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 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. 

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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.

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Telstra Tests Gigabit Upstream mmWave

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.

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

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.

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Jeff Pulver is Bringing Back VON. Zoom Jan 25-26

Bill Smith told me what it took to recover from Hurricane Katrina as CTO of BellSouth. In 2004, John Chapman explained how cable would get to a gigabit. (Almost no one believed him.) Jef Raskin explained why he created the Macintosh and what he did wrong. He did sessions in Second Life, now being refashioned as "The Metaverse."

The most original minds in telecom argued long into the night about how to create the future. Years before the rest of us, Jeff realized the giants were going to take over, innovation would slow, and conferences about telecom futures had less of a place. Since then, he invested early in Twitter and created the 140 Character Conference. He was a pioneer of NFTs but now sees them as overhyped. 

When we programmed Pulver conferences, the mandate was clear: find the best and most interesting speakers, whether or not they would buy a  sponsorship. We all know how the many pay-to-play events are dominated by boring sales pitches.   

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Rosenworcel's Failed Emergency Broadband Benefit

Less than 20% of the $3.2 billion in the EBB program is being spent on reaching the unconnected. Nobody's perfect, I learned from Joe E. Brown, so I am comfortable with the strong endorsement I gave Rosenworcel for permanent FCC Chair.  But it's crucial to face what went wrong before more money is wasted.

The program was sold with dramatic stories of families who couldn't afford a connection at home. From Joe Biden  

"No parent should have to sit in a parking lot at a fast-food restaurant again just so their child can use the Internet to do their homework. That’s over." 

In practice, extremely few unconnected kids were helped by the program. Instead, most of the money went to ISPs for customers that already had service, often at 2 or even 5 times what was formerly charged. 

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"Everyone" Buying 5G As Samsung 5G Falls to $129

5G phones have taken over. >70% of phones sold in China, Korea, Australia, Canada, and the United States are now 5G. I believe Japan, England, and most of Western Europe are similar but I don't have firm data. 

5G still does nothing important, of course, but the cost difference between 4G & 5G is very small. The immensely popular Apple 13 doesn't even have a 4G model. 

Since December 2019, I've been reporting that prices of $150-220 were driving demand for 5G phones. Boost Mobile, owned by Dish, on November 7 2021 dropped the price of the Samsung A32 5G to $129. 

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