The Press Needs An Intervention When It Comes To Over-Hyping 5G

from the words-are-but-wind dept

By now we've made it very clear that while fifth generation wireless (5G) is good, it's being painfully over-hyped. Yes, better faster networks with lower latency are always a good thing. And, in time, these networks will power a lot of nifty things. But if you read press coverage of the technology, you'd walk away thinking that 5G is akin to some kind of mystical panacea; something you just sprinkle around on the sidewalk anytime you want innovation and magic to spring forth from between the cracks. It will somehow result in four-day workweeks, we're told. It will revolutionize cancer treatment, companies insist.

Wireless carriers facing slumping smartphone sales would certainly like you to think 5G is more revolutionary than it actually is. So would network hardware vendors eager to sell upgraded gear to those wireless carriers. But again, while faster networks are good, they're not magic, and it's the press' job to make it clear 5G is more evolution than revolution.

It's a hard lesson to learn, apparently. For example, this Tom's Hardware piece documenting five ways "5G will change your life" is rife with examples that will do nothing of the sort. Like this claim that 5G will somehow revolutionize the classroom:

"The faster speeds and lower latency that 5G will deliver will make AR and virtual reality transformative for kids in classrooms.

Toby Redshaw, Verizon's senior vice president of 5G innovation, offered a scenario in which 5G could make education more accessible: "You have a child that sits in a class for four hours. There's a presentation about China: a PowerPoint. It's a good environment. But there's another child in the class. [The teacher:] 'Put on that headset and we'll drop you into a 360-degree video so you can be [in China] without being there.' [The kid:] 'I'm flying over the Great Wall! That is unbelievable!' The second child had an experience. A whole chunk of his brain lit up. That immersive environment is between three and eight times more effective."

But guess what? Classrooms already have gigabit+ connectivity in the form of cheaper, more reliable WiFi. Why would said classrooms suddenly decided to pay Verizon for 5G to fuel their VR goggles, assuming VR is being used at all, when their existing connections can already easily power these technologies for less money? Another of the five examples in the piece, hospital diagnostics, suffers from the same logical problem:

"Just as 5G could make it easier for kids to experience subjects that most of us have only read about in books, next-gen speeds combined with augmented reality could also make it easier for doctors to learn and perfect procedures."

But as we just noted, no hospital is going to use 5G for next-gen VR and AR diagnostics when the kind of bandwidth 5G provides is already available over the hospital's existing WiFi or Ethernet connections. And no medical professional worth their salt is going to trust a sensitive medical procedure to a frequently capped and throttled cellular network. Especially when we're talking about Verizon, a company recently under fire for throttling and upselling firefighters as they attempted to fight one of the biggest fires in California history.

Other examples in the story are equally thin. Autonomous and smart cars, for example, can already use 4G networks. 5G might be faster and more reliable, but it's not going to just start crapping out autonomous cars in and of itself. Similarly, given what's likely to be high cost and spotty availability, 5G isn't really going to be a panacea when it comes to broadband competition either. In other words, four of the article's five "life changing" examples either aren't real or are being over-hyped. And like most of these reports, it ignores that thanks to regulatory capture, the biggest impact 5G is likely to have on most of us is going to be higher prices.

Filed Under: 5g, education, hype, journalism, wireless

Verizon Now Pretending That 5G Will Help Cure Cancer

from the ill-communication dept

Fifth-generation wireless (5G) will be a good thing when it finally arrives at scale in a few years, in that faster, more reliable networks are always good. But at the same time, 5G's capabilities have been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers and network hardware vendors looking to sell more cell phones and network hardware. Cellular carriers appear to be in a race to to broadly misrepresent not only what 5G is capable of--but where and when it will actually be available to the public at large.

Verizon, who has scolded other companies for over-hyping the technology, has been one of the biggest culprits in over-hyping 5G. On any given day Verizon's executives and marketing efforts can be found claiming that 5G will revolutionize the planet, magically enabling the smart cities and smart cars of tomorrow. In recent months, the company's marketing has proclaimed that 5G will somehow result in massive evolutionary leaps in medical technology, its ads going so far as to suggest that surgeons will soon be more accurate:

If you look at the replies to that Tweet, the message isn't being received too well by the public. Most are curious why they'd trust any medical procedure to a cellular connection. And many more have wondered why anybody would put their life in the hands of a company recently busted throttling and upselling firefighters as they struggled to battle the biggest wildfire in California's history. That's not stopping Verizon, which has been running several video ads -- replete with sad music -- claiming that 5G will even revolutionize cancer treatment:

When you visit Verizon's website to learn more, you'll quickly find there's not much there in the way of evidence supporting Verizon's claims. Yes, faster, lower latency networks are good in general, but they alone won't magically create new, innovative technology. And much of the stuff Verizon is hyping (like smart cars) can run just as well on 4G networks. The generational bump from 4G to 5G is more of a natural evolution than a revolution, and while the public will benefit -- we're not talking about some world-shaking paradigm shift.

As for 5G's impact on medicine, when I spoke to an ER doctor last week about Verizon's claims, he noted that 5G isn't even likely to be widely used for hospital diagnostics or treatment, since the lion's share of that technology will use existing hospital gigabit WiFi and Ethernet connections:

"Christian Dameff, an ER doctor and cyber security researcher at the University of California, San Diego, told Motherboard that hospitals generally utilize WiFi or Ethernet connections that already deliver the gigabit speeds and low latency that Verizon is advertising for 5G networks.

“The use of mobile connectivity such as 4G is rare in medical devices or diagnostic equipment because hospitals have traditionally relied on local connections as the primary architecture for their vast networks,” Dameff said. “WiFi and Ethernet currently simplifies disparate system integration, scales better, and is the status quo over most of the healthcare industry in the United States."

5G might have some application in remote diagnostics and treatment, but there too the revolutionary impact will be far more modest than Verizon suggests. Dameff argued that if Verizon really wanted to cure cancer, it would take money spent on ads over-hyping 5G, and actually donate that to cancer research:

"I do not see any significant cancer breakthroughs being dependent on 5G,” Dameff said. “In my opinion, we should take the money spent on these well-produced commercials touting medical advantages of 5G and donate them to cancer research. That would help cancer patients more than 5G itself."

Ultimately Verizon's hype is a disservice to itself. By routinely overstating availability and capability, Verizon is associating 5G in the public's mind with bluster and bullshit. That may help sell Luddite politicians on Verizon's desired policy agendas in DC, but it won't help Verizon in terms of its longer-term goal: accelerating stalled smartphone sales and the purchase of more expensive data plans.

Filed Under: 5g, cancer, telemedicine, wireless
Companies: verizon

Trump Ponders Banning All Chinese-Made Gear From US 5G Networks

from the unintended-consequences dept

We've already noted extensively how the "race to fifth generation wireless (5G)" is kind of a dumb thing. While 5G is important in the way that faster, better networks are always important, the purported Earth-rattling benefits of the technology have been painfully over-hyped. And they've been painfully over-hyped largely for two reasons: one, mobile carriers want to give a kick to stalling cellphone sales numbers, and network hardware vendors like Cisco want to drive the adoption of new, more expensive, telecom hardware.

The "race to 5G" isn't a race. And even if it were, our broadband maps are so intentionally terrible, we'd have no idea if and when we'd won it. Regardless, 5G has subsequently become a sort of magic pixie dust of tech policy conversations, justifying all manner of sometimes dubious policy. But the underlying desire to simply sell more kit has also infected the Trump administration's protectionist attacks on companies like Huawei, which is based on about 40% actual cybersecurity concerns, and 60% lobbying efforts by US hardware vendors that don't want to compete with cheaper Chinese hardware.

The Trump administration's war on Chinese network manufacturers has not been subtle, even though evidence supporting wholesale spying allegations against companies like Huawei has been arguably lacking. This week rumblings emerged that the Trump administration would soon be accelerating this effort by potentially banning absolutely any Chinese-made hardware from being used in US 5G networks, at all:

"As the Journal noted, such a requirement would force European companies Nokia Corp. and Ericsson, which currently dominate the sales of equipment to U.S. wireless carriers, to move their operations out of China or potentially lose access to the American market. That could potentially have a bigger impact on the market than any deal to end the ongoing trade standoff, as it may permanently alter the global technology markets—though both Nokia and Ericsson have already started working on plans to pull out of China due to the Trump administration’s escalating trade war tariffs."

There's a few problems with this. One remains the fact that despite an 18 month investigation, nobody has been able to provide a shred of proof that Huawei spies on Americans wholesale, the very allegation that began this whole effort. Two, smaller US telecom carriers say such bans will have a profoundly negative impact on their ability to compete in the States, since cheaper Chinese gear helps them better manage the tight margins of deploying service to lower ROI areas:

"RWA’s members estimate it might cost from $800 million to $1 billion for them to replace all the potentially affected gear from their wireless networks—costs they believe the government is legally required to reimburse."

Guess who'll pay for that? Hint: not carriers or the government.

The other problem is the myopic focus on Chinese telecom equipment. If the concern genuinely is cybersecurity, what about the Chinese hardware that exists in everything from smart refrigerators to residential routers? This all contains a universe of Chinese-made hardware susceptible to supply chain attacks. And what about the vast universe of shitty, poorly-secured IOT Chinese hardware that Americans happily connect to their home and business networks every day? If cybersecurity, and not say protectionism, is the real motivator, why is the focus so narrowly tailored to just telecom equipment?

Another problem remains the US' hypocrisy on this subject. The NSA, with BFF AT&T, have been busted repeatedly spying on everything and everyone. The statement being made here is obvious to anybody not infected by patriotic fervor: it's OK to covertly spy on the world if you're the United States, but the faintest allegation of China doing the same thing will result in a massive protectionist ban. The same kind of ban we'd be freaking out over were the shoe to be on the other foot.

Again, none of this is to say that China is an angel or that it doesn't routinely engage in some terrible behavior. But the Trump administration's "solution" to these problems is light on evidence, myopic to a fault, largely hypocritical, and fails to really address the bigger problems at hand if concern for cybersecurity is genuinely the driving motivator.

Filed Under: 5g, china, infrastructure, surveillance, telecom gear
Companies: cisco, ericsson, huawei, nokia

DOJ Floats A Truly Stupid Idea To Salvage The Sprint, T-Mobile Merger

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 megaunion, rumors are that DOJ staffers remain highly skeptical about the purported benefits of the deal. The sticking point remains the same: that the merger would reduce overall competition in the space by 25%, a move that historically almost always results in higher consumer prices, and less effort and innovation overall. Unions and Wall Street analysts also believe the deal will eliminate anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 jobs as redundant positions are inevitably eliminated, something T-Mobile continues to deny.

While Sprint and T-Mobile lobbyists continue to apply as much pressure as they can in a bid for regulatory approval, there's every indication the DOJ remains highly resistant to their charms. For example, Bloomberg reports that one proposed condition being pushed by the DOJ is the mandatory creation of an entirely new fourth competitor in the wake of the deal. In short, T-mobile and Sprint would be forced to divest spectrum and other assets to create a fourth competitor to keep the market semi-healthy:

"Top Justice Department officials want T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp. to lay the groundwork for a new wireless carrier -- with its own network -- as a condition to clearing their $26.5 billion merger, according to a person familiar with matter.

The two companies have been pondering additional concessions that could help win Justice Department approval for their deal, said people with knowledge of the discussions, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. But the idea of spinning off a full-fledged national competitor would be a high bar for T-Mobile and Sprint to meet.

And while that might sound good to some folks as a way to mitigate overall competitive harm, the problem would be one of enforcement.

When they can be bothered to impose beneficial conditions on telecom mergers at all, US regulators have a long, proud history of not really bothering to enforce them. Comcast, for example, not only volunteered most of the conditions affixed to the company's 2011 mega union with NBC, it repeatedly failed to adhere to most of them with little to no penalty. And Spectrum was recently found to have largely lied to regulators about meeting broadband deployment promises affixed to its megaunion with Time Warner Cable. In telecom it's a problem that goes back decades, with companies like AT&T also routinely being allowed to tap dance around numerous conditions affixed to its acquisition of BellSouth and countless other companies.

Having regulators enforce merger conditions on a good day is usually an uphill climb. Expecting them to steer the creation and protection of an entirely new company for decades isn't something government's likely to excel at. And given his FCC has yet to stand up to the industry on a single issue of substance, anybody expecting Ajit Pai to be a functional beat cop here hasn't been paying much attention.

It's unlikely Sprint and T-Mobile are particularly keen on such a proposal, given it hamstrings what is, to them, the two biggest benefits of the deal: less overall competition, and a massive trove of wireless spectrum. But even if they did sign off on such a plan, it's hard to see how just blocking the deal outright to protect the four competitors we already have isn't a much cleaner and simpler solution.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, doj, mobile carriers
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

Unsurprisingly, Ajit Pai's FCC Thinks The T-Mobile Sprint Merger Will Be Wonderful

from the man-of-the-people dept

For the last year, Sprint and T-Mobile have been pushing a large number of bogus claims justifying their $26 billion competition and job-eroding megamerger. One, that the deal will create jobs (false). Two, that the deal is necessary to deploy fifth-gen (5G) wireless (false). Three, that reducing the number of major wireless competitors from four to three will somehow create more competition (false, just ask Canadians or the Irish how that works out in practice).

There's really no debate over whether such significant consolidation is bad for the market, consumers, and employees. You need only look to 30 years of US telecom history to discover that such growth for growth's sake uniformly results in less competition, in turn resulting in higher prices, fewer jobs, and worse customer support. It's a major reason everybody hates Comcast. It's also easy to find a long, long list of companies that made all manner of pie in the sky promises pre-merger, only to fail utterly to adhere to any of them.

It's a major reason why similar deals--both AT&T's attempted acquisition of T-Mobile in 2011 and Sprint's attempted merger in 2014--were blocked by regulators, something that helped drive more competition to market.

Given Ajit Pai has become a sort of poster child for regulatory capture of late, he's not particularly keen on learning from telecom history. His agency this week unsurprisingly announced it would be approving the merger after T-Mobile made several concessions. Among them, T-Mobile promised to deploy 5G wireless broadband to 97% of the US population within three years of the closing of the merger and 99% of Americans within six years. That convinced Pai that the deal would be in the best interests of the American public:

"Two of the FCC’s top priorities are closing the digital divide in rural America and advancing United States leadership in 5G, the next generation of wireless connectivity. The commitments made today by TMobile and Sprint would substantially advance each of these critical objectives....The construction of this network and the delivery of such high-speed wireless services to the vast majority of Americans would substantially benefit consumers and our country as a whole."

As usual, however, Pai was a bit casual with the facts. For one thing, both T-Mobile and Sprint were already on record saying they would have deployed these networks anyway to compete with AT&T and Verizon. The other major problem, obviously, is no matter how many conditions T-Mobile volunteers, consumer advocates are hard pressed to believe that Pai would actually enforce any of them:

"Industry watchers doubt whether Pai’s FCC would enforce conditions given the agency’s unwillingness to stand up to major carriers on a litany of subjects, ranging from the foot-dragging on implementing robocall tech, casual treatment of consumer location data, and repair delays in the wake of hurricanes in both Florida and Puerto Rico.

“Does anyone really believe that this FCC, which has asked nothing of the big mobile companies for over 2 years will require the companies to abide by these commitments?” former FCC lawyer Gigi Sohn told Motherboard via email."

For what it's worth, the Department of Justice remains skeptical that the deal's benefits will outweigh its harms. And there are several state AGs who've said they'll sue to block the deal even if it's approved.

While T-Mobile's disruptive nature (again, largely made possible because regulators blocked AT&T from gobbling it up) and its brash CEO tend to confuse some folks into thinking that somehow this merger will be different, you'd be hard pressed to find a single consumer group (you know, the folks paid a pittance to protect end users) that supports the deal. And unions continue to argue that the deal will be a mammoth job killer as the combined company inevitably eliminates duplicate HQs and redundant retail and support personnel. You'd be hard pressed to find a single telecom megamerger in US history that didn't result in higher prices, job reductions, and terrible customer service, a major reason Comcast is the country's biggest broadband provider and one of the least liked companies in America.

But time after time, companies are able to pay a rotating crop of consultants and economists to pinky swear that this deal will somehow be the one to finally fix a market broken by endless consolidation. And time after time, well-heeled lawmakers, revolving door regulators and unskeptical reporters are quick to believe them, driving the market further away from healthy competition and toward obvious monopolized dysfunction.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, merger
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

Consensus Quietly Builds That 5G Was Overhyped, Rushed To Market

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.

If you looked past press releases you'd notice that Verizon's early launches required the use of $200 battery add on mod because we still haven't really figured out the battery drain issues presented by 5G's power demands. You'd also notice the growing awareness that the long-hyped millimeter wave spectrum being used for many deployments have notable distance and line of sight issues, meaning that rural and much of suburban America will not likely see the speeds you'll frequently see bandied about in marketing issues, and many of the same coverage gap issues you see with current-gen broadband are likely to persist.

If you looked past the headlines you'd probably noticed that even Wall Street was concerned that 5G was being over-hyped and wasn't yet ready for prime time. Those concerns continue to be expressed largely in industry trade magazines, where you'll often find stock jocks noting that most of the purported promises of 5G remain well over the horizon:

"What of the other fancy features of 5G, like massive IoT and ultra low latency? Specifications for those technologies are scheduled for availability in -- wait for it -- 2020, when the 3GPP's Release 16 is scheduled to be finished.

"We believe the current investment opportunity associated with 5G is limited and unlikely to drive meaningful incremental upside for companies involved considering the mature state of the smartphone market," wrote the analysts at Wall Street research firm Cowen in a recent note to investors."

None of this is to say that these early deployments aren't providing some very useful knowledge that will inform broader deployment. And when "real" 5G does start to slowly materialize over the next decade or so the ultra-low latency and high-speeds will ultimately help improve connectivity -- provided it's available to you. But consumer groups like the EFF continue to point out how 5G hype is obscuring our repeated failure to deploy fiber (necessary to feed cellular towers) across America despite countless billions in subsidies having been thrown at telecom giants:

"All this hype over 5G networks by these large companies has done little to answer fundamental questions in the U.S. broadband market: why are the largest ISPs not aggressively deploying fiber to the home despite its proven track record of profits and success? How is it that the United States, as the FCC has recently acknowledged, starting to slow down on fiber to the home, whereas the rest of the world moving is faster? Fiber to the home is cheap to upgrade to even higher speeds once it is laid, making it an infrastructure investment that will be good for decades to come. And its top speeds are already dwarfing even the loftiest 5G hyped assertions."

Meanwhile, these early 5G marketing missteps are creating an aura of distrust in the minds of American consumers. Instead of being directly and clearly shown what the standard can do in the form of fully-cooked product, consumers are being taught that carriers still can't really be trusted to accurately portray where or when the technology will be available to them. And that's of course before you get to how much more 5G is going to cost everyone, or how many nickel-and-dime restrictions will be included in these next-generation networks in the wake of the repeal of net neutrality, hampering its full competitive potential.

Filed Under: 5g, overhype, wireless

The DOJ Isn't Buying T-Mobile's Nonsensical Merger Benefit Claims

from the ill-communication dept

Back in 2011 DOJ regulators blocked AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile, arguing that that the deal would have harmed consumers and resulted in higher rates by eliminating one of just four major wireless players. That's a pretty easy argument to make, given every time a country allows four wireless carriers to morph into three, the sector gets less competitive and prices go up (see: Ireland or Canada). Blocking the deal wound up being a good thing: T-Mobile went on to be even more disruptive, and has helped introduce a number of consumer-friendly market shifts like cheaper international roaming and the death of long-term contracts.

In 2014 T-Mobile and Sprint tried to merge, and regulators (quite correctly) pointed out the deal wouldn't be good for consumers or the market, and blocked it from happening.

Fast forward to 2019, and T-Mobile is once again trying to merge with Sprint, hoping to take advantage of the Trump era to finally overcome regulatory scrutiny. Both companies have been telling everyone who'll listen that reducing the total number of competitors will somehow boost competition in the sector. Not too surprisingly, even in this era of blind telecom sector fealty, regulators are having a hard time swallowing this particular pill. Both Reuters and the Wall Street Journal cite DOJ insiders who say that the DOJ isn't likely to approve the deal in its current form:

"The U.S. Justice Department has told T-Mobile US Inc and Sprint Corp it has concerns about their proposed $26 billion merger in its current structure, sources familiar with the matter said on Tuesday, although no final decision has been made.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere was quick to insist the "premise" of the report was "simply untrue":

The CEO didn't get into which aspect of the story he took issue with, but it's not just the DOJ that has expressed skepticism of the deal's benefits. A growing array of state regulators and attorneys general have also started kicking back against the deal, expressing concern that more consolidation is probably the very last thing the already arguably broken US telecom sector needs right now. While T-Mobile claims merging with Sprint will create a bigger, better third competitor, that's simply not how telecom works historically. Fewer competitors equals less competition, and higher prices. History suggests that's not really debatable.

Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett tells me his research firm dropped the chance of merger approval from around 50% to 33% given the growing state-level opposition, public disdain, and the growing call for more meaningful US antitrust enforcement in the way of the DOJ's bungled AT&T Time Warner merger kerfuffle.

Granted the deal could still be approved. Pai's FCC is likely to rubber stamp the deal without much thought. And the DOJ could approve the deal given the right combination of conditions. Given the vast army of revolving door lobbyists T-Mobile has under its belt (ranging from Trump ally Corey Lewandowski to former FCC Commissioners like Mignon Clyburn and Robert McDowell), there's a lot of firepower aimed at getting this deal done, regardless of how terrible history says it's going to be for consumers, competition, and a healthy wireless market.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, doj, mobile operators
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

Verizon's 'World First' 5G Launch Was A Bit of a Dud

from the underwhelmed 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 the sense that faster, more resilient networks are always important), the idea that 5G will fundamentally transform the broken broadband market tends to overshoot the mark.

Under the din of hype, groups like the EFF have repeatedly warned that fixating on the technology obscures the industry's failure to deploy fiber broadband to countless Americans despite billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks. Fiber that's essential in driving 5G outside of major metro markets.

Meanwhile, companies like Verizon continue to overstate not only what 5G can do, but where it's available. A closer look at Verizon's "Home 5G" service (which affixes a 5G antenna to user homes) in cities like Sacramento has found it to be barely available. Last week, Verizon again heralded the "world first" launch of truly mobile 5G service in both Chicago and Minneapolis. Again however reporters who visited the city to cover the launch walked away unimpressed, noting that while speeds were blisteringly fast (upwards of 500 Mbps on the test network), actually getting a steady signal was largely impossible:

"Even carefully positioned a few feet away from the 5G node, the large on-screen icon exclaiming Verizon's 5G network toggled back and forth from 4G to 5G," CNET said. "After two hours, we had run maybe one clean Speedtest.net app side by side with the Galaxy S10 Plus." Samsung's phone is a 4G LTE device.

The Verge said, "coverage is so extremely sparse that, for right now, I'd caution anyone against buying the 5G Moto Mod and paying Verizon an extra $10 every month to receive 5G," even though it found "blazing fast data speeds."

Again, this was a PR network, with little to no actual congestion on it, so it should have performed notably better than this. But the trials highlighted a technology that's clearly not ready for prime time. Only one, unimpressive phone supports these early launches right now (the Motorola Moto Z3), and even then, to actually get the phone to work required an additional $200 "mod" for the device. A mod that contained not just the necessary mmWave antennas needed to get 5G signal, but an additional battery pack to handle the immense battery drain issue phone manufacturers haven't solved yet.

That doesn't sound like much of an industrial revolution. Verizon, for its part, apparently tried to blame phone icons for the patchy availability of its shiny new product:

"When people try and look for coverage, the way the icon works on the phone is different than it works in the past," Mike Haberman, Verizon's vice president of network engineering, told CNBC, noting that the icon that shows a 5G connection only appears when you try to use 5G. So, unlike 4G LTE, right now you don't see the 5G icon even in a coverage area. That will change in a couple of years."

Granted, that just floats over the fact that reviewers couldn't get any 5G signal at all for the lion's share of their testing last week. Verizon appears to have rushed these launches just so it could claim it beat the South Koreans to market, even if that means fielding a product nobody's all-that impressed by. That this might result in consumers associating 5G with empty hype apparently hasn't crossed executives' minds.

Again, some early bleeding edge hiccups aren't unexpected, and these early efforts will likely be a far cry from what we'll see once hardware is more fully cooked and 5G is more fully deployed. But Wall Street analysts like Craig Moffett also told me this week that after crunching the numbers, he's skeptical that Verizon's 5G plans can affordably scale across the United States:

"Yes, it will be better than 4G eventually, and it will be great for supporting huge numbers of low bandwidth IoT connections,” Moffett said. “But broad-based availability of the kinds of insane speeds people have gotten so excited reading about won’t be available for many, many years, if at all."

To hear carriers tell it, 5G was supposed to provide ubiquitous connectivity coast to coast as a much-less expensive alternative to the fiber connections companies like Verizon refused to fully deploy. But as Moffett's data analysis points out, there's increasing skepticism that's not going to be the case. While 5G will be incredibly useful in urban areas, even Wall Street thinks it's going to fall short in terms of driving next-gen connectivity to the more rural and less affluent urban and suburban corners of America that need it most.

And this is all before you factor in price and network restrictions. Americans already pay some of the highest prices for mobile data in the developed world, something that's only going to continue in the face of regulatory apathy and wireless industry consolidation. And despite greater capacity, 5G connections are almost certain to include additional restrictions in the face of net neutrality's demise, almost certain to at least partially curtail the technology's utility and potential in a bid for even bigger revenues.

Filed Under: 5g
Companies: verizon

Another Study Finds Verizon's 5G Is Barely Available, Not Scaleable

from the big-old-hype-parade dept

We've talked a lot about how while fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a good thing (in that faster, more reliable networks are always good), it's been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers and network hardware vendors looking to justify high prices and sell network gear and handsets. It has also been accompanied by what appears to be a race between cellular carriers to broadly misrepresent what 5G is capable of, and where and when it will actually be available.

At the heart of a lot of this hype has been Verizon, which routinely insists 5G is the "fourth industrial revolution," and will almost mystically result in a universe of smart cities and smarter supporting technologies. Ironically, while saying all of this, Verizon executives publicly warn about carriers over-hyping 5G. For example here's a Verizon blog post from last January:

"The potential for 5G is awesome, but the potential to over-hype and under-deliver on the 5G promise is a temptation that the wireless industry must resist. If network providers, equipment manufacturers, handset makers, app developers and others in the wireless ecosystem engage in behavior designed to purposefully confuse consumers, public officials and the investment community about what 5G really is, we risk alienating the very people we want most to join in developing and harnessing this exciting new technology."

And that's a good point. Carriers desperately want consumers to be excited about 5G, but by over-hyping the technology (or misrepresenting it completely as AT&T did when it pretended its 4G network was 5G) the companies risk associating 5G with hype and bullshit.

That said, Verizon hasn't listened to its own advice. Analysts and reporters keep finding that Verizon's 5G network "launches" so far are largely fluff and nonsense. One analyst recently noted how Verizon's 5G "launch" in Sacramento was, in reality, barely a launch. And absolutely not something Verizon could quickly replicate at any real scale:

"This is not what I expected," Lum said.

Instead of a city covered with 5G signals, and a network geared for mobile services, Lum said he instead found select locations in Sacramento where Verizon built a network that seems exclusively designed to offer fixed wireless services to a handful of potential customers.

Basically, Lum's big takeaway from his work is that, if Verizon wants to cover all of Sacramento with mobile 5G at 28GHz, "you're talking about a crapload of poles."

"I don't think there's enough people in the industry to deploy these," Lum added, noting that antennas would need to be installed every 1,000 feet or so, and each would need the requisite permits, power, backhaul and technicians capable of doing the work. And that labor would have to be replicated at each street corner across Sacramento and, ultimately, across every major and minor city in the country. "I think there's a long way to go," Lum concluded, estimating a ten-year buildout timeline for such an endeavor."

5G will rely heavily on small cells or micro-cellular towers positioned on city lamp posts. Another more recent piece of analysis by telecom analyst Craig Moffett found that just 6% of Sacremento could actually get Verizon 5G in the city, again suggesting the company not only dramatically over-hyped availability, but again questioning how easy it will be for Verizon to duplicate these efforts at national scale. He also ironically found that 5G deployment costs are comparable to what it will cost to deploy fiber, which is generally seen as more efficient and more reliable:

"To us, the most interesting statistic isn't so much the low take rate as it is the relatively low coverage, as it illustrates the enormity of the challenge of scaling a small network, in neighborhood after neighborhood, across the United States," Moffett wrote...The report notes that the cost of the drop for fixed wireless broadband (it could dip to about $200) is lower than it is for an FTTP network (about $700), but the "passing cost" is about the same. The difference maker, Moffett said, is the number of homes that are eligible for service and the ultimate take rate. The low penetration rate Verizon has seen thus far for 5G Home in Sacramento isn't nearly enough to achieve economics that are better than a typical FTTP network example, the report found.

"Our analysis suggests that costs will likely be much higher (that is, cell radii appear smaller) and penetration rates lower than initially expected," the report explained. "If those patterns are indicative of what is to come in a broader rollout, it would mean a much higher cost per connected home, and therefore much lower returns on capital, than what might have been expected from Verizon's advance billing."

Verizon has taken a lot of heat for effectively letting its aging DSL lines rot on the vine as executives shifted its focus from fiber to wireless. And while Verizon would have you believe 5G is a perfectly symmetrical alternative to fiber, that's just not true. Neither is the idea that 5G is going to come in and magically bring oodles of new competition to these neglected markets, something both AT&T and Verizon are quietly making obvious.

Again, the faster, lower-latency connections 5G will deliver will be a good thing -- provided it's actually available in your neighborhood anytime soon and you can afford the premium Verizon intends to charge for it. But over-hyping what 5G can do and where it's available is only going to bite the industry on the ass as it generates distrust among consumers who otherwise might be genuinely excited about the tech. It's a bit of dysfunction Verizon would be smart to heed its own advice on.

Filed Under: 5g, hype, marketing, scalability
Companies: verizon

Verizon Confirms That Yes, 5G Will Cost You Extra

from the nothing's-shocking dept

By now we've established that while fifth-generation (5G) wireless will result in faster, more resilient networks, the technology has been over-hyped to an almost nauseating degree. Yes, faster, lower latency networks are a good thing, but 5G is not as paradigm-rattling as most wireless carriers and hardware vendors have led many in the press to believe. 5G is more of a useful evolution than a revolution, but it has become the equivalent of magic pixie dust in tech policy circles, wherein if you simply say "it will lead to faster deployment of 5G!" you'll immediately add gravitas to your otherwise underwhelming K Street policy pitch.

Throughout all of the hype, carriers have been really hesitant to discuss what's perhaps the most important question: how much will 5G cost? After all, next-generation connectivity is only going to help boost broadband competition if it's both ubiquitous and affordable, two things the US wireless industry has never really been known for. And now that the carrier lobbyists have effectively convinced the Pai FCC to neuter itself, that question has only become more important.

It's starting to become clear why carriers haven't wanted to much talk about price. AT&T's early offerings haven't been much to write home about. And this week Verizon took the wraps off the pricing for its mobile 5G offerings, noting that consumers will need to pay $10 extra per month across the board if they're interested in using it:

"Verizon has decided to treat its emerging mobile 5G network as a premium service that customers should pay more to access. The company is debuting its mobile 5G network next month at select locations in Chicago and Minneapolis, but customers wishing to use it will need a new phone and a new, costlier plan.

Verizon confirmed its new Mobile 5G service will require a new premium unlimited plan, starting at $85. That is $10 more than Verizon’s current GoUnlimited plan. Customers will also need a Motorola Moto Z3 phone — currently the only model compatible with Verizon’s 5G network, and a special 5G Moto Mod attachment, sold separately."

In other words, 5G will cost you extra. Which isn't surprising if you've watched Verizon at all over the last decade or two.

Granted some will try and claim that Verizon should charge more due to the high costs of 5G deployment. That ignores the fact that US consumers already pay some of the highest prices for 4G LTE mobile data in the developed world. That also ignores that Verizon just nabbed incalculable countless billions from the Trump tax cuts and a litany of policy favors from the FCC, money the company has already acknowledged won't be put back into the network. That money was, if you have a memory, supposed to go toward significant new jobs and network investment, according to Verizon.

Verizon's charging more because it doesn't believe it will be adequately punished by competitors for doing so. And it doesn't worry about competition because while the wireless sector (including T-Mobile) talks a good game, they still usually refuse to seriously compete on price. And with the looming Sprint and T-Mobile merger preparing to reduce the total number of major competitors in the space from four to three, that's not getting better anytime soon.

That brings us to the other major question users should be asking about 5G. In a post net neutrality landscape where the FCC no longer seriously has the authority to hold wireless carriers accountable, what kind of annoying restrictions will be placed on these lines? Verizon (who already charges some "unlimited" data customers more to stream video in HD) hasn't affixed any on these early 5G markets yet, but should the FCC win its looming lawsuit over the net neutrality repeal, all bets are off.

Filed Under: 5g, costs, fees
Companies: verizon