Safe Connections Act

With an FCC vote on classifying mobile and fixed broadband as a Title II common carrier service on tap for Feb. 26, the drum beat against the plan is getting louder. Wireless carriers and associations independently released letters and studies Thursday. FCC officials, meanwhile, are denying the latest rumor that Chairman Tom Wheeler will have the commission vote on interim rather than permanent rules, at least in part, at the meeting. Industry officials on both sides of the issue said the noise level likely will increase leading up to the vote.

LAS VEGAS -- The nascent move toward 5G wireless networks won’t leave behind 4G and other advancements to carrier networks, predicted executives from carriers and device and network equipment makers. They said some smart and other devices using the Internet of Things may use 4G for the foreseeable future, especially those that are sold now or are already deployed. Some speakers at a CES panel Wednesday, and in answers to our question from the audience, described the move toward 5G as an evolution to what they characterized as already robust networks.

LAS VEGAS -- Fiber to the home (FTTH) and sufficient broadband capacity to the home are key to the widespread use of the kinds of devices being introduced at CES -- everything from wireless security cameras, to smart light bulbs, to remote thermostats to smart crockpots -- speakers said Monday on a policy panel at the CES Broadband Conference.

It likely will take longer to reach 100 million 5G subscribers than it did to reach that many 4G subscribers, an ABI Research study said. It will take more than five years for 5G to hit that mark, which is two years longer than for 4G, ABI said Thursday in a news release. The growth of 4G was fueled by the capabilities of “increasingly powerful smartphones and the availability of 4G devices,” it said. Subscriber growth of 5G likely will be a bit more muted at first due to the increased complexity of 5G cells and networks, but will pick up in 2023, it said. The countries that will lead 5G subscriber volumes are the U.S., China, Japan, South Korea and the U.K., it said. A 5G network will be a network of small cells and it will be practical in urban and industrialized environments “for the population density and the reflections in urban canyons,” it said. But “expect a scaled down version of 5G to use existing spectrum for macrocells as well in the longer term,” ABI said.

Aruba Networks, Broadcom Corp. and other technology vendors formed an alliance to meet industry demand for higher ethernet speeds. The companies making up the Multi-Rate Gigabit Ethernet Base-T Alliance, put their support behind efforts at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to bring 2.5G and 5G ethernet speeds to enterprise access points and other systems relying on unshielded twisted-pair cabling, MGBASE-T said Monday in a news release. The specification adopted by the alliance "leverages many of the fundamental technologies in Ethernet standards as defined in the IEEE 802.3 10GBASE-T, enabling faster time to market with minimal research and development efforts for ecosystem vendors," it said.

The growing demand for spectrum capacity for mobile services requires more access to spectrum and a more "decentralized" approach to spectrum allocation, wireless industry professionals said Friday at a Silicon Flatirons event webcast from Boulder, Colorado.

Industry will need to move to 5G in the next five years or so to deal with rapid expansion in data demands on wireless networks, said Norimasa Sugiura, an official at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communication Technology. Sugiura spoke Wednesday at a Wireless Telecommunications Association policy workshop at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business. His institute is an agency of the Japanese government.

While many believe 5G networks will start to be deployed around 2020, much work remains to be done, 4G Americas said in a paper released Friday (http://bit.ly/12snKCu). The 5G networks will have to take into account the Internet of Things, the group said: “To support possibly billions of IoT devices, a wireless network infrastructure is needed that’s not only highly scalable in terms of its capacity, but can also optimally handle differing service needs of various IoT verticals.” There's also some consensus that since LTE and LTE-Advanced are still being deployed, “there is considerable life left in 4G,” 4G Americas said.

CTIA President Meredith Baker turned up the heat on the FCC to not impose the same net neutrality rules on the wireless industry as are imposed on wireline, saying doing so would be “almost reckless” on the agency’s part. Baker made her first appearance as CTIA president on C-SPAN’s The Communicators, in an interview set to be televised this weekend.

The FCC approved on a 5-0 vote Friday an order designed to speed deployment of distributed antenna systems, small cells and other wireless facilities. In a late change negotiated by Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, the FCC reduced from 90 to 60 days the period of review before a collocation application can be deemed granted. In return, CTIA and PCIA agreed to work with local jurisdictions on streamlining the approval process. Commissioners noted that infrastructure buildout is as important to deployment as spectrum for robust wireless networks. The FCC also approved, 5-0, a notice of inquiry examining new developments in technology that could increase the viability of operations in bands above 24 GHz.