Bleeding Edge

Besides the thaw in relationships between the two Koreas, and especially between North Korea and the United States of America, and besides the debut of the Trumpian foreign policy of muscular non-appeasement, another thing altogether made made its global debut during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics…

This other thing is the new wireless standard called 5G, which was actually first used during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, in order to broadcast live immersive HD images of the sporting events in virtual reality to those few of us who had the numbered devises and could follow through with the proceedings in an experiential and fully immersive environment these ground breaking Olympic games where Peace reigned supreme for the first time in the much maligned peninsula of Korea that has been ravaged by the specter of war for more than seven decades already.

Some of us also might now that the Olympic Truce is a real thing since time immemorial back in history more than two thousand five hundred years when the ancient Greeks first started the Olympic games to showcase their best and brightest and make Peace for the duration of the games as well, so that everyone can compete in Peace and often times the Olympic Truce lasted far longer than the time of the Games…

So these auspicious beginnings of Peace in Korea also mark the date of the auspicious beginning of the new wireless technology standard called 5G because for the first time we used full flowing wireless that was adequate to broadcast virtual reality experiences from the field of honor to the few lucky spectators and news people who had the responsive wireless equipment and had a completely new experience than any other sporting competition on earth up until now…

So it’s no coincidence that South Korea leads on the path to 5G.

Yet is is also followed closely by Japan, and China, who are also leading the transition to 5G, followed right along by the United Kingdom, the United States, and certain EU leading nations.

But even after the 3GPP consortium releases the 5G standard, it will take a couple of years for the networks to roll out the system specs and the hardware worldwide.

Surely for some of us, the long wait will test our patience, but on the bright side, it will give everyone involved the time necessary to get fully onboard, and prepared for the 5G and especially for the platforms that will severely test the limits of 5G’s capacity, and it’s inter-operability with all other wireless modalities, such as Wi-Fi and all other earlier iterations of wireless standards from the IEEE, and from the various Mobile Congress standards.

However whatever side the Telecommunications industry falls on this issue — it is always best to recall that the industry’s response to the hyperconnected society we are moving towards will transform the way we talk, speak, work, experience, & communicate with others and all the things around us. It is also how things, physical entities, and digital objects, can talk, speak and communicate with each other as well.

By 2023, Ericsson predicts that each active smartphone in North America will consume 48 gigabytes of data per month. That’s roughly a seven-fold increase compared to 2017. The trend is the same across global markets, driven by improvements in our smartphones, increasingly data-rich content, and better, more affordable data plans.

At the same time as smart homes, cities, and industries are linking up to the cloud, it is opening the door to entirely new applications across verticals with demanding requirements on network capacity and capability. As a result of this unprecedented revolution, a new generation of cellular networks will be needed to transform existing 4G networks to cope with the rapidly increased data traffic demand.

The industry’s answer to the hyper-connected society we’re moving towards is 5G cellular communication technology. 5G addresses future demands and enables new services through three key features: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-low latency and high reliability (uRLLC), and massive machine communications (mMTC). It does so, in part, by expanding the spectrum dedicated to cellular communication to much higher frequencies capable of transporting data at faster speeds, and combining a series of sophisticated technologies to ensure that data is delivered reliably and securely across the network.

3GPP, the standardisation body responsible for defining global mobile network communication standards, is releasing 5G in a two-step process. Phase 1, scheduled for Q3 2018, will focus primarily on eMBB applications with high data rates, high mobility and low latency, and use cases include ultra-high-definition video and augmented and virtual reality. Phase 2, which will follow one year later, will focus on critical communications with high reliability and ultralow latency, as well as on connecting millions of devices, especially in the industrial IoT.

From virtual reality to the Internet of of all things and to the internet of experiences and deep domain expertise and all human skills — industry stakeholders are working together in the 3GPP to define 5G technology specifications, to ensure that the 5G standards meet the needs for emerging use cases and services while leaving ample room for innovation.

It will take longer for 5G to impact you in your everyday life, but when it does, you’ll feel the difference. High data rates – up to several gigabytes per second – will transform the way you communicate, and just might let augmented and virtual reality live up to their much-hyped potential. You’ll be able to stream high-definition video on all your devices and leverage the computing power of the cloud in ways that are unimaginable today.

Ultra-low latency down to half a millisecond, 99.999% availability, and predictable quality of service will enable critical applications that improve safety and well being. Vehicle-to-pedestrian communication, to name one, will alert drivers when pedestrians cross roads. Another is remote surgery, with which surgeons will be able to operate via a robotic arm on patients that are on the other side of the planet. It’s just one fascinating illustration of the Internet of Skills that highly secure and resilient communication over 5G networks will enable.

That is the holy grail of Comms when we can superimpose our AR and VR on our handset and on our wearable lenses, our screens, and our dashboards, face plates, helmets, windshields etc.

Or on those funky glasses we used for Snapchat and dropped them after it became too embarrassing to be seen in them.

But for now, just imagine the density of connected devices that mobile communication networks will have to reckon with. Our homes, cities, and industries will all be connected. And so will we, with our wearables and other devices that will serve us and connect us to the new and unheard of as yet, VR and AR communications & social networks, that will augment our life and uplift us, each and every minute, hour, and waking moment of each and every day of our future lives.

All these experiential networks combined — will lead us to an explosion in the number of connected devices per square mile, and of course cause heightened demands for computing capacity with new internal chips for smartphones, and connected yet wireless devises, that will be coupled with additional bandwidth, speed, and server memory, on the cloud, alongside power efficiency and network coverage, etc.

This is the incremental innovation that the 5G networks are fully geared to handle, offering us solutions for most communication problems of today along with some of the most coveted yet unasked for solutions for the AR and VR needs of the Geeks amongst us, who are unafraid of deploying our sea legs on firma terra 24/7 and on demand…

We do and we ask for this because we dare to dream…

Innovation, driving technology, driving innovation

Yours,
Dr Churchill

As for the new smart companies that are building the future by deploying Apps that are massive consumers of bandwidth and speed — they need to be challenging the standards set by the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA), or perhaps make separate agreement with the approximately 30 wireless service providers in the United States who have their own facilities and hardware deployed across our land.

The Competitive Carriers Association (CCA) has over 100 members, but the totemic identification of the 30 majors carries across to this One Hundred carriers also. And besides the facilities-based providers there are also another 50+ virtual operators that use the top four networks to provide their service.

Largest U.S. wireless providers
See also: List of mobile network operators of the Americas § United States
The top 4 wireless telecommunications facilities-based service providers by subscriber count in the United States are:

Verizon Wireless: 152.7 million (Q2 2018)
AT&T Mobility: 147.3 million (Q2 2018)
T-Mobile US: 75.6 million (Q2 2018)
Sprint Corporation: 53.7 million (Q2 2018)
Each active SIM card is considered a subscriber. Wholesale customers include Machine to machine and Mobile Virtual Network Operator customers that operate on the host network, but are managed by wholesale partners. Verizon Wireless does not report wholesale subscriber count. For comparison purpose, the total subscriber count for Verizon Wireless includes an estimated number of wholesale customers.

These are the top three technologies used:
The top 5 wireless providers have all standardized on 4G LTE as their wireless communication standard, which has been deployed across the entire coverage; however, the LTE bands used by each provider remain largely incompatible. All 5 wireless providers also maintain legacy networks; of these, AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM and 3G UMTS (mostly converted to 4G HSPA+), while Verizon, Sprint, and U.S. Cellular use cdmaOne/EV-DO/1xRTT. While the top 4 wireless providers operate nationwide wireless networks which cover most of the population in the United States, U.S. Cellular and other smaller carriers provide native network coverage across selected regions of the United States while supplementing nationwide coverage through roaming agreements with other carriers.

As of 2016 all operators have adopted LTE, which includes provisioning of service through SIM cards. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint sell SIM cards through their retail channels in-store and online however the selection of devices compatible with Verizon and Sprint networks is limited. All carriers except Sprint have enabled VoLTE on their networks.

AT&T shut its GSM network down on December 31, 2016.

T-Mobile plans to reduce spectrum allocated for GSM and use the network mostly for nomadic and non-mobile GSM services through 2020. T-Mobile hopes to shut down 3G network “long before 2020.” As of September 2016, 60% of calls were on VoLTE.

Verizon introduced first LTE-only phone, LG Exalt LTE, in June 2017. Verizon plans to shut down CDMA 1xRTT network by the end of 2019. CDMA EV-DO was scheduled to operate until 2021 according to the plan announced in 2012. As of May 2017 half of voice traffic is on VoLTE.

Dig in folks…

Dig in, and get through to the other side with robust VR alongside AR and AI that is riding atop all the new networks.

You can do that and have priority interoperability and messaging and all your Comms riding on top of the “heap” and above the “herd” following Dr Churchill’s totemic identification to rise atop the spool, like the emergency “Beeper” does, that is used by Doctors and Emergency professionals, and as Dr Churchill used to create the same effect for Twitter’s 120 characters, that rose from obscurity to prominence based on that simple innovation alone…