No business strategy lasts forever. Five decades ago, profits were driven by long distance calling and the base business was selling monopoly voice to everyone. Sometime in the 1980s the revenue and profit growth shifted from fixed network long distance to mobility. Fixed network operators [...]

It is at present very difficult to determine whether private 5G, operated by enterprises or neutral host providers will, on balance, help or harm mobile service provider revenues. One might use the analogy of Wi-Fi, historically the province of private networks, as an example. It is doubtful if [...]

Way too much is made of near-term potential revenue gains for mobile service providers because of 5G. Keep in mind that nearly every 5G account replaces an existing 4G account. When a 5G account generates more revenue for a mobile service provider, it might sometimes be for a mix of reasons, [...]

One often thinks of satellite communications being most valuable for reaching customers in highly isolated locations where fixed networks are impossible to build or merely too expensive. That often includes wide parts of the developing world. But SpaceX might get an early test of demand for its [...]

It never is too difficult to find somebody criticizing the use of millimeter wave spectrum for 5G, even if there is less skepticism  about millimeter wave usefulness for 5G than was the case five years ago. A decade ago, rational observers might have argued that millimeter wave frequencies were [...]

América Móvil, KT, Rogers, Telstra, Verizon and Vodafone have formed the 5G Future Forum to develop interoperable 5G specifications–including mobile edge computing–across key geographic regions, including the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe. The 5G Future Forum says it will focus [...]

5G is going to succeed, despite all worries, for one simple reason: 4G is going to run out of gas, at some point, and 5G will be needed simply to allow mobile service providers to supply consumer bandwidth demand and yet still make a profit on those services. That is the inevitable consequence [...]

Walmart plans to build its own edge computing centers. Furthermore, Walmart expects to make that capability available to third parties. Also, Walmart expects to make its  warehouse and shipping capabilities available to third-party sellers, using a model perhaps similar to the way Amazon [...]

The viability of 5G fixed wireless and mobile substitution are possibly the biggest wild cards in the U.S. fixed network internet access business. For the most part, where telcos and other internet service providers have fiber-to-premises networks, market share of about 50 percent for the telco [...]

One of the touted big drivers of 5G value is speed, offering mobile broadband speeds, in some instances, up to a gigabit per second, using millimeter wave, and often in a fixed usage deployment. Perhaps surprisingly, given all the hype about 5G data speeds, you might think mobile internet [...]

Eventually, the U.S. connectivity business, at least the part selling services to consumers, is going to be dominated by a small set of suppliers, perhaps two with telco roots and two with cable TV roots. Most likely believe that AT&T and Verizon have reached a natural limit in terms of [...]

Sometimes international rankings on various measures of connectivity quality are less important than you might think. Consider voice adoption, where the best the United States ever ranked was about 15th globally, for teledensity (people provided with phone service). Does anybody really think [...]