High speed wide area wireless data (at internet speeds) looks promising in S. Korean tests:

Last month, Huawei and LG U+ had announced completing dual-connectivity technology verification during a 5G trial in Seoul, providing 20Gbps downlink speeds by simultaneously linking two 5G base stations... Huawei will maintain its capability to provide competitive E2E 5G network products in 2018. LG U+ and Huawei will continue to conduct further research into 5G technologies and build a robust E2E industry ecosystem to achieve business success in the upcoming 5G era...

Claing the world's first at-scale 5G network test, the companies used a 5G "tour bus" to deliver 5G 4K IPTV and used a virtual reality (VR) drone to demonstrate data rates of between 20Mbps and 100Mbps at the LG U+ offices.

Read more here...

Google in trouble for predatory pricing -- for NOT charging.

Fairsearch Europe, a group including rivals Microsoft, claims Android operating system is 'deceptive way' to dominate markets. The group says Android is "a deceptive way to build advantages" which aims to "dominate the mobile marketplace and cement its control over consumer internet data for online advertising as usage shifts to mobile.

The complaint comes as the European commission's antitrust chief, Joaquín Almunia, continues an investigation into Google's dominance in search that has ground on for more than two years without any clear action. The EC competition group has raised four principal objections to Google's activities in Europe – normally a precursor to regulatory action.

Android-powered phones make up about 70% of those shipped in Europe at present, though a smaller amount of the installed base. Microsoft's Windows Phone makes up around 5%. Not to be left out, Apple has been the subject of European Union complaints about anticompetitive practices carried out by Apple, and its administrative department -- the European Commission -- is closely monitoring the situation.

Carriers throughout Europe (but mainly French carriers) have sent information regarding their contracts with Apple to the European Commission saying that Apple's rules for carrying the iPhone are anticompetitive.

According to many, predatory pricing is a practice of selling a product or service at a very low price, intending to reduce competitors out of the market, or create barriers to entry for potential new competitors. To many economists, this is an absurd concept: as long as any transaction takes place because the parties to it agree to the price, the only reason they will do so is because each party thinks he will be better off doing the transaction, than not. One party is not "preying on" the other.

To this author's mind, the term of arbitrary and moralizing based on non-economic views -- whoever is using the term disapproves of an actual price for whatever reason; there is no reason why Google should offer its mobile operating system for free, if handset makers agree. They do have a "EULA" or licensing agreement to abide by, after all.

Some argue that it is particularly hypocritical for a government agency to criticize companies' pricing, since the funding of government comes from taxation, which is not a voluntary transaction, but is based on coercion -- ultimately the threat of imprisonment. The only real predatory pricing is taxation, to many anarcho-capitalists.

Follow-up: Free WiFi

On the heels of the U.S. FCC's interest in free wifi for all, here's an article on municipal wifi in my favorite *other* home, Dublin.

If Leopold Bloom could have availed of free wifi as he engaged in his citywide perambulations all those years ago, we might have got a very different version of Ulysses, with added hashtags, LOLs and OMGs, but still of course displaying the same cavalier attitude to punctuation.
Dublin City Council has chosen some well-known landmarks to set up its brave new service: Temple Bar Square, Wolfe Tone Square, Smithfield Square, Barnardo Square, Clarendon Street, St Patrick’s Park, Merrion Park, Grafton Street, Henry Street, outside the GPO on O’Connell Street, in front of the Convention Centre on City Quay, and in the outdoor amphitheatre at the Civic Offices at Wood Quay.

In my current station, you can find free wifi around the city. But it is typically not the urban dwellers who need such access (think: Starbucks). Fixed wireless broadband from some companies is a step in the right direction, but again the market focus is on high-population urban centers (where, naturally, there are more potential customers per square mile). Finding info superhighway on-ramps in the countryside is still difficult. Let's hope that the spectrum proposed for ubiquitous wifi works well across long distances, so everyone truly has freedom of access.

Ars Technical indicates this is just the White Spaces proposal that's been around for a few years -- and not described as "free Wi-Fi for all". White Spaces may well be an important step toward expanding Internet access, but it is not going to bring free Wi-Fi to every major US city. White Spaces takes the spectrum from empty TV channels and allows the airwaves to be used for Wi-Fi, or "Super Wi-Fi" as it's sometimes called. Using lower frequencies than traditional Wi-Fi, White Spaces signals would be better at penetrating obstacles and thus travel farther.

Occasionally, competition yields savings. At Least in the case of the failed AT&T - TMobile Merger

Sometimes a little competition is a good thing. From a leading blog on telecom: The biggest thing that has happened to improve the competitive landscape is that T-Mobile has now finally acquired enough spectrum to build out a nationwide 4G LTE network. Before the AT&T merger died off, T-Mobile didn’t have nearly enough spectrum to remain competitive with its rivals in the LTE space, which was a big reason why parent company Deutsche Telekom wanted to sell it to AT&T in the first place: if T-Mobile was doomed as a national carrier anyway, Deutsche figured it might as well get some money for the carrier while it still could. The Federal Trade Commission recognized the fact that a joining of AT&T and T-Mobile would reduce competition, ending up with a wireless leviathan of over 125 million customers -- more customers than Verizon, and three times as many as Sprint Nextel, and control about 42 percent of the U.S. mobile market. In theory, consolidation isn't itself may not be bad eventuality. But it is unusual that in such a market with such high barriers to entry, protected with the assistance of government and regulators, would get any more open. We don't need the current oligopoly, much less a duopoly.

Cellular capacity expanded... or not?

Of course, as soon as I put a stake in the sand, one of my associates comes up with a different perspective. Vince D'Onofrio made some excellent points, so I am re-posting here what he wrote to me directly -- I think his commentary warrants a wider audience...

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I have seen all kinds of distributed radio technologies and do not believe result of DIDO technology is really possible the way it has been reported in this article. Except for the bit about overcoming Shannon's Law. I believe it is possible for DIDO to add additional capacity in the right environment, but it still must follow mother natures laws. So it has to have some limitations. Each person getting full cell capacity regardless of the number of users is never going to happen. There are always choke points in the network unless there is unlimited money to spend on infrastructure and unlimited radio spectrum available. Undesired signals from other in-band users will be perceived as noise by the radio receiver and noise chokes throughput, thus limiting data rates. There is no easy way to test the impact of unrestrained capacity without a fully loaded network. Nether Steve Perlman or his cohorts have the capital to do that. Anything can be proven on paper with enough math. But there are reasons why most theoretical patents never get implemented in the real world.

Even if we were able fix radio link capacity problems by distributing the transfer nodes, the switching centers are going to hit a wall. The only way I see this technology working is if all of the content comes from other local mobiles are being used as relay stations. This also means distributing backhaul data traffic (PSTN and Internet traffic) to local fixed connection points or miniature base stations. Otherwise no real-time transmissions will be possible due to interconnection delays in the network.

Though, it is possible that new technology could address the needs of certain high bandwidth users better that what is out on the street today. Since 99% of users would be happy with only 1% of what a base station has to offer, there might be enough surplus capacity for the bandwidth hungry gamer after all, despite the lack of high throughput for all users. We may approach this capacity anyway with LTE Advanced technology which is well on its way to being implemented globally.

Today, most users are not actually annoyed with the speed of their wireless networks. What they perceive as a slow network is the delay associated with provisioning and setup time, which can be horribly long (one minute or more when the network is congested). This delay is not a radio link problem. You can experience these delays even when there is enough channel capacity. LTE takes care of this problem with new protocols that create an Instant On mobile Internet experience. Users will perceive faster network speeds because the overhead delays will be greatly minimized.

My guess is that DIDO is best used for small local networks like college campuses where everyone is talking or gaming with their neighbors and there are relatively few high bandwidth consumers. In a dense urban environment, with 1,000+ simultaneous users possible in a few city blocks, the technology will likely fail to deliver enough throughput for all because of the combination of excessive load and noise.

Though, hats off to Steve Pearlman if he can prove me wrong. I would love to see something truly disruptive change the industry landscape.

-Vince D'Onofrio
Wireless Telecom Consultant
www.radiofrontier.com