Network management

It’s a question that has baffled many minds for years. The mismatch between the U.S. population growth rate and U.S. wireless carriers’ ability to add oodles of new phone customers every quarter has mystified some Wall Street analysts for eons. “Investors have been puzzling over the industry’s ‘excess growth’ for years now,” wrote Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research. “Wireless is, after all, a fully saturated industry in the U.S.

Future G networks will require more dynamic, agile support for the management of radio spectrum on a fine-grained basis. The radio access network (RAN) technologies necessary to enable Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) have progressed significantly over the past 20 years, but the challenges of realizing the potential for DSA requires the co-evolution of technologies, business models, and regulatory policy. This paper presents a multidisciplinary research effort to develop the building blocks needed to advance DSA.

Verizon and T-Mobile are at it again, and this time, it’s more about what’s above their terrestrial networks than what’s on the ground. To be sure, these two have been at each other’s throats for years, primarily because Verizon made a reputation for itself as the carrier with the “best network” and T-Mobile, long known as a network laggard, set its sights on upending that.

T-Mobile demonstrations using a commercial Samsung Galaxy S25 and a non-commercial mobile test device achieved a 6.3 Gbps “record-breaking” downlink speed in a recent trial. The Galaxy S25 test featured Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF System running text software on T-Mobile’s 5G network. It reached a download speed of 4.3 Gbps in real-world conditions. The second test featured Qualcomm’s X85 5G Modem-RF on a mobile test device.

There is an interesting trend of internet service providers selling broadband products that are not always guaranteed to be at the same speed and quality as other customers. I've especially noticed this practice in recent years from big fixed wireless providers that sell home broadband using cellular spectrum. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have all reserved the right to throttle customers any time that the network gets too busy. It’s easy to understand why cellular companies would throttle home broadband customer first—they are protecting their cellular customers.

Comcast has pushed ahead with a new mobile offering aimed at customers who take one of the operator's higher-end home broadband speed tiers. Comcast combined that announcement with a wave of free speed upgrades—including faster upstream speeds—across its prepaid and postpaid home broadband services. On the mobile end, Comcast is now offering new and existing home broadband customers an unlimited line of Xfinity mobile for a year when they subscribe to broadband speeds of 400 Mbit/s or faster.

Nokia has been hyping its planned moon network for almost five years now. However, the robot carrying the network to the moon landed wrong and, as a result, Nokia was unable to notch a PR win by placing the first cellular call on the moon. The company said the network ran on the moon for about 25 minutes after Intuitive Machines' robot landed. "Unfortunately, Nokia was unable to make the first cellular call on the moon due to factors beyond our control that resulted in extreme cold temperatures on our user device modules," the company said.

For many years, the satellite industry faced a PR challenge: being out of sight and, therefore, out of mind. That's the case with geostationary orbit satellites, which fly some 36,000 km (22,000 miles) above a designated spot on the equator. The debut of SpaceX's Starlink low-earth orbit satellite broadband service in 2020 began shifting that perception. Starlink's launch has impacted more than industry PR.

In November 2024, Nguyen Thi Que’s mobile phone suddenly stopped working as telecom companies in Vietnam permanently shut down the 2G network. “I thought of buying a new phone, but I don’t have money,” said the 73-year-old, who sells iced tea at a bus stop in Hanoi. Vietnam’s plan was simple: Offer free 4G feature phones to help low-income 2G consumers adapt to the change.

US cable operators have been struggling to regain their footing in broadband as they try to grow subscribers again in the midst of an array of pressures including fiber and fixed wireless access competition, a slow housing move market and the impact of the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program. Several US cable operators are responding by leaning into convergence.