Dish Network will use products from Samsung Electronics throughout its 5G open radio access network, the companies said Tuesday. “Per the multi-year agreement, the companies will collaborate to deploy Samsung's 5G O-RAN-compliant virtualized RAN (vRAN) solutions and radio units in markets across the U.S., supporting DISH's 5G commercial services,” they said. Samsung will supply “vRAN software and a variety of O-RAN compliant radio units, including Massive MIMO radios,” which “can operate on any commercial off-the-shelf server, while still delivering performance on par with traditional hardware-based equipment,” said a news release.

The world is adding 5G cities at a pace of almost two per day, with the current number at 1,947 globally, reported Viavi Solutions Tuesday. At the end of January, 72 nations had 5G networks in place, with the newest crop of Argentina, Bhutan, Kenya, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Malta and Mauritius, the report says. The U.S., at 296, and China, at 356, had the most 5G cities. “There are currently 24 Standalone (SA) 5G networks globally, meaning that they have been built using a new 5G core network,” Viavi said: “It is widely considered that many of the next-generation use cases and monetization models associated with 5G, beyond enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) will only be possible when Standalone 5G networks built on new 5G core networks are in place.” Some 64 operators have publicly announced open radio access networks. “This breaks down to 23 live deployments, …34 in the trial phase with a further seven operators that have publicly announced they are in the pre-trial phase.”

Consultants the Besen Group estimated the U.S. market for private 5G networks market will reach $3.2 billion by 2026, in a report Monday. The market segments are warehouse/storage, office space, service, mercantile, public assembly, religious worship, education, food service, hospitality, healthcare, food sales and public order/safety, Besen said.

Motorola began taking preorders Thursday for the moto g stylus 5G smartphone ($499), with a 6.8-inch 120 Hz display, 50-megapixel camera system with optical image stabilization and 5,000-mAh battery. The phone will be available unlocked April 28 at Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon and Motorola.com. It will be available in the coming months from 11 additional carriers, emailed the company: AT&T, Boost Mobile, Cricket Wireless, Dish, Google Fi, Optimum Mobile, Republic Wireless, Spectrum Mobile, UScellular, Verizon and Xfinity Mobile. Motorola also announced the moto g 5G ($399), due at Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart May 19 with a 6.5-inch display, 50MP camera and 5,000-mAh battery.

The next big 3rd Generation Partnership Project document, Release 19, is still taking shape and the approach it will take to 5G standards isn’t clear, experts said Wednesday during an ATIS webinar. Many 3GPP meetings remain remote, they said. 3GPP Release 17 “focused on a select set of verticals, like the factory, like medical,” T-Mobile’s Greg Schumacher said. That document was “the big rush and flood of new verticals,” he said. “Release 18 had some new verticals, but it was a little more balanced” and “more of the work was focused on providing services across multiple verticals,” he said. “We will see what Release 19 looks like,” Schumacher said. “We expect to have more work to discuss and agree upon this coming quarter,” he said. The target is to get to 80% completion of the release in Q2 of next year, with the document complete at the end of Q3, he said: “This is subject overall to 3GPP schedules, which often are driven by other external forces,” he said. The timeline for Release 16 slipped about six months in 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic (see 2009220052). 6G won’t hit the market until the end of the decade, but “these technology and generational transitions have a very long lead time,” said Iain Sharp, ATIS principal technologist. Now is “a time to be looking at the early stages of what technology goes into 6G and what is its vision,” he said. In February, ATIS released the "Roadmap to 6G" by its Next G Alliance (see 2202170049). “We are in a pre-standards phase,” he said: “It’s really only in 2027 and beyond that we get to the standardization phase.” Work on 6G shouldn’t “detract” from work being done to make 5G work better, he said.

T-Mobile said Wednesday it topped 1 million Home Internet customers, a year after the 5G service launched. About 40 million households nationwide are eligible to subscribe. “T-Mobile’s remarkable growth in broadband -- a market that’s full of big behemoth corporations -- just underscores how hungry customers are for a real alternative to the Carriers and the Landline ISPs,” said T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert.

The number of 5G users in China topped 400 million in Q1, Chinese news service Shine reported. That's one in every four subscribers, based on numbers from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. China added 48.1 million 5G subscribers in Q1, hitting 403 million, Shine said Tuesday.

The 5G for 12 GHz Coalition updated aides to FCC Commissioners Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington on the group's push for revised rules to use the band for 5G, said a filing posted Tuesday in docket 20-443. The proposal “continues to gain support from a wide array of policy thought leaders, public interest groups, and service providers,” coalition representatives said. The filing highlighted the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society’s recently announced support (see 2203210056).

T-Mobile will host its Q1 earnings call April 27 at 8 a.m. EDT, said the carrier Thursday. This is a change for T-Mobile, which customarily released quarterly results and held the call after the markets closed. The AT&T and Verizon Q1 calls are set for April 21 and 22, respectively, both also before the markets open.

Mid-band fixed wireless access from T-Mobile and Verizon “has emerged as perhaps the key controversy in broadband,” MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett told investors Tuesday. “Both companies have targeted broad rollouts and have set ambitious targets, and they have largely dismissed concerns about capacity constraints,” but neither offers much detail, he said. For T-Mobile, Comlinkdata’s data shows deployment skews “towards rural areas” with the “preponderance of subscribers … coming from areas where there is at least one robust competitive wired alternative,” he said. T-Mobile is “clearly being quite deliberate in where they accept new subscribers,” he said. “It is much harder to draw real insight from the Verizon FWA numbers, inasmuch as they apply only to Verizon’s relatively limited deployment of their [millimeter-wave] offering,” Moffett said: “Their subscribers necessarily skew towards dense areas, as the propagation of mmWave demands.”