecom Getting Serious About 5G in High Frequencies
  16. Full Duplex: DT, SKT, Stanford Guys Say Close
  17. More Spectrum Than We Need: Sprint Drops Out of Auction
  18. 40 Million Comcast Gigabit Homes. Really.
  19. England Tops in Euro Medium/fast Broadband
  20. AT&T paid $17/month extra for video (Datapoint article)
  21. Quantenna's Remarkable 10 Gig WiFi - Spectrum Greedy But Works
  22. Supersonic DOCSIS: 15 Gigabit Cable 2020, 50-80 Gigabits 2030
  23. Nokia Gives Half of Nokia China to Government to get Alcatel Deal Approved
  24. 83% of Wireless Going Wi-Fi
  25. Sartre Project: Is Wi-Fi an Existential Threat to Telcos?
  26. USA: Cable adding, telcos shedding
  27. Verizon, Intel: "5G the Free WiFi Killer"
  28. 300 Megabit 3 Band LTE in Korea, Spain
  29. From Lantiq: Intel deal "is great"
  30. Gigabit cable for Montreal, Suddenlink & Alaska
  31. Gigabit of spectrum to Vodafone and Deutsche Telecom
  32. Germany chooses 100-150 megabit 35b DSL
  33. Vultures come out on the Qualcomm-Ikanos deal
  34. $50-60M Ikanos buy brings Qualcomm into DSL
  35. Networks of the world, 2019. A first draft.
  36. 256 Antenna Transmitter & receiver for high frequency
  37. 10% Speed DOCSIS 3.1 to Australia in 2016
  38. 28 top engineers predict 5G
  39. 300 megabits (shared) going to a gigabit across Denmark
  40. Alcatel's Weldon: Governments are splitting the broadband market. We get 11% in China

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