Ericsson and T-Mobile ink $3.5B deal for 5G

[dsl]

The real kicker is the last line. T-mobile can software upgrade its LTE equipment to 5G:

> The partnership with Ericsson means that T-Mobile’s already installed base of Ericsson Radio System radios will be able to run 5G NR with a remote software installation.

[StudentStuff]

Ericsson was/is Intel's large foundry client, but with the 10nm delays and 14nm being thoroughly booked with x86-64 and LTE modems for Apple, there isn't room for Ericsson to produce new chips on modern nodes. Worse yet, I hear Ericsson designed specifically for Intel 10nm, which leaves them up a creek for the next few years.

A firmware update to make existing hardware have a longer lifespan and help Ericsson to retain their clients was likely the only out here. If Ericsson had the new chips they were planning on, this firmware update would be much more expensive and less probable to actually see carriers taking them up on it.

[NKosmatos]

That's the good thing with almost all telecom equipment by Ericsson and their big advantage. Remote software update/upgrade while in operation with almost zero down time and also the ability to live/actively patch the running code.

[cellularmitosis]

Great. Now I'll be able to use up my monthly data in 2 minutes instead of 10 minutes.

Edit: I don't mean to poo-poo the advance of tech, but this really highlights the disconnect between what's possible and what consumers actually want/value.

[babypuncher]

I was under the impression that the real improvement in "5G" systems was in how many concurrent users they can handle, not the amount of bandwidth they can offer a single user.

[trizic]

It would be great to see wireless providers becoming competitors to home ISPs. If some day wireless speeds become comparable, the problem of having only one home ISP would go away.

[InclinedPlane]

Did you have a smartphone 10 years ago? Do you remember what 3G was like? Wasn't so bad, right? Try using 3G in any metropolitan area today, a lot of times it's painfully slow. Why is that? Congestion. The reason to upgrade isn't necessarily to improve the best case performance for a single user it's to provide a better quality of service for a larger number of users. Anyone who's attended an event like comic-con or PAX knows just how easy it is for even 4G LTE to get saturated with connections.

[rayiner]

Do ordinary consumers actually run into data caps routinely? When I was on T-Mobile, I used hotspot extensively and never paid attention to my data usage, but never hit the soft cap on their unlimited plan.

Also, data caps grew a lot in the 3G -> 4G transition, and will grow a lot in the 4G -> 5G transition: https://www.pcmag.com/news/357374/verizon-no-4g-level-data-c...

[Brakenshire]

I think it depends where you are. I’ve just looked, you can get 100GB for £20 a month in the UK (sim-only), cost of data is not a big issue here.

I agree top speed isn’t too much of an problem in itself, but if with contention that speed can drop a hundred fold and still provide a good connection, the leeway is worth having. And presumably there are range and robustness of connection benefits as well.

[gascan]

I was a little excited for 4G, because while 3G achieved respectable throughput, the latency was terrible- 4G seemed to dramatically improve.

IMO 4G is pretty solid all around, and for the first time people are going, "5G? Why?"

[jesseb]

Yeah, I share this sentiment. I live in Canada, we get gouged bad here. Thankfully my employer covers my cell phone, because my bill would regularly be well over $100/month with the amount of data I use.

[tjoff]

It highlights the effects of lack of competition and a broken market. I have more monthly data than I can ever use up.

[lylecubed]

T-Mobile still has an unlimited plan, right?

[devy]

5G wireless data plans have to be different or it won't make sense to have such high speed.

[ksec]

This is good news as it kept Ericsson on the battle field. Nokia is looking a lot worst though may be it will merge with Ericsson some day. In terms of telecom equipment industry Huawei is now bigger than Nokia and Ericsson combined. And may be I am the only one not entirely comfortable with that.

[NKosmatos]

I don't know from where exactly you get this impression but last time I checked they only had a 1% difference (28% versus 27% and Nokia 23% with 2017 figures [0]). I can tell you that Ericsson is in a much better position than Huawei. And although I would also like an Ericsson Nokia merger, I don't see it happening soon ;-)

[0] https://technology.ihs.com/600864/global-mobile-infrastructu...

[hourislate]

It seems they are using both companies to build out their network.

T-Mobile and Nokia Ink $3.5 Billion, Multi-year 5G Network Agreement

https://www.t-mobile.com/news/nokia-5g-agreement

[astrowilliam]

Why are you concerned about Huawei being bigger?

[jnurmine]

Huawei is bigger than Nokia and Ericsson combined in telecom equipment market?

That does not sound right.

Do you have some numbers to back that up?

[nickserv]

Good news for Erlang? I hope some of those dollars go to improving the language and VM.

[rdtsc]

Here is a video of Joe Armstrong from React 2014 conference where in the intro he describes how Erlang is used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQIE22e0cW8&t=590

TL;DL: If Erlang breaks so does cat picture sharing for more than 50% of world's smart phones.

[lytedev]

And, by extension, Elixir!

[signa11]

> Good news for Erlang? ...

not sure if radio was using erlang to begin with. on the epc-core i.e. mme/pgw/sgw probably...

[xattt]

Is there a specific 5G standard? In comparison to 3G which had CDMA2000 and UMTS, there seems to be mutlitude of unnamed standards.

[fuzzyset]

4G mobile standard was LTE from 3GPP, which competed against WiMax from IEEE and won in the late 00s.

5G mobile standard is NR (stands for New Radio) from 3GPP. There is no competing mobile standard from anyone else.

Biggest change compared to LTE is the formal standard for millimeter wave communication for mobile. Previously it's been used for fixed wireless access and/or satellites. We'll see how it plays out in a mobile consumer environment.

[ofcrpls]

Those are two separate technology standards. 3GPP2 evolution got merged and we came down to a single "4G" standard with the LTE air interface. It borrowed a lot from WiFi's adoption of OFDMA that allowed a lot of the bandwidth increases. 5G evolution on the air interface though significant, are just an extension of that, using higher frequency bands. But where the meat of 5G lies is in expanding on the legwork done in LTE specs in preparation for IoT. It brings in the ability for multi-bandwidth, multi-reliability and multi-latency applications and SDN paradigms. "Kubernetes for the Network" kind of terms are being thrown about.

Initial deployments though will focus on "FTTH replacement" scenarios.

[Nokinside]

Yes.

5G New Radio (NR) is the global standard for a unified 5G wireless air interface. It was ratified some time ago. This allows investments to hardware.

The standardization efforts continue and they add functionality and more interfaces for specialized services and applications. For example: Multimedia Priority Service, Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) application layer services, 5G satellite access, Local Area Network support in 5G, terminal positioning and location and lots of other service interfaces. 5G will be much more than just 4G LTE with steroids.

[dkonofalski]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but won't this put Verizon in the opposite situation that they're in now? Doesn't Verizon have coverage in most places because they were able to build early and keep their old CDMA towers in place? With the change to 5G aren't all the LTE/GSM carriers now in a better place to update to 5G? Won't this actually cause Verizon to require huge network and infrastructure upgrades?

[unit91]

ITU IMT-2020, though I can't seem to find the actual text. Secondary sources:

https://news.itu.int/5g-update-new-itu-standards-network-sof...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G

[mdani]

Yes, there is a set of 3GPP specs that define 5G standard. Slicing of the network to provide low latency is one of the highlights. There are open source implementations such as openCORD that target the same goals.

[wyldfire]

3gpp release-15 describes parts of what they're calling 5G [1]. And no AFAICT it's not finalized, there's a lot under this umbrella. IIRC fixed/terrestrial wireless (at 60GHz?) is part of what's referred to as '5G'.

[1] http://www.3gpp.org/release-15

[phoe-krk]

http://www.3gpp.org/news-events/3gpp-news/1929-nsa_nr_5g

[crudbug]

It is like virtualization of air interface. Multiple standards with different metrics.