China Mobile Vice President Jian Qin says the company expects 70-100 million 5G sales in 2020. Wang Hengjiang, Deputy General Manager of China Mobile Terminal Company predicts 150 million or more 5G phones will be sold in China in 2020.

Prices will go down to US$300 by June or July and ~$200 by the end of the year. Wang Hengjiang also predictedthe scale of the second half of the year will be scaled up. By Q1, there will be several 5G chips available. In the second quarter, less expensive chips should hit the market, allowing the summer drop in phone prices.

By the end of 2020, China Mobile expects to cover between 600 and 700 million people with a 5G network. The 2020 plan is for 600,000-800,00 5G cells.  

These plans are far ahead of anything in the West, but the Chinese carriers have shown they can produce remarkable results. 

"It works" Greg Sherill of Verizon confirmed. Verizon has installed thousands of systems five years after first proposing NG-PON2. "The traffic seems to be just fine. What's in the field is working." Video below

Hesse, founder of the NG-PON2 Forum, Broadband Forum Board of Directors Member, BASe Chairman and Senior Director of Standards Marketing and Thought Leadership for Calix, sat down at Calix ConneXions with us and provided a look from the beginning of NG-PON2 to the future. Video below

Vince O'Byrne of Verizon drove the project forward starting in 2014. Verizon had decided that 10 gigs would not be enough for their millimeter wave 5G. Tunable lasers, the key technology, were very expensive but the price was falling.

NG-PON2 uses four frequencies, (wavelengths, lambdas) each with 10 gigabits. Combining them yields 40 gigabits as transmitted, 36 gigabits net. 40 gigabits from the bonded wavelengths is still in the lab and soon will reach the field.

Going forward, using more wavelengths and higher speeds on each will yield 80 to 100 gigabits. Currently, standards groups are considering 8 wavelengths of 25 gigabits each. Research provides a  clear path to much higher speeds. 

Video by Jennie Bourne of Bourne Digital. http://bit.ly/BourneD

Nearly every 5G strategy in the world is being reconsidered after 10M Chinese signed up in a few days early in October. Huawei has been selling thousands per minute. 3.7M Koreans have also purchased 5G phones, with 5M expected yearend.

5G now has an excellent use case: people want to buy. My working figure for 2020 is 210 million 5G phones, but I need a month or two more data for any confidence.

See my new Analysis Branch.com for how China is doing it.

T-Mobile 4G faster than T-Mobile 5G. Sprint has covered 8%+ of the US population with robust 2.5 GHz 5G. IHS three city testing found 5G on 51% of tests in Atlanta, 32% in Chicago, and 25% in Dallas. The 25-40 million people Sprint covers dwarfs any carrier in Europe, where no telco has reported even 2 million people in its serving area. Adjusted for population, only Swisscom and Sunrise Switzerland come close. (Neither has released coverage.details.) The median download speed in Chicago was 124 Mbps, about as predicted. 

Sprint's John Saw is an obvious candidate for CTO of the year. Despite a low capex budget, Sprint is bringing 5G to far more of the US than any other carrier. Verizon covered 7% of Chicago and lower percentages of the population in Dallas and Atlanta. AT&T & T-Mobile are far behind with coverage of 3% or less. "T-Mobile’s 5G median download speeds in both Atlanta and Dallas were slower than its non-5G mode speeds in each city." 

At left, how T-Mobile serves Rockefeller Center and Wall Street but provides little in Harlem or Black Brooklyn.

Karl Bode discovered that AT&T doesn't think 5G matters, at least to consumers. In return for eliminating regulations, the US telcos nominally provide all the information consumers need to make a good choice and the FCC needs to make sensible regulation. But as consumer groups and Congressmen alike demand accurate broadband maps, AT&T is resisting bitterly.

Require mobile providers to report on their broadband networks by speed capability rather than technology. The record reflects that speed is more important to consumers than the air interface used to provide it. AT&T therefore proposes that the Commission require mobile providers to report their mobile voice and broadband coverage with coverage maps depicting two service levels: (1) voice and broadband service below 5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload, and (2) voice and broadband service at or above 5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload.

Since the NR air interface is AT&T's definition of 5G, if that doesn't matter, neither does 5G. That's true in one sense - good 4G LTE matches the performance of 5G in low and mid-bands.

In addition, the AT&T comments were inappropriate. So I filed a rebuttal:

China Mobile had 5.32 million 5G customers. China Telecom and China Unicom each have about 1.75 million. Almost all have signed up in the last couple of weeks. The pace will presumably pick up after the opening later this month. The monthly price is US$20-30/month. Phone prices are down to US$520-700. The telcos are giving only modest subsidies, typically $50-70.

Those figures have been widely reported in the Chinese press but not officially announced. These are mega-billion dollar companies with audited financials and stock listings. I believe the figures are accurate. If so, China will almost certainly have more than 25 million subs by yearend. A low prediction for 2020 is 100 million; 206 is a plausible working estimate. Data is still very limited, however; we'll know more by the end of November.

Korea reported 2 million phones sold by August. The carriers have confirmed 5 million expected by yearend,

One confusion: Some articles report this as 10 million "reservations" as people wait for phones.

The city of Shenzen will likely have more (robust) 5G radios deployed than either Verizon or AT&T for the next year. Robert Clarke reports Shenzen will have 15,000 5G radios in the next few months and 45,000 by August. One Chinese city has more 5G than the entire United States.

Neither Verizon nor AT&T have provided any real information about coverage but their figures likely will be lower. There is no technical reason for delay. The technology now is working for over 10 million people. The limiting factor is the carriers' investment budgets. In the West, investment has been flat to down.

Verizon & AT&T each have 60-70,000 towers and have virtually stopped adding macrocells. Well under half will be upgraded to mid-band or mmWave 5G. Verizon is adding some small cells, but probably not enough to match Shenzen figure.