5G in China, BroadbandNow’s Q3 2020 Report, FiOS Subscriber Growth Reaches 5-Year High

There has been a huge amount of hype in the United States about being in a race with the Chinese over the deployment of 5G. But after seeing a recent South Korean news article, from the ChosunILBO, concluding that the Chinese 5G experiment might end up an economic bust, Doug Dawson, in a blog post for Pots and Pans, argues that the best U.S. strategy is to lay back and wait until 5G equipment gets cheaper and until new 5G cell sites are made energy efficient.

According to the South Korean article, 5G coverage isn’t seeing wide acceptance. The article cites a recent Chinese survey where over 73 percent of the public says there is no need to buy 5G phones. This matched the findings from another survey that also said the public saw no need for 5G.

Don’t miss the second event in “Broadband Breakfast’s ‘A No-Nonsense Guide to 5G’ Series,” on Wednesday, October 28, 2020, at 12 Noon ET: “National Security, 5G and Trusted Partners.” The series is sponsored by Samsung Electronics America.

The article highlights that Chinese 5G cell sites use a lot of energy. Starting in August, China Unicom took to shutting the cell sites down from 9 PM until 9 AM daily to save on electricity costs. They say each cell site is using triple the power of a 4G cell site, and there are a lot of sites to power.

It takes a huge number of millimeter wave cell sites to cover a city. According to the article, by the end of June 2020 the Chinese had installed 410,000 cell sites. The article estimates that to get the same coverage as today’s 4G that the network would eventually need over 10 million cell sites.

The article quotes Xiang Ligang, the director-general of the Information Consumption Alliance, a Chinese telecom industry association, who said the plans are to build one million new cell sites in each of the next three years.

Northeast states have the highest access to affordable broadband, reports BroadbandNow

On Tuesday, BroadbandNow released The State of Broadband in America study for the third quarter of this year, which reveals that states in the Northeast region have the highest access to broadband, and further, the most affordable broadband options.

Utilizing a new and improved definition of broadband, which increases minimum download speeds to 100 Megabytes per second and requires upload speeds of 25 Mbps, BroadbandNow’s report ranks states based on the availability of broadband.

The report finds the top five states with access to 100 Mbps/25 ranked from the highest rate are Washington, D.C., Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware and New York, with New Jersey faring the best for latency performance overall.

Meanwhile, the bottom five states, which includes one Northeastern state, ranked from the lowest rate are Montana, Wyoming, Maine, South Carolina and Alabama.

The quarterly study highlights access to affordable plans, which Northeastern states also lead the way in.

Rhode Island was found to have the highest level of access to affordable plans with speeds of at least 100 Mbps download / 25 Mbps upload, followed by Washington, D.C., New Jersey, New York, and Maryland.

Pent-up demand drives Verizon’s Fios internet subscriber growth to five-year high

Verizon’s Fios Internet subscriber growth crushed expectations in the third quarter of 2020, as the telco began to handle pent-up demand, which built up during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, reported Jeff Baumgartner for Light Reading.

Thanks in part to a restart of field installs, Fios Internet added 144,000 subscribers to Verizon’s fiber service in total, beating the expected amount of 37,000. The boon of subscribers extended the provider’s grand total to 6.11 million, up 4.1 percent from 5.86 million, a year earlier.

“That’s a five-year high,” Hans Vestberg, Verizon’s CEO, said of the Q3 results during an earnings call last week.

Even without the Q2 backlog fueled by the pandemic, Verizon still would have added “significantly north of 100,000” Fios Internet customers in Q3, thanks in part to the company’s relatively new Mix & Match bundles that lead with broadband, said Matt Ellis, Verizon’s CFO.

Extending Fios’ fiber service, which is currently only offered in seven states, remains one of the main complaints of Verizon customers today.