FCC Chief Technologist Henning Schulzrine startled the engineers at a high level 5G wireless event by predicting a complete turnaround in spectrum policy and licensing.

Instead of "licensing" monopoly use of spectrum, "All new spectrum would be shared." That corresponds to the opinions of nearly all impartial top engineers, but of course is heresy to lobbyists in the EU and U.S.

Shared spectrum is better, but I fear Henning is being optimistic about what the politicians will do.

MM depends on receiving back from the phone information on the channel. That uplink information has practical limitations on many cases, including from interference. In this paper, Bjornson, Hoydis, and Sanguinetti take on the assumption that there is a theoretical limit of spectral efficiency. Beginning with Marzetta, potential problems have been recognized.

"The pilot resources are limited by the channel coherence time, the same pilots must be reused in multiple cells. This leads to pilot contamination. ... it appears that pilot contamination is a fundamental issue that manifests a finite SE limit, except in some impractical special cases."

In 30 page dense with mathematics, the authors claim, "We will show in this paper that this is basically a misunderstanding, 

These may be the first customers getting more than 10 megabits reported anywhere. Michael Davies and Richard Yu of 6Harmonics in Ottawa have sent me test data showing customers with a connection phy rate of 16-18 megabits, as well as convincing details from other deployments doing better than that. I thank Boston Consulting Group for pushing me to go beyond published reports and get these new results. The fuzzy photo below shows eight users connected to a base station using a single 6 MHz channel. They have deployments in California and North Carolina using two channels for nearly double the speed. High speed uplink is included.

They are ready with a three channel unit for even higher speeds. Yu has been working on multiple antenna systems (MIMO) for almost 20 years. I'm sure he can achieve even better throughput using more antennas. They seem to be so busy actually building the equipment they haven't had time to get the latest results up on their web site. CEO Yu, off the record, shared remarkable predictions for what they will offer within a year. 

All telcos fudge these figures. The U.S. population on July 22, 2017 is 325,491,181 on the census bureau clock. Population will be less than 327M yearend. John Legere of T-Mobile says his LTE network covers 315M. That's 98%. They will cover 321M in six months. AT&T and Verizon both claim 98% today. Overlap is nearly total, but not exactly.

The U.S. has ~99% LTE coverage unless T-Mobile CEO Legere, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, and AT&T CFO John Stephens are lying in the Wall Street presentations. As soon as I saw Pai's proposal for $4.8B in LTE subsidies, I knew something was wrong.

I wrote FCC Plan May Reduce 4G Deployment (Not Satire). Since ~2010, telcos have been slashing spending on landlines even where they would be profitable. They aren't stupid and preferred to wait for the government to pay for everything. With the FCC now paying for wireless, they are cutting wireless spending.

Good data could reduce the confusion that often dominates "international policy" discussions. What are the real costs of backhaul and royalties in each country, by far the largest international factors in consumer prices? How much undersea capacity is unused? (I've heard estimates as high as 90%.) These are the issues the International community should be addressing, rather than the unneeded advice and meaningless drivel I hear from the U.S. State Department and so many more.

Comparing data from similar countries is often very helpful. Early in the broadband era, Xavier Niel brought the triple play down to 30 euros in France. I asked German regulator Kurth why were German prices so much higher? It was the right question.

While Jio calls the phones "free," they require a $22 deposit refundable only after three years. Jio plans start at thirty cents for 200 megabytes and unlimited calls for a day.  $1.50 buys a gig/day for 7 days. It's less than $5 for a gig each day for 28 days. 500M Indians are still on 2G phones. Starting in September, Jio intends to migrate hundreds of millions to 4G.

Ambani's 4G network offers more than 10X the capacity of 2G & 3G, drastically bringing down the network cost. 4G is so much cheaper to run Ambani would come out ahead even with a $10/phone subsidy. The $20B LTE system is easily handling 100M paid subscribers. The government measured speeds have been going up despite the massive subscriber influx. It's designed to inexpensively upgrade to carrier aggregation and MIMO for 5X to 10X current capacity. 

The Made-In-India JioPhone supports 22 major languages, voice over LTE, secure payments, and voice dialing. Press #5 to send a distress signal, a feature I predict others will copy.  The chip is either a Qualcomm Snapdragon 205 or a Spreadtrum SC9820. The 205 is about as basic as you can get today. 3 MP camera, 640 x 480 screen and LTE Cat 4 topping out at 150 megabits. The SC9820 can support a 5 MP camera and 720P video.  Both are manufactured on a years-old 28 nm process and have two ARM cores. The first iPhone had a 3.5 inch screen at 320x480. The JioPhone screen by one report will be smaller. 

Most connections will be Wi-Fi or local. Very few require 5G high speeds or latency. Consumer IoT will come, but industrial is now leading the way. Those observations are from Linley Gwennap, one of the world's leading chip analysts. I listen closely to the chip guys, who often see trends several years ahead.

Wi-Fi is close to ubiquitous in every middle class home, so why pay a phone company to connect you in home or office? The vast majority of IoT apps are low speed and latency tolerant. Your air conditioner or washing machine doesn't need to communicate at megabits/second, much less gigabits. Adding Wi-Fi is just a couple of bucks and getting cheaper. 802.11ac is delivering a routine 500 megabits.

Lowell was more polite, of course. Verizon didn't buy any spectrum in the last auction despite prices that were down by 50-60%. "We simply don’t need it," explains Chief Network Officer Nicola Palmer. Lowell McAdam told Morgan, "When you look at the spectrum and the cost of small cells versus the cost of spectrum in the old AWS auction sort of environment, it was clear to us that building the fiber infrastructure to densify via small cells was better than the alternative of a buying spectrum." CFO Matt Ellis explained to Craig Moffett, "Spectrum is one way that we can add that capacity, but it's not the only way," 

Technology allows adding relatively inexpensive capacity within existing spectrum faster than demand is growing. Verizon estimates the cost per bit is going down 40%/year; Telus estimates 55%. Verizon's capex has been flat to down but they now are offering new unlimited plans. McAdam expects capex to stay flat for the next decade, despite one of the largest 5G mmWave builds in the world.