An industry group calling itself 5G Americas has published a whitepaper that touts the advantages of a smart auto grid powered by 5G and the C-V2X technology. This technology is the car connectivity standard that much of the industry has gelled around, replacing the older DSRC standard. Over a decade ago, the FCC became so enamored over the idea of self-driving cars that the agency dedicated the 5.9 GHz spectrum band for the sole use of smart cars. more
Last week, I predicted that much of the Internet and most cloud datacenters would launch into space in the next ten years. Today the only part of the Internet in space is a very small amount of "bent-pipe" access: signals which go from a user to a satellite and bounce back down to a ground station which feeds them into the terrestrial internet where all processing is done and all queries answered by internet-connected servers, many of them in cloud data centers. more
I read an article on the Finley Engineering blog that talks about new research with free-space optics. For those not familiar with the term, this means communication gear that communicates directly using light without any wires. The article talks about a Chinese team of scientists who have used light to transmit ultrahigh-definition video signals between high-rise buildings. more
There was a recent dispute between OneWeb and SpaceX regarding the possibility of a collision between two of their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. OneWeb's satellite (OneWeb-1078) was launched on March 25 and headed for its orbit at an altitude of 1,200 km when, in early April, it passed near a SpaceX satellite (Starlink-1546) in orbit at about 450 km. There was no collision, but subsequently, OneWeb's government affairs chief Chris McLaughlin said... more
I still run across articles that extol the supposed wonders of 5G. The most recent, published in Gizmodo asks "How 5G Could Replace Your Home Broadband Connection". I was surprised to see an article like this in a tech-oriented site because the article gets most of the facts wrong about 5G - facts that are not hard to verify. This article talks about 5G having "faster download speeds, faster upload speeds, more bandwidth, and lower latency" than landline broadband. more
Dr. Bento J. Lobo, an economist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga undertook a study to quantify the benefits of the municipally-owned fiber network in Chattanooga. Any citywide fiber network brings economic development to a community, but a municipally-owned system brings additional benefits because of the way that the business is more deeply integrated into the community. more
As Trump's horrific Administration of non-stop debacles and self-serving gambits headed toward the exit over the past few weeks, one last regulatory grab after another has been pushed out the door while the toddler-in-chief rants. Sure enough, the last of the 5G debacles just appeared in the Federal Register courtesy of the President's policy instrument, the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA). It was titled the 5G Challenge Notice of Inquiry. more
Just as the last change in administration changed the course of the FCC, so will the swing back to a Democratic administration. If you've been reading me for a few years, you know I am a big believer in the regulatory pendulum. Inevitably, when a regulatory agency like the FCC swings too far in any direction, it's inevitable that it will eventually swing back the other way. more
In the 2020 Broadband Deployment Report, the FCC made the following claim. "The vast majority of Americans -- surpassing 85% -- now have access to fixed terrestrial broadband service at 250/25 Mbps". The FCC makes this claim based upon the data provided to it by the country's ISPs on Form 477. We know the data reported by the ISPs is badly flawed in the over-reporting of download speeds. Still, we've paid little attention to the second number. more
There is an interesting article recently published in the English version of a South Korean newspaper, the ChosunILBO, that talks about 5G in China. According to the article, the Chinese 5G rollout is an expensive bust. There are a number of interesting facts disclosed about the Chinese 5G rollout. First, it's clear that the rollout is using millimeter wave spectrum. more
One of the products my consulting firm offers are statistically valid surveys and conducting surveys has let us get a close look in many communities at the mix between cable broadband and telco DSL. In the last few years, the percentage of DSL subscribers in towns with a good cable company network has plummeted. It's not unusual to see DSL market penetration in bigger towns of 10% or less, meaning in most cases that the cable company has essentially won the competitive battle. more
When I became involved in the telecoms industry back in the late 1970s, we were just seeing fiber optic cables being commercially developed by Corning. Over the following decades, I have been asked many, many times -- do we need fiber cables or wireless technologies, and what is next? During all that time, my answer has been that there was no other communication technology available in any commercial sense that would make either fiber optical or mobile technologies obsolete. more
A lot of rural America continues to hope that low orbit satellite (LEO) service will provide a broadband alternative. It's been a while since I've covered the status of the companies proposing to deploy constellations of satellites for providing broadband. In March, OneWeb filed for Chapter 11 restructuring when it was clear that the company could not raise enough cash to continue the research and development of the satellite product. more
The pandemic made it clear that the millions of homes with no broadband or poor broadband were cut off from taking the office or the school home. But the pandemic also showed many additional millions of homes that their current ISP connection isn't up to snuff for working or doing schoolwork from home. Families often found that multiple adults and students couldn't share the bandwidth at the same time. more
During the recent pandemic, many homes came face-to-face with the realization that their home broadband connection is inadequate. Many students trying to finish the school year and people trying to work from home found that their broadband connection would not allow them to connect and maintain connections to school and work servers. Even families who thought they had good broadband found they were unable to maintain multiple connections for these purposes. more
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