Thursday School: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics! Telecoms infrastructure sales is about listening to the customers needs, and delivering solutions matched to those needs. Posting this week about one of the rural sites within these indicative macro locations, I was asked about the need to densify the footprint to add 3.5GHz 5G Massive MIMO. Even without the parlous financials of the UK MNOs, it was never an RoI which I believed was attractive in the UK. Within the map below, towns are 5-20Km apart, but there are likely 2-3 populated villages within that range. Meaningful 3.5GHz coverage beyond 1.5Km is unlikely, as is sufficient population within that range to justify the equipment and services investment. Since then – apparently to embarrass their customers into buying more equipment – one of the top 3 RAN vendors has taken the view that MNOs should be deploying more 3.5GHz in order to satisfy their customers – on the basis that different geographies have deployed more, while simultaneously saying that they have over-predicted traffic growth by 7-10%. Arguing that 95% of US 5G coverage is WideBand and that the European figure must be massively boosted from just under half that is disingenuous without examining the deltas: 🥇US populations are a much narrower spike than Europe, with tiny populations in large areas. 🥈US revenues per customer are almost twice European levels ($30USD vs EUR15). 🥉The US is 1 market, Europe is 30 with smaller scales and higher regulation. 💲So US revenues per site are higher, and costs per site are lower. We owe it to our customers to act in their best interests, offering them solutions cost-matched to their needs, not solutions designed to maximise our revenues! #Infrastructure #EveryDaysaSchoolDay #Mobile 🤳🏼 #Telecommunications Previous Post: https://lnkd.in/ebwrZzY6
Quite insightful. The mobile communication industry has come a long way to offer widespread connectivity all around the world, but the final frontiers of connectivity prove to be a daunting task, more from RoI perspective than technological point of view. If we really want to achieve the ITU 6G goal of "ubiquituous connectivitiy", we need to rethink a few things, starting from regulations (e.g. spectrum and RAN sharing), how we research, design and standardize technologies, how we select features and deploy all the way to vendor offerings.
Builder of Open vRAN, Small Cell and EdgeAI Networks
3wAs a point of clarity, I'm going to assume that 4G mobile/cell-phone coverage by population is 99+% in both cases. But by land-mass, UK is approx 97-99% while the US is about 85% with mid-west, east-coast and west-coast cities capturing the vast majority of the population in a tiny percentage of the land-mass.. So more rural areas with sparse population will tend to have coverage in UK and Europe than in the US. So a European 5G Low-band / Narrow-band rural service is being compared with mMIMO/wideband service in the US but perhaps more fairly should be compared with NO coverage! And of course while 95% of Canadians do not actually live within 100 miles of the US border, 99% population coverage lives in about 20% of land-mass