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 [...]

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 [...]