Category Archives: LTE/5G/6G

Turning the Page on 5G: Service Providers’ Vision for 6G

By | April 4, 2025

Service providers, vendors, cloud service providers, and other stakeholders gathered to define the vision, high-level requirements, and considerations for 6G networks during the 3GPP Workshop on 6G in Incheon, South Korea, from March 10–11, 2025. This Insight Note focuses on the most critical requirements voiced by service providers. While the views of other stakeholders are… Read More »

Wi-Fi vs. 5G In Enterprise Private Networks

By | July 4, 2022

Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) brings a number of features that elevate the performance of Wi-Fi significantly from that of older generations. These features solve many of the challenges that limit the performance of current Wi-Fi networks, and raise the performance to a level close to that of cellular networks based on 4G and 5G technologies. Since… Read More »

5G vs. Radio Altimeters: A Storm in a Tea Cup?

By | January 5, 2022

The row between the wireless and aviation industries on potential interference between 5G and aircraft radio altimeters is sounding like a storm in a tea cup! The genesis of this dispute is a report in October 2020 by the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA) citing potential interference to altimeters operating in the 4.2 –… Read More »

mmWave FWA vs. FTTH: Friend or Foe?

By | October 15, 2020

5G fanatics would lead you to believe that 5G will make fibre obsolete. So how real are their claims and how does 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) compare to FTTH on performance and RoI? To answer, we teamed-up with our partners at DTS to objectively assess the performance of fibre and millimeter wave (mmWave) FWA.… Read More »

Dynamic Spectrum Sharing: The Pros and Cons

By | March 9, 2020

Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) has emerged as one of the hot 5G discussion topics [see here on T-Mobile and Verizon]. This feature which allows simultaneous operation of LTE and 5G technologies has become a bellwether of product maturity and 5G leadership for equipment and silicon vendors and for service providers. But how important is DSS… Read More »

The 5G Roadmap in Simple Terms

By | January 27, 2020

The basic building blocks of 5G were introduced in Release 15 which is now in commercial deployments. In addition, the 5G roadmap has defined two more releases. Release 16 brings in new features in addition to improvements to features introduced in Release 15. Last December, 3GPP identified Release 17 work items. Below, is a summary… Read More »

MNO Migration Strategies: Core Network Migration

By | November 21, 2019

In my previous article, I wrote about developments in virtual RAN, and indicated that the actual focus on the service providers is on core network migration strategies. The RAN receives high attention because it consumes more of the MNO capex and opex than the core network. This makes it a primary target for cost reduction.… Read More »

MNO Migration Strategies: An Update on Virtual RAN

By | November 20, 2019

Over the past week, I had the opportunity to get a full status update on Radio Access Network (RAN) transformation at the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Summit in Amsterdam. I also had the opportunity to speak with a few service providers on the evolution of the telco network. Understanding the pain points and motivation of… Read More »

Can Telecom Service Providers Monetize the Edge: On-Premise Edge Computing

By | October 19, 2019

As 5G rolls out, edge computing is the hope of service providers to finally provide differentiated services. Service provides have two paths to monetize the edge: a consumer services path and an enterprise services path. The former plays to the strengths of the mobile service providers. The latter, enterprise path, is as an incremental opportunity… Read More »

5G Deployment Trends and Prospects

By | July 8, 2019

Research from Xona Partners on 5G deployment trends and prospects reveals that operators will focus on mid-band spectrum. The millimeter wave technology will remain a niche play in the short and medium terms. 5G is a Mid-Band Play Operators around the world have spent over $16.2 Billion acquiring 3.5 GHz spectrum (C-band) in the 18… Read More »

The Skyrocketing C-Band Valuation

By | May 29, 2019

The FCC concluded Auction 102 netting over $2 billion for over 2,900 licenses in the 24/25 GHz band. A good milestone, but more critical is the availability of 3.5 GHz spectrum which has better performance tradeoffs than millimeter wave spectrum. With all the talk about the ‘5G race’, availability of mid-band spectrum makes the most… Read More »

The True 5G Value Proposition: It’s not about Speed and Latency!

By | May 4, 2018

It is common to pin the 5G value proposition on its performance, mainly capacity* and latency. These features will enable applications that operators can monetize. However, I will argue here that capacity and latency are secondary to realizing the full 5G value proposition. Capacity and latency make for big headlines and are easy to grasp… Read More »

The Cost of 5G

By | April 23, 2018

In my earlier post, I outlined a few myths about 5G to avoid the cascading technology trap. Here, I like to extend the discussion and share a few data points on the cost of 5G networks. Over the past few months, our team has analyzed vendors’ roadmaps and product features, assessed spectrum and its cost,… Read More »

5G Myths and the Cascading Technology Trap.

By | April 13, 2018

There are a few myth about 5G that I came about in discussions with executives, investors, smart city officials and other parties active in technology development and planning for new services. Two examples: Don’t bother deploying a certain IoT technology – for example LoRaWAN or similar technology – because 5G will serve all these applications… Read More »