That is not the way it is happening: Wireless operators and suppliers considered that mobile wireless networks would become broadband capable and that OTT, over the top, and competing video subscriber, mobile payments, advertising, etc. would emerge. However, the industry is competitive which forces operators, more or less, to anticipate how markets will change and try to get in front of it. Operators are the ones who have borrowed several hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide to acquire spectrum and build 3G, 4G and beyond 4G networks. Device suppliers, including Apple, Samsung, and OS suppliers Apple and Google/Android, would have no market to sell into if operators had not anticipated and spent to deploy the networks in the first place.
Operators are not so much playing catch up as playing games to have the industry develop along the lines that they have the best chances to maintain control. The broad policy is to orchestrate control over spectrum access through encouraging government regulators to put almost all easy to use spectrum into their hands rather than place some prime spectrum into unlicensed use.
Here is a simple reality check: About 85% of home broadband use goes over 2.4GHz WiFi. That spectrum is 'junk spectrum' because it is a high frequency, competes with home phones, microwave ovens, microphones, Bluetooth, and other interferers. 2.4GHz is near the resonance of H2O.. why it is used in microwave ovens. That makes it susceptible to weather, foliage, etc. which is part of the reason why mobile operators never wanted it until WiFi became popular.
The magic of WiFi is that it has users deploying it. That increases the points of purchase and use by orders of magnitude. And it lowers the cost of 'building' the network: compared to building a managed network using 4G, 5G or whateverG, WiFi costs about 1/20th to 1/200th.
The enormous increase in capacity of 5G comes from deploying magnitudes more densely: 'massively smallcell' deployment. 5G technologies are extensions of 4G: the basic waveform technology does not change from OFDMA/SC-FDMA. plus MIMO-AAS. Greater exploitation of those waveforms largely stems from the evolution of IC technology and fabrication, (chips): synchronized cells can coordinate to send multiple signals through the same spectrum, differentiated by spatial vector/space, time, polarization, and coding.
The development of 5G has long been anticipated. Operators want to be in the position of playing catch-up.. it is not a scramble imposed on them without knowledge and anticipation. Instead, it is being BORG-like: waiting for the market to develop under their control and then assimilating it. If regulators and operators and the IT/Internet/networking community were not so brain-dead, they would be putting much more pressure on regulators to open up a fair amount of clean low-band spectrum for combined use. The 600MHz auction was the last chance US regulators had to turn the industry into a more competitive, efficient landscape.. and they have screwed that up before it gets out of the gate IMO. |
