Network management

Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr announced the next step in the FCC’s efforts to accelerate the buildout of wireless infrastructure. Commissioner Carr unveiled a draft order that
would provide for streamlined review of requests to add limited space at the bottom of existing towers for backup power, low-latency computing, and multiple providers to be housed at one site, among other uses. The FCC  will vote on the order at its next open meeting on Oct 27.

The largest user of spectrum, the Department of Defense (DoD), has put out a Request for Information (RFI) that seems to propose that at least some of the spectrum traditionally used by the military could be shared for a fifth generation (5G) wireless network. The DoD cites a component of 5G technology called dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) as the vehicle to accomplish this. This is a milestone. The Defense Department itself is suggesting that it is possible to share spectrum without harming its operations.

5G is coming to Milwaukee, causing worries about how and where the new cellular equipment will be installed. “My board members and every citizen in Milwaukee County really want to have control over what is being approved and what is not,” says Milwaukee County Supervisor Sheldon Wasserman, who has been at the forefront of concerns about the 5G rollout. “The federal government and state government have a lot of regulations and rules on the topic, and local government has very little ability to control the situation.

Thank you to Chairman Gupta, Director General Dua, and everybody at the Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (TAIPA) for inviting me to be with you tonight. For all the progress that’s been made, you understand that there is still so much more to achieve for the communication infrastructure sector in India. Why else would you be rolling out a new white paper at your 10th anniversary celebration? You’ve already got your eye on 5G and other new technologies being introduced right now and in the near future. 

Verizon has recently completed lab trials with Corning and begun lab trials with Samsung on new 5G mmWave in-building solutions which, when commercially launched, will provide 5G mmWave coverage inside facilities such as hospitals, manufacturing facilities, warehouses, schools, ports, retail stores and more. The launch of these indoor cell sites will not only extend the footprint of Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network, but will also bring the promise of private networks with Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) capabilities one step closer.

The Federal Communications Commission held a ground-breaking, marathon virtual event Sept 14, hosting numerous stakeholders in the wireless ecosystem to discuss open radio access networks (RANs). The main impetus for the event was to promote open RAN technologies for 5G as an alternative to RAN equipment from the Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE. Currently, the choices for telecom equipment are fairly limited to the big vendors Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Huawei.

T-Mobile announced that supercharged mid-band 5G is live for millions more people in parts of 81 new cities and towns across the country, delivering peak download speeds of up to 1 Gbps and average speeds of around 300 Mbps, 7.5x faster today’s average LTE speeds. With the announcement, this 5G experience is live in nearly 90 cities and towns, and the Un-carrier plans to continue lighting up this optimal 5G spectrum at an aggressive pace, reaching thousands more by end of 2020.

For the first time, we are now comparing 5G users’ overall experience across 12 of the world’s leading 5G markets. Globally, our 5G users in Saudi Arabia see the fastest overall average download speed with a Download Speed Experience of 144.5 Mbps ahead of Canada’s 5G users in second place with 90.4 Mbps. Strikingly, 5G Users in the country with the highest adoption of 5G to date, South Korea, rank just third.

[Aug 12's] decision is a massive victory for US leadership in 5G, our nation’s economy, and American consumers. The court rightly affirmed the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to ensure that infrastructure deployment critical to 5G—a key part of our 5G FAST Plan—is not impeded by exorbitant fees imposed by state and local governments, undue delays in local permitting, and unreasonable barriers to pole access.

I am pleased that the Ninth Circuit affirmed the wireless infrastructure reforms we adopted in September 2018. I thank the Federal Communications Commission staff who carefully crafted the order, and I congratulate the Office of General Counsel for their successful defense of our work. Small cells that power 5G were threatened by exorbitant fees and unnecessary delays—red tape that was tolerated when building macro towers but would have brought small cell deployment to a halt.