Like The Rest Of Its 5G Footprint, Verizon 5G Sports Venue Availability Is Being Overhyped

from the ill-communication dept

Have we mentioned lately that 5G is being over-hyped? While it's an important evolutionary step in wireless connectivity, it's far from the revolution hardware vendors and cellular carriers are promising. Verizon, for example, insists that 5G is the "fourth industrial revolution" that will almost miraculously spur the smart cities and smarter cars of tomorrow. While 5G is important (in that faster, more resilient networks are always important), the idea that 5G will fundamentally transform the world tends to overshoot the mark.

Carriers haven't quite learned yet that over-hyping the standard (or flat out lying about it) only serves to associate it with disappointment in the minds of consumers. Verizon, for example, has crowed widely about the company's early 5G launches, but when reporters and users actually try to use these networks, they routinely find they're barely available.

To hype the standard further, Verizon has been deploying it to select parts of a handful of major sports venues, insisting in its press releases that these early deployments are "fundamentally changing the way we live, work and play." But when reporters actually press the company on where it's available, they quickly discover it's, well, not. While Verizon has been hyping 5G availability in NFL stadiums, deeper inquiries have shown that the service is available in only a few areas because the millimeter wave spectrum Verizon is using for these early efforts has a hard time with range and penetrating walls.

The same thing is now playing out in other major sporting venues. While Verizon has claimed in press statements that it will soon be offering 5G in more than 10 major sports venues, Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica pressed them for additional detail and came away notably unimpressed:

"...When contacted by Ars, Verizon said the 5G network doesn't cover the whole arena for any of these NBA facilities. "Just certain seating areas" in the NBA arenas have access to 5G, a Verizon spokesperson told us.

This isn't surprising, given that Verizon's early 5G rollout relies heavily on millimeter-wave signals that don't travel far and are easily blocked by walls and other obstacles. But while NFL stadiums typically seat between 60,000 and 80,000 people, the seating capacity in NBA arenas is generally 17,000 to 21,000. Despite the big difference in size, Verizon's 5G network isn't yet capable of covering all the seating areas in any one of these facilities.

Yes, the transformative, revolutionary power of being able to get 1 Gbps connectivity you probably won't use in "a few seating areas."

Again, 5G will be a good thing, in that faster, lower latency, tougher networks are certainly good. But the empty hype carriers are using to promote what the standard can actually do (no it can't cure cancer) and where it's available (Cisco predicts 5G will still only account for around 10% of all mobile connections three years from now) is only sowing distrust among consumers.

There's a reason AT&T and Verizon are trying to hide 5G mapping data, and it's not because they're excited about its revolutionary capacity for change. They're using the modestly-important standard to not only justify charging consumers higher rates, but as a lynchpin to deregulate industry; as in: we don't need any consumer protections because 5G will soon be available everywhere as a sort of a competitive panacea. You're not supposed to know that claim isn't actually true. Telecom remains a fundamentally broken sector, with regulatory capture and mindless merger mania the fashion of the age. 5G isn't going to fix any of this.

Filed Under: 5g, hype, overselling, sports venues
Companies: verizon

Wireless Industry Is Trying To Hide Where 5G Is Actually Available

from the ill-communication dept

Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.

There's a solid chasm between where carriers say they offer 5G, and where 5G is actually available. And there's every indication that mobile carriers are working overtime to make sure that chasm isn't obvious to consumers.

As the FCC finally buckles to pressure to fix the US's comically inaccurate broadband availability maps, both AT&T and Verizon are trying to ensure that 5G is excluded from these efforts. The FCC has been widely ridiculed for blindly relying on overly-generous ISP data indicating where wireless and wired broadband exists. The FCC has long declared that an entire census tract is technically "served" with broadband if just one home in that tract has service. After massive bipartisan political pressure, the FCC recently announced it would at least take a look at using more accurate geospatial data to pinpoint broadband availability.

But in letters to the FCC, the wireless industry declares that 5G should be excluded from these mapping improvements because it might reveal ambiguously "sensitive" information:

"It would be premature for the Commission to require wireless providers to submit coverage maps for 5G service at this time," AT&T said, stating that "requiring 5G coverage maps in this early stage of 5G deployment could reveal sensitive information about cell site locations and even customer locations."

The CTIA, the wireless industry’s top lobbying organization, mirrored those claims in its own filing, insisting that while the organization “supports efforts to monitor 5G deployment,” it is “premature to propose standardized service requirements” for mapping 5G availability.

The broadband industry has historically lobbied against any real effort to improve broadband mapping. Why? Better public data would only more clearly highlight the country's broadband availability gaps and lack of competition, and might result in somebody, you know, actually trying to do something about it. In this case, the industry isn't keen on having its rosy 5G availability promises exposed as a marketing farce:

"Right now, 5G is the technological equivalent of the emperor's new clothes,” she said. “It's the finest new technology, but no one can see it. Without maps that clarify where 5G service is offered at particular service standards, carriers have few checks on their claims about 5G's current reach and capabilities.”

The Trump FCC has used the promise of looming 5G availability as partial justification for obliterating countless consumer protections (read: you don't need oversight of a historically predatory industry because 5G competition will drive amazing innovation!). But there's every indication that, like 4G, 5G will be spotty in areas where the industry has skimped on deploying fiber because it's not profitable enough, quickly enough, for Wall Street. As such, knowing where the emerging standard is actually available is going to be kind of important.

Filed Under: 5g, competition, fcc, map, sensitive information
Companies: at&t, ctia, verizon

Verizon Can't Stop Over-hyping 5G; This Time In NFL Stadiums

from the unrealistic-expectations dept

We've noted for a while that 5G is being aggressively over-hyped. While it's an important evolutionary step in wireless connectivity, it's far from the revolution hardware vendors and cellular carriers are promising. Verizon, for example, insists that 5G is the "fourth industrial revolution" that will almost miraculously spur the smart cities and smarter cars of tomorrow. While 5G is important (in that faster, more resilient networks are always important), the idea that 5G will fundamentally transform the world tends to overshoot the mark.

Carriers haven't quite learned yet that over-hyping the standard only serves to associate it with disappointment in the minds of consumers. Verizon, for example, has crowed widely about the company's early 5G launches, but when reporters and users actually try to use these networks, they routinely find they're barely available. Lately, Verizon's marketing department has been heavily hyping the company's launch of 5G in around 13 NFL stadiums, once again insisting this is going to be a paradigm shift that changes the woooooooorld:

"Today’s announcement is a key moment in our partnership with the NFL. We’re proud to work with such an iconic organization to bring Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband service to fans across the country. Verizon 5G is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and play, and we expect the impact on the sports entertainment industry to be massive - it promises to revolutionize the entire game-day experience for fans."

But once again, reporters who dug just beneath the service again found that the launch was nowhere as impressive as what the company has promised:

"Verizon isn't promising any 5G coverage outside the seating areas, and the seating-area coverage will only be available in some sections. When contacted by Ars, Verizon said that its 5G coverage "varies by stadium" but provided no specifics on how widespread the coverage is in each facility. At least some of the 13 stadiums don't have any 5G coverage available outside the seating areas, Verizon also acknowledged."

Part of the problem is Verizon is leaning heavily on millimeter-wave signals to fuel most of its 5G deployments, but such signals don't travel very far and are easily blocked by walls, weather, and other obstacles. The other problem: there are few if any phones that actually support the standard yet, since the industry has yet to really hammer out the battery issues caused by the higher power consumption (one of several reasons Apple isn't expected to launch a 5G iphone until the second half of 2020, if not later).

In other words, most of the hype you've seen about 5G is talking about networks that are barely available, and have little to no widespread device support. Wireless carriers are eager to over-hype 5G for two reasons: it allows them to justify sky high prices for mobile data (US consumers pay some of the highest prices in the world for 4G, something that's only getting worse with 5G), and it will eventually help spur the sales of significantly more mobile handsets, a metric that has stalled out in recent years as smartphone innovation has plateaued.

Superficially, those seem like sensible reasons for wireless carriers to hype a new network standard that will genuinely bring about some important (albeit not really revolutionary) improvements. But by associating 5G with failed promises in the minds of consumers, companies like Verizon are actually sending the message to most of those users that it's not actually going to be worth their time to make the switch, defeating the entire point of the marketing hype.

Filed Under: 5g, hype
Companies: verizon

DOJ 'Solution' For Sprint T-Mobile Merger Will Result In Less Overall Wireless Coverage

from the empty-promises dept

As we recently noted, the DOJ is absolutely tripping over itself to approve a $26 billion merger between T-Mobile and Sprint that most objective experts say will inevitably erode competition, raise rates, and reduce not only the total number of sector jobs--but the amount everybody in the telecom industry is paid. Forty years of telecom history is very clear on this point: when you reduce the total number of competitors in a telecom market, the results generally aren't pretty (unless you're an investor or executive).

To try and justify its approval, the DOJ has been pushing a plan that would involve the government nannying the creation of an entirely new fourth wireless carrier by spinning some of T-Mobile and Sprint assets to Dish Network, a company with a long history of empty promises on the wireless front. But a closer look at the proposal notes that not only will it take years for Dish to become a viable replacement fourth carrier (if it happens at all), the end product will result in a carrier that covers just 70% of the US, not the 99% T-Mobile, Sprint, and the FCC have been promising:

"70% of the US is far short of what T-Mobile and Sprint promised the FCC. The merging companies "committed to deploying a 5G network that would cover 97 percent of our nation's population within three years of the closing of the merger and 99 percent of Americans within six years," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in May."

And again, this is assuming that Dish builds a full network in the first place, something many doubt will ever actually happen. For one, doing so requires some heavy coddling from the likes of FCC head Ajit Pai, who has done little to nothing to punish wireless carriers for a wide variety of sins ranging from location data scandals to billing fraud. The idea that this rubber stamp FCC will stand up to Dish and T-Mobile should they miss build out deadlines (or stand up to AT&T and Verizon when they inevitably try to undermine the effort) seems fairly laughable.

And Dish has a long history of hoarding precious wireless spectrum and then doing nothing with it, something even T-Mobile complained about at length before they became megamerger BFFs. Wall Street analysts doubt Dish has the assets, expertise, or funds to actually pull off the DOJ plan:

""Verizon spends $15 billion annually to maintain a network that they've already built," wireless industry analysts Craig Moffett and Jessica Moffett wrote in a note for investors on July 25. "The idea that Dish might spend $10 billion (their own estimate on previous conference calls) and then somehow be finished is, well, just silly."

MoffettNathanson recommended that investors sell their Dish shares, writing that the biggest loser in the T-Mobile/Sprint/Dish deal "is Dish Network, or rather, Dish Network's investors." Dish's investors value its "spectrum holdings as an asset-held-for-sale," which is "only appropriate if the spectrum will be sold," the firm wrote."

It's likely the FCC and DOJ know this proposal simply ends with Dish selling its spectrum assets back to Verizon or AT&T, but simply don't care. That's the benefit of regulatory capture. Granted the deal still has to survive a bipartisan lawsuit from a growing number of state AGs, the trial for which won't even begin until December.

Filed Under: antitrust, coverage, doj, fcc, merger, wireless
Companies: dish, sprint, t-mobile

The DOJ's Plan To 'Fix' The T-Mobile Merger Isn't Going To Work

from the fluff-and-nonsense dept

As expected, the Department of Justice has signed off on T-Mobile's controversial $26 billion merger with Sprint. You'd be hard pressed to find many objective folks who think greater consolidation in the telecom space is a good idea, given the deal will likely result in less competition, higher prices, and some major job cuts as redundant positions are inevitably eliminated. And in countries where four major wireless carriers were reduced to three, the resulting problems are usually pretty damn obvious.

Still, both the FCC and DOJ have tripped over themselves to approve the deal after T-Mobile's full-court lobbying press, which has included hiring Trump allies like Corey Lewandowski as advisors, and pandering up to the Trump administration by ramping up patronage of Donald's hotels.

To make its approval of the deal seem like a good idea, the DOJ has come up with a quirky solution: it is demanding that Sprint and T-Mobile offload prepaid brand Boost Mobile and some spectrum to Dish Network, who then will (theoretically) use those assets to create a new fourth carrier to replace Sprint. The announcement frames the proposal as such:

Under the terms of the proposed settlement, T-Mobile and Sprint must divest Sprint’s prepaid business, including Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, and Sprint prepaid, to Dish Network Corp., a Colorado-based satellite television provider. The proposed settlement also provides for the divestiture of certain spectrum assets to Dish. Additionally, T-Mobile and Sprint must make available to Dish at least 20,000 cell sites and hundreds of retail locations. T-Mobile must also provide Dish with robust access to the T-Mobile network for a period of seven years while Dish builds out its own 5G network.

There are some painful problems with this proposal.

One, Dish Network and its CEO, Charlie Ergen, have already been hoovering up valuable spectrum for years under the promise they'd build a wireless network. And yet despite endless promises, that network has never arrived. Even T-Mobile complained about this back when Dish initially opposed the deal. Dish has, effectively, been engaged in "spectrum squatting" for the better part of the last decade with little penalty from the government. This proposal places an awful lot of trust in a company that has a pretty impressive history of empty promises.

The other problem is one of enforcement. To make this smattering of spectrum options and some prepaid assets into a viable fourth competitor will require a lot of government hand-holding. The DOJ and FCC will need to not only ensure that Dish meets all its deadlines and T-Mobile keeps all its promises, but they also have to prevent AT&T and Verizon (who have an obvious, vested interest in just three viable competitors) from screwing up the proceedings. The idea that Ajit Pai, who has yet to hold the industry accountable on a single issue of substance (most recently location data scandals) will just magically decide to do so here is fairly laughable.

Unless they want to face greater price competition, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon have every incentive to ensure that this new proposal never really works. And with former Verizon lawyers now leading the FCC and the DOJ, this particular administration isn't particularly likely to do very much about it once that happens. Many experts believe this is little more than a stage play that ends with Dish never actually building a major network, and selling its collected spectrum for a tidy profit:

The third problem is that a collection of spectrum and a prepaid carrier does not a vibrant competitor make. Boost Mobile has just 8 million prepaid subscribers, compared to more than 150 million each for AT&T and Verizon. Both AT&T and Verizon also enjoy geographical monopolies in the business data services (BDS) market that feeds things like cellular towers. Wall Street analysts like Craig Moffett believe Dish lacks the assets and expertise to actually make it work. Consumer groups argue that the simpler, cleaner tack would have been to simply block the deal, then force Sprint (whose shaky financial footing has been overstated for effect) to find an interested partner (Comcast, Spectrum, Google, Altice) outside of the merger process.

Numerous State AGs have sued to block the deal for just this reason, and the merger can't be completed until that lawsuit is settled. NY AG Letitia James made it abundantly clear in a statement that her office wasn't impressed by the DOJ proposal:

“The promises made by DISH and T-Mobile in this deal are the kinds of promises only robust competition can guarantee,” said Attorney General Letitia James. “We have serious concerns that cobbling together this new fourth mobile player, with the government picking winners and losers, will not address the merger’s harm to consumers, workers, and innovation.”

Again, the history of US telecom is not murky on this subject: major mergers routinely erode competition, raise rates, and result in worse customer service. That's great for investors and executives, but less so for the end user. It's the primary reason you all hate Comcast so much, and this "growth for growth's sake" approach to business is the primary reason the US suffers from expensive, substandard broadband. The DOJ's proposal pretends to remedy the problems with the T-Mobile merger with little more than fluff and nonsense.

If this merger survives and follows historical precedent, in five years when the deal's negative implications are becoming evident to consumers, the regulators that approved it will be working as telecom lobbyists or at telecom think tanks. And most of the folks that supported the deal will pretend none of this ever happened. It's the American way.

Filed Under: competition, conditions, doj, merger, mobile, spectrum
Companies: dish, sprint, t-mobile

DOJ Prepares To Sign Off On An Elaborate T-Mobile Merger Plan That Isn't Likely To Work

from the ill-communication dept

While the Pai FCC is chomping at the bit to approve T-Mobile and Sprint's competition and job killing mega-union, rumors have long been that many DOJ staffers remain highly skeptical about the purported benefits of the deal. After all, history routinely shows that when you reduce the number of overall competitors in the telecom space from four to three, the reduction in competition results in higher prices and worse service (go ask the Canadians or the Irish). Such mergers also pretty routinely are massive job killers, given there's a laundry list of support and middle management personnel who wind up being redundant.

To address the competitive impacts, the DOJ is prepared to sign off on a new, elaborate deal that would offload Sprint prepaid brand Boost Mobile and some spectrum to Dish Network in a bid to cobble together a viable, fourth competitor out of sticks and twine:

"Satellite-TV provider Dish Network Corp. has agreed to pay $5 billion for wireless assets in a deal with T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp., setting the stage for the Justice Department to approve the $26.5 billion merger of the mobile-phone carriers, according to people familiar with the matter.

After weeks of negotiations, the parties have hammered out an agreement under which Dish will pay about $1.5 billion for prepaid mobile businesses and roughly $3.5 billion for spectrum, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are still private. Under the terms of the deal, Dish can’t sell the assets or hand over control of the agreement to a third party for three years, the people said."

So one, understand that Dish has spent the better part of the last decade hoovering up valuable spectrum and doing nothing with it (with no real regulatory penalty). This was even something T-Mobile was quick to point out when Dish was initially offering objections to the competition-eroding deal. Dish isn't exactly a company known for following through on its promises. And even here, while the idea is Dish is supposed to be building a vibrant, fourth competitor to compensate for the deal's impact, you'll note that Dish is allowed to offload all of these assets three years from now.

Creating a viable, new fourth competitor will require a lot of regulatory hand holding and guidance to ensure that not only does Dish actually live up to its end of the bargain, but that the industry's remaining three competitors (T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon) don't engage in behavior that undermines the effort. Who is going to do this, exactly? Ajit Pai, the FCC head who has yet to hold any major player in the telecom space accountable for anything? A DOJ now led by a former Verizon executive? An FCC that just effectively neutered its authority over telecom at lobbyist behest?

Basically, the DOJ is pretending that cobbling together a new fourth competitors out of a bunch of scraps will compensate for the competitive impact of the deal. But in a sector that suffers from immense regulatory capture, there's very little chance this deal gets adequately shepherded to meaningful conclusion. A far simpler approach would have been to block the deal outright (protecting four competitors), forcing Sprint to simply find another suitor organically outside of the merger process (claims the company is on death's door have been highly exaggerated).

Granted that even with DOJ and FCC approval, the deal still faces several obstacles, not least of which being a coalition of state AGs that have filed suit to stop the deal.

Filed Under: competition, doj, fcc, merger, wireless
Companies: dish, sprint, t-mobile

Early 5G Plans Show Cell Carriers Haven't Learned Much About Misleading 'Unlimited' Plans

from the ill-communication dept

A little more than 12 years ago, Verizon was forced to strike an agreement with the New York State Attorney General for marketing data plans as "unlimited" when the plans had very clear limits. Carriers have received numerous subsequent wrist slaps for the practice in the decade since, but none of these lessons appear to have gotten through.

Case in point: Verizon recently launched its first ever 5G hotspot for use on the company's barely available 5G network. To use it, you'll need to pony up $650, which is three to four times higher than the cost most pay for a comparable 4G hotspot. From there, you'll need to pay Verizon $85 per month for an "unlimited" 5G data plan, which is roughly $10 more per month than a comparable 4G plan. And of course, this being Verizon, the company's "unlimited" data plan is not really unlimited:

"Verizon said hotspot-only plans "start at $85 a month (plus taxes and fees)." Verizon describes the $85-per-month hotspot plan as "unlimited" when you go through the online checkout process. But the fine print states that customers get 50GB of high-speed 5G data, and 5G speeds are reduced to 3Mbps after that. The plan treats 5G and 4G data separately; it provides 15GB of high-speed 4G data and slows users down to 600kbps after that. Verizon allows 4K video streaming on 5G, while limiting video on the 4G network to 720p."

Oh yeah, that's not confusing at all. And speeds of 600 kbps and 3 Mbps are a pretty far cry from what anybody would consider "next-generation" (technically they don't even meet the FCC's 25 Mbps standard definition of broadband).

Carriers tap dance around criticism by suggesting that the data plan is technically unlimited because your data line will always work -- albeit at reduced speeds. But that long list of caveats is still very clearly "limits" by any modern understanding of the word. Carriers should have simply stopped using the word years ago, but because there was no real penalty outside of a wrist slap for misleading customers as to the limits on these connections, the behavior simply never stopped. Consumers like the simplicity of "unlimited" data. Cell carriers like to pretend they're providing it.

With the erosion of FCC authority and elimination of net neutrality protections, it's likely all of this is going to only get dumber should this looming lawsuit against the FCC go the industry's way (a ruling there is expected pretty much any day now). There's now no real penalty if an ISP wants to dramatically mislead consumers as to restrictions placed on a consumer's line, just as long as they bury a complicated explanation somewhere deep in their TOS. And more than a decade after carriers were first criticized for marketing "unlimited" data plans with very real limits, we appear to have made little to no real progress.

Filed Under: 5g, exaggerations, throttling, unlimited
Companies: verizon

Claims Of 5G Health Risks Are Frequently Based On A Single, 20 Year Old Flawed Graph

from the ill-communication dept

If you've spent any time on Twitter, you've probably seen a rising tide of folks expressing worry about the health impact of 5G.

To be clear, the widespread, long term impact 5G (especially millimeter wave) will have on human health hasn't been adequately studied yet, which makes absolutist claims on either side of this argument shaky from the start. As such, a lot of the recent health concerns being spread about 5G aren't based much on actual science, if they rely on actual science at all. Numerous news outlets (like RT) have similarly proclaimed that 5G will "kill you," without providing much in the way of hard evidence. Their recent segment on the "5G apocalypse" is just one of several the outlet has been running over the last few years or so:

This week however, the New York Times penned a report noting that one of the key bits of "evidence" used by those insisting 5G will be harmful wound up not being evidence at all. Since 2000, those professing that wireless signals can cause brain cancer have relied on a chart by physicist Bill P. Curry, proclaiming to show that tissue damage increases with the rising frequency of radio waves:

Curry's data was widely used to justify removing wireless communications from many schools, reposted repeatedly online by purported health experts, and even laid the foundation for several lawsuits alleging negative wireless health impacts. It wound up as the foundation for other, broader, but equally shaky theories. The only problem: it was never true. The graph failed to acknowledge that human skin tends to block higher frequencies, making the entire chart inaccurate:

"It doesn’t penetrate,” said Christopher M. Collins, a professor of radiology at New York University who studies the effect of high-frequency electromagnetic waves on humans. Dr. Curry’s graph, he added, failed to take into account “the shielding effect.” You Make the Call: ‘Moving Forward With the American Dream’ in New Jersey Dr. Marvin C. Ziskin, an emeritus professor of medical physics at Temple University School of Medicine, agreed. For decades, Dr. Ziskin explored whether such high frequencies could sow illness. Many experiments, he said, support the safety of high-frequency waves."

Having reported on this subject a few times, I will say that this is a seedier, deeper rabbit hole than you might think. While Russian news outlets do seem to be enjoying amplifying fear on this subject, there's plenty of home grown folks pushing 5G health risk claims as well. I've found a long line of academics happy to go on the record claiming 5G could pose a health risk. I've also found plenty of others proclaiming any health concerns are fluff and nonsense. But pretty uniformly you'll find one consensus buried under the mess: far, far more study is necessary before anybody engages in absolutism one way or the other.

Filed Under: 5g, bill curry, fearmongering, health risks, radiation, research, studies, wireless

5G's Latest Problem: Summer Temps Are Causing 5G Phones To Overheat

from the this-is-all-going-really-well dept

Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon's falsely telling everyone 5G will help cure cancer, but its actual deployments have been spotty and expensive.

5G device support barely exists. Apple is in no rush to get its first phones to market. The promise of 5G as a competitive and rural coverage panacea has been vastly overstated. And most surveys suggest US consumers (who already pay some of the highest data prices in the developed world) are more interested in lower bills than faster speeds. All of which is to say that 5G isn't quite the Earth-shattering revolution it has been heralded as by carriers and network vendors eager to sell more cell phones and network hardware.

There's another wrinkle being noticed by some of the folks putting these networks through their paces. Qualcomm's first generation 5G modem chipsets appear prone to overheating in summer temps, something oddly missing from the industry's marketing hype. It's a problem that's plaguing numerous carriers, according to Sascha Segan and PCMag:

"On a hot Las Vegas morning, my two Galaxy S10 5G phones kept overheating and dropping to 4G. This behavior is happening with all of the millimeter-wave, first-generation, Qualcomm X50-based phones when temperatures hit or exceed 85 degrees. We saw it with T-Mobile in New York, with Verizon in Providence, and now with AT&T in Las Vegas. It's happened on Samsung and LG phones, with Samsung, Ericsson, and Nokia network hardware."

Current 4G LTE smartphones integrate everything into one chip. Early 5G chipsets require numerous chips including a chip for the 5G mmWave modem and the mmWave antenna modules. As a result, current 5G chipsets take up a lot more room and generate notably more heat than their 4G equivalent. And while better chips are expected to arrive in time, it's another example of how early 5G adoption isn't really worth it, especially given this connectivity is being priced at a steep premium over already costly 4G LTE plans.

Again, faster, more reliable networks are always a good thing, and in time 5G will be an important natural evolution, whenever it's fully cooked and widely available. But the absurd hype we've been subjected to up to this point (5G will cure cancer! 5G will result in four day work weeks!) is actually undermining the technology. Instead of showing consumers why 5G is important, carriers and hardware vendors rushed 5G tech to market, overstated what it can do, and misrepresented where it's available, leaving consumers with the distinct impression 5G is largely just undercooked bullshit.

Filed Under: 5g, hype, overheating

NASA, NOAA, and the Navy Tell The FCC Its 5G Plan Will Harm Weather Forecasting

from the ill-communication dept

The Ajit Pai FCC has pissed off yet another subset of the population still reliant on factual data.

Scientists and researchers at NASA, NOAA, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have been warning that the wireless industry's use of select bands for 5G could interfere with transmissions of weather-satellite imagery. In a letter (pdf) sent to the FCC last month, warning that the industry's plan to use 24GHz band could severely hamper weather forecasting. The FCC recently auctioned off spectrum in this band for private companies, but a growing roster of scientists say precautions weren't taken first:

"NOAA and NASA have conducted studies that show interference in passive collection at the 23.6-24 GHz band from the adjacent 5G band (24.25 GHz); as such it is expected that interference will result in a partial-to-complete loss of remotely sensed water-vapor measurements. It is also expected that impacts will be concentrated in urban areas of the United States first."

More plainly, water vapor emits radiation at 23.8GHz. Both the NOAA and NASA say monitoring these vapors won't be possible if the neighboring band is too noisy. Things like hurricane forecasts, they say, could take up to two to three days longer if adequate protections aren't put in place. There's far more detail in this recent article in Nature, where academics note that while far more scientific study is needed, the interference potential here is a very real threat.

AT&T and other industry players recently gobbled up spectrum in the band at auction, and have an obvious vested interest in getting the spectrum in place quickly as they look to cash in on fifth generation wireless (5G). This being Ajit Pai, his response to the concerns has been to tell the NOAA, NASA, Navy, and AMS that they don't know what they're talking about. Senators have since pressed Pai to provide insight into exactly what his agency did to mitigate the potential harm:

"Explain and provide supporting documentation related to the FCC's public interest analysis, including any cost-benefit analysis, on the FCC's emissions limit. In particular, explain how the FCC addressed the costs to taxpayers from the loss of billions of dollars of investment in weather-sensing satellites, the costs to public safety and national security, and to the nation's commercial activities that rely on this critical weather data."

As if on cue, representatives of the "American Consumer Institute" (a non-profit pretending to be a consumer advocacy firm but actually backed by big telecom companies) has been pushing editorials trying to claim the problem doesn't actually exist either, and that the Navy, AMS, NASA, and NOAA are all somehow suffering from some form of scientific delusion. Meanwhile a separate but similar controversy has emerged over the FCC's plan for the 1675-1680MHz band. There too the American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Meteorological Society (AMS), Boeing, Accuweather, and National Weather Association (NWA) have all been warning the FCC that its spectrum sharing plan for that band could also cause forecasting problems.

It's yet another example of the discord created when you have a regulatory agency driven by ideology, alternative facts, and a blind fealty to big companies involved in overseeing issues that require nuance, objectivity, and at least a fleeting regard for science and data.

Filed Under: 5g, ams, fcc, interference, nasa, noaa, weather forecasting