I have been asked a lot about the recent work freezes in the carrier networks. While there are a ton of conspiracy theories out there, I thought I would drop in a few words of common sense to help ease the pain of all of you that are seeing a slowdown in work.

There are two main things carriers are looking at moving ahead. Obviously, they want to add revenue and cut costs. How will they do that? Break into new markets and look for network efficiencies.

One is to add new subscribers since it appears that the mobile market is near capacity. So, the next market is the fixed wireless access market, (FWA). They might as well cut into the ISP market. (ISP = Internet Service Provider for all you newbies).

They also want to cut network costs. The obvious winner is energy savings. This will be more complicated but there are several things that the carriers are looking at. 

Many people are questioning the way the industry is moving. To me, history repeats itself and it’s almost as if everyone complaining has never seen this before. The industry moves in cycles. I didn’t think you had to be as close to 59 years old as I am. (I’ll be 59 this year so excuse me for being a grumpy old man!!)

I’m just saying, open your eyes, and look at the progression of 3G to 4G to 5G. The cycle repeats itself. I just don’t know how 6G is going to happen with the spectrum pool so depleted. 

One thing that slowed this cycle down was the government’s lack of operating properly. I don’t blame the FCC, in my opinion, they were held back by the Senate and Congress by not adding another commissioner until now and tying their hands in the spectrum auctions. The US government seems to be incompetent at times, getting in its own way. Again, just my observation. 

This is bad news for many in the industry. It is very hard to weather a storm that may last for a few years. 

Let’s look at what is being done and address these issues as we move forward, shall we?

Let the network pay for itself!

The beauty of building a network is that at some point it will pay you back. The carriers would like to stop spending billions so that they can start making money off the network.

Let’s face it, they were able to build these networks and still turn a profit. At least T-Mobile was able to do that. I don’t know what’s going on at Verizon.

Anyway, the network now can run, growth can slow, and the income will grow slightly over the next 2 to 3 years. I’m not sure if you figured it out but that should mean very high revenue and expenses will be reduced in a big way.

Show me the money!

Well, here it is. Same plans, new FWA users, increased network efficiency, and profits increase. Sounds like a win!

Is 5G a Failure for the carriers?

Honestly, I don’t think so. For my argument, look at the ecosystem. 

The OEMs obviously made out very well. They are selling a lot of radios, upgrading networks and cores. 

Backhaul providers, fiber providers, and cabling providers have been killing it over the past 5 years.

Tower companies have increased revenue that they can live on for the next 20 years. While the major expansion may be over they will continue to add more revenue and the systems fill in for the next 5 years.

Tower climbers had a boon over the last 5 years. Unfortunately, construction is going to slow down. This hits hard and quickly. Sorry, but some will continue to work while many will be looking for a new job very soon.

New devices are everywhere, new iPhones, new Androids, and new IoT devices. Look how the 5G models have taken off. If anything, IoT devices have fallen behind, but only because tech moved so fast that they’re not getting back their 4G investments in time to pay for the 5G investment. It is hard when you sell a device for under $100 to keep updating the chipsets and then testing the new model. So many SKUs for a low-cost device.

What you may not see is the new features beyond spectrum and technology. For instance, software on the network is constantly being upgraded. We’re moving from NSA (non-stand-alone) to SA (Stand-alone) 5G networks. This will allow new features, such as network slicing, to take place all the way to the end user. We also have new features, new data analytics, and new apps along with the increase in data throughput.

The new doors are opening and showing us new network capabilities.

So I don’t think the carriers are losing anything in technology. However, I do think that the delays in releasing spectrum are hurting the carriers. T-Mobile planned well but had a lot of luck on their side. They were able to purchase Sprint and all that beautiful 2.5GHz spectrum. They got 100MHz in most markets, which today is crushing AT&T and Veriizon’s C Band spectrum. The 600MHz spectrum helped them grow the rural area, but it is definitely not the beachfront property the FCC touted it to be at the time, far from it. Band 41, now that’s beachfront property!!

People are already talking about 6G, which has not been defined yet, but will be in 2027. The great thing about being with an OEM is that we’ll be testing 6G wannabe models up until then and after that. For the OEMs, that is good news, to see what’s possible and what chips will take us into that era. 

Until then, the carriers will start to cut expenses and increase sales where they can. How will they do that? I made a few points below.

FWA = Fixed Wireless Access

We already see this moving ahead. Luckily the carriers are already offering this. As 5G matures and Stand Alone 5G (SA) becomes the new normal, this will be utilizing the network the best way it can be run efficiently.

We’ve all seen the emails and flyers from Verizon and T-Mobile for FWA in the home. This is the new market the carriers are breaking into. It seems to be the fastest-growing segment for the carriers. The great thing is they’re not stealing customers from each other but from the cable companies. That means that many of these customers are net-new greenfield customers. A new market for carriers. 

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the FWA home user has different requirements than most mobile users. I also understand that in most homes and businesses the local ISP offloads onto Wi-Fi inside the building. Offloading to Wi-Fi actually is an easy way for any ISP to distribute the connectivity throughout the insides without much hassle. The 5G coverage may not penetrate into hard-to-reach areas whereas Wi-Fi in the building is much better.

What the carriers have done is cut the cord outside. They also could allow you to take the hotspot with you, assuming it works in the new location. Cable companies do this with their boxes, but I’ll tell you from experience that it’s a pain in and never works right on the first try.

The data usage of home users is where you would think mobile carriers would have an issue. Luckily, most 5G spectrum is new and offers huge throughput compared to networks just 5 years ago. Now they can offer over 100 Mbps up to 1 Gbps. Very competitive with what most ISPs offer with a wire or fiber to the home. 

Unfortunately, many mobile carriers try to cap that data. That will need to stop. I know they probably make a lot of money by charging overages, or at least they will until enough people say enough is enough and leave them to return to Comcast or Charter. 

You can’t screw them if you want to keep a happy customer. I already have neighbors complaining about AT&T charging them overages for their home network. We had to limit their TV’s connectivity. Even then they were so mad at AT&T, not the TV. So, they may take all of their devices over to someone new, it’s not that hard anymore. They told me they went to AT&T because Comcast was charging a lot of money and their customer service was poor. At least AT&T’s customer service was better, but the surprise charges were not good. They may try T-Mobile next. 

However, from a network perspective, suddenly you have sites that may have had passing mobile users on them offering FWA customers full-time, daily, and in off-peak hours. This makes the network much more efficient than it was before. Each fringe site becomes a profit center.

You have to be sure each site can handle the additional traffic at sustained data rates. 

FWA makes each macro site look sexy!!

Think about it, all those sites that were built for the home user or the occasional mobile drive-by are suddenly someone’s lifeline for internet access for their home network. They will rely on it to watch TV, surf the internet, and maybe even work from home like me!

This makes all those fringe sites even more valuable, bringing in more revenue than ever before. They are no longer a coverage requirement but a new profit center. 

Cutting Energy Costs

While this has been a point of contention for the carriers, albeit a quiet one, it is one that now is being addressed. 

The cost per bit has decreased, but the bits used on a site have increased exponentially. So that means that radios and networks have become more and more efficient, and power consumption has increased. Heat creation has increased. Electricity costs more than ever so energy costs have had a double whammy. 

Site expenses just went way up! A big hit on the old OpEx budget on something pretty much out of their control!

Or is it?

The OEMs heard this and listened. There are several new ideas that have come about in the industry, not just for radios but also for networking equipment. 

First, why are utility costs so high at a site? Hint, it’s not the heating bill, it’s the cooling bill.

There are several things that cause problems. Let’s look at a few of them here.

Radios get hot, but generally, they are atop the tower, so they really don’t count. The OEMs did a great job making sure these units take extreme heat. While there are exceptions, looking at Arizona and Nevada here, most radios can take extreme heat. When they need to avoid the sun, OEMs added a sun shield to minimize solar heating.

The radios are more energy efficient than ever, unfortunately, they are also putting out more data, spectrum, and power than ever before. The energy savings were negated by new performance requirements. 

The answer is to reduce run time if possible. Many sites serve coverage or loading purposes. In an urban environment, the radios might only be fully utilized throughout the day or during rush hours. They may have downtime at night or in the wee hours of the morning. This used to not matter. However, as I said, the OEMs were thinking about this.

Now they have ways of turning down power and shutting radios off at off-peak times. While this could be a manual thing, then you have to pay someone to do. That defeats the purpose of cutting costs.

So, the equipment will learn when its slow times are and cut back on radios, maybe a sector, and lower power automatically. Don’t get me wrong, this may cause an issue, but until the complaints come in, let’s cut utility costs, shall we?

With this feature, the network is trying to save costs automatically without human intervention. The carriers should think this is a win-win, but who knows what some of them are thinking.

Next, the networking equipment in the shelter draws a lot of power and puts off a lot of heat. 

This is getting better. Most equipment now is air-cooled, removing those fans that used to fail all the time. They can take extreme heat, but anyone who runs a data center knows that Air Conditioning is required and it becomes the biggest load on electricity. The AC unit also requires a lot of maintenance and it seems like they fail a lot. Especially when they’re running almost 24/7 in the summer. 

If you’ve ever done fieldwork, then you know how many times you went to a site for overheating. I’ve had many calls like this back in the day and I had to learn to repair air conditioning units and call for repair. Maintenance of these units was critical. Not just filter replacement, but monitoring the temperature trends to see if it was losing cooling power.

It’s labor-intensive just to maintain these things.

Well, OEMs are now coming out with liquid-cooled units. While this is new in the data industry, if any of you have worked on broadcast transmitters, then this is actually old-school.

What you have is liquid, maybe water with antifreeze in it, that pumps liquid through the electronics heat sinks and then out to an external cooling unit. Imagine the cooling unit is outside and looks like a large radiator with a fan connected to it. It should have multiple fans to bypass a point of failure, but many still only have one fan to save costs. All the same, this greatly reduces AC cooling costs because the heat is quickly transferred to the outside of the cabinet or shelter or data center, wherever the networking and BBU equipment is located. 

How cool is this? While it seems like a breakthrough in data, broadcast figured this out decades ago, back when I did broadcast work as a young buck.

The difference was that broadcast back then used kilowatts, that’s right, thousands of watts to broadcast to a region. If you made a mistake, it would kill you, literally. 

Today, low power and you’re worried about the lasting effects. Aside from heart attacks and tower accidents, not many people die at a site, especially from electrocution or radiation.

It’s a brilliant idea that is being released today. Unfortunately, a lot of these ideas are coming out in the middle of the 5G build, but all the same, at least we have options moving forward.

Now, for all of you people crying that we should use sustainable power. That sounds good, but the reality is it’s not practical in most of the United States. Where it is practical, there are still limitations.

In the US where backup power is required everywhere, you don’t see many batteries tied to solar panels for long-term backup. We have generators everywhere. We’re still adding generators everywhere. We love generators in this industry. Do you know why? Because 98% of the time they work. If they don’t work it’s because they failed or someone didn’t maintain it properly. 

A generator will guarantee us days of run time, not hours.

I don’t know of any solar panels that can guarantee me days of unbroken run time, do you?

While solar is popular, it has limitations. You need space, enough to add panels for power collection. 

If you put them on the tower, you threaten the structural integrity of the tower which already holds hundreds of pounds of mounts, clamps, antennas, lines, and radios. Oh, did I mention it has to survive hurricane-force winds with all that crap on it? Well, it does!

In la-la land this sounds great, just use solar and wind and everything will be OK. In the real world, those solutions suck for so many reasons. Yet, we are trying to make them work.

One more thing, it takes a ton of batteries to have that lasts for over 4 hours. Batteries, even the amazing Lithium-ion batteries take up space and are heavy. They also have corrosive chemicals in them and come with a lot of risks. There are also a lot of ethical issues with the sources of Lithium and Cobalt. Make sure the batteries are sourced correctly, preferably not from a Chinese company that will not be truthful about the sourcing.

Summary

At least the industry sees these problems and is addressing them.

New business in the form of fixed broadband opens up a new market. Sure, there are a lot of critics, but what is the alternative, doing nothing? People often critique without looking at the actual downside.

Saving energy at the site to cut costs. This is just plain old common sense. One that is finally being addressed.