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The Right Funding: NYU Wireless $2.5M for terahertz testing

NYU Wireless, founded by Ted Rappaport, may be the World's most respected research site In wireless. Tom Marzetta, whose Massive MIMO may be the most important advance in wireless this century, joined from Bell Labs. There are a dozen senior researchers and a slew of grad students and postdocs. 

Ted, the Prince of Millimeter Wave, was the first in the US to believe mmWave would work for 5G mobile. His teams took mmWave gear to really tough terrain, the buildings of Manhattan. Their results astounded the industry. A year later, everyone in wireless was investigating mmWave.

Marzetta and Rappaport now are doing leading research on "terahertz" for 6G. (Mostly actually a few hundred GHz,) We need that kind of work from academia, ten and twenty years ahead of what's being deployed.

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Mobile traffic grows only 15% in 2021 (OECD)

Mobile traffic growth rates have been declining inexorably for more than a decade. By now, most people are watching as much TV as they want. Back in 2012, I wrote: 

Confirmed: Wireless Data Growth Rapidly Slowing. The growth rate drop will continue as the once in a generation surge due to the introduction of smartphones is winding down. The growth rate drop will continue as the once in a generation surge due to the introduction of smartphones is winding down.

40% growth rates are long gone. Across 38 OECD countries, mobile data rose by 15%, far lower than ever before. (OECD represents almost all affluent nations. China is not included.) Some of the decline is probably pandemic related.

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Fiber passes DSL & Cable

Cable passes DSL 230Fiber (green line) passed DSL (blue line) in 2020 in OECD countries and cable (yellow line) in 2021. The OECD is primarily developed countries, ignoring India, China, and Africa,

The gap will increase rapidly, with the US passing well over 10 million homes/year. England, Italy, and Germany are accelerating fiber builds. People often take years to switch. Most homes passed with fiber the last few years have yet to convert. 

Consumers choose fiber, even when cable is a perfectly good alternative.

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Finally, 5G Carrier Aggregation is Starting to Work OK

carrier aggregation Wikipedia 2304G has been approaching 2 Gbps for several years, combining signals from 5 spectrum bands, typically 20 Mbps each. Most networks stuck with 3 or 4 channels because since ~2014, most telcos have had more bandwidth than they could sell. Most phones couldn't handle 5 channels until recently. The technology worked but was rarely put into production.

4  or 5 channel 4G was faster than most 5G, which added little or nothing to throughput. The recent speeds of hundreds of megabits have nothing to do with 5G. The large volume of mid-band spectrum delivers high speeds in either 4G or 5G.

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G.hn Over In-building Phone Wires: Great price, reported reliable. sales booming

TNO Ghn performance 230"It's fantastic," Alex Moulle-Berteaux, COO of Starry, tells me. Starry uses an innovative wireless-to-the-rooftop signal to bring bandwidth to an apartment building and then uses Positron G.hn to serve the individual units. (TNO performance graph at left and below)

Chano Gómez astonished the 2017 G.Fast conference with the claim G.hn could deliver similar bandwidth at half the cost and complexity.  G.hn's much simpler interference cancellation brought the cost down. The retail price for G.hn Access Multipliers is $120-175 per port.

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US Landline Net Adds Fall by Half as Fixed Wireless Becomes a Contender

FWA test by Eli BlumenthalConsumers have spoken: there is no doubt fixed wireless is a reasonable alternative for many. 532,000 of the 1,065,000 of  broadband net additions in the first quarter were wireless, according to Bruce Leichtman, whose work has proven reliable.

At my apartment, T-Mobile wireless is faster than cable on the upstream, fine on the downstream, and $20 cheaper. I'd happily switch. Reporter Eli Blumental was able to try both Verizon and T-Mobile and found them to be reasonable choices, although still shaking out the system. He tested one service at 465 Mbps down and 445 Mbps up. (Illustration)

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Is Boost Mobile Ripping Me Off Deliberately or Through Incompetence?

Boost offlineCharlie Ergen's company wants $50 I don't owe and has turned off my phone even though I am prepaid in full through October 2022. Even more infuriating, they want a $3 fee even to talk to someone to get this corrected. As I type this, I've been waiting on hold for 32 minutes for a supervisor. Update: I was cut off. I called back in. 

US carriers, including the biggest, know the FCC won't do anything no matter how miserably they treat customers. That gives the companies incentive for "strategic incompetence." They make it so hard to get bill errors corrected many people give up.

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50% FTTH in Chile

On Net ChileHalf the ~6 million homes in Chile can get FTTH from On Net,  CommsUpdate reported, to my amazement. That's better than Verizon and much better than AT&T, BT, or Deutsche Telekom. It passed 500,000 homes in the last six months and plans to pass another million in 2022. (The figure was confirmed by the company financials.

Private equity firm KKR net controls On Net, spun out from Telefonica Movistar.  Like all private equity firms, it only invests where the capital return is high.  The money is a very strong endorsement of a neutral fiber build from one of the most sophisticated investors in the world.

While so far On Net is only available from Movistar, CEO of ON*NET Jose Miguel Torres is confident other ISPs will use On Net.

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More Articles ...

  1. Indian Gov Building 100 Edge Data Centers
  2. China's "Disappointing" 2021 5G 266M
  3. Facebook Needs People Like Verizon's Krista Bourne
  4. Maybe True "Impossible" Performance By Cohere, Tarana
  5. Telstra Tests Gigabit Upstream mmWave
  6. Verizon Super 5G Only 57 Mbps Upstream, 500 Foot Radius
  7. Jeff Pulver is Bringing Back VON. Zoom Jan 25-26
  8. Rosenworcel's Failed Emergency Broadband Benefit
  9. "Everyone" Buying 5G As Samsung 5G Falls to $129
  10. 10 Gig Up & Down to 15 Million! at AT&T - Newsbreak
  11. Update Dec 2021 Goldman: 8 million Verizon 5G fixed mmWave by 2023
  12. December 2021 update: Verizon 4G 1.45 gigabits! Who needs 5G?
  13. 2021 Update Verizon, NTT, AT&T: ?$200-$400 5G Costs Much Lower Than Expected (2)
  14. Calix' Mighty Marketwise Magic
  15. I Ordered Dish/Boost Free 5G Phone: 35 Gigs $25/month 12 months
  16. Jio/Radisys, Bharti/Tata, Nokia, NEC, Samsung look to O-RAN dominance
  17. Frozen Wireless: 14% 2020 Traffic Growth
  18. Telefonica Germany/Tele Columbus huge cable sharing deal
  19. "Take a number and wait." US at limits in building broadband
  20. Data confirms "digital redlining" of rural black south
  21. 5G Base stations $13,000 in China
  22. Goldman Sachs: Fiber = "Material value creation"
  23. Half of Europe fibered
  24. Ericsson, Nokia oppose TRIPS waiver on Covid
  25. Ericsson paying Nokia $96M in bribery damages
  26. 100+ Mbps Mbps cable ** upstream ** ready to take off
  27. Adtran: "Highest product bookings for any quarter in our history"
  28. LoRaWAN gains traction for in-building & campus
  29. India giant Jio, slower but profitable growth Q1
  30. Verizon CTO: We have massive overcapacity
  31. China Mobile 5G era: Profits Q1 up 2.3%, prices flat, traffic +37%
  32. $1 average worldwide cost/gig; 35% traffic growth 2020; US 4X world
  33. 4G NB-IoT reading meters in India
  34. $152 Realme 5G Q2i
  35. Robin Mersh passes Broadband Forum on
  36. 5G tested peaks: 707/79 Mid-band, 3294/210 mmWave
  37. 5G China Price: $201-$262, sometimes $154
  38. G.Network raises £1bn to fibre London
  39. $300 5G OnePlus Nord N10 T-Mobile. The 5G explosion moves west.
  40. Farooq Khan and Jerry Pi's 2011! paper on 5G

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