What does your business look like if the key constraint is removed? It is a question so challenging–and often so seemingly impossible–that most of us never ask it. Most connectivity service providers, though, have had to grapple with the business implications of nearly-free [...]

End user demand for various connectivity services changes over time, but typically when some new need arises. Or when major suppliers decide to push its use. 5G will not be different, as has been the case for mobility in the past and for fixed network broadband as well. Since 5G requires new [...]

All of us are by now used to the idea that Wi-Fi access inside buildings is supplied by the building tenant or resident, not a communications service provider. In the 5G era, it is possible that something similar will arise, in most locations other than large public venues, for 5G indoor [...]

In purely technical terms, every digital mobile generation (3G, 4G, 5G) has produced an order of magnitude increase in bandwidth and an order of magnitude decrease in latency. Each next-generation network has used more advanced coding and modulation, partly responsible for the increased [...]

Despite lots of presently-hypothetical use cases, much of the early enterprise demand for 5G still relies on the traditional value of “more capacity,” even if the long-term value will tend to be built around latency performance. New enterprise use cases will develop, but require the [...]

With the caveat that industry professionals can be quite wrong about the future, there is a fairly substantial consensus on the value of 5G for end users. Industry professionals expect “speed” to be the top driver of value for consumer end users, but latency performance is the [...]

A recent study of 5G speeds by Opensignal found U.S. and U.K. speeds lagging those of several other countries that have deployed 5G. This actually is a fairly typical outcome, both early in deployment as well as later, when the networks are fully built out. You might wonder why. There is a a [...]

Busy business executives rarely have time to waste. And, for many, discussions of advanced new technology, ranging from artificial intelligence to blockchain are simply not practical matters for people who run businesses and are responsible for monthly, quarterly and annual financial results. [...]

Virtually every business achieves lower costs per unit with greater scale, at least in part because fixed costs can be amortized over a bigger base of customers or units sold. The converse also is true: diminishing scale can lead to higher costs, all other things being equal, because fixed [...]

Many would argue there is likely to be no single “killer app” for 5G, as some argued there was no single killer app for 4G. That is not to say some obvious lead use cases are not foreseeable. Many could agree that 3G’s lead app was mobile web access, while 4G’s lead use [...]

Despite the fact that we are only at the beginning of the 5G era, some say it already is a big failure. It is easy to argue such views are premature, if predictable. The networks themselves are under construction, and such massive projects take years to complete. So availability is limited.  [...]

This graph showing 3G (and what remains of 2G) subscriptions, compared to 4G, shows a fundamental principle: no product lasts forever. Demand for any existing product eventually saturates and declines, so new products must be created before the inevitable decline of whatever products presently [...]