Mobile & Wireless Roundup #67

Welcome to the 67th edition of this newsletter. One of the challenges as an analyst is to try and always stay honest, regardless of the consequences. Let me tell you it’s not easy.

One of the features I worked on for a long time in 3G and then in 4G was (e)MBMS. After working on it just for a short while, I realised that while the feature is very interesting and useful, there may not be a commercial angle to it. I explained this to some people involved in it, but they didn’t like my analysis.

So I wrote about it and even presented my analysis at a conference. It was downplayed by some of my clients and in one case I lost another project, not related to this, but only because I wouldn’t change my stance on this.

I am bringing this up because the way things have been going with 5G is sort of a reminder that analysts should be speaking their mind about the technology roadmaps and features. While 5G has gained bad reputation in the last year or so, it is not bad as a technology. It was rolled out in a hurry so it didn’t reach the maturity it should have. Many of the features have yet to be deployed but the operators seem to have run out of money and motivation. 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) was a good interim solution but it diverted the focus away from 5G Standalone (SA), or as many people refer to it, Real-5G.

There is a good chance that the same story may be repeated with 6G. Instead of creating something revolutionary, with a lot of thought behind it, 6G may end up as a minor upgrade of 5G with some basic issues fixed but it wouldn’t be able to make much difference to the consumers or the verticals. You will see analysts and operators warnings about no urgency for 6G but surely anyone involved in selling anything with 6G or trying to be “world’s first” may differ.

Just as a final note, one also has to remember that analysts don’t always get it right. While there are many things analysts have been wrong about, the example always been stuck in my head is the one about Windows phone overtaking iPhones by 2015. If you are too young to remember what happened to Windows phone, Wikipedia has a good amount of detail here.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a technologist with over 24 years’ experience in mobile wireless technology, currently working as an independent advisor, analyst, consultant and a trainer. This newsletter is a summary of my posts and others news that caught my attention since the last newsletter.

? 6G

• Free 6G Training: 'Impact of 6G on Metaverse' from Brooklyn 6G Summit (B6GS) 2023 (link)
• Silverlinings: NTT DoCoMo doesn't want to rip out the 5G core to move to 6G (link)
• Light Reading - 6G Summit brings unusual plea from carriers: Slow your roll (link)
• Fierce Wireless - Trouble ahead: 6G cost per GB may pose problems — Madden (link)

? 5G

• 5G Network slicing Charging by 3GPP (link)
• Light Reading: Indian telecom industry grapples with growing 5G talent crunch (link) – people on LinkedIn disagree. Here is a post by Sanjay Kumar.
• Fierce Wireless: T-Mobile’s approach to 5G slicing; start simple and go from there — Schoolar (link)
• 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G PPP), the joint initiative between the European Commission and European ICT industry has formally come to a close. A post by Dan Warren on LinkedIn here.

? 4G/LTE

• Tefficient on Twitter: “4G is making a comeback in South Korea's mobile subscription market” (Tweet with photo and analysis)
• Mohamed Abdel Monem on LinkedIn: RAN Energy Consumption 5G Vs. 4G (link)

? 2G/3G

• Peter Clarke on Youtube - A window into a 3G Free World: Testing Vodafone UK's 3G switch off in Hull! (video)
• Tim Miller on LinkedIn: "A very quick bit of research into 3G sunsetting led to the attached map, via a lesson in how to correct dates between US and global formats and a geography lesson in where certain Caribbean islands were situated..." (link)

? Open & Disaggregated Networks (including Open RAN, vRAN, etc.)

• Jinsung (Alex) Choi on LinkedIn: LLM for O-RAN Open RAN (link)
• Jinsung (Alex) Choi on LinkedIn: O-RAN GPT Development (link)
• Jinsung (Alex) Choi on LinkedIn: Open RAN RIC GPT for xApps/rApps Auto-development (link)
• Jinsung (Alex) Choi on LinkedIn: O-RAN Digital Twin - RAN CoPilot (link)
• Jinsung (Alex) Choi on LinkedIn: The Imperative of RIC Testing in O-RAN (link)
• Jinsung (Alex) Choi on LinkedIn: Anatomy of Near Real Time RIC E2 Interface (link)
• Jinsung (Alex) Choi on LinkedIn - Interoperability Unleashed: The Global Impact of O-RAN PlugFest 2023! (link)

? AI, ML & Automation

• IBM Launches $500 Million Enterprise AI Venture Fund (link)
• Jinsung (Alex) Choi on LinkedIn: Deep Reinforcement Learning - The Hidden AI Champion in Open RAN (link)
• Jinsung (Alex) Choi on LinkedIn: Transforming O-RAN RIC with Advanced GenAI Analytics (link)

? Sustainability

• 5G Advanced introduces new techniques to improve network energy savings (link)
• Gov.uk: Thousands of homes to be kept warm by waste heat from computer data centres in UK first (link)

? Spectrum

• 5G Observatory: Netherlands opens up 3.6 GHz band for local 5G networks (link)
• Dean Bubley on LinkedIn: "There's quite a lot of discussion today about a Nokia report on mobile and fixed network traffic, with forecasts out to 2030…" (link)

? Private Networks

• Private Networks Technology Blog: Non-Public-Networks (NPNs): State of the art and way forward (link)

? Telecoms Infrastructure, Small Cells, Antennas & others

• Paul Rhodes on LinkedIn - Thursday School : Back to Basics; Spectrum (link)

? IoT / M2M / Smart Homes

• Copper Horse - Connected but at risk: IoT manufacturers continue to fail despite imminent regulation (link)

? Virtualization, Cloud & Edge

• Jinsung (Alex) Choi on LinkedIn - Deciphering RAN Evolution: Understanding Virtualization, Centralization, and O-RAN Levels (link)

? Security & Privacy

• The 3G4G Blog: Presentations from ETSI Security Conference 2023 (link)

? Connected And Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)

• Cavnue: Three Years In, An Ambitious Vision for Next-Generation Roadways Comes to Life (link)

? Smartphones, Devices, Wearables & Gadgets

• MWL: Industry heavyweights hit out at India smartphone TV plan (link)
• MWL Feature: Uncovering the most iconic and oddest devices (link)
• BBC: Man crushed to death by robot in South Korea (link)
• Light Reading: Connecting humans to computers with 5G? Actually it's Bluetooth (link)

? Satellites, HAPS, Drones, UAVs & Space

• Iridium Announces New D2D Direction (link) – Analyst Luke Pearce’s take on this topic on LinkedIn here.
• Lennox Omondi on Twitter: "I spent KES 95K on Starlink, plus another KES 6,500 for the first month's subscription. Yes, it's a lot. I initially hoped to resell it in the village, but after a month of using the service, I took a pause. Tried to answer all the questions you might have in this thread..." (Twitter thread)

? Metaverse & Extended Reality (XR)

• GlobalData: Metaverse faces uphill path ahead as adoption struggles with limited use cases (link)
• Financial Times: ByteDance’s virtual reality division announces restructuring and staff cuts (link)

? Other News and Technology Stuff

• Understanding the TCO of a Mobile Network (link)
• Dr. Kim (Kyllesbech Larsen) on LinkedIn: "I am sure it comes as no surprise if I say I am sort of "obsessed" with Telco cost and it’s economy ... Particularly the structural parts that tell a story about a Telco's business, operational model, and management's strategic choices..." (link)
• Core Analysis: What's behind the operators' push for network APIs? (link)
• Rudolf van der Berg on LinkedIn: "KPN had its Capital Markets Day this afternoon and as was the case with BT and other telcos, this presentation tells the real story of how the network and business perform. The positive outlook is a nice contrast with the doom and gloom of the FT/ETNO CEO session this morning. Some quick notes…" (link)
• BBC - Optus outage: Millions affected by Australian network failure (link)

? Picture of the week: Adding GPS to a Conference Badge. Read here.

Happy to hear your thoughts. Feel free let me know what worked, what didn’t, how I can make this better, etc. Get in touch over LinkedIn!

PDF version of this and previous newsletters are available here.