The EU shouldn't ignore U.S. urgings that it create national standards on potential network-based threats to privacy, security and intellectual property when it discusses 5G safeguards this week in Brussels, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote Monday for Politico. China's Huawei has a troubling business track record of ties to the Chinese People's Liberation Army, bribery and IP theft, but securing 5G goes further than blocking any one company from building those networks, he wrote. Huawei didn't comment. Pompeo said such suppliers as Nokia, Samsung and Ericsson don't pose the same dangers as Chinese companies.

T-Mobile continued the 5G drumroll Monday, lighting up its low-band 600 MHz network and announcing preorders for two phones due in stores Friday. Metro by T-Mobile will launch the first U.S.-wide prepaid 5G Friday, it said. It spans 200 million-plus people, 5,000 towns and 1 million square miles, covering “more people in more places” than rivals, said the carrier. It pitched the $900 and $1,300 5G phones to early adopters. In a promotion, line switchers can get the $900 OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren for free with a trade-in of select smartphones and a 24-month contract. Buyers of the Samsung Galaxy 10 Plus 5G ($1,299) can get up to $1,300 off via 24 or 26 monthly bill credits or any Samsung Galaxy S10 or Note10 of equal or lesser value when they add a line. The phones are ready to use Sprint’s 2.5 GHz 5G spectrum "when available if the merger closes,” it said. T-Mobile CEO John Legere said (see 1902270030) the combination of its low-band and millimeter-wave spectrum and Sprint’s mid-band spectrum would create “the highest capacity network in U.S. history -- a whopping 400 MHz+ total spectrum for customers nationwide on average.” A map shows consumers 5G coverage, "down to their neighborhoods."

The migration to 5G “isn't just about wireless,” said Analog Devices CEO Vincent Roche on a fiscal Q4 call Tuesday. It will also require “a complete re-architecting of the core and wireline network to meet the 5G vision of gigabit speeds, low latency and high reliability demanded by mission-critical applications,” he said. “This network expansion will require a significant upgrade of the backhaul system, opening a new revenue opportunity,” he said. The chipmaker's ambitions include supplying optical and "point-to-point microwave solutions" to 5G networks, he said. Its 5G infrastructure design wins “are moving to low-volume production in 2020, ahead of a more meaningful ramp in 2021,” he said. Analog Devices expects 5G demand to “remain modest” for the rest of calendar 2019, “with a positive inflection in demand to occur in the fiscal second quarter as the global 5G rollout ramps,” said Chief Financial Officer Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah.

Three straight years of smartphone market “contraction” will end in 2020 when global smartphone shipments are expected to return to growth on China’s “ambitious 5G plans,” reported IDC Tuesday. IDC forecast 1.5 percent unit growth to slightly more than 1.4 billion smartphones. It predicts 190 million 5G smartphones will ship in 2020. That 14 percent of total smartphones shipped would far exceed the first year of 4G shipments in 2010 when 1.3 percent of shipments were 4G handsets, it said.

Ericsson expects 5G will grow to 2.6 billion wireless subscriptions globally by the end of 2025, for 29 percent of wireless accounts: “With the continued momentum for 5G, we predict 13 million 5G subscriptions by the end of this year.” A “big share” will be in China, where all three main service providers launched commercial 5G services in Q4, the equipment vendor said Monday. “Sign-up of customers started even before launch, with more than 10 million 5G users registered in October.” LTE is expected to remain “the dominant mobile access technology” the next six years, peaking in 2022 at 5.4 billion subscriptions globally before declining to 4.8 billion by the end of 2025 “as LTE subscriptions migrate to 5G,” said Ericsson.

The FCC is "solidly on track" for a 2020 C-band auction, said Commissioner Brendan Carr in an interview with The Communicators, posted online Friday and to have aired on C-SPAN over the weekend. Noting concerns that such an auction might be three or more years out, he said "that's not going to happen" due to the auction's being such an agency priority. “A lot of regulators right now are struggling with a lack of vision” on 5G, and he said it will be more consequential than the transition from analog to digital. He said that lack of vision is reflected in opposition to T-Mobile buying Sprint. Support of deals like it shows "you understand where technology is going," he said: "A lot of consumers aren't happy with the status quo," and want to see new competition. He has "significant concerns" about China Unicom and Chinese Telecom being licensed to operate in the U.S., and favors an investigation of whether existing Communications Act Section 214 licenses should be pulled. He said there's unanimity among U.S. allies on the issue. Carr doesn’t think there's a need for a new agency like the FCC to regulate just edge providers; instead, antitrust authorities need to have "forward-looking vision" to see where the tech industry is going.

That 5G wireless service is “super fast” but scarcely available are among key “things to know” about the technology for consumers weighing a 5G smartphone purchase this holiday, said Opensignal Friday. The mobile analytics firm measured 5G service performance in the U.S., Australia, Switzerland and South Korea, and found users are experiencing download speeds exceeding 1 Gbps, with U.S. speeds topping out at 1.8 Gbps, it said. “As 5G evolves, we expect to continue to see increasing speeds.” Only 1 percent of the speed tests Opensignal did recently “actually used an active 5G connection,” it said. “While users may have a 5G phone, it will take a bit longer to find ubiquitous connectivity.” Though industry 5G chatter has been going on for a while, “the technology is still in its early days and there is lots more to come,” it said. Future stand-alone 5G networks “will require totally new core infrastructure, which take longer to create, but will help usher in some of the biggest benefits of 5G such as lowering latency and improving network congestion.”

Verizon executives made clear in a meeting with sell-side analysts Tuesday it doesn’t need the C band for its 5G plans, Wells Fargo’s Jennifer Fritzsche told investors Wednesday. “Over the next year, [Verizon] will be rolling out additional 5G Mobile markets, with plans to upgrade cell sites to enable dynamic spectrum-sharing with 4G LTE and to bring more compatible devices into the ecosystem,” Fritzsche said: “They are certainly interested in C-band spectrum to accelerate their 5G deployments, but their current plans contemplate only using their existing assets in place.” She noted Verizon is building its 5G network using technology from Samsung, Nokia and Ericsson and plans to launch a mobile-edge computing product this year.

MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett cut AT&T to sell from neutral Tuesday, questioning whether the carrier can meet the targets it discussed last month in an earnings call (see 1910280060). “Almost as soon as AT&T issued its 2020 and three-year guidance, investors began to struggle with a very simple, but very vexing, question. How in the world can they get there?” Moffett said in a report to investors. AT&T’s wireless business is doing well, the problem is other business lines, he said. “Wireless will have to do an awful lot of heavy lifting.” The entertainment group is a “cancer” and AT&T will start 2020 with at least 15 percent fewer subscribers than at the start of this year, he said. The number of broadband subscribers is also declining, he said: “Business Wireline is shrinking around 4 percent as well, and margins are contracting. The issues there are secular (although a cyclical slowdown would certainly make them even worse). It’s awfully hard to imagine they can reverse those trends. Not even for one year, let alone three.”

The U.S. needs to make the C band and other mid-band spectrum available for 5G, said Ericsson Global CEO Borje Ekholm and North American CEO Niklas Heuveldop in a meeting with FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks. “It is being rolled out faster than anticipated,” said a filing posted Friday in docket 18-122: “Globally, Ericsson is seeing a lot of demand for 5G mobile broadband, but we expect to see more use cases centered on enterprise solutions -- taking IoT and industrial applications to the next level.” The FCC may act soon on an auction of the C band for 5G.