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. In the few cases where deployment will be pushed, there are reasons for the sense of urgency. Some [...]

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 spends most of its acquisition funds on network assets. So it probably is not surprising that the [...]

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 near saturation, and actually went to negative growth rates on two continents in the first quarter of [...]

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 price declines on well-supplied routes (transAtlantic or TransPacific) decline rather predictably. [...]

“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 networks industry actually will shrink. Some forecasters already believe the global industry is going to [...]

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,” beyond connectivity, will be highly fragmented. And highly-fragmented opportunities are difficult [...]

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 reached. That bears emphasis. Global telecom revenue has been driven by mobile revenue for a couple of [...]

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 products or vertical integration offset pricing and profit pressures in zero-sum markets where market [...]

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 growth overall, while telco revenue growth was driven by consumer mobility and internet access revenues. [...]

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 could wind up costing no more than 4G, a slight increase to 4G, or perhaps even less than 4G. At [...]

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, beyond the fact that, in the consumer market, 5G will displace 4G for current phone access use [...]

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 news, not bad news. It is good news because it is completely in line with the traditional rule of [...]