2023-04-27 23:43:17
Karl Bode recently wrote an excellent article on the excessive media coverage of wireless technologies. He’s right: for the past twenty years, we’ve been told of the imminent arrival of wireless technology that would change the world, but none has ever materialized. No wireless technology has been a bigger failure than 5G when comparing hype to reality.
The hype around 5G has been incredibly overdone. Carriers and wireless service providers have made a coordinated effort to pitch 5G as the solution that will bring broadband everywhere. 5G was going to bring us self-driving cars. 5G would allow doctors to perform remote surgical operations from across the country. 5G would fuel an explosion of smart factories that would bring complex manufacturing back to the United States. And 5G was going to use millimeter waves to bring us broadband at gigabit speeds everywhere, eliminating the need to invest in expensive fiber optic networks.
The hype ignited the general public, who believed in the promises of 5G, but the public was not the real recipient of this hype. Cellular operators have waged a non-stop blitz with federal officials to convince them of the incredible future of wireless. Mobile phone companies have launched gadget networks in city centers to deliver gigabit cellular speeds using millimeter wave spectrum to sell the vision of 5G. In retrospect, it’s clear that the rtoric and gimmicks were meant to get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to release more mid-range spectrum for cellular use – and it worked. Pressure has been exerted on the FCC to speed up the procedures for reviewing the availability of the spectrum. Wireless carriers have even convinced the FCC to allow mobile carriers to appropriate free WiFi spectrum in cities. The hype has worked so well with elected officials that there has been serious talk of the US buying one of the big wireless service providers, like Nokia or Ericsson, so as not to lose the 5G war with China.
The main problem with all this hype is that the rhetoric doesn’t match the 5G specifications that have been adopted by international standards bodies. The 5G specifications included a few key goals: to achieve cellular speeds above 100 Mbps, to allow more concurrent users at a given cell site, to allow a mobile phone to use two different spectrum bands at the same time, and allow a user to connect to more than one cell site if the request so requires. The primary goal of the 5G specification was to eliminate cell site congestion in places where many people attempt to use the mobile network simultaneously. Nothing regarding the 5G specification is revolutionary. The specification, as a whole, seems to be the natural evolution of the mobile network to better adapt to a world where everyone has a mobile phone.
I wrote several blogs during the height of the 5G craze, in which I was puzzled by claims that 5G would drive a broadband revolution, as I did not see those claims supported by the technical capabilities of 5G. I’ve also written several blogs on the 5G business case because I mightn’t find any. We will probably never build a dense cellular network along millions of miles of roads to support self-driving cars. The biggest commercial use of 5G touted by carriers was to get people to buy subscriptions to use 5G to support smart devices in our homes – but people will never buy a subscription to do what WiFi can do for free.
There’s still no good business case that can generate the new revenue needed to justify significant spending on 5G. This is why most of the 5G specifications have not been implemented. How many people are willing to pay extra to be able to connect a cell phone to two cell towers simultaneously?
Instead of spec-compliant 5G, we got a marketing hype where cellular carriers branded the FCC’s new spectrum as 5G. 5G specifications are virtually non-existent in this product, and the product labeled as 5G still uses 4G LTE technology. Introducing the new spectrum helped ease the strain on overloaded cell sites, and we saw cell speeds increase significantly. But that increased speed is lost on most cellular customers who aren’t doing anything more data-intensive than watching videos.
It was interesting to see how the rhetoric died down once cellular operators gained access to more spectrum. The big winners in the marketing hype have been the phone makers, who convinced customers they needed to have 5G phones, without really telling them why. Cellular carrier customers are generally pleased with the increased speeds, which translates to better coverage inside buildings and in dead zones outside. But surveys have shown that only a tiny percentage of people are willing to pay more for higher cellular speeds.
The most ridiculous part of the 5G story is that the industry is now 6G. This new marketing hoax focuses on part of the mid-range spectrum that was originally touted as part of the 5G war – but marketers are rightly assuming that most customers won’t get the facts or won’t care. It seems the industry has embarked on breaking up what was originally thought to be the 5G spectrum into smaller chunks, so that carriers can deploy the next generations of 6G, 7G and 8G, which were supposed to be part of of the original 5G revolution. I’m sure the public will get caught up in the hype and want 6G phones when they hit the market, but I also know that none of them will see a difference in performance. The formula seems simple: announce a new generation G every eighteen months and sell lots of new phones.
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#disappointment #Doug #Dawson #President #CCG #Consulting
