US mmWave Spectrum Auction Results in 24 GHz & 28 GHz

Fortune reported:

The federal government’s latest auction of airwave rights that can be used for super-fast 5G mobile phone service brought in only $2.7 billion, a fraction of the amounts raised in earlier sales for 3G and 4G airwaves.

AT&T and T-Mobile were the top bidders, with each spending almost $1 billion for rights in the 24 GHz and 28 GHz bands, the Federal Communications Commission said on Monday. Verizon, which already owned a considerable amount of airwaves in the 28 GHz band before the auction, spent $521 million.

Meanwhile, United States Cellular spent $256 million, Boston-based wireless broadband startup Starry spent $48 million, and data carrier Windstream spent $27 million. The auction didn’t draw any bids from cable companies and big tech players that have previously shown an interest in wireless.

The total was far less than the $20 billion to $45 billion that the wireless industry spent each at auctions over the past decade covering airwaves in the 600 MHz, 700 MHz, and 1700 MHz bands. Sometimes referred to as the millimeter wave bands, the high frequency airwaves sold at the latest auction can carry a tremendous amount of data, but they don’t travel nearly as far as lower frequency bands and can be blocked easily by buildings and trees.

FCC website:

• Winning Bidders Announced for Auction of 28 GHz Upper Microwave Flexible Use Service Licenses (Auction 101)

• Auction of 24 GHz Upper Microwave Flexible Use Service Licenses Closes; Winning Bidders Announced for Auction 102

Tables from Light Reading Article here.

Pie charts at the top from Allnet Blog post here.


Related Posts:

• New Tutorial on 5G Spectrum

Verizon offering $1 Million for Killer 5G Application

Source: Diana Goovaerts

At CES 2019, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg announced a US $1 million bounty for transformative 5G applications, as he touted the potential of next generation networks to drive change. According to Mobile World Live:

In a keynote address, Vestberg said the operator will launch a Built on 5G Challenge in the first half of this year, luring innovators with awards of up to $1 million in seed money and access to Verizon’s 5G labs to develop new use cases.

The announcement came as Vestberg talked up the potential of 5G, noting it will represent a “quantum leap compared to 4G” and power an “enormous transformation” in the way companies do business.

Specifically, the CEO pointed to eight key characteristics of the next generation technology he said will spur a new era of innovation, including: faster peak data rates; increased traffic volume; mobility; connected devices; energy efficiency; faster service deployment;

Source: Mobile World Live

Official website of the challenge: http://verizon.com/builton5Gchallenge

According to the website, The Built on 5G Challenge is a nationwide search for the biggest and brightest ideas that will bring the true power of 5G to life. The Challenge will launch in Spring 2019. Sign up for updates and be first to learn when it officially opens. The winning innovators will be awarded up to a total of $1 million, gain access to our 5G Labs and more.

Official Verizon video from CES and the launch of challenge below



To learn more about what 5G exactly means, visit the 5G videos section on 3G4G homepage here.

USA gets two faux 5G networks

From Android Headlines, back in July:

Regional wireless carrier C-Spire claims it already launched 5G service in the United States, having announced it’s now offering a next-generation fixed wireless access solution in select locations across Mississippi earlier this week. While the company is referring to its solution as 5G, it’s not basing it on the 3GPP’s Release 15 or any other standard released by the wireless consortium. Instead, it’s using proprietary hardware and a set of close-sourced IEEE 802.11 specifications, so while the service offers faster speeds compared to 4G LTE, it likely wouldn’t be considered as “true” 5G by anyone outside of C-Spire.


Another one from Android Headlines regarding Verizon's 5G Fixed Wireless:

A number of officials from the stateside wireless segment dismissed Verizon’s claim of having the world’s first commercial 5G network and customers. Speaking with AndroidHeadlines under the condition of anonymity, several industry veterans pointed to the examples of Qatari carrier Ooredoo and Mississippi operator C-Spire as clear evidence that Verizon’s claims about the uniqueness of its 5G Home service are entirely false. Much like Verizon, C-Spire and several other telecom companies abroad already launched fixed wireless access solutions reliant on a proprietary specification that’s in no way associated with the 3GPP, the organization responsible for standardizing the next generation of cellular connectivity.

Here is what John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile USA had to say about Verizon's 5G launch

We have a different vision! @TMobile will have 5G across the country – and the New T-Mobile will build a 5G network that’s both broad & deep - NATIONWIDE. Ask Verizon if their proprietary non-standards 5G* will eventually work on any phones in the market.... (SPOILER: they won’t)

— John Legere (@JohnLegere) October 1, 2018

Related Posts:

• Lesotho: First 5G launch in Africa
• Orange Romania: 1st European 5G multi-vendor Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) test
• San Marino launches first nationwide 5G network
• Three Middle East Operators launch 'World's First' 5G Networks

Global Top 20 Telcos by Revenue

Source: Global 100 Total Telecom via Elena Neira

AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile and NTT have maintained their top four positions in 2017 while Softbank has slipped one place to let Deutsche Telekom become the fifth largest operator by revenue. Other top 20 players by revenue include Telefónica, Vodafone, China Telecom, América Móvil, Orange, Comcast, China Unicom, KDDI, British Telecom (BT), Charter, Altice, Telecom Italia, Telsta and KT

Related posts:

• APAC's 32 largest operators ranked by revenue

Verizon's 5G Progress & Plans

Verizon plans to launch 5G in at least 4 cities this year, two that have already been announced being Sacramento and Los Angeles. This information is based on Lowell McAdam, Verizon chairman and CEO, speaking to CNBC's David Faber back in May.

Their intention is still to use millimeter wave bands (mmWave) in 28GHz and do a Fixed-wireless access (FWA). Lowell McAdam referred to this as ultra-wideband 5G as he says there will be different flavors of 5G.

The videos (playlist) below shows some of the trials and applications and the first video is particularly interesting as it tries to dispel the myths associated with mmWave bands.


Verizon have publicly announced that they are doing trials with Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia. According to Light Reading, Samsung is supplying the gear for Verizon's fixed 5G network in Sacramento, Calif., while Ericsson's equipment will be used in Los Angeles, the only two markets announced so far.

We will see Nokia equipment being deployed in another city soon as its being heavily promoted by their marketing department and rightly so.

Verizon is also working with innovative universities, start-ups and other companies to develop the use cases that will run on tomorrow’s 5G networks. At Alley, site of Verizon’s 5G incubator, five of these innovators are getting to use real 5G technology to develop, refine and demonstrate ways 5G networks will change the ways we live, learn, work and play.

We are looking forward to seeing real world results after the services are launched on Q4 2018.

Further Reading:

• Introduction to Fixed Wireless Access (FWA)

Chinese carriers dominate global operator ranking as M&A deals shake up US market

All three Chinese mobile operators feature in the top ten in GSMA Intelligence’s latest ranking of mobile operator groups, underlying China’s status as the world’s largest mobile market.

The study ranks global operators using a model based on reported mobile connections and mobile revenue (see methodology below). China Mobile was comfortably the largest group by both measures, reaching 790.6 million mobile connections and recording annualised revenue of £66.4 billion for the period to Q2 2014. China Mobile’s two domestic rivals, China Unicom and China Telecom, are ranked third and tenth, respectively.

The remaining positions in the top ten were filled predominantly by operator groups with substantial global footprints across multiple markets, including Vodafone, Telefónica, América Móvil, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and VimpelCom.

Notes on methodology
Subsidiaries are included within a parent group as per reported consolidation. Minority holdings (less than 50 percent plus one share) are included where a group does so within its audited financial statements.

Data for connections is shown as the period-ending value, excluding customers from any subsidiaries that have been divested over the course of the year. Revenue data is annualised, such that revenue attributed to any qualifying subsidiary is included on a quarterly basis over the four quarters provided the subsidiary meets the rules for consolidation in the respective quarter.

The ranking gives equal weighting to period-ending connections and annualised mobile revenue in determining final positions. The ranking by connections and revenue is combined to give an overall ‘score’, with a lower combined score ranking higher. For example, Vodafone is ranked second by connections and fifth by revenue, giving it a combined score of 7 (2+5). This ranks the group second behind China Mobile, which scores 2 (1+1), as it the largest group by both connections and revenue. Where scores are tied, the rank by connections is used as the deciding factor.

Source

AT&T and Verizon are now tied for the rank of largest U.S. mobile carrier

Who leads the U.S. in mobile subscribers? According to mobile analyst Chetan Sharma, it’s now a neck-and-neck race between AT&T and Verizon who collectively controls 68 percent of the market.

At the end of March, AT&T had 116 million total connections, but that number includes all of its wholesale subscribers (those that connect with one of AT&T’s mobile virtual network operator partners) and machine-to-machine links attached to cars, gadgets and other devices in the internet of things. Verizon doesn’t report any of those numbers. It only reveals business and consumer retail subscribers buying their service directly from Verizon. That number totaled 103 million.

If you only factored in AT&T’s retail prepaid and postpaid customers you would get 85.1 million, but AT&T has a substantially larger wholesale business Verizon. So by Sharma’s calculations just as many people are connecting their phones and tablets and hotspots to AT&T’s network as Verizon.

Any way you look at it, these two carriers are huge. They collected control 68 percent of the U.S. wireless market. It’s also interesting to note that if Sprint were to merge with T-Mobile – as Sprint’s new chairman Masayoshi Son is so keen on doing– the two would hold a combined 30 percent of the U.S. mobile market.

That’s still smaller than either Big Red or Ma Bell, but definitely qualifies as a mega-carrier. And it doesn’t leave much room for the other guys. The 125 or so regional and rural carriers in the U.S. accounted for a meager 2 percent of all mobile subscriptions.

Source

US Wireless Market Trends Q1 2014