Led by telecommunications giants such as Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Ericsson, the move to 5G is well and truly underway. This next-generation cellular networking standard promises an order of magnitude faster speeds than 4G LTE, though it will take a considerable amount of time and work until it is fully deployed and operational to its fullest potential.
T-Mobile paid for a chunk of 2.5GHz spectrum licenses earlier this year, but hasn’t been able to access them because the FCC’s authority to actually hand out the licenses has been in limbo. Now, Congress has passed a bill that allows the FCC to give T-Mobile access to the spectrum, which appears to be destined for fixed wireless. How thoughtful!
It’s 2023 and mobile operators are still convincing general news pubs to write about the wonders of 5G. This time The Post in Wellington, New Zealand heroically tries to make a 5G robotic cooking demonstration sound convincing but, well.
There’s no camera on the robot, rather it relies on clever spatial programming while two phones set up above the stainless steel prep area allowed Gault, armed with a tablet in Auckland, to issue it instructions.
Local chefs lay the groundwork ‒ prepping and seasoning the tails, preparing the slaw and precise placement of the ingredients for the arm to collect.
Two phones, a tablet, and local chefs, all to misplate the food! At this one actually happened. Will the wonders of 5G ever cease? Or... begin?
You know that nature is healing when Verizon issues a press release that doesn’t mention 5G. This one’s about a trial on the company’s fiber network that sent 1.2 terabytes per second of data over a single wavelength. In 2020, a similar trial achieved 800Gbps — in service of an impending “explosion of data” over 5G. How times change!
The “ultra capacity” label is just a fancy name for T-Mobile’s mid-band and mmWave 5G networks. In addition to reaching this coverage goal “months ahead of schedule,” T-Mobile also announced that it has expanded its overall 5G coverage to over 330 million people.
“It has the potential to change the world,” said Samsung at the IFA event in Berlin, without any shame.
Now where have we heard this before? Prepare the HYPErdrive!
We’ve been talking about whether 5G was worth the hype for a few weeks now (sometimes, sort of, mostly it hasn’t returned the investment) and the best idea anyone really has is “private networks” where commercial customers can set up their own high-bandwith low-latency 5G networks to do... stuff. And now T-Mobile can do that by “slicing” its public 5G network, which it says it did successfully in June at a Red Bull event, creating a slice for a broadcast drone to achieve 276Mbps uplink speeds.
Meanwhile, nearly 20,000 visitors were in attendance, using their devices as they normally would – uploading pictures and videos of the event. Because of network slicing and traffic management, their traffic did not impact the Red Bull production – and vice versa.
Neat! But let’s not forget T-Mo can do this because it was allowed to buy Sprint and reduce wireless competition, which in turn has allowed it to raise prices and act way more like a traditional carrier.
[T-Mobile Newsroom]
5
Verge Score
Oh, the apps you’ll uninstall.
Apple sued Nokia in 2009 for attempting to copy the iPhone as Nokia sued Apple for copyright violations. They settled in 2011. Then in 2016, they filed competing lawsuits again before reaching a deal that brought Withings products back to the Apple Store and included an up-front payment to Nokia of $2 billion.
Today Nokia announced a new agreement covering 5G and other tech to replace the last one, which was due to expire at the end of this year.
Nokia will “receive payments from Apple for a multi-year period.”
[www.nokia.com]
Wireless carriers haven’t been able to monetize 5G, and telecom companies are in crisis. Sean Kinney at RCR Wireless bears the bad news in a new report from an industry event:
The optimism around 5G as some sort of panacea to any sort of business problem is giving way to disillusionment. Cost pressure is mounting, headcount reductions are happening, and outright cynicism is in the offing. This raises a question: if operators, for whatever reason, cannot leverage 5G to grow revenues and deliver innovation, do they drop the pretense and face the harsh reality that connectivity is a commodity and should be sold as such?
Guess we can look forward to even more creative new ways for carriers to charge us more!
[RCR Wireless News]
Compare that to Q1 of 2022, when it lost 343,000 mobile subscribers and 462,000 from TV.
Dish is hanging on to 7.91 million wireless subscribers across multiple services, including MVNOs Boost Mobile and Republic Wireless, Project Genesis (its slow-to-grow 5G network), and others, along with 9.2 million TV customers (2.1 million for Sling TV streaming and 7.1 million satellite).
Dish also finished spending $30 million in remediation for a cyber security attack. COO John Swieringa said on an earnings call that one of the “big things” for Dish Wireless is bringing the iPhone to post-paid Boost Infinite “later this year.”
I wish this twelve-year-old Portlandia bit about buying a phone plan wasn’t still so on the nose, but it sure is.
Case in point: Verizon’s current unlimited plans. They’re so confusing that one retail employee had to make their own cheat sheet so their team could decipher them. Never change, wireless carriers.
