At CES 2021, 5G was everywhere. It was the future of mobile communications that made self-driving cars, remote surgery, and augmented reality a reality. Low latency! capacity! It would change everything, we were told. Verizon and AT&T wrote big checks for new spectrum licenses, and T-Mobile gobbled up another network. very important To realize the 5G future as soon as possible and win the competition.
CES 2024 is just around the corner, and while just a few years ago carrier executives were enthusiastically shouting about 5G to their stakeholders, this time around we’re likely to hear a lot more whispers about it. You’ll be lucky to have it. It’s true that 5G is indeed here, but the great use cases we heard about years ago have yet to materialize. Instead, we have happy Swifties streaming concert footage and a new way to connect the internet to your home router. These are not bad! But deploying his 5G at the breakneck speed needed to win the hypothetical race meant he had one less major wireless carrier to choose from and a hefty debt to pay off. Network operators are now looking at every profit they can make, including to our wallets.
If there’s one poster child for the entire U.S. 5G landscape, it’s Verizon, the loudest company and biggest spender. The company spent $45.5 billion on new spectrum in the 2021 FCC license auction, nearly twice as much as AT&T. And you don’t have to guess whether investors are asking questions about when they will make a profit. Investors asked point-blank questions in the company’s latest earnings report. In response to this question, CEO Hans Vestberg said that while maintaining a balance between “providing customers with relevant offers” and “generating revenue ourselves,” CEO “Adjustment” was a nod. It was just a show of verbal gymnastics that meant nothing.
Verizon in particular has cried 5G wolf over and over again
But, albeit in an indirect way, the entire rest of Verizon’s earnings update is an indication of exactly where 5G is heading for the carrier. There is no talk of robotic surgery or self-driving cars.After all, all you need is standalone The 5G networks to deploy many of these are something that carriers are still gradually building out. Verizon in particular is guilty of crying 5G wolf many times. First, I tried to convey that mmWave is really her 5G. Although this is fast, it is too limited in scope for any use case. Then on the low band he tried to sell 5G, but in reality he turned out to be slower than 4G in some cases. The company is currently slowly converting its existing network to standalone 5G to shore up its mid-band spectrum, an effort that will take several years.
During the earnings call, Vestberg talked about the pillars of Verizon’s current 5G strategy: a private network for industrial and manufacturing businesses, a secure, high-bandwidth network that does not require a complete overhaul of the company’s national network. Pointed out the sale. But another investor who attended a recent earnings call said there was little mention of that possibility beyond a single word. What gives?
Vestberg says this is happening slowly. He has one problem that stands in the way of his company. RCR wireless news Editor-in-chief Sean Kinney explains: The Verge, That said, carriers aren’t really set up to sell services to specific industries. “When you sell 5G and edge computing services to hospitals, you need a sales organization that understands healthcare. We know. This is needed in every vertical industry: transportation, logistics, healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality. And it’s just hard.”
Deploying 5G in sectors such as manufacturing is also no easy task. First, not all manufacturers need his 5G. Kinney said it’s possible for certain types of manufacturing, such as automobiles, but that’s what most factories tend to be. old Also, it is not suitable for fast upgrades. “How could he insert a SIM card into the robotic arm he bought in 1982? He could do it, but was it worth it? Was it really delivered?”
“How do I insert a SIM card into my robotic arm that I bought in 1982?”
Instead, there is one use case for 5G that the big three networks are focusing on, and it’s been mentioned over and over again in their earnings reports. Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). If you’re keeping score at home, it’s the internet that reaches your home via radio waves rather than cable. T-Mobile and Verizon have been aggressively expanding their FWA services in recent years, and AT&T, which is “all about fiber,” is also getting started with Internet Air. While it’s nice for people to have multiple options for high-speed internet, it’s not like robotic surgery, and it’s not necessarily the best way to fix the dire state of home broadband.
If 5G has truly transformative benefits, it will likely be a combination of network advances and behavioral changes. People will start to see 5G work in situations where reliable data connectivity is not expected. Just ask the Taylor Swift fan he moved 29 terabytes of data in one day on AT&T’s network in Arlington, Texas. , a stop on the Elas tour. For crowded stadium events like this, the additional capacity of 5G can actually outperform his LTE.
AT&T spokesman Jim Greer said in an emailed statement to AT&T, noting that traffic across the company’s network is increasing 30 percent annually. The Verge “5G networks are the ‘killer apps’ that will change the way we live and work.” Perhaps 5G wasn’t. destinationThis makes sense. Your mind changes when you realize that you can actually stream video from a packed stadium, or that you don’t have to wait until he connects to his Wi-Fi at home to download something. It changes what you can expect from your connection.
Jeff Fieldhack, director of Counterpoint Research, also sees great potential in network slicing, which allows carriers to prioritize certain types of network traffic. This is important for safety-critical applications such as self-driving cars. According to Fieldhack, slicing allows networks to “prioritize cars passing through intersections, not YouTubers in the backseat.” For now, they can’t tell the two apart. There’s only one problem he has. As mentioned above, you need a standalone 5G network for this to work. This is something only his T-Mobile has achieved on a national scale. His 5G networks at AT&T and Verizon still rely heavily on his 4G core, and the switch to standalone 5G is a slow, multi-year project underway.
Even if 5G isn’t all smoke and mirrors, networks are being cornered
Maybe 5G isn’t completely smoke and mirrors. However, through fierce competition, the network pushed itself into a corner. They incurred large amounts of debt. During a recent earnings call, Verizon executives talked about the company’s desire to return debt to pre-spectrum auction levels. On the other hand, there is little return on these investments. This is due to high interest and declining smartphone sales. The network side thought it had the golden goose of 5G, but so far it’s just laying regular old eggs. And while they wait for their efforts to bear fruit, they look for other ways to increase their bottom line.
The easiest way to make more money is through what Verizon calls “pricing actions.” This is a good way to say “charge the customer more.” The company boasts that it will implement a “pricing policy that will exceed $1 billion a year in 2023,” and nevertheless boasts of keeping customer churn (customers leaving Verizon) low.
Maybe it’s because switching carriers is a hassle that most people don’t want to do, or maybe it’s because everyone is less sensitive to price increases due to inflation. But even if you decide to make the jump, it probably doesn’t help that most of us only have two other networks to choose from. And that’s another missing piece of the 5G puzzle. It’s his fourth wireless carrier, which was supposed to be made possible through his Sprint acquisition deal for T-Mobile.
We know this story. T-Mobile was able to swallow Sprint by selling Boost to Dish Network. Boost plans to use that as a springboard to become the nation’s fourth-largest wireless carrier while building its own standalone 5G network from the ground up. One in, one out. how is it? Well, Dish meets the coverage requirements set by the FCC as part of the deal. However, it is not as simple as saying, “If you build it, it will come.” When it was sold to Dish, Boost had 9 million subscribers. Now there are 7.5 million people. And, founder Charlie Ergen said during the company’s last earnings call, the “vast majority” of those 7.5 million people don’t have a cell phone that works on Dish’s proprietary network. Instead, it will run on AT&T or T-Mobile’s networks, which Dish has contracted as his MVNO.
More phones are starting to support Dish’s network bands, including the iPhone 15. But Ergen said the timing of T-Mobile’s shutdown of Sprint’s traditional CDMA network meant Dish had to quickly replace many phones at once for customers. When most of the new phones didn’t support the new network. Those customers may not be ready to replace their phone just yet. Dish will then face its toughest challenge yet: covering 70 percent, and in some cases 75 percent, of the population in each economic region in which it holds specific spectrum licenses. Achieving this goal “may require us to make significant additional investments or partner with other companies,” the company said in its third-quarter earnings report. Doesn’t inspire confidence at all.
5G tends to improve over time, especially as networks fully deploy standalone 5G. But perhaps we can stop holding our breath for those killer apps and accept the fact that technological progress is often slow and boring. We’re not progressing by leaps and bounds, but by base station. In the short term, its biggest impact is likely to be a more consolidated and more expensive wireless broadband market. If there’s any consolation in the fact that we probably won’t be seeing any 6G commercials for a while, it should be some solace.
