IEEE ComSoc opens the papers.
What the heck is 5G? Any big company will tell you 5G is whatever they happen to be planning. It's a meaningless marketing term. Another way to define 5G is "whatever advances are still to come." ComSoc has now pulled from behind the paywall four papers with expert opinion, all worth a read. Below are the abstracts and conclusions.
500 towers running dual carrier LTE. Many Danes, much of the time, will see download speeds over 100 megabits as TDC upgrades to using 2 carriers and 40 MHz. The total capacity is 300 megabits, shared, and obviously lower as you get further from the towers. TDC's Peter Schleidt warns people to be realistic. "A client must not expect to get 300 Mbit / s or later 1 Gbit / s for herself." Gigabit speeds are part of LTE-Advanced Release 10 and will reach the field in a few years.
Confirms cartel. Weldon notes "China allows foreign vendors to claim a maximum 11% of the wireless market; Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia each have an 11% share." (Jessica Lipsky, EE Times http://bit.ly/china11share) Whether China will allow the merged company 22% or only 11% is a major factor in the future success of the company, but nothing is decided. Lipsky quotes Weldon, "I think what is definitely true is we will both be stronger in wireless in either company. We’re hopeful that means we can maintain the aggregate market share and not have that renormalized.”
Fearing bankruptcy of Alcatel and Nokia, the EU threatened high "dumping" tariffs on China's Huawei and ZTE. The Chinese were taking market share and driving down prices. The threat was highly credible. The U.S. had blocked Huawei, citing "security" but without any proof. EU Trade Commissioner Karel DE Gucht went public with the statement below.
In 2014, the tariff investigation was put on hold. The industry rumor was the governments reached a behind the scenes agreement on market share. China allowed Alcatel and Nokia a share of the Chinese market and Huawei/ZTE accepted a limit on their market share in Europe. Equipment prices went up.
NYU (Rappaport), Texas (Heath), Stanford/Berkeley joined by TU Dresden and the University of Surrey. Monica Alleven at Fierce asked researchers where the outstanding work is being done and produced a report ranking the top universities. I can confirm that #1 NYU, #4 Stanford/Berkeley and their joint research and #5 University of Texas-Austin are among the most respected in the U.S. (I don't know academics outside the U.S. well enough to comment.)
Any American lead is fragile because research money is hard to find. Korea has committed $1.5B and the EU €700B for 5G research. Huawei, Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia are spending heavily. All the the big telecom companies in North America are gone. AT&T and Verizon are cutting capex and R&D.
Rappaport of NYU and Heath of Texas recently published what instantly became the standard textbook, Millimeter Wave Wireless Communications. Ted has been running his graduate students around Manhattan and Brooklyn testing prototype gear. The results have been strong and convinced most of the industry that high frequencies are part of the 5G story. Heath built a testbed for MU-MIMO, which Paulraj tells me is the way to reach rural homes.
NFV, SDN starting to inspire white box fears. (Update 4/31 Adtran's stock climbed and Calix plummeted, leaving them both about the same % lost.) Adtran's stock fell 10% Wednesday, about $100M, to the lowest level in five years. Tom Stanton's company was hit hard by disappointing sales to two major customers. Quarterly sales were slightly down, partly explained by the euro falling against the dollar. Interim CFO Interim CFO Mike Foliano didn't warn the street of the sales decline. The analysts expect a wink and nod in advance with inside information.
Adtran remains a capable and profitable company but the market has been treating it as a growth stock. Telecom is not a growing business. Nearly no company except Huawei has seen sales increase.
AT&T canceled a project to upgrade some of the old BellSouth territory. That's not much of a surprise; AT&T's $4B capex cut this year is the largest of any telco over the last decade, anywhere in the world. Craig Moffett for several years has been pointing to how hard Randall has to work to cover the dividend. Over the last four years, dividends have actually exceeded earnings per share.
Deutsche Telekom is trying to weasel out of their repeated commitment to meet the EU 100 megabit speed with vectoring to 24 million homes in 2016.
As many as 13 simultaneous sessions. Many of the world's best engineers are coming to the IEEE International Conference on Communications, from the most advanced academics to the slickest salesmen. Hundreds of presentations, far more than anyone can absorb. Alcatel, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, Samsung & ZTE will each explain why they and they alone have the right path to 5G. Of course, none of them can even provide an agreed definition of what 5G is or are even close to delivering relevant equipment. (Marketing is like that.) In particular, experts like NTT are saying one much discussed "5G' technology - high GHz millimeter waves - is unlikely before 2022-2023. http://5gwnews.com/90-r/211-2022-or-later-for-high-ghz-5g This will be a conference where I can learn just how far along each technology is in 2015.
Lajos Hanzo's "A Stroll with Shannon to Next-Generation Plaza: Large-Scale MIMOs, Single versus Multiple RF Chains and All That..." promises to be particularly interesting. Filming Stanford Professor Andrea Goldsmith, I asked "What are the most interesting problems in communications? What would you include if you were creating a list after Hilbert's?" Her first answer was "Extending the notion of a limit from Shannon's single wire to today's multiple channels."
Larry Strickling could become an American hero. NTIA chief Strickling is looking at a remarkable 960 MHz of mostly U.S. government spectrum for sharing. It's not impossible this will double the effective spectrum for use in much of the United States. More likely, the other agencies - largely the Defense Department - will preserve much of the monopoly. Given that the entire Verizon or AT&T network can fit into 55 MHz, the potential gains are impressive.
The 3.5 GHz spectrum recently opened for sharing had largely been used by the Navy. With few aircraft carriers in Iowa and North Dakota, it lay fallow. The same is certainly true of other government spectrum now under investigation.
"Sharing is the U.S. Government policy," I heard as a member of the U.S. State Department ITAC. That policy arose out of the very important PCAST report, which in 2012 transformed the discussion about spectrum. François Rancy of the ITU and several EU officials have told me how influential it has been internationally.
Craig Mundie of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt of Google officially presented the report and gave it a strong public endorsement. From the FCC, Rashmi Doshi, Walter Johnston, & Julius Knapp had important input. They are respected engineers who unfortunately are usually overlooked by the FCC Commissioners. Perhaps most important, the PCAST group reached out to independents including Vint Cerf, David Clark, Andrea Goldsmith, Michael Marcus, Robert Horvitz, Jon M. Peha, and Eli Noam.
One reason that NTIA is making progressive moves is that the group is not just the usual lobbyists and government reps. Charla Rath of Verizon is included, but so is Marty Cooper, who built the first cellphone; Dennis Roberson of IIT, who has done important academic work on how spectrum is used; Dale Hatfield of the University of Colorado; and key public advocates Harold Feld of Public Knowledge and Mike Calabrese of the New America Foundation.
Ultimately, far more effective spectrum use. Google Fi is an important step towards the ?quadrupling of capacity possible with radios that are smart enough to test the environment and then find spectrum. It works by testing the capacity/signal available in Wi-Fi, the Sprint network and the T-Mobile network. Using Wi-Fi well will allow offloading of 70-90% of all traffic. Being able to switch between Sprint and T-Mobile adds ?20% to effective capacity.
To make that estimate, I tried to find quality analysis of how much is gained by sharing spectrum. The pickings were slim until I realized I should be looking at the massive research on "cognitive radio." I found an enormously helpful compilation from the IEEE http://www.comsoc.org/best-readings/topic/cognitive-radio http://bit.ly/1GiJaTo
Know thyself applies to radio spectrum and networks just as it does to people. A radio that can observe and adjust will deliver data more efficiently and reliably. If it can communicate with those in the same space, they can cooperate even more effectively. (John Cioffi's "Dynamic spectrum management" and "vectoring" is showing the way.)
