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By now it is obvious that a few countries and service providers are in a “race” to be first with 5G. It also is clear most countries and service providers do not share that sense of imperative. [...]

With the exception of its buying Vodafone’s interest in Verizon Wireless for $130 billion, most of Verizon’s acquisitions have been far smaller. The overall pattern might indicate that Verizon [...]

If you want to know why mobile service providers are so interested in internet of things, this graph suggests a key reason: sales of services and products to human beings using mobile phones is [...]

It might be overstating matters to argue that capacity prices are in “free fall.” That is the case on some routes that traditionally have had less supply, such as North to South America, but [...]

“Cutting out the middle man” (telcos) now has emerged as a key constraint on global telecom service provider revenues and profits, and will be a huge force dictating when and how the public [...]

It remains very much unclear how important internet of things revenue will be for most mobile operators building 5G networks. And one big problem is that opportunities “up the stack,” [...]

Analysts differ on precisely when global mobile industry revenue will reach its peak, and then begin to decline. But we are growing closer to that point. Some believe the peak already has been [...]

Can a “mobile-only” business strategy succeed when markets reach saturation? In other words, once every potential customer already buys the service, can some combination of higher usage, new [...]

Over the last 20 years, if you wanted to know what was driving internet ecosystem revenue, you had to look to the consumer segment. It was the consumer app and platform suppliers that drove [...]

Some observers believe most service providers will not be easily able to build 5G networks because they will be so expensive. Others are more sanguine, arguing that there are many reasons why 5G [...]

Dire warnings about 5G cost, and therefore the 5G business model, are not hard to find. Though it is easy to find broad suggestions of how new revenue streams will develop, there is no certainty, [...]

Korea Telecom executives say a 5G network using 28-GHz spectrum requires four times as many outdoor cell sites as does a 4G Long Term Evolution network using low band spectrum. And that is good [...]

Wireless substitution remains a controversial prospect, as some argue that  5G is a substitute for the National Broadband Network, while others doubt that will happen, as fixed network access “is [...]

In Africa, mobile average revenue per user was more than $23 in 2004. By 2012, just eight years later, ARPU had dropped to perhaps $6.50, according to ICT Africa. That illustrates a core [...]

Service and product suppliers are interested in Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) for obvious reasons: it creates new sales opportunities for infrastructure and possibly services. Some also [...]