It does work! mmWave true gigabit at Verizon downloads a movie in 8 seconds

1.096 gigabits. 1.098 gigabits. 999 megabits. 941 megabits. ((Line of sight, < 200 meters) These are actual tests on Verizon 5G with a Samsung Galaxy 10 in Chicago. These are real people on real phones, three of them independent journalists.

10,000's have already ordered the Galaxy 10 5G, even knowing it will be rare to connect to 5G. Consumers want 5G; 400,000 Koreans have bought 5G phones in six weeks.

These results are about twice tests from a month ago and three or four times December tests. Almost everyone doubted high-frequency 5G would make sense. Neville Ray, CTO of T-Mobile, blogged the mmWave would only be a small niche. Craig Moffett, one of the best on Wall Street, wrote that the economics were extremely dubious. 

mmWave still faces major obstacles.

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Insider: 5G demand likely to be weak for years

Tom Bartlett is CFO of American Tower. The company's 170,000 towers mean it is intimately involved with every major carrier in the U.S., India, and Brazil. His comments reflect the consensus views of the companies:

• 5G "relatively flat for a few years"
• Yearly "30% to 40% demand on the network" 
• Massive MIMO and multiple antennas will be used on many/most sites to increase capacity.

Bartlett doesn't see much profit for American Tower in small cells and is directing investment to other products. Despite all the lobbying and self-congratulatory politicians, I haven't seen much of an increase in small cell building or more than modest interest outside the U.S.

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Chip bottom: Sales down 7%

IHS forecasts a 7% drop in 2019 chip sales as prices plummet in memory, blockchain miners disappear, and mobile phone sales drop. This is consistent with many other data points, such as TSMC's quarterly earnings. Lower prices for memory chips and most others are holding down equipment pricing, including PC's and phones. 

Four sectors stand out in the chip business.

5G wireless chips can only be produced on TSMC's 7-nanometer production line or by Samsung, mostly for its own use. Huawei and Qualcomm are producing 5G chips with reasonable yields at TSMC. Six months ago, 5G phones were not expected before the summer because Apple had bought out most of TSMC's 7 nm production. The decline of iPhone sales opened some capacity and Qualcomm is supplying chips to Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and ZTE. China Unicom is offering phones from those four, Huawei, and I believe Samsung.

Qualcomm's prices are reasonable enough that Xiaomi announced 5G phones at US$600, which others will match. Intel is now out of the market. MediaTek and UNISOC are behind, so Qualcomm has little incentive to adjust prices. IHS emails me:  

In the near term, our analysts don’t see much pressure on BOM pricing due to the strong Qualcomm market presence but in the longer term, BOM prices will be under pressure as soon as China Mobile comes online with their 5G SA network. It is also unlikely that semiconductor manufacturing (of application processors and modems) will drive the market into oversupply.

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Korea 5G far ahead: 250,000 5G in Korea, goal 8-10M in one year, 3,690 bases added one week (First look)

May 1, 2019. Korea has pulled far ahead in 5G, by almost every measure. Half the country is covered with 5G, with 90% expected by the end of 2019. Korea Telecom has 100,000 subscribers and the country 260,000. The hope is for 10% of users will be on 5G by the end of 2019, four to five million. SKT projects 6-7M subscribers by the end of 2020. That would suggest the three carriers will have 8-10M subscribers in a year. It will be difficult to impossible for any other country to catch up until 2021 or later. 

Takeaways: The government "suggested" the companies move quickly, effective industrial planning. KT CFO Kyung-Keun Yoon on its financial call said, "The investment into 5G is actually inevitable for us." I believe this pattern will be common: one company moves fast on 5G and the others feel they must match. Ericsson data is:

More than half in China, one-third in South Korea and one in four in the US and Australia will change either immediately or within six months should this be the case. 

Ericsson wants to sell radios and is not an objective source, but all indications are that if 5G is offered at the same price as 4G, consumers will buy. I expect this will especially be true later this year when numerous 5G phones hit the market at about US$600. 

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U.S. Defense Dept: Spectrum must be shared

Milo Medin, one of the most respected communications engineers, co-authored what should become the basis for all discussion of spectrum allocations. Most thoughtful engineers realized a few years ago that shared spectrum usually delivers far more capacity because more users will usually mean more radios. While today's phones are not "software-defined" or completely "frequency agile," many support dozens of bands and the networks can almost always find less congested bands.

The most important recommendation is

"DoD should recommend that the NTIA, FCC and Department of State should advocate the reallocation of the C-band satellite spectrum to IMT-2000 5G use at the World Radio Conference later this year (WRC-19), and take measures to adopt sharing in all 500 MHz of the band in the United States on an accelerated basis for fixed operations." 

Almost all independent engineers conclude sharing is now the way to go. Columbia Professor & former FCC Chief Technologist Henning Schulzrinne in 2017 projected "All New Spectrum Likely To Be Shared." OFCOM and some EU experts have said the same thing to me. More sharing is implied in the important White House PCAST report.

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mmWave in suburbs? Neville & Craig say no, Ted, Seizo, and Hans say yes

Neville Ray, T-Mobile CTO, thinks Verizon 5G is heading for disaster if they build mmWave to the planned 30 million homes. He wishes them "Lots of Luck" in the illustrations at left and below, illustrated with skulls. Top Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett has looked in detail at Verizon's mmWave and infers it is currently limited to under 200 metres.

Ray's blog (excerpt below) begins "5G is at the height of the hype curve right now and there’s also a lot of misinformation." On the blog, Neville has a striking very short video of how mmWave performance can be destroyed simply by closing a door. 

On the other hand, Swisscom/Fastweb on May 2 committed three billion euro to bring 26 GHz mmWave to 8 million Italian homes. They are sure they will deliver a gigabit 500 metres. Ted Rappaport of NYU, the leading researcher, emails me, "5G small cell operating on mmWave spectrum should reach 100 to 200 metres in a dense urban environment, up to 900 metres in suburban areas."  

Whether mmWave reaches 200 metres or 800 metres is the biggest unknown in planning for 5G.  

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Traffic growth falling to 23%-35%

Wireless traffic growth is falling across the developed world, but the 2018 figure from Swisscom is lower than anything else I've seen. The Swiss figure may be an anomaly, but Cisco's VNI, a respected source, sees Western Europe growth in 2018 as 44% and North America 42%. In 2022, the Cisco projection is Western Europe 35% and North America 31%. 

Update 5/12 Iliad/Free in France announced 28% in 2018 (end) In the developed world, the era of exponential growth is long gone. 100% annual growth is now just a memory, that ended when most of the population acquired smartphones. In India and Africa, only a minority have smartphones today, so growth is higher.

Verizon and AT&T both estimate wireless productivity growth of ~40% per year. Traffic growth and declining cost per bit roughly match. The result: Cost per customer is roughly flat. If prices are roughly flat, which is common, profit will remain roughly constant. In 2017 & 2018, profit at most major telcos has risen slightly. That confirms the Verizon and AT&T productivity estimates. 

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Fastweb 8M mmWave homes passed outclasses Verizon

Fastweb, owned by Swisscom, has announced the first large millimetre wave build (26 GHz) in Europe, intending to cover a third of Italy by 2024. That's actually more than Verizon's plan, adjusted for population. (Italy: 60M; U.S. 328M.) Verizon's current plan is 30M by 2024 to 2027, about a quarter of the U.S. Fastweb expects to deliver a gigabit 500 meters, using Samsung fixed wireless gear and all outdoor antennas. (That's ambitious.)

They are building a better network than Swisscom's own, I believe, which is sub-6 GHz and generally will run at a third the speed of mmWave. Xavier Niel is taking millions of mobile customers in Italy and will soon offer fixed as well. This is a competitive response, one more datapoint that competition, not higher prices, drives investment.

Telefonica Germany has a similar plan, according to CTO Cayetano Carbajo. 

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