Wireless Telecommunications

We saw giant steps backward on communications, media, health, education, environment, voting rights, court appointments, money in politics, equal opportunity, women’s rights, labor rights… the list goes on and on.

Verizon Wireless is asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to use a portion of the 37.6-40 GHz band in part of northwest Arkansas for testing purposes as it develops different healthcare-related use cases and devices with an unnamed corporate partner. The application seeks a testing schedule of 12 months. Ericsson is noted as supplying three demonstration units and “multiple mobile manufacturers” for supplying 20 demo units.

A fight between the Federal Communications Commission and dozens of cities over the placement of 5G infrastructure will continue to play out in federal court in 2020, with oral arguments scheduled for February. At issue is whether the Federal Communications Commission can restrict how much municipalities can charge wireless carriers like AT&T Inc. to attach pizza box-sized wireless antennas, or small cells, to light poles and other city-owned infrastructure.

Tope broadband stories from 2019:

1. Policymakers wake up to the importance of universal broadband.
2. Full court press put on broadband mapping problems. 
3. Carriers are ultra-competitive over 5G. 
4. Edge computing is hot and should get hotter.
5. Policymakers also wake up to the need for more spectrum. 
6. Windstream files for bankruptcy and Frontier could follow.
7. Fixed wireless gains momentum.
8. Video shakeup continues – with little agreement on where it’s going.

For all the talk about 5G, operators still prefer to keep some things to themselves, such as exactly how many 5G cell sites they’re deploying. CTIA, which lobbies for the big wireless carriers in the US, has estimated the industry may need more than 800,000 small cells by 2026.

In South Korea, where the next-generation wireless network has been rolled out widely, download speeds have risen but many users aren’t impressed. 5G hasn’t lived up to the hype. For most of 2019, South Korea was home to the vast majority of the world’s 5G users, offering the broadest lessons in what the next-generation network has to offer. Though it is still early in the global rollout, 5G service in South Korea has proved more of a future promise than a technological breakthrough. 

In a Dec 20 court filing,  the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission argued that T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint is in the best interest of the US, and any nationwide injunction holding up the merger would block "substantial, long-term, and procompetitive benefits for American consumers." The argument, in large part, boils down to: trust us, we're the experts. "Both the Antitrust Division and the FCC have significant experience and expertise in analyzing these types of transactions and do so from a nationwide perspective," the agencies write.

The collision of corporate opportunism and Republican anti-government orthodoxy has pushed the United States backwards on the allocation of important spectrum for fifth-generation wireless networks (5G).

The future of the American mobile broadband industry has hinged on a small courtroom in lower Manhattan, where carriers and regulators are squaring off over a plan to reshape the wireless business as we know it. The last hurdle to T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint is a federal lawsuit, filed by ten state attorneys general in the Southern District of New York, accusing the merger of being anti-competitive. This is regulators’ last chance to stop the merger from going through, by proving that a merged T-Mobile will mean higher prices and worse service for wireless customers.