Global 5G development began accelerating in mid-2019, said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. CEO C.C. Wei on a Q3 call Thursday. TSMC expects “faster ramp” here than 4G, he said, with 5G penetration reaching a “mid-teens” share percentage of smartphones in 2020. “We expect the silicon content of 5G smartphones will be substantially higher than that of 4G,” due to increased “functionalities” and additional chips, he said.

Verizon is building a graphics processing unit-based system that will mean better use of virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality and cinematic reality for 5G, the carrier said Friday. “These capabilities could pave the way for a new class of affordable mobile cloud services, provide a platform for developing ultra low-latency cloud gaming, and enable the development of scalable GPU cloud-based services," Verizon said: “Because of the heavy imaging and graphics that would benefit from this technology, many of these applications will run significantly better on a GPU.”

Ericsson CEO Borje Ekholm told analysts Thursday 5G is rolling out faster than expected, driven by the U.S. and northeast Asia. Ericsson and Nokia are the two top 5G equipment suppliers to the U.S. 5G is “happening even faster than we expected just a few months ago,” he said. The biggest market for 5G infrastructure will be China, “where deployments are expected to start near term,” Ekholm said: “We have invested to increase our market share, however it is still too early to assess possible volumes and price levels.” The IoT will be a strong point, Ericsson business growing “twice as fast as the estimated market growth of 20-25 percent per year,” he said.

Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson asked where the revenue is going to originate to justify carrier investments in 5G. Moffett told investors Thursday he isn’t hearing any real answers. “Most of the use cases we’ve heard don’t make sense, yet the capital requirements for densifying networks are very real,” he said: “Simply using more data at higher and higher speeds -- we’ve all heard about the dream of downloading a full season of Game of Thrones in seconds before boarding a plane -- has, up to now, been a dry well for wireless revenue generation.” There are problems with most use cases, he said. Driverless cars are commonly cited, “but would anyone really make steering, accelerating and braking, the most mission-critical functions of a driverless car, dependent on ubiquitous network connectivity?” Moffett asked. The factory of the future is likely to be broadly connected, but private networks could cut out carriers, he said: “Won’t low frequency mesh networks like Amazon Sidewalk siphon off lots of the simpler narrowband IoT network use cases?”

The threat to networks is real, Clete Johnson, of Wilkinson Barker, said at a Silicon Flatirons spectrum conference Thursday. The threat comes from intelligence services and their agents in countries including North Korea, China, Iran and Russia, he said. There are “tens of thousands of people” who “go to school, go to work, they provide for their families, they find fulfillment in their daily life by trying to figure out how to get into our networks and devices,” Johnson said. “It’s their job. So it’s not some abstraction. It’s a concrete set of forces who are out there working on this every day.” The more everything is connected “everything is vulnerable” and 5G will pose new threats, he said. The government and industry need to work together, Johnson said: “If everything is connected, then all of the solutions need to be connected.” Monisha Ghosh, engineering professor at the University of Chicago and program director at the National Science Foundation, said the U.S. is researching the security threat. “A lot of the news items that you see of threats being discovered or solutions being proposed are coming from the academic community,” she said: “We need to get that community much better connected to industry as well as federal agencies.” Ghosh said “funding is never adequate” and the joke is “NSF stands for not sufficient funds.” Some of the threats will be revealed only as networks launch, she said. “5G is going to roll out as a production system,” she said: “It’s not being experimented with at the scale at which it’s going to roll out. When it rolls out is when you’re going to find the holes.” Rebecca Dorch, senior spectrum policy analyst at the NTIA Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, oversaw testing of systems in the new 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band. Researchers did their best to identify the unknowns, she said. “My nightmare scenario is, notwithstanding all of the careful analysis, … something unexpected or unanticipated could occur within that entire ecosystem that could actually cause harmful interference,” she said. Dynamic spectrum sharing in general poses risks, Dorch said. “Sharing between very, very different types of communications systems, as that increases, and the density of those devices and systems … that’s where I think that we really haven’t fully tacked for potential for interference at the RF level,” she said: “We’ve got some real vulnerabilities potentially there.” Johnson recalled the financial crisis of 2008, where problems in the subprime mortgage market in the United States developed into a full-blown international banking crisis. “You had a problem in one place that cascaded and took over the entire economy,” Johnson said: “My nightmare is as the speed of innovation increases, or the rate of innovation increases, and we deploy billions and billions of devices” it connects people and companies “that may not be aware or where their data sits or how it can be corrupted or manipulated.” We need to test networks, but we don’t know what the “bugs are” until 5G rolls out on a mass scale, he said. Cooperation is crucial, Johnson said: “We’re all part of this increasingly symbiotic relationship and we don’t know exactly what the effects of that are going to be when something goes wrong.”

5G will drive a 5.9 percent global semiconductor rebound next year, after what IHS Markit called a “brutal downturn” in 2019. Global semiconductor revenue is forecast to reach $422.8 billion this year, growing to $448 billion in 2020. Deployment of 5G will be the primary driver of the turnaround because of the renewed growth it’s expected to bring to the wireless industry and wider benefits including new business models, said the researcher Thursday. Historically, every semiconductor market downturn has ended “with the arrival of a technical innovation that spurred a major increase in demand,” said analyst Len Jelinek.

Nokia declared more than 2,000 patent “families” to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute as 5G “standard-essential,” said the company Wednesday. ETSI is one of seven standards development organizations that belong to 3GPP, which is managing 5G standardization. The 2,000th family includes U.S. and European patents on higher-throughput “network resources” for smartphones, industrial devices and other equipment, said Nokia.

Wilson Electronics urged FCC Wireless Bureau staff to adopt criteria that would allow use of consumer signal boosters (CSBs) in spectrum being opened for 5G. “CSBs can play a significant role in the rollout of new 5G networks” and should be permitted in the 600 MHz and 2.5 GHz bands “which will assist carriers in densifying their early 5G networks,” Wilson said, posted Tuesday in docket 10-4. Wilson said high-frequency bands “present propagation challenges that can be overcome with the use of CSBs.” It said the FCC should act to eliminate the personal-use exemption for small businesses, as it has for residences (see 1806190052). “Affordable CSBs provide the best solution for improved in-building cellular connectivity for most small businesses" in the U.S., the booster maker said.

Seventy percent of developers worldwide expect 5G to “dominate” in their nations within the next two years, found Evans Data’s survey. In North America, 80 percent developers of developers said 5G will dominate in two years. In the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, 32 percent predict 5G dominance within a year.

Surecall is trying to rally support among resellers against Pivotal Commware's waiver request for a 5G signal booster. Surecall opposed the waiver at the FCC (see 1909300050). The only other opposition came from T-Mobile, which said the device should face consumer booster rules (see 1910010072). Waiver was sought by an “industry newcomer,” Surecall emailed resellers: “If this waiver is allowed to pass, the manufacturer will be free to create and sell boosters that do not meet current FCC requirements. Their sales model is also direct-to-carrier, which bypasses the retail channel -- essentially cutting out future revenue for booster resellers like you.” Surecall noted filings are due Monday in docket 19-272. “Please submit your comment this week to be sure it’s received by the FCC with ample time,” the manufacturer said. Pivotal didn’t comment.