Farooq Khan says Phazr, his small company near Dallas, can compete with the giants for the millions of 5G small cells soon to deploy. Verizon is listening and is testing the Phazr equipment. Their target was to be ready by the end of 2017.

Phazr's base station is about two feet high and a foot wide. That's large enough for 384 antennas per sector, three sectors per cell. That's massive, massive MIMO. It's made possible by the very small size of mmWave antennas.

Phazr's system uses mmWave for the download but ordinary spectrum below 6 GHz for the upload. This has the advantage of requiring much less power in the mobile phone, producing less heat.

2019 Mobile 5G Phones! blazes on ads across the trade media from Qualcomm. "You’ll see 5G in 2019 for sure," Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf promises. Verizon has begun a huge, rapid deployment of mmWave, with hundreds of sites installed. 

Mollenkopf himself thought it would be 2020, but new technology is allowing him to chop a year off the schedule. His main foundry, TSMC, has begun "risk production" of 7 nm chips, the next generation. It's reasonable to expect volume production in 2019. TSMC is taking delivery in 2018 on $150M EUV machines to improve critical layers. Steve is going for 2019 because he can.

Verizon will be ready to serve mobile 5G "as soon as phones are available." China Mobile and AT&T are also looking to build early. They will be expensive and probably power hogs, but a true gigabit should be possible. ("Gig LTE" will usually be 75-300 megabits to the customer, per Qualcomm.)

20 top telcos banded together to set a common path for the next thirty years. China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, AT&T and many others have now produced the NGMN 5G End-to-End Architecture Framework O.8.1. The 36 pages are a blueprint of how the telcos want the future. They've done an extraordinary job making the concepts clear to anyone knowledgeable in today's wireless. 

This is the antithesis of the Internet model, a network of networks connected but operating independently. Implicitly, everything would be under the control of the telcos. They would have standard procedures to work together for international traffic, based on everyone having common QoS control.

Competition is fierce and spectrum is short, Reliance Jio spent $20B, built one of the best networks in the world, and gained 100M customers in the first year. Mukesh Ambani's aggressive plans for the 4G $20 (refundable) feature phone will probably add 100M more in the next year or so. Hundreds of millions of Indians are still on 2G. Ambani is ready to spend $B+ in subsidies to bring them to Jio 4G. 

Giant Tata is closing their #4 mobile network, putting 10,000 out of work, writing off billions, and selling off cheaply to Bharti.. #5 Reliance Communications, Ambani's brother's company, is likely to follow. They couldn't compete in the price war. Vodafone and Idea, #2 & #3, are merging to stay alive  

#1 Bharti's strategy in response includes a huge build of Massive MIMO, just announced. Danish Khan now reports the other two likely survivors, Jio and Vodafone/Idea, will also do Massive.

5G is here, Verizon has installed "hundreds": of mmWave cells, per CEO Lowell McAdam. Korea Telecom is building rapidly a system along Highway 50, ready to astound the world at the Olympics in February. Massive MIMO is expanding rapidly. Softbank in Japan and China Mobile are installing thousands of towers, Bharti in India has now joined. Sprint in the U.S., Vodafone, and Deutsche Telekom are building and will soon have major announcements. I predict huge growth in M MIMO in 2018 & 2019. 

These are not tests. Nor are they "trials," of which there are hundreds. Countries only go on these maps when I'm confident they are building and ready to serve customers. Updates and improvements very welcome.

381M customer Bharti Airtel, India's #1, has now turned on Huawei many antenna systems in Bangalore & Kolkata. Early results are doubling and tripling capacity. Bharti's pr, below, claims a 5-7 times improvement. That level of capacity and more will be possible as the software and algorithms improve, but the first generation is getting about half that. 

China Mobile and Softbank pioneered M MIMO only a year ago. Now, the announcements are coming every week. Vodafone in England, Deutsche Te!ekom in the Netherlands and Hutchinson in Austria are officially moving from trials to commercial service. Sprint in the U.S. has a large network installed just waiting for Ericsson's final product release.

Bharti needs to keep up with Jio, the fastest growing network in the world.

The growth of LTE networks continues to astonish even those of us who meekly predicted near-ubiquity as far back as 2009, US Telecom's Pat Brogan estimates LTE coverage at 99.5% of the population, based on company data reported to the FCC. Both Verizon and AT&T claim 98% coverage and T-Mobile almost as high. They have different unserved areas, so 99.5% amongst them is plausible. 

The real figure may be as low as 95-96% because coverage data is notoriously unreliable, with companies having incentives to inflate claims. I remember AT&T telling the FCC a while back the FCC didn;t need to test wireless availability because the companies could provide accurate maps. I checked AT&T's map of Manhattan and saw it claimed as 100% covered. I live here, and at the time was hearing numerous complaints of deadspots.

September 13's announcement by Lowell McAdam will go down in history as the date of the first real 5G mmWave deployment. True speeds of a gigabit are possible, rather than the 100-300 megabits more common with "Gig LTE." 

 We literally have hundreds of cell sites that we have up and operating and 8 markets moving to 11 markets. The global standards will be done we believe sometime this year. The chip manufacturers will have chips available in the first quarter next year for us to incorporate that are on the global standards. So this platform is not two or three years out the way it was a year ago, it's on our doorstep and I think it's going to be huge.

Fixed only at first, competing with cable. It will be 2019 or more likely 2020 before substantial numbers of mobile phones will be able to connect. Both Qualcomm and Intel have thousands of engineers at work and are optimistic about chip delivery dates. It will not be easy.

Verizon needs 5G more than any other company on Earth. Its business model is based on being better and able to charge a premium price. AT&T and especially T-Mobile have caught up in important ways. Independent testing by Open Signal has T-Mobile faster in many cities, although Verizon data disagrees.