?5G Phones $80 for additional parts (Cheap)

A report in Digitimes suggests premium 5G phones will cost about US$100 more than comparable 

The production cost for 5G phones as compared to their 4G predecessors should increase by less than US$80 per unit, including an increase by almost US$50 for 5G modem chips and application processors, and the remaining US$30 for new antennas, PCBs and other materials, the sources indicated.

Digitimes stories like this have usually been accurate in the past. This is much less than the US$200 additional estimated by OPPO CEO Pete Lau.  

Dan Adams of Deloitte estimates about a million 5G phones will ship in 2019.

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AR/VR/XR: What to expect from networks the next four years

Latency, clouds, and how the telcos hope to take over

The 1 ms latency frequently touted will be available to less than 2%, probably much less. 300-600 million homes will be able to connect at 15-25 ms through carrier edge cloud networks. Most will be in China. (This and the other predictions are well-researched but of course not guaranteed.)

Deutsche Telekom is rapidly building a network to connect all Germans to servers within 20-25 milliseconds. Multi-player Pokemon has a great demo. DT is working with rivals. Timotheus Höttges and team have decided a project like this needs to reach the largest audience and are including rivals. 

Carriers have monopolies on reaching their own customers. Many expect to charge a high price to use their edge clouds, which will be 10 ms to 30 ms faster than other choices such as CDNs. It is totally unclear whether the market for that kind of service will be large. I am more sceptical than most but very unsure.

They are already making deals, such as China Unicom with Tencent. Verizon is building game servers. The partnerships are logical, if and only if the terms work.

Telcos dream of a wireless umbilical cord between your phone or autonomous car and their servers

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Vestberg: ?90% 5G energy saving?

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg is generally a straight shooter, so I was surprised by his comment

"5G network equipment and devices will consume only 10% of the energy consumed by 4G network equipment and devices,"

Almost everyone expects 5G to use more energy. It takes enormous calculating power to keep up with the speeds and complex calculations. The phone may need 10X the number of transistors as basic LTE. The base station energy demand is not as extreme. MIMO and Massive MIMO do not require major increases in power. But many network builders are warning about the expense of energy. In November, Iain Morris reports,  

Guiqing Liu, the executive vice president of China Telecom, grumbled during a keynote presentation about the high power consumption of 5G basestations. His complaints were echoed and amplified by Orange's Arnaud Vamparys, a senior vice president of radio networks with the French incumbent. 

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AR/VR: China's Gov says Go!

China is already far ahead in VR, experts tell me.  The gap is likely to widen as this MIIT opinion puts the full force of government behind AR/VR promotion. Cities and provinces are expected to provide support. Banks are "encouraged" to provide financing. Any "patriotic" company will be expected to provide support.  

 ‘Guiding Opinions of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Accelerating the Development of Virtual Reality Industry’, provides guidance for the development of virtual reality technology in the country. Standards will be developed and supported. 

The goal is "By 2025, China’s virtual reality industry as a whole has entered the forefront of the world, mastering key core patents and standards, and forming a virtual reality backbone enterprise with strong international competitiveness." In Europe, the telcos are pleading for support from other industries like entertainment. The German automakers are pleading for the telcos to build networks ready for connected cars. The Chinese government has the power to make things happen. (Which, of course, also has a downside.) 

Separately, I'm reporting Minister Miao Wei has instructed the telcos to bring 90% of China within 25 ms of the cloud.

In Google translation, here is the 8 step program 

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10 ms latency? Huawei delivers in 4G

5G at Verizon and AT&T is delivering latency around 10 ms. Mei Meiyuan writes, "For 4G mode, the best round-trip radio latency is about 10ms for FDD and about 13ms for TDD model2). In theory, With short TTI, the best round-trip radio latency is about 2ms（FDD,2 OFDM symbols 8ms(TDD, 7 OFDM symbols under planning，model2)." 

(Editor's note: Those measures are from the base station to the receiver. To reflect the real user experience, you must add the latency from the base station back to the relevant server. That's 20-50 milliseconds or much more. In the future, edge clouds will often reduce the combined latency to 20-30 ms total.)

Many politicians and salesmen still think 5G latency is much better than 4G latency. As the new equipment reaches the field, people will discover the difference in latency is only a few

milliseconds.

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4G SuperBAND erodes rationale for T-Mobile/Sprint

Neville Ray's central justification for the merger is that in 5G  "mid-band spectrum will achieve a 52 percent improvement" over 4G. That is not an appropriate figure today.

One reason for the improvement was that 5G allows 100 MHz bands compared to the 20 MHz bands of 4G. Sprint and China Mobile both have blocks of over 100 MHz at 2.6 GHz. The new 4G SuperBAND from Huawei effectively coordinates 100 Mhz of spectrum for a similar result. T-Mobile's vendors, Nokia and Ericsson, should soon be able to do similar.

Ray in a footnote points out he doesn't know whether his claim is accurate. "The spectral efficiency improvements are derived from equipment vendor simulations, internal T-Mobile analysis, and ITU requirements." Those equipment vendors are trying to sell him 5G equipment and have the incentive to make inflated claims. They are not a reliable source. It's easy to imagine testing that produces a preferred result.

There was no test data available when Ray (a first-rate engineer) wrote in June 2018. Fortunately, several vendors can now provide the equipment to provide more accurate figures. I have data from T-Mobile's parent company, Deutsche Telekom, that 5G speeds in 100 MHz of mid-band spectrum are 350-850 megabits. That's slower than the 4G starting to be deployed. 

SuperBAND 4G performance undermines the primary engineering argument for the deal. The early results from 5G suggest the actual testing of 5G will show less benefit than the T-Mobile claim. 

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Guo Ping complete speech: Huawei New Year: $108B sales, "The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory."

Huawei employees are among the hardest working in telecom, with a dedication rare in the West except at inspirational startups. Guo Ping now asks them to work harder. "We will encounter even greater difficulties." Ren has weathered far worse.

Sales in 2018 reached US$108.5 billion, up 21%. It shipped over 200 million phones, ahead of Apple and gaining on Samsung. 10,000 5G base stations had shipped by November.  (I wouldn't be surprised if that figure is 100,000 a year from now.) Huawei Cloud is deployed in 22 regions. 

Guo Ping has just delivered a message intended to inspire the people at Huawei. It's far more intense than annual messages in the West and gives you a sense of the spirit,

Fire is the Test of Gold

—A New Year's Message for 2019, Guo Ping, Rotating Chairman

Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman philosopher, once said, "The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory." Truer words were never spoken as we bring 2018 to a solid close. It has been an eventful year, to say the least. But we have never stopped pushing forward, and as a result our 2018 sales revenue is expected to reach 108.5 billion US dollars, up 21% year-on-year.

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US$170M fine for Charter consumer fraud, $330M Sprint tax cheating, FCC investigating Verizon & T-Mobile for False Claims

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge was paid US$98 million in 2016. For that kind of money, most of us would lie, cheat, or steal. Charter has just agreed a fine of US$170 million for consumer fraud. Working pro bono, Columbia Professor Tim Wu made crucial contributions to the case. The court decisions made clear telcos and ISPs must obey ordinary laws on fraud and false advertising. The national FCC does not pre-empt consumer law.

Marcelo Claure of Sprint is on track to make $61 million from Sprint. They have just been fined $330M for cheating New York State on taxes. The FCC is investigating Verizon and T-Mobile for false claims on coverage, which affect US$billions of subsidies.

Charter/Time Warner ripped off New York consumers for hundreds of millions, as I reported last February.

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