Investing Opportunites
By Liam Tung
A year ago, Huawei was the world’s top smartphone brand by global shipments, but US sanctions effectively cutting it off from Android and mobile chips have seen its shipments tumble. The company is now eyeing its 5G patents as a way to earn revenue from other companies selling 5G phones and equipment.
Bloomberg reports that Huawei will start charging the likes of Apple and Samsung a “reasonable” fee for using its 5G patents in their smartphones.
Telstra has finalised testing for its low band 5G spectrum and will now begin rolling it out as part of its commercial 5G network.
The low band spectrum, in the 850MHz range, is currently used for the telco’s 3G network. With 3G traffic progressively declining as consumers move to newer technologies, Telstra has been working towards repurposing part of that spectrum for its 5G network.
“The tests and rollout, which started last November, have added another dimension to our 5G offering with parts of the network now able to do a 5G data session over distances exceeding 80km,” Telstra said.
By Todd Shields and Scott Moritz
Verizon Communications Inc. committed $45 billion for 5G wireless airwaves in a government auction that attracted record bidding as the largest U.S. mobile carriers race to build faster networks.
At $23 billion, AT&T Inc. was the second-highest bidder, according to the Federal Communications Commission, which ran the auction. Participants also included T-Mobile US Inc. and pay-TV providers such as Dish Network Corp., Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications Inc. Some have already tapped the debt market to help pay the tab. The auction started in December, and within days the tally exceeded analysts’ estimates of $47 billion before settling at $81.2 billion.
By James Sullivan
The UK government must learn quickly from its policy decisions around its 5G networks, and start grappling much earlier with risks posed by other emerging technologies.
MPs have called on the UK government to identify other critical emerging technologies, highlight the dangers of dependency on high-risk vendors and set out the government’s proposed response. Considerations should include domestic capability and international cooperation, research and supply chain security, and transparent standards setting.
By SHIRLEY ZHAO, SCOTT MORITZ AND THOMAS SEAL
Most of the world has not yet experienced the benefits of a 5G network, but the geopolitical race for the next big thing in telecommunications technology is already heating up.
For companies and governments, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The first to develop and patent 6G will be the biggest winners in what some call the next industrial revolution. Though still at least a decade away from becoming reality, 6G — which could be up to 100 times faster than the peak speed of 5G — could deliver the kind of technology that’s long been the stuff of science fiction, from real-time holograms to flying taxis and internet-connected human bodies and brains.
The scrum for 6G is already intensifying even as it remains a theoretical proposition, and underscores how geopolitics is fueling technological rivalries, particularly between the U.S. and China.
By Ben Lovejoy
Swedish networking giant Ericsson has reported that the 5G rollout is progressing faster than expected and that around a billion people worldwide will have coverage by the end of this year.
Ericsson cites three main factors for the accelerated rollout.
First, the availability of low-cost smartphones with 5G capabilities. Some models cost as little as $2-300.
2020 has changed every aspect of life, and this is particularly true when it comes to the way we work. Gone are the centralized office environments as we once knew them; now, the daily workplace has now been relocated to suburban residences that are distributed throughout our cities and towns. Because of this change, network traffic has been shifted out of city business districts and into the home office environment. With people working remotely, applications that were once accessed only in a controlled office building or campus must now be accessed from virtually anywhere. Employees today expect the same seamless connection enjoyed in the traditional in-office experience, with thousands more touch points than before. For network providers and the people responsible keeping all these employees connected this means they have their work cut out for them.
On October 20, Sweden became the latest country to ban Huawei, China’s telecommunications giant, from participating in its 5G networks.
PTS, the Swedish telecom regulator, said that companies supplying 5G services in the country will have until 2025 to remove any equipment from Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE from their infrastructure networks. PTS added that the decision was based on the advice of Sweden’s military and security services, which apparently described China as “one of the biggest threats against Sweden.”
So you think you’re finally ready to buy a 5G smartphone? They’re certainly not hard to find, but if you’re shopping for a new device, temper your expectations about the next-generation wireless data network.
It is not an easy task to make sense of 5G wireless networks. Not only are there a wide variety of complicated individual pieces needed to create a network, there’s also the manner by which those pieces interconnect, the software used to control them, the standards and protocols they need to support, and, well, yeah…it’s a lot.
Of course, most people don’t really have to worry about how a wireless network of any kind works, as long as it does what it’s supposed to do. However, if you want to make sense of the growing applications for 5G and what may or may not be possible at any given time or place, then you should understand at least some of the basic principles behind how it works.