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 [...]

STL Partners has a new 5G status tool that assesses the 5G market based on supply and demand drivers, with 2020 essentially acting as a baseline. As you can see, we are just at the beginning of the 5G era. That is worth keeping in mind the next time you hear somebody complain that 5G […]

It always matters how a question is asked, but some might be more than a little surprised at the findings from an Omdia survey of expectations about 5G, cited by BearingPoint. Survey respondents expect that as much as 73 percent of 5G revenues will be driven by business, enterprise and [...]

Millimeter wave spectrum matters, as a quick comparison of mobile network speeds shows. Verizon, basing its 5G rollout initially on millimeter wave spectrum, handily beats the other U.S. networks using 2.5 GHz, 850 MHz or 600 MHz frequencies. It is just physics: low frequency spectrum has [...]

As millimeter wave spectrum–prior to powerful and cheap signal processing–could not be harnessed commercially for mobile and fixed mass market communications, so now technology might enable use of the stratosphere in new ways.  Earth’s stratosphere–at 11 km (seven miles) to 50 [...]

Mobile service provider revenue growth rates over the past decade have fallen from a range of six to seven percent to less than 1.5 percent, though rates are higher in some countries, below the rate of inflation, which essentially means real growth is actually negative. That arguably is the [...]

Global connectivity supplier capital investment (mobile and fixed) is projected to grow at a one percent compound annual growth rate between 2019 and 2022, according to the Dell’Oro Group. Other forecasts call for a decline in capex after 2022, as 5G and fiber investments to support 5G and [...]

Nokia has launched Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) software upgrade for existing Nokia AirScale base stations, allowing 5G networks and devices to use 4G spectrum resources and speeding 5G time to deployment.  Nokia’s DSS solution, delivered as a software upgrade to existing Nokia AirScale base [...]

“Once industries become digital, they also become digitally contestable, meaning companies from outside the traditional industry confines can enter and compete more easily,” consultants at Accenture said five years ago, urging firms not to delay the adoption of industrial internet of things [...]