Links to an article that is Sponsored by Verizon Talks of 3-10 GHz spectrum. Meh, if the carrier pays for use, let it go... I just see this adding to the cellphone Zombies running around
Wonderful more frequencies so the idiot zombies can walk around with their eyes a couple of inches from a phone screen. Coming into work this morning i witnessed a zombie who was leaving work at the same time with his eyes about 2 inches from his phones screen run into a pole. Nowhere in my job description does it say that I should warn morons about poles in their paths.
It's worse than that. The big mobile carriers are trying to control "the" spectrum, period. 5G was a flop. It was promised to do all sorts of whizzy stuff, but either nobody needs that whizzy stuff (do you really believe in telesurgery by waving hands in the air in front of a phone 5000 miles from the patient?) or 4G was adequate. In reality, it was just an excuse for a spectrum grab. And 6G is more of the same, only even less useful than 5G, which has a few corner cases of utility. But the mobile carriers have other agendas. What spectrum are they looking at? Well, they've talked about the 6.6-7 GHz spectrum, which is used for private microwave, especially by public safety, and was recently opened for Wi-Fi 6E. The biggest carriers (AT&T, Verizon) wanted to take that back and hope that the microwave users would pay them through the nose for their unregulated fiber services. The 7-8 GHz spectrum is federal and important for military applications, but the carriers hope to squeeze them down and make them buy new radars and stuff. And then there's 10.0-10.5 GHz, which we share. Hey, I mostly wrote that petition to open it to sharing with fixed microwave, with Amateur taking precedence via automated coordination. The idea was to put more there, so the feds, hams, and other microwave users could share it. But the FCC hasn't moved on it, and the mobile carriers are begging for it at WRC this year. As they did for 3.3 GHz. While some of their new spectrum gets used in dense urban settings (football stadiums, Manhattan), most is not really used. Instead it's a financial instrument, an exclusive-use geographic license treated as a trading card for Wall Street. It's a colossal waste of spectrum. But they will make ever more outlandish claims about how much they need it and how much good it will do for jobs, the economy, etc. It is all unadulterated bovine scat.
You meant to say the elite big corporations are controlling everything, not just the spectrum. 20+ years ago George Carlin (philosopher disguised as a comedian) said it and we laughed; “Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.” ― George Carlin
Pretty much everyone who works in mobile will agree -- though not necessarily out loud -- that 5G is struggling to find its market. Sure, adoption in the Americas and abroad is skyrocketing, but very few consumers and enterprise customers are paying extra for it compared to 4G. Not good for paying off all that additional spectrum and additional cell sites. On top of everything, technologies such as eSIM are making it easier than ever to switch IoT devices to the operator offering the best price/tariff/rate. Time will tell whether unique capabilities such as eMBB, URLLC and mMTC enable enough new use cases and thus new revenue streams. All of this angst makes for interesting and entertaining discussions at the analyst conferences I attend. On the plus side, 5G is making inroads in the residential broadband market. For example, T-Mobile is at least $40 cheaper than the fiber and copper services in my city. No, it's not 1 Gig, but very few households need even half that speed. My cable broadband is about 130 Mbps, and it never has a problem keeping up with two TVs streaming. So I'll be switching to T-Mobile once it's available in my neighborhood.
5G was never about download speeds on your phone. It was oversold for that, doesn't really work and doesn't matter, so yeah disappointing. 5G is really about supporting 100 billion devices, just imagine the telecoms raking in the dough, subscriptions for every one of those devices. Those devices are called IoT. No one really needs a cell enabled toaster, or toothbrush, or car, or whatever. So, the ID stands for I Don't Want, in IDIoT. Too bad, greedy telcos.
The IoT market is difficult. Many of the devices are low-value and their manufacturers don't want to pay for an expensive LTE or 5G chip. If they do cellular at all, they prefer cheap 2G or 3G whose patents have expired or are about to. But the cellular carriers aren't interested in operating those old networks. Many IoT devices are battery-powered, sometimes for life with a charged battery inserted during manufacturing. Traditional cellular connectivity burns the battery too fast. Nb-IoT from the cellular carriers was supposed to address this market, but it has been a fiasco. Cellular is not the only wide-area technology for IoT, and even when cellular is called for, in many countries a company can purchase private cellular equipment from Ericsson, etc and use it on their own spectrum. And lastly, WiFi works quite well and is being enhanced over time. 5G was also intended to be an attractive migration path for public safety networks, but Motorola and the other companies supplying that market have been pretty successful in keeping the cellular carriers at bay.
Very well said! Thanks. To your point: Even in high value items like automobiles, manufacturers don't want to pay for 5G. Earlier today I read an article, quoting several auto industry execs saying they will be "trailing edge" of 5G adoption, like in 2030s. (Sorry I can't find the link right now.). If automobiles' margins don't support 5G, how can anything else!? And, yeah, losing 3G has put many things offline, like GM OnStar, some electric meters, alarm systems, ... I have no sympathy for the idiot telecoms, I hope the stockholders get it in the shorts for all the $$$$$ overspent around the world on the 5G landgrab and rent seeking.
