Editor’s Note: RCR Wireless News goes all in for “Throwback Thursdays,” tapping into our archives to resuscitate the top headlines from the past. Fire up the time machine, put on those sepia-tinted shades, set the date for #TBT and enjoy the memories!
C Band auction concludes as assignment phase ends
The assignment phase of the C Band auction has ended, officially bringing to a close the highest-grossing spectrum auction in FCC history. The auction kicked off on December 8 with its clock phase, which lasted through January 15 and raised nearly $80.92 billion in gross bids after 97 rounds. The assignment phase offered winning bidders the chance to bid for frequency-specific blocks if they were so inclined; that phase began February 8 and ended yesterday after 43 rounds. All 5,684 licenses offered in the auction were sold. The final gross total raised in the C Band auction: $81,168,677,645. Even allowing for up to $9.7 billion in controversial incentive payments to incentivize satellite companies who will have to move into the upper portion of the band and about $3.3 billion in estimated relocation costs, the auction will go down in history as a blockbuster. Comparatively, the previous largest auction was the AWS-3 auction that ran in 2014-2015 and raised nearly $45 billion. … Read more
From 5G to 6G with Industry 4.0 — and the $1tn telco boom that might never come
(Am I really going to write this?) 6G is a trillion dollar opportunity, apparently. So says the headline in a PR missive about a new report from research firm IDTechEx, making a stab at forecasting the next generation of mobile comms, even before the newest generation has learned to walk – let alone talk. “Far better than 5G,” the message goes; “the race is on”, it says, making out like 5G will be to 6G what 3G was to 4G: a curtain raiser for the real spectacle. The release talks of the kind of timeless and limitless communications that will transform society by animating intelligent transport systems, lights-out industrial operations, and smart cities. “5G serves far more than the needs of mobile phones or even personal electronics in general. This will be even more true of 6G, with thing-to-thing communication possibly more important than human communication,” it goes. This will come to pass, we are informed, because 6G will perform “at least 10-times better than 5G” – largely because the Terahertz frequencies it will occupy will be 10 times higher. “There are more things than people in the world… At a minimum, the basic specifications will embrace the needs of sensing, positioning, edge computing, highest definition imaging, and yes, communication.” … Read more
Deutsche Telekom to start trials of 5G SA technology
German telco Deutsche Telekom installed the first 5G Standalone antenna in the town of Garching, near Munich, to carry out trials of this technology, the company said in a release. Deutsche Telecom said that the antenna will be soon connected to a 5G Standalone core network, which will be implemented via cloud infrastructure. The German operator also noted that the infrastructure in the core network will also be fully upgraded to a new, cloud-based 5G architecture. “It is important for us to be at the forefront of the further innovation steps of 5G,” said Claudia Nemat, board member for technology and innovation at Deutsche Telekom. “To ensure that our customers can take advantage of technologies such as network slicing or edge computing in the future, we continue to actively drive the development of 5G and its features.” The 5G technology currently deployed in Germany is based on the 5G Non-Standalone (5G NSA) network architecture, which means that the current 5G offerings are still technically dependent on a simultaneously available LTE network. … Read more
Oil and gas sector dispenses with in-house IoT to splurge $712.7m on cloud analytics
Spending on big data and analytics in the oil and gas industry is increasing at a rate of about 75 percent per year, as companies rapidly dispense with in-house IoT management to go with big cloud providers instead. Analyst house ABI Research said the oil and gas sector will invest $712.7 million on IoT analytics by the end of 2026, up from $156 million in 2020. The sector’s investment in third-party IoT expertise has been climbing steadily, already; the annual spending figure was about $90 million in 2018, and has increased by 36.8 percent per year since then. ABI Research explained the oil and gas sector remains “deeply challenged” in its mission to connect and transform operations by “complex system integrations, siloed data, and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) management systems”. Kateryna Dubrova, research analyst at ABI Research, commented: “In-house analytics is no longer a sustainable and cost-effective IoT option, and oil and gas firms have widely recognized the expertise of IoT cloud platform- and software-as-a-service vendors… More and more enterprises are turning to suppliers [for] advanced analytics and AI as-a-service offerings enabled through extensive cross-industry collaborations.” … Read more
TIM shows it’s possible to close digital divide; it just takes fiber, copper, FWA and satellite
Closing the digital divide and ensuring people everywhere have reliable access to quality broadband services has been a long-standing talking point for politicians, regulators and telecoms executives. In fact, the most recent convocation of the World Economic Forum saw the formation of the EDISON Alliance, a group including many telecom luminaries that’s focused on developing public/private partnerships to rapidly address the connectivity issue. While the conversation around the digital divide predates the global COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid shift from in-person classes and working from offices to web-based instruction and working from home has served to drive home the inequities in access facing people in many parts of the world. But, for its part, Italian operator TIM has shown that it is indeed possible to achieve 100% population coverage in the Apulia region in the southeast portion of the country along the Adriatic Sea. Apulia, at some 7,500-square miles, is home to just more than 4 million people with a population density around 540 people per square mile. According to TIM, it’s fiber-to-the-home and fiber-to-the-cabinet infrastructure reaches 99.4% of households using the network in the area with the former providing 1 Gbps service and the latter supporting 200 Mbps speeds. FTTC describes fiber running to local cabinets and copper running from the cabinet to homes. The less than 1% of households without wired connections are served by either satellite or fixed wireless access. … Read more
Check out the RCR Wireless News Archives for more stories from the past.
