Spectrum

Spectrum scarcity long has been a key assumption of mobile or fixed wireless service provider business models. But scarcity is diminishing. Over the next few years, it is likely that mobile [...]

The cost of spectrum always matters for mobile operators in competitive markets. Prices of 5G spectrum in Italy, an outlier so far, were driven by a new competitor eager to get into the market. [...]

Verizon has faced criticism in some quarters related to the performance of its millimeter wave fixed wireless service, which remains in early commercialization. The general tenor of the critique [...]

“To date, no adverse health effects have been established as being caused by mobile phone use,” says the World Health Organization. That might be worth reiterating, in light of concern in some [...]

How hard–or easy–will it be to sell smartphone 5G to consumers? Some now believe it might be harder than it was to sell 4G to 3G customers. Maybe not, others might argue. When 4G [...]

“The top priority for spectrum auctions should be to support affordable, high quality mobile services,” the GSMA, a major mobile industry trade group argues. While noting that auctions are not [...]

Some technology innovations are important because they either keep an existing business model from breaking, or threaten to break business models. Low earth orbit satellite constellations, in [...]

Lower frequency spectrum is better for coverage, while higher frequency spectrum is better for capacity, and mobile service providers need both. That will be as true in the 5G era as it has been [...]

Will service provider executives and firms be significantly better at predicting 5G use cases and new revenue streams than they were at predicting 3G and 4G use cases and revenue streams? [...]

With coming dual connectivity capabilities, allowing a single 5G device to use capacity resources from two radio sites, we can point to one new way 5G can build on 4G: 4G often will provide [...]

Seven or eight years ago, as we began work on what became PTC’s Spectrum Futures conference series, some might have thought spectrum sharing was interesting, but a niche for TV white spaces [...]

Though it has not be the case in the past, midband spectrum now seems to be emerging as a key underpinning for 5G services globally, and that might provide incentives for many parts of the U.S. [...]

5G might not be a full replacement for Wi-Fi in all settings, but it is likely to happen in at least some industrial settings where manufacturers want greater control over latency performance of [...]

Spectrum aggregation now is among the major new methods mobile operators will use in the 5G and succeeding eras to dramatically boost capacity by orders of magnitude over 4G. Networks will [...]

In the 3G era, business models were  unclear at the onset. And though we forget, that was true for the 4G era as well. So we should not be surprised that uncertainty exists around 5G. In fact, [...]