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re Is 5G a Spectrum-eating Monster that Destroys Competition?
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2018 17:01:46 +0900
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From: Dave Burstein <daveb () dslprime com> Date: September 28, 2018 at 4:37:11 PM GMT+9 To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Fwd: [Dewayne-Net] Is 5G a Spectrum-eating Monster that Destroys Competition? Dave Share if interesting. You may recall Dave Isenberg's fast fail petition in 2002 that I lot of people signed. I held back. I'm all in favor of more competition but even then was skeptical it would do the job. Ivan Seidenberg taught me, "This is a business of scale and we have the scale." I would rather have been wrong. Many people are underestimating how fast wireless tech is improving. Verizon's Lee Hicks thinks his cost per bit is coming down 40%/year and it will continue. The constantly lower costs give them a lot of ammunition if anything else grew. (It also means that the current overcapacity on wireless will probably get more extreme. Traffic growth rates are falling; Cisco estimates 30% in the U.S. in 2021. But that's another subject. On Fred's thought that 5G is a competition killer, I don't believe having more spectrum would be enough for robust competition. There are important points here. Fred's underlying policy recommendation - keep lots of spectrum open for new and other users, is on target. (Sharing works, as Wi-Fi proved. It's a mistake to add monopoly spectrum, especially in the 3.7 GHz band under consideration.) But I believe the answer to Is 5G a Spectrum-eating Monster that Destroys Competition? is no. In 20 years in this business, I haven't seen any major new entrants in either U.S. wireless or broadband. Lots of ideas are still floating around; I've volunteered in two community networks. Europe isn't much different, except when satellite of cable companies offer more to their customer base. The result: U.S. prices are 50% higher than many of our peers in Europe. (Where diminishing competition is also becoming a problem.) We who want a great Internet affordable for all need a different solution. It's highly unlikely that any additional spectrum plan will result in much more competition. Even if spectrum were completely free, the economics of adding a new mobile network are unlikely to work. That's because it takes about $10B to build a new U.S. network and another $5-10B to cover the losses until you have enough customers to break even. Regional carriers are already falling by the wayside, with a handful of exceptions. Blair thought spectrum freed by the Broadband Plan will allow new competition. That was nine years ago and it hasn't happened. I love solving problems with competition, but in the real world the competition is unlikely. Regulation has severe problems of course, but dreams of more competition haven't worked. I've written about some possible alternatives to strong regulation and welcome ideas. If we want better and cheaper networks, we need a strategy that works with the current market structure. (It's also important to understand that 5G now is mostly low and mid-band, except Verizon. I and all the network people objected, but the marketing people, regulators, and 90% of analysts have accepted a new definition of 5G that includes low and mid-band. 90% of the "5G" being built in the next five years worldwide will be below 4.2 GHz. It's really just 4G with a software tweak, NR. We lost that battle. What I do for my technical readers is say millimeter wave, not 5G, unless I want to include 600 MHz up. That's how the world understands 5G.) Dave Burstein p.s. There are some possibilities for new entrants in fixed wireless in broadband, but it's a longshot. No one has broken out yet. Editor, http://Fastnet.news http://wirelessone.news gfastnews.com Author with Jennie Bourne DSL (Wiley) and Web Video: Making It Great, Getting It Noticed (Peachpit)On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 12:27 AM Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> wrote: Is 5G a Spectrum-eating Monster that Destroys Competition? By Fred Goldstein Jun 15 2018 <https://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2018/06/15/438482-5g-spectrum-eating-monster-that-destroys-competition.htm> To hear the current FCC talk about it, 5G mobile service is the be-all and end-all of not only mobile communications, but the answer to most of the country’s ills. The snake oil pitchmen of the 1800s were tyros compared to the claims being made for 5G. Yet nobody even quite knows what 5G is! To be blunt, 5G simply seems to refer to anything that comes after 4G, which is LTE. After all, 5 is the next number after 4. The key technological advance in 5G seems to be its ability to operate on multiple frequency bands at once, on any and all spectrum above 600 MHz, including higher frequencies than those actually useful for mobility. It can thus consume spectrum the way a black hole sucks in matter. But 5G isn’t, as the FCC members tweet, a race that the US has to somehow “win” against China, lest uncertain horrors result. The likely real purpose of 5G is less obvious than its technology. 5G is more like a cult, a sacrificial cult that is being designed to kill off what little competition is left in the telecom industry. The Aztecs were notorious for their vast use of human sacrifice, culminating in 1489's sacrifice of 20,000 prisoners of war on the pyramids of Tenochtitlan. They did not see themselves as being particularly brutal, though. They worshiped the sun god and thought that if they failed to continue human sacrifices, the sun would not rise in the morning. Today the biggest carriers and their backers have a new sun god called 5G. But unlike the sun, we don't know who really needs it. It’s based on a supplier-driven model, not a demand pull, given that 4G LTE has been both a technical and market success, and continues to be enhanced. But the FCC knows that 5G needs a lot of spectrum. LOTS of spectrum. So they're basically handing any and all available spectrum over to the big mobile carriers who are promising "5G". It is a vast sacrifice of precious spectrum. The FCC seems to fear that if they fail to give more and more spectrum over to whatever 5G may turn out to be, the US will somehow "fall behind" in a “race”, and maybe the sun won’t shine any more. And to promote this kill-all-prisoners approach, they attribute preposterous miracles to 5G, like saving energy, making self-driving vehicles practical and safe, and, like the original snake oil, curing diseases. 5G, in other words, is buncombe. It is a mythical monster that is worshipped by killing off access to spectrum to all except the big mobile carriers who can afford to pay top dollar at auction. There is precedent for this. In 1948, microwave transmission itself was new technology, and the television networks, just starting up, wanted to use it to link their affiliates together. The FCC ruled instead that civilian use of the microwave spectrum was limited to AT&T Long Lines, and the networks had to buy their connections from AT&T. It was a high point for monopoly. In 1959, however, in its landmark Above 890 decision, the Commission authorized private microwave systems. Eventually that led to at least some competition in the telecom sector, and may have been the hole in the dike that eventually led to the breakup of the old AT&T and the birth of the public Internet. The existing private microwave spectrum is now quite crowded in many places. Not only have fiber optics not replaced microwave, but the FCC’s deregulation of the telecom incumbents, and market consolidation, have been making fiber services more expensive and less widely available. Microwave gear, on the other hand, has become faster, better and cheaper (pick 3). Cellular mobility was originally predicated on the idea that capacity could be increased by reusing the same frequencies over smaller areas – more cells. But it’s often cheaper to use more spectrum and fewer cells. And the carriers are now promoting the use of cell phones to carry video, which uses tremendous amounts of capacity. They want more spectrum so they can show even more TV to addicted small-screen viewers. Not coincidentally, the two biggest mobile carriers are also the two biggest wireline incumbents, who want to abandon most of their wireline business. FiOS was last decade’s news. Verizon has begun to refer to high-speed wireless to the home as “FiOS” too. It’s cheaper to build than fiber, after all. The wireless ISP community has proven that fixed wireless it is very effective for Internet access, though that is mostly done in rural areas, and doesn’t carry hundreds of TV channels. AT&T has likewise given up on expanding GigaPower as well as U-Verse. They will require some additional spectrum. The FCC’s auction policy will allow the two of them to essentially buy it all up in order to exclude competitors. Because 5G. And you thought the Aztec sun god was powerful. 5G is a mythical monster whose hunger for spectrum is insatiable, but which its believers think must be satisfied lest the wireless sun stop rising. Or maybe it’s just an excuse to undo decades of competition and return the bulk of the Above 890 spectrum to the descendants of the old Bell System. 5G was the stated reason why almost all of the lower millimeter wave spectrum, from 24 to 57 GHz, was not given over to regular microwave licensing, on a point to point coordinated basis that ensures efficient use of the band by anyone who needs it, including cellular backhaul. Instead, last year’s Spectrum Frontiers Order has the bulk of it being auctioned off in large-scale exclusive geographic areas, as if it were a mobile band. Not that millimeter waves work for mobility -- they don't. And they don’t go far – useful for a mile or two if absolutely nothing is in the way, and they won’t penetrate walls or cars. But the mythical 5G monster is supposed to find a use for them. [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp
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- re Is 5G a Spectrum-eating Monster that Destroys Competition? Dave Farber (Sep 28)