Network management

Dish Network sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, complaining that T-Mobile — its partner for wireless services — is rushing to shut down a network still used by millions of Dish's Boost Mobile customers. T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint was only allowed after it agreed to sell a chunk of assets to Dish, including its Boost prepaid business. Dish is highly reliant on T-Mobile for network services as it builds out its own 5G network over the next several years.

The Federal Communications Commission has been in overdrive in recent months as billions of dollars in 5G investments put new demands on its staff. The coronavirus pandemic has complicated matters even more by highlighting the millions of Americans who lack broadband access for work and school. The FCC’s earliest 5G-focused auctions sold off millimeter-wave licenses, which support extremely fast internet connections but suffer over long distances.

I want to start by recognizing that the cybersecurity challenge is about to get even more challenging with the advent of 5G. I’m going to share three lessons we’ve all learned from scary movies that should apply equally to our nation’s cybersecurity.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted a Notice of Inquiry to start a formal discussion on the opportunities and potential challenges presented by open and virtualized radio access networks, and how the FCC might leverage these concepts to support network security and 5G leadership. The FCC seeks comment on the current status of development and deployment, whether and how the FCC might foster the success of these technologies, and how to support competitiveness and new entrant access to this emerging market.

California has enacted a “net neutrality” law banning “sponsored data” services that allowed companies to pay for, or “sponsor,” the data usage of their customers who are also AT&T wireless customers. Unfortunately, under the California law we are now prohibited from providing certain data features to consumers free of charge. Prior to California’s law, sponsored data customers were able to browse, stream and enjoy applications from sponsors without using their monthly data allowance.

Cellphone carriers that spent years promoting their blueprints for new fifth-generation wireless networks devoted the past week to explaining how they plan to pay for them. AT&T and Verizon said they would spend billions of dollars more in the coming years on cellular-tower equipment, fiber-optic lines, and other infrastructure to use new wireless spectrum licenses they acquired through a federal government auction. T-Mobile said it would put the new licenses to use without increasing its capital budget.

Verizon is rolling out an enhancement to 4G that absolutely blows away its own "nationwide" 5G, and that shows good signs for the new C-band 5G coming in 2022. Citizens Band Radio Service (CBRS), a set of airwaves close to the C-band, has quietly started rolling out nationwide. I got a tip on two locations near me, so I went to check it out. CBRS appeared on sites configured for all of Verizon's latest technologies: 4G, its "nationwide" Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) 5G, and its super-speedy ultra wideband (UWB) 5G.

A Q&A with Angela Siefer, executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. 

We’ve been promised a fourth industrial revolution with fantastical things like remote surgery and driverless cars. Instead, what we have now is widespread 5G that’s more or less the same speed as (or even slower than) 4G and super-fast mmWave 5G in some parts of some major cities with highly limited range. So where is this 5G future we’ve been promised? The truth is that it’s coming along, but it will materialize more slowly and in less obvious ways than what we’ve been led to believe.

AT&T has agreed to a $12 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit over its throttling of "unlimited" mobile data plans. As usual, refunds to individual customers amount to a fraction of what the customers paid for the hobbled service. The paltry nature of expected per-person payments was explained by plaintiffs in a filing that asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California to approve the settlement.