3/4ths of the U.S. won't even be available in the highly touted 28 GHz auction. There is essentially no spectrum available in the crucial 28 GHz spectrum band in the top 50 markets.

Verizon controls 76% of the 28 GHz band in the top cities (The red in the chart.) TMO has 12% and another 10% is spoken for. Only 2% will be available for auction. Verizon has 46% of the 39 GHz band and AT&T 30%. 

Stephen Wilkus, a veteran of Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent, calculates the 28 GHz auction will only cover 23.7% of the U.S. population. Much will be rural, inappropriate for the short reach of mmWave. .

Eric Xu, current Huawei Chairman, concludes "consumers would find no 'material difference between 5G & LTE'.” Louise Lucas and Nic Fildes,  Financial Times He added, "Since 4G is robust, we don’t see many use cases or applications we need to support with 5G.” 

Last May, I reported similar thoughts from Telefonica CTO Enrico Blanco. In November, DT CTO Bruno Jacobfeuerborn,  FT/Orange SVP Arnaud Vamparys, and BT CEO Gavin Patterson chimed in. The politicians & marketers screamed "5G Revolution." The engineers knew better. 

Andrus Anders and Roberto Viola at the EU, as well as Jessica Rosenworcel & Ajit Pai in the U.S., are still lying to themselves and too proud to face their errors.

Good data. suggestive if not definitive. Pal Zarandy at Rewheel offers four years of data comparing 8 European companies. I believe at least 10-15% relative increase is highly likely.

His conclusion: Gigabyte prices in 4 to 3 consolidated German and Austrian markets have fallen considerably behind the Netherlands and other 4-MNO European markets. 

Compared to a control group of six countries with four primary operators, German and Austrian prices almost doubled. (Denmark, France, Italy, Poland, Sweden, UK.) Austria went from 30% less expensive than the control group to 74% more. Germany went from 60% more expensive to almost triple the control group.

1 ms will be in the lab for years, (A First Look) From China to AT&T to the EU, regulators are being promised ultra-fast, 1 ms latency, 5G. They are being led by the nose to offer giveaways and subsidies. 1 ms. is certainly possible, as is 2 ms. LTE. But the networks being built are 5-15 ms., sometimes more. AT&T's Melissa Arnoldi has committed to a report twice a month. (Thank you.) The highlights:

• Latency of 9-12 ms. 150 meters in Waco, Texas.
• 1 gigabit 300 meters in Kalamazoo, Michigan
• Observed no impacts on 5G mmWave signal performance due to rain, snow or other weather events.
• 400 MHz signals.

~500M Africans, Indonesians, and Indians are regular Internet users without a landline. Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico add ~200M more. In total, something like 1B people were wireless-only at the end of Q3 2017. I'm comparing the number of Facebook users (over 250M in India) with the number of landlines (< 20M in India) for a rough guess at how many are wireless only. In the developed world, 70-90% of all homes have a landline connection, implying fewer than 100M are wireless only.

About 65% of Internet users are now in the Global South. The gap is increasing by about 50M/year.

No. CEO Tom Rutledge goes too far claiming "Using unlicensed and licensed Spectrum working together" as a definition of 6G. T-Mobile did that years ago, and BT and many other Europeans have long treated Wi-Fi as part of their network. LAA, taking over Wi-Fi spectrum for LTE, is one of the pillars of 3GPP Rel. 15.

Do not miss the Brooklyn 5G Summit, livestreamed by IEEE.  Arogyswami Paulraj of Stanford, perhaps the most distinguished communications engineer alive, is joined by Gerhard Fettweis (Tactile Internet,) MacArthur Fellow Dina Katabi of MIT and a dozen others. Executives include CTO Seizo Onoe of NTT, Marcus Weldon of Bell Labs, and an extraordinary panel on phased array antennas..

They are speaking to their peers, so they bring the most recent and important results. Four and five years ago, Ted and team presented the data that convinced the industry mmWave will work, with hundreds of thousands of base stations in the works now. Marcus brought an inspiring call for 1 ms latency, still to be realized. This year, Paulraj is bringing insights into 60 GHz, above the current 5G range. That's nothing: Kaushik Sengupta of Princeton is working with terahertz.