There has been a failure of coordination between the government’s 5G strategy and the independent regulator’s “competition and spectrum” regulatory strategies. They have been pulling in opposite directions. At the very time the UK needs to roll out a more expensive high performing wireless infrastructure, the regulator has been sucking excessive oxygen out of the UK’s infrastructure investment capacity.
Read more →One of the hardest things to do is to reverse the habits of a lifetime. The mobile industry, with the support of governments and national regulators, has spent almost its entire lifetime looking upwards to the next higher band in the spectrum to continue its success story. But that path is no longer sustainable. The spectrum capacity for the next big wireless network upgrading will have to come by making more efficient use of the mid and low mobile bands.
Read more →With the precision of a swiss watch, no sooner has 5G just started to be rolled out in 2020 than the first conversations began on 6G. Many mobile operators were aghast at the thought of there ever being a 6G, as they struggled to convince their shareholders that the substantial 5G investments still to come […]
Read more →An eye witness account of what went wrong and then what went right for 5G
Read more →One component part of 6G can already be identified today – the part that will be needed in the Gb/s era to deliver the 5G vision of the pervasive perception of unlimited capacity
Read more →If the industry had gone to the 5G auction seeking an equal share of the spectrum they would have paid £30m. Instead they paid £1.16 billion. Yet despite this record sum, nobody emerged with the amount of 5G spectrum they wanted. Ofcom auction design has made “incremental bandwidth” exceedingly expensive in the UK. The industry need to think long and hard on how they adjust their strategies to reduce the price they pay for incremental bandwidth. If next year’s auction of 3.8 GHz spectrum fetches a similar amount, the money spent on 5G spectrum alone would have funded 100,000 5G small cells. That is not a route to 5G profitability nor of UK leadership in 5G
Read more →The battle lines are drawn between the broadcasting and mobile radio industries over the future of the precious UHF spectrum. The mobile industry case appears to be winning. But there are clear dangers in overlooking important issues that may well come back and cause an upset later. One of those issues is the long term future of free-to-air public service TV broadcasting in a wireless broadband Internet age.
Read more →People may have forgotten the film “All the President’s Men” starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redgrave but everyone knows the expression coined in that film…that if you want to find the answer “follow the money”. The answer we want to know today, as we set our research objectives for 5G, is what the market drivers are going to be for 5G. We need to finish with a globally harmonised technology that mobile network operators (who comprise “the market” for 5G networks) will want to buy.
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