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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.

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.

Fiber passes DSL & Cable

Cable passes DSL 230 Fiber (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.

Finally, 5G Carrier Aggregation is Starting to Work OK

carrier aggregation Wikipedia 230 4G 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.

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.

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

FWA test by Eli Blumenthal Consumers 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)

Is Boost Mobile Ripping Me Off Deliberately or Through Incompetence?

Boost offline Charlie 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.

50% FTTH in Chile

On Net Chile Half 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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