Sprint wants merger approved based on secret data

Sprint's latest merger filing has 40 "redactions," holding back some of the most critical information the public needs to judge whether the transaction is in the public interest. Particularly egregious are the redactions of Appendix A & Appendix B. They don't even note the subject. 

The usual reason for the FCC allowing such "highly confidential" treatment is the information would give competitors a significant advantage. I have reviewed some of the 30+ omissions and am confident that in many cases the information would be available to competitors from analysts and common industry sources. Some can be inferred from public Sprint statements.

Sprint's lawyers - Sam Feder, Regina Keeney, & Steve Sunshine - were once senior FCC officials and surely know the requirements. I believe they are all senior partners in important D.C. firms, jobs which probably pay US$5 million per year.  They also know the regulations are almost never enforced, which I believe is a scandal at the FCC.

The filing concludes, "Absent completing its transaction with T-Mobile, Sprint will have limited options, and is likely to be forced down either a repositioning path and/or a restructuring path." Proponents of the merger believe that 3 carriers would be more competitive than 4 and/or the merger will have a major impact on 5G in the U.S. If those arguments are insufficient, likely insolvency might still win approval.  

Sprint's 5G covers 7M, more than AT&T & Verizon combined

A million here (Los Angeles), a million there (New York), and soon you are talking real coverage. At Brooklyn 5G, John Saw showed two slides showing 7 million people were already covered with a 4G/5G network with massive MIMO.

AT&T and Verizon refuse to release actual 5G coverage, implicit confirmation that the deployment, unlike the pr, in very modest.* Don't believe the hype.

The 4G is live, with something like a 4X capacity increase due to the 128 antennas. The 5G is also tested and will be turned on in a few weeks when the vendors deliver final production software.

Customers in a good location should enjoy 150-450 megabits down.

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AT&T CTO: Our costs are coming down 40%/year

Andre Fuetsch, AT&T CTO, paused for a moment to think before answering my question about telco cost trends. "“We've gone from 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits to now 400 gigabits on our fiber. MIMO and massive MIMO are extremely productive. Yes, I think 40% per year is a reasonable estimate of how our costs are going down. AT&T’s leadership in open white box and SDN will continue to drive that number higher, which is needed as network demand increases.""

Lee Hicks and others at Verizon estimated their costs were falling 40%/year. Does that that sounds right to you, I had asked Fuetsch. Andre had just presented the challenge he faces of continued traffic growth. Whether cost savings can cover the increased traffic carried is a major question.

I know cost accounting is heavily subjective; in a past life, I wrote accounting software. For example, Fuetsch leads both AT&T's capital spending and its operation. How much of his salary should be allocated to each?

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Where is the telco edge?

Carriers have to decide whether they want to offer ~15 ms latency or 25-45 ms latency. 25-45 ms is inexpensive because it requires very few servers, The number of servers and the cost is much higher for ~15 ms. (1 ms works in the lab but it will be years before it is widely deployed. I wish politicians would stop lying about that.)

Choosing where to put Edge Servers is one of the most crucial decisions to make in advanced networks. Very few are certain the demand is there and confident about spending heavily. In the diagram (larger below), I point to 4 Levels at different speeds and costs.  

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Brooklyn 5G: The Big Questions

Every spring, the best telecom engineers in the world come to meet their peers. Ted Rappaport, Andrea Goldsmith, Gerhard Fettweis, slews of CTOs, and many others will present. Do watch the IEEE Livestream. Ted and Gerhard will present the future, including terahertz. I'll be asking about:

Reach of mmWave/density of cells required. Who will do mmWave in the next 5 years?

Latency of 5G air interface. Now 8-12 ms in the field, will it come down to the 1-4 ms in the lab?

Edge Clouds where? Tower, local in C-RAN or exchange, further back and slower?

How to simplify standards to bring down cost and time to market?

Who, what, where, when, and how?

China Unicom 5G covers centres of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Xiong'an (First look)

Officially, the builds at China Unicom, Telecom, and Mobile this year are not commercial deployments. However, China Unicom claims it is "continuously covering the core areas of 7 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Xiong'an."*

If so, Unicom's "test network" is substantially far ahead of Verizon or AT&T's "deployment." It is also ready in "hotspots" of 33 more cities. Until they release the actual number of radios or confirmed coverage maps, I have to consider the claim plausible but unproven.

Qualcomm's 855 chip is ready and half a dozen phones are sampling. Phone prices should be as low as US$600-700, but haven't been announced.

Unicom is using Ericsson equipment, because "Ericsson offered to sell its products for 21 billion yuan ($3.1 billion), or 25 percent below Huawei and 22 percent lower than ZTE’s offer. Nokia Oyj asked for the highest price at 34.7 billion yuan." Bloomberg Davy Zhu Standard Chinese practice would be to give the other vendors part of the contract. Nokia Shanghai Bell may be pricing itseld out of Chinese contracts.

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HP, Tsinghua 5G small cell radio

New H3C, a joint venture of Tsinghua Unigroup & Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is China's #1 in data centre switches, enterprise WLAN, blade servers, and security hardware. CEO Yu Yingtao tells Caixin it will shift in strategy to focus on next-generation telecommunication technology - including 5G small cells. 

Datang, the TD-LTE pioneer, also is looking to compete with Huawei & ZTE for the million+ radios needed for China's 5G network. Datang is now part of Fiberhome, a primary supplier of network and IT gear. Mavenir, Altiostar, Parallel Wireless and others are also promising 5G small cells. 

H3C goes back to a joint venture between Huawei and 3COM, Bob Metcalfe's old Ethernet company. The U.S. government eventually blocked the collaboration. 3COM was sold to HP, which continues to hold 49% of New H3C. 

As you can see in this press release, New H3C has major international ambitions.

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5G first field results: 72-909 Mbps down, 16-30 ms latency

The best results are on track. Korea Telecom is using 100 MHz of spectrum at 3.5 GHz and tested at 193-430 Mbps down. Upload was at 4G speeds. Verizon is using 400 MHz at 28 GHz and the best results were 600-900 MHz. Note that these almost all were clear line of sight, no windows or walls, and only a short distance. Two tests through windows saw a 60-80% drop-off.

Speeds will probably go up as the equipment improves; speeds will probably fall as more people connect. Below, a table with 7 independent test results. More very welcome.

430 Mbps corresponds to what Deutsche Telekom measured on a similar system in Warsaw and what Sprint & T-Mobile expect when they turn on their 5G:

In “daily-use” cases (farther away from the station, on a street, in our #5G_LAB building) we are registering speeds around 350-500 Mbps, which is really great considering the circumstances.

85% or more of "5G" will be similar to the Korean and DT systems. Verizon and AT&T mmWave should be about three times as fast.

600-900 for 400 MHz mmWave is actually more than the 450 megabits Verizon press release suggested. (Below) 400 MHz should provide 2-5 gigabits shared in the lab and often reach a gigabit to individual users. Verizon has 800 MHz to eventually use. No carrier has suggested consumer speeds above about a gigabit, although two gigabits should be practical for fixed wireless with larger antennas. 

Lots of bugs, inconsistencies, and problems have to be fixed but the best results are on track. 

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