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Nokia's Moiin Believes Massive MIMO/Interference Cancellation is Ready to Come Out of the Labs

ArtemisVerizon and Nokia are ready to test. Nokia CTO Hossein Moiin intends to test Antonio Forenza's pCell technology early next year. Last year, I wrote extremely skeptically about Artemis/pCell informed by three very respected engineers. CEO Steve Perlman made wildly implausible claims, including that they would deploy across 350 San Francisco rooftops by the end of last year. They haven't been seen.

Moiin is a respected, independent engineer. I have to look again. USC Prof Giuseppe Caire now says "The early trials showed pCell achieving far higher concurrent user capacity than any wireless technology I am aware of." That's very different from his earlier comments (below) and I assume he's been shown something newer. Peter White at Faultline has an important article about semi-secret trials in U.S. sports stadiums. (Paywall.) 

Verizon in a startling move Monday told analysts they would soon test Massive MIMO and beamforming. (pCell is very similar.) These are key "5G" tools that weren't expected until about 2020. 

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Beamforming Explained: What the Heck Is It?

Goldsmith Wireless CommunicationsEssentially, beamforming focuses the radio signal. It's concentrated and stronger to an individual receiver such as a mobile phone or WiFi. It's sometimes described as "steering" the signal. It's been used in radar and sonar for decades. More recently, it's common in 802.11ac WiFi and built into some wireless standards. As processing power becomes cheaper with Moore's Law, more powerful systems become practical. 

Eric Geir offers a lay explanation: "Wireless routers (or access points) and wireless adapters that don’t support beamforming broadcast data pretty much equally in all directions.

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DSL "Reference Noise Cancellation" from Broadcom

Confirms the importance of going beyond vectoring to eliminate other noise. Because I'm on the Advisory Board of ASSIA, I choose not to do any assessment of this competing product. The pr is below. Because there are almost no details of the product in the press release, I've also included a recent Broadcom patent filing for "reference noise technology" to suggest possibilities. 

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Why U.S. Mobile Sucks: 50% Fewer Cell Sites

People per cell siteAT&T, Verizon cram 3-5 as many people on each cell site. AT&T has 50,000 cells, China Mobile 1,000,000, SK Korea 35,000, Spain 33,000. Currently, Albania, The Maldive Islands, and at least a dozen other countries have faster LTE networks than the USA. The chart is adjusted for population and AT&T obviously stands out. Verizon would be similar.

Since 2000, U.S. wireless networks have been far less reliable than many in Europe and East Asia, except for a brief period around 2010-2011.

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14,000 Tests Support Indoor High Frequencies for 5G

millimeter wave bookNYU Wireless has just reported on 14,000 tests using 28 GHz and 73 GHz indoors. The paper isn't online yet so I put the abstract below. Professor Ted Rappaport believes, "These high frequencies will be an effective substitute when today's Wi-Fi frequencies get crowded."

The FCC is about to set aside some high frequencies for telco use. My opinion, not Ted's is that monopoly spectrum is obsolete. Wi-Fi is proving sharing is possible and productive.  Some monopoly spectrum is needed where reliability is important, but the 100 MHz Sprint, AT&T and Verizon each have is plenty.

Ted makes an important point.  "I think the FCC would do well to also authorize unlicensed bands in the near vicinity of that new mmWave spectrum.

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Ericsson: Microwave Fine for 5G Backhaul. Needs Proof.

Karolina WikanderMost experts thought it would require fiber. Karolina Wikander is confident. "Microwave backhaul technology is already able to handle 100 percent of all radio access sites' capacity needs, both now and in the future. By 2020, the technology will have evolved to support multi-Gb capacities in traditional frequency bands and beyond 10 Gb in the millimeter wave."

Most plans for 5G assume extraordinary reliability. The telcos want to control traffic and connected cars. Failures there - including in massive snow or rainstorms - can cost lives. Controlling the cars may require 1 millisecond latency. One expert thought that would be impractical without fiber. (Dan Warren, a good engineer, wonders whether 1 millisecond is practical no matter the technology.) Update - Ericsson pointed out that microwave latency is low. See below.

Millimeter wave high frequency for the 5G network itself is deeply troubling for policy.

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France Telecom Getting Serious About 5G in High Frequencies

Belfort Wikipedia
Gets ARCEP permission to test. Ted Rappaport at NYU has convinced the industry that high-frequency, millimeter wave wireless can work. But many questions remain. What are the effects of walls, windows, rain, and distance? We have only partial answers.

France Telecom/Orange intends to find out. They just receive approval for a year's worth of testing in the ancient city of Belfort. Much of the testing to date has been in Manhattan, Brooklyn and other highrise areas. Belfort is ideal for testing low-rise and suburban regions.

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Full Duplex: DT, SKT, Stanford Guys Say Close

Cambridge full duplex LTE highresSame frequency, same time, ?double wireless speeds. Today, self-interference makes it impractical to send and receive at the same time on the same frequencies. Testing at Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom suggests Moore's Law is bringing enough processing power to change that. (pr below.) They are working with Kumu Networks, a spinoff from the lab of Stanford's Philip Levis. Their extraordinary advisory board gives them extra credibility.

Research on Full Duplex is hot.  An article by Sabharwal et. al. lists 141 papers (below.) At Columbia,  Harish Krishnaswamy has developed chips. At a Cambridge Wireless meeting, David Lister of Vodafone concluded, "We can consider the problem of self-interference cancellation as solved. Now is the time to consider system requirements and assess the use cases. There are still major challenges to overcome."

Joel Brand of Kumu is confident. "By the second half of 2016 we could ship full-duplex solutions for infrastructure applications where the requirements are a bit more relaxed than in a mobile phone." WISP backhaul would be a natural niche for this kind of product. 

Some are skeptical about the potential to double performance in the real world.

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More Articles ...

  1. More Spectrum Than We Need: Sprint Drops Out of Auction
  2. 40 Million Comcast Gigabit Homes. Really.
  3. England Tops in Euro Medium/fast Broadband
  4. AT&T paid $17/month extra for video (Datapoint article)
  5. Quantenna's Remarkable 10 Gig WiFi - Spectrum Greedy But Works
  6. Supersonic DOCSIS: 15 Gigabit Cable 2020, 50-80 Gigabits 2030
  7. Nokia Gives Half of Nokia China to Government to get Alcatel Deal Approved
  8. 83% of Wireless Going Wi-Fi
  9. Sartre Project: Is Wi-Fi an Existential Threat to Telcos?
  10. USA: Cable adding, telcos shedding
  11. Verizon, Intel: "5G the Free WiFi Killer"
  12. 300 Megabit 3 Band LTE in Korea, Spain
  13. From Lantiq: Intel deal "is great"
  14. Gigabit cable for Montreal, Suddenlink & Alaska
  15. Gigabit of spectrum to Vodafone and Deutsche Telecom
  16. Germany chooses 100-150 megabit 35b DSL
  17. Vultures come out on the Qualcomm-Ikanos deal
  18. $50-60M Ikanos buy brings Qualcomm into DSL
  19. Networks of the world, 2019. A first draft.
  20. 256 Antenna Transmitter & receiver for high frequency
  21. 10% Speed DOCSIS 3.1 to Australia in 2016
  22. 28 top engineers predict 5G
  23. 300 megabits (shared) going to a gigabit across Denmark
  24. Alcatel's Weldon: Governments are splitting the broadband market. We get 11% in China
  25. Fierce: 3 of 5 top 5G Universities are in the U.S.
  26. Adtran hurt badly by loss at AT&T, slowdown at DT
  27. Communication Engineers of the world unite in London, June 8-12
  28. Another Gigahertz of Wi-Fi Spectrum Sought
  29. IEEE Papers on Cognitive Radio
  30. First Look: Google Fi is "increasing" spectrum by ~20%. WTF?
  31. ITU 5G Focus Group wants you!
  32. First Look: 4G to 250M at China Mobile:
  33. Why telco small cells can't cover highways.
  34. "Rules of the road" for unlicensed spectrum
  35. 2022 or later for high GHz 5G
  36. Gig for $25/month in Bakersfield, CA
  37. $40/port VDSL Baby DSLAMs with new Lantiq system
  38. Review: Millimeter Wave Wireless Communications
  39. Death of Gigaom: This one really hurts
  40. 10 GHz spectrum for many gigabits

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