It is fashionable to talk about the race to 5G. This theme started last year, and has picked up this year with many opinion articles published on the topic. Perhaps the one that got most attention is the white paper by Deloitte: The chance to lead for a decade. The paper compared US networks and investments to that of other countries, with a focus on China. Of the several comparisons made, one in particular got me thinking: can we use the number of cell sites to qualify who’s winning or losing a race? Never mind whether or not the whole notion of a 5G race is relevant (I’ll save this for another post), but is the number of sites, which is a proxy to coverage and capacity indicators, a legitimate metric? In this, I don’t mean to pick on one element of the argument. This question is more fundamental: should coverage and capacity remain the sole indicators for wireless services?
China ahead on number of sites – and that’s that!
According to the Deloitte, China has 14.1 sites per 10,000 people vs. the US’ 4.7 (3x). Alternatively, China has 5.3 sites/square miles vs. the US’ 0.4 (13x). At face value, this is a big disparity, but one that’s well known. The larger of the US carriers like AT&T and Verizon have on the order of 60,000 cell sites, each. That pales in comparison with China Mobile’s 500,000+ LTE sites alone! Continue reading
Anyone knows what generation processor running in their laptop? How about which DSL or cable modem technology is serving their house? With 802.11ax starting to come to market, I don’t see anyone rushing to upgrade their access node. When no one is keeping track of ‘generations’ in these technologies, why is it that in mobile it’s all about the “G”? How did this come about and why? And, will it keep being this way? Or will 5G be the last “G”?
The Algiers Smart City Project is more than just another smart city project: It is a platform for talent mobilization. Over the past week, I had the pleasure to participate in the Smart Cities Summit in Algiers and as mentor and judge in the Leapfrog Hackathon and Startup Challenge. These events were designed to focus attention on Algiers burgeoning startup scene and enhance interaction with global actors to address the IDC syndrome. 
Interest in the 3.5 GHz band is increasing as its set to become the global 5G spectrum band. We recently undertook a study for a new research report* of global 3.5 GHz band to uncover the impact on the 5G deployment timelines and ecosystem. One of the fundamental questions is putting figures on the value of the 3.5 GHz band. Our analysis shows that on average 3.5 GHz spectrum is 36% that of 2.6 GHz spectrum. In the meantime, we estimate that a 3.5 GHz network will require 15% more cell sites than a 2.6 GHz network. This leads us to conclude that prices for 3.5 GHz spectrum will rise. We also identified a number of issues that regulators will have to address to improve the value and utilization of this band.
It’s official! Telecom is a utility! The admission comes from service providers themselves. Service providers struggled to monetize value added services to keep from being dumb pipes. Now, it seems that they have resigned themselves to being a utility and are happy to be the pipe. This admission came at the 
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 by the common subscriber. But the true value of 5G resides elsewhere: it lies in the network architecture of 5G. It is not that capacity and latency are not important. However, if we think of 5G purely from capacity and latency perspective, we could misread how the market could evolve. 
In my earlier post, I outlined a 
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:
Artificial intelligence is in yet another hype cycle – the fourth since the 1960’s. What is different this time from past hype cycles is that it is driven by data from the bottom up as opposed a top-down approach in previous hype cycles. The pervasiveness of connectivity and the Internet make AI applicable in many industries, including telecom. At the year’s 
The 
Startups lead innovation in the technology world. But is there room for startups in the telecom world? And, what is the future of innovation in this industry? Innovation is one of the 
One of the criticisms of blockchain technology center on power consumption and the cost of mining. The electricity consumed in mining operations is high and continues to grow as mining difficulty increases in response to increasing processing power. Some think that blockchains is wasteful technology that is not compliant with a 21st century outlook for a green economy. Others accept it as the price to achieve consensus and trust in decentralized networks. Following recent work in this space, I like to share a perspective by making a comparison to the energy used in communication systems.