Could telcos lose the Edge Cloud race before it even begins?

Cole Crawford at Vapor IO is building a network designed to bypass the telco entirely. He's installed an "aggregation box" a hop or three from the towers. Iyad Terazi's Federated Wireless is ready to connect it with a dedicated radio in 3.5 GHz shared spectrum. That's natural for certain kinds of IoT. The speed will be much better than the carriers. Interesting stuff. Packet, MobiledgeX and others are ready with the hardware and software that will make it work. 

Cole gave me reasons he thought the telcos should buy in. Maybe. It's also possible services like IoT create enough of a niche to become profitable. Vapor says a single hub could serve hundreds of towers, which would bring the cost down. (I've asked how that would affect latency and am waiting to hear from the company. I would guess 3-8 ms with high performance gear but do not have data.)

What if Google, Amazon and a few others jump in to bypass the telcos? There's no evidence that's in their plans, but interesting talk. The software and programming talent at the web giants outclasses the ability of anywhere else. Google's network is the largest civilian system in history. It works well all around the world at an amazingly low cost. The scale dwarfs Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, or AT&T. 

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"Levels of Edge" What are the real choices?

Where will the boxes go? Who will buy? Dozens of companies are jumping in, many with wild and contradictory ideas. "Levels of Edge" brings some order to the analysis.

Edge clouds reduce latency with servers close to the customer. The true believers talk 1-4 ms; the actual results for now are likely 15-25 ms. That's great for multi-player Pokemon, worthless for controlling autonomous vehicles. 

Level 1 Edge Clouds don't exist yet and may cost too much to deploy. 1 ms 5G is still in the lab and years away from deployment. the 5G deploying is ~10 ms. 

A Level 2 site is building in Chicago with equipment moving in. Vapor is supplying the main boxes. The server adds ~ 4 ms. Level 2 sites aim for 10-20 ms. Cole Crawford of Vapor tells Mike Dano their boxes are "tower-aggregated and connected, not tower-located." Vapor is not, as originally thought, going directly to the cell.  Federated Wireless is testing a new radio network, which may be the only way to performance desired.

Level 3 sites are testing in live networks at Deutsche Telekom and in China.

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Denmark: Terabyte fixed wireless, $35, 40-70 megabits

5G level service before 5G is deployed. Danish Mobile carrier 3, like most wireless companies today, has capacity going to waste. 4G Massive MIMO, Carrier aggregation, and other technologies advances are growing networks faster than the traffic demand grows. It covers 98% of Denmark and should be able to deliver the 40-70 megabits to most of the country. The 1 terabyte cap is enough for almost everyone.

Third and fourth carriers in many countries are suffering from a lack of customers. They have to think like new entrants and move aggressively. That does not necessarily mean cutting prices, although price cuts are an obvious choice. In wireless in particular, most carriers have excess capacity in most places. That allows you to drastically increase caps or video quality, both of which customers want. That's much easier when the marginal cost is low, like here. You can give more to customers without it costing too much. (Unlike, say, investing in fibre to the home. Although Telefonica and Orange seem to be making it work.)

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China Mobile, Sprint 2.6 GHz could be much faster

5G is not 5G is not 5G. 85+% of 5G will be mid and low bands, below 6 GHz. Typical speeds will be 100-400 megabits.  In the U.S. Sprint holds a huge chunk, well over 100 MHz. China Mobile has 160 MHz. They can, and probably will, have better 5G than all but a handful of carriers who are doing mmWave. Huawei is ready to deliver equipment for maximum performance at 2.6 GHz.

Europe and Japan will do almost all of their early 5G in 100 MHz or less of 3.5 GHz spectrum.  Higher signals, such as 3.5 GHz, fade so rapidly that until recently this band was unusable for broadband. With Massive MIMO, 100 MHz of 3.5 has the performance of 20-40 MHz in lower spectrum - with a spectrum cost of a quarter or less most places.

2.5 GHz has much greater reach, especially with Massive MIMO antennas.

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5G EUV chips from TSMC in 60 days

At least a dozen 5G phones will be announced in the next two weeks for MWC Barcelona. Some of them may start shipping as soon as April, earlier than expected. That's not guaranteed. The primary chips should be available but the front end of the phones - RF or Radio Frequency - also has been struggling.

End of March, Taiwan Semi promises volume production of 7 nm chips produced using an Extreme Ultraviolet system (EUV.) TSMC is taking delivery on 18 of the US$100 million-plus machines this year. Some will be tested on 5nm, with production expected in 2020.  Samsung and TSMC have begun construction on 3 nm facilities that will cost US$20 billion. 

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Wikipedia edits Cloud & Edge computing

I began the process of updating and clarifying the first paragraphs of these articles. Improvements welcome.

Cloud computing makes computer system resources, especially storage and computing power, available on demand without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet. Large clouds, predominant today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers. If the connection to the user is relatively close, it may be designated an Edge server.

Clouds may be limited to a single organization (enterprise clouds,) be available to many organizations (public cloud,) or a combination of both (hybrid cloud.) The largest public cloud is Amazon AWS.

Edge computing brings memory and computing power closer to the location where it is needed. Definitions vary.

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Verizon freezes 5G for 6-10 months

Except for a very few people in small parts of 4 cities (map at left and at PC Mag,)Mag,) Verizon will not sell you 5G until they get NR certified equipment. They are looking to Motorola and Samsung, who are both six months and more away from volume production.

After spending untold millions to be "first," Verizon has stopped opening 5G sites to customers. Hans Vestberg decided to wait until he could get 3GPP approved NR routers rather than those custom-built to Verizon's early standard. 

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Ericsson 4G LTE: 2 gigabits, 10 ms latency

As previously reported, Ericsson is bringing the 4G latency close to 5G latency. In March, the company emailed me,

From mid-2018 Ericsson will have support for latency (Round Trip Time, RTT) down to 9ms on the LTE air interface (Based on the 3GPP Rel-14).

Verizon and others are being coy, but the reported latencies on 5G are also ~10 ms. 

On speed, Ericsson now offers multi-Gigabit LTE for 2Gbps. This is consistent with previous reports. See 4G LTE: Telstra 2 gigabits, Singtel 1.5, Verizon 1.45. 5G NR low and mid-band will be slightly faster one day, but today is slower in practice since 5G doesn't have functions like LAA. 

Below, the press release. It speaks of Massive IoT. I'll ask Ericsson for more info.

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