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ITU 5G Focus Group wants you!

Toure lula Toure on right. 3/4ths of the world
considers him a hero.Join me and play a key role in the future networks. The new ITU 5G Focus Group will rapidly become a key forum. In 2015, "5G" covers everything important coming in wireless networks. No one wants to be promoting last year's ideas, so whatever they are doing they call "5G." That's where the action is. Because so few public interest advocates join, you can make a difference. Sign up. Lower right on the screen.

"The new Focus Group,is open to participation by any interested party," (Official announcement, below.) Joining the committee gets you on a mailing list and invited to meetings and calls. You're not obligated to go to meetings and there is no cost. In return, you have access to an amazing amount of information that never comes near the press. Much of the material is highly technical and/or boring. Just ignore those

All the ITU meetings are open to civil society. I was in the room when ITU Secretary-General Touré reminded the Internet Society they can and should bring up to 100 members of civil society. All documents are open via the U.S. government ITAC.

First Look: 4G to 250M at China Mobile:

chinese dragon pizabay My take: 4G gear is now cheap enough it's time to stop building 3G except in the poorest countries. 4G is so much cheaper to run essentially every telco in the developed world is quickly migrating. That's a very good thing because carriers inefficiently using spectrum limit everyone's capacity.

China Mobile is proving it also make sense in less affluent countries. They have about ~140M LTE customers today and are adding 15M/month. They expect 250M by year end 2015.

A year ago, 4G phones cost $50-100 more than 3G. As new chips came out and competition developed, the gap has narrowed. Spreadtrum, 20% owned by Intel, say their new chips will bring LTE phone prices down to $65 or so.

Depending on how you measure, 4G LTE delivers 3 to 10 times as much capacity as 3G. (Using MIMO and carrier aggregation.) On a wall street call, a Verizon executive estimated 4G cost 70% less per bit delivered than 3G.

Adding 15M 4G subscribers per month, China Mobile is on track towards its goal of 250M 4G subs by the end of 2015. That overwhelms the results at both domestic and international alternatives. About six months ago, CM passed early leader Verizon (< 100M, I couldn't find a precise figure.) Yearend 2014, they had built 600,000 base stations and had 90M 4G users. That's about 3x the density of Verizon or AT&T's network, adjusted for China population being 4x the U.S. 400,000 more basestations are expected in 2015, topping 1,000,000. Fiber home is also coming strong in CHina.

Inferences:

TD-LTE phones are not that much more expensive than 3G phones.

Why telco small cells can't cover highways.

Tokyo highway 30 MPH traffic would require a prohibitive number of small cells for carriers to do it themselves. Wi-Fi First is not a complete substitute for LTE towers. There will always be spots not covered because small cells, especially in higher frequencies, have very short range. Below, the CEO of American Tower puts forth his opinion why highways and moving vehicles are particularly difficult to cover. James Taiclet via Seeking Alpha.

Taicet. The handoff requirement from places where our towers serve people, which are often around highways and other transportation corridors, suburban or rural, you've got people traveling 30 miles an hour to 60 miles an hour. You can't really have sufficient handoff capability over a very large stretch of multi-mile roadway to economically provide those handoffs.

Taicet, thinking of carrier small cells, went on to say the economics become dubious with densities of less than 10,000 people per square mile. Wi-Fi First changes that, of course.

"Rules of the road" for unlicensed spectrum

U.S. spectrum When Michael Marcus and others at the FCC created the "unlicensed bands," they had little idea about how it would go. Wi-Fi has been a major game changer but that wasn't clear at the beginning. It's yet one more example of what creativity makes possible. Today, we see some congestion in the "commons," as well as proposals to squat on a large share. We need some "rules of the road" to manage the congestion fairly and efficiently. But they need careful design to have minimal impact on innovation.

Fred Goldstein reminds me that the band is used for more than Wi-Fi.

2022 or later for high GHz 5G

5g alcatel delay

Could the "2019" World Radio Conference be pulled up to 2017 to get product to market sooner?
Decker Anstrom will lead the U.S. Delegation to the 2015 World Radio Conference in November, a major event that sets international spectrum rules. He told an open meeting of the State Department ITAC that the meeting after that might be advanced from 2019 to 2018 for scheduling reasons. I spoke up with a suggestion that it be moved to 2017 if possible. Otherwise the standards process will delay the deployment of a potentially important technology, 5G in high GHz millimeter bands.

Engineers I respect are convinced gear could be ready by 2017. However, if the spectrum decisions aren't made until 2019, that gear won't get to the field before 2022-2023.

Dan Warren of GSMA, who works closely with almost all the major telcos, believes regulation delays will be a major factor. "We need a spectrum allocation from the ITU World Radio Conference, likely 2019. The standard will take a year or two after that. Then it will probably be a year or two more for gear to get into the field in volume."

Satoshi Nagata of NTT DOCOMO is looking for 5G "demonstrations" in 2018 and "deployments" in 2020. NTT's early 5G will use frequencies below 6 GHz. They will not use high frequencies before 2022 or 2023.

Gig for $25/month in Bakersfield, CA

Attractive real estate come-on. Rent any of 224 apartments in a new real estate development and automatically get connected at a gigabit. Natural prices for a gigabit are $40-$100, Google's $70 +- $30. Gigabit Internet is a very attractive amenity. One proponent believes "fiber to the home increases the value of a $300,000 home by $5,300 to $6,500," (below)

A $40/month discount is a modest marketing concession on apartments that rent for $1100-$1400. Bakersfield is 120 miles and 3 hours by train north of Los Angeles. It's a desert town dependent on imported water and probably a hard place to sell apartments in a drought.

Randall Stephenson literally 10 years ago told the street that AT&T was already installing fiber in all new developments. After all, glass is cheaper than metal. It was the right thing to do even back then but in practice AT&T was doing nothing of the sort. Carriers without high speeds are just leaving themselves open for folks like this to jump in.

George Soros has put £50m behind Hyperoptic, an English company doing the same.

$40/port VDSL Baby DSLAMs with new Lantiq system

Cheap 8 50-100 megabits so cheap it can go everywhere. Lantiq's new VINAX dp8 is designed to lower the price of an 8 port DSLAM to $20/connection. Include the hookup cost and it's only about what the customer pays in a single month. Lantiq says similar units today cost more than twice that. The nominal speeds in the lab are 200 down, 100 up; 50+ megabits down, 25+ up will often be practical for 500 meters. In small buildings, performance will be much better, often 100/50. While larger buildings can be served with multiple cheap units, the interference in the binder becomes a crucial factor. With vectoring, the rate reach would often double, but that's a more expensive and complicated system.

The unit is based on their existing 8/16 port VDSL chips, controlled by an inexpensive network processor Lantiq originally designed for their GPON system on chip. Eliminating the high-performance network processor simplifies design, further reducing cost.

Review: Millimeter Wave Wireless Communications

High Frequency wireless (millimeter wave) can deliver speeds well into the gigabits. At millimeter wavelengths you can aggregate hundreds o Millimeter wave textbool f MHz of spectrum compared to the 20 MHz typical of today's wireless networks. High frequency antennas are very small, so it's practical to put 50 of them on a chip for massive MIMO.

Rappaport, Heath and colleagues are world leaders in research in millimeter wave high frequencies and MIMO. Rappaport's NYU Wireless Center has been sending teams out to get empirical data on frequencies like 28 GHz. They are testing in two of the toughest locations for a wireless network: Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. Heath at the University of Texas built one of the first MU MIMO testbeds.

With literally $billions going into 5G wireless research you need the latest information and best sources.

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