Adoption later this month of the 5G Standalone New Radio standard will accelerate the work toward 5G implementation, blogged Intel's Reza Arefi, director-spectrum strategy, next-generation and standards group, Tuesday. He said Intel is working with manufacturers to develop prototypes and test global interoperability, which will translate the standard into technical reality. He said the standard "will create a universal technological foundation" of global interoperability, helping manufacturers get to economy of scale.

The U.S. can win the race to 5G but not without help from policymakers, said Roslyn Layton, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “States and municipalities must streamline policies on infrastructure deployment,” Layton blogged Thursday. “Old siting and permitting rules designed for large cell towers must be modernized for today’s smaller and less intrusive technologies.” Layton stressed importance of the FCC making more mid-band spectrum available on a quick timeline. “Until now, the availability of mid-band, more flexible use spectrum has been lacking,” she said. “It will be critical that FCC deliver on mid-band spectrum, the so-called ‘Goldilocks band,’ which is neither too low -- which is best for long distances and penetrating obstacles -- nor too high -- best for high data throughput but only moves short distances.”

Analog Devices is participating in “virtually all” the 5G “field trials" that are taking place "across the globe,” said CEO Vincent Roche on a Wednesday earnings call. Roche's "sense" is that the U.S. and China will take the lead in “trialing” some 5G “particular applications” in the 2019-2020 “time frame,” he said. “China will get faster to mass market, I think, with what they call 5G, which is really to me 4-and-a-half-G with massive MIMO.” Roche sees “pure 5G” taking shape commercially in the 2024-2025 time frame, he said. That’s when “the core network gets changed,” he said. With 5G, “an entirely new wireless and wireline network architecture will ultimately be needed to meet the demands for orders-of-magnitude increases in bandwidth-hungry areas,” such as HD video streaming, said Roche. Though 5G will provide “revolutionary capabilities,” the transition “will be evolutionary,” he said. Adding massive MIMO will be the “first phase” and will “provide a significant increase to the capacity of the current 4G wireless network,” he said. A massive MIMO system “can deliver a greater than 3X data capacity increase in the same spectrum of a current 4G base station,” he said.

AT&T is unlikely to have much to say on T-Mobile buying Sprint (see 1804300055), AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said Wednesday at a Cowen financial conference. “I don’t think you’ll see us opposing the transaction,” he said. “We’re really going to stay away from commenting other than that and kind of leave it to the regulators.” AT&T dropped its bid for T-Mobile in 2011 after running into regulatory roadblocks. Stephens said AT&T is poised to finalize its buy of Time Warner after U.S. District Judge Richard Leon rules on DOJ’s challenge of the acquisition (see 1805300011), a decision expected June 12. “We’re ready to close” after the decision, Stephens said. “Everything is lined up with financing and so forth.” Stephens also said AT&T has sold FirstNet services to more than 600 public safety entities across 48 states. The carrier sees a potential market of 10 million devices on FirstNet, which doesn’t include service to power companies and other critical infrastructure companies, he said. “The ability to raise the quality of our network and the quality of our services to our existing 100 million customer base is really important.”

Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri met with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on spectrum issues, including the 3.5 GHz citizens broadband service band (see 1805220034 and 1805230013), said a filing in docket 14-177. Suri and Rick Corker, Nokia president North America, also met with Commissioners Mike O’Rielly and Jessica Rosenworcel. “Innovative spectrum policies [have] unlocked the potential of gigabits of spectrum, including the 3.5 GHz and mmWave bands,” the filing said. “The Commission should move more quickly to get those spectrum bands into the market via auction so that they can be put to use. The Nokia Executives asked that the Commission expedite auctioning mid-band and mmWave spectrum bands, and hold auctions that cover more than one band at a time, which will speed deployment of 5G services to American consumers.” The executives stressed the importance of the 3.7-4.2 GHz band “as the centerpiece for nationwide 5G deployment.” A proposal by Intelsat and SES "to unlock only 100 MHz of spectrum for 5G over 3 years is not sufficient to meet the needs of wireless operators, or to keep the U.S. competitive with the emerging 5G plans in China, Japan and Korea,” they said. They encouraged the FCC to approve this year proposals for spectrum access system administrators in the 3.5 GHz band (see 1805220065), including the telecom manufacturer's SAS submission. As the regulator tries to prevent USF from funding equipment that threatens national security, the firm asked it "not be used to cast uncertainty on the entire industry, including longstanding, well-vetted partners of U.S. government and industry."

Scopeworker said Sprint will use its supply chain software to help digitize the carrier's multibillion-dollar supply chain. “Following successful trials in which double-digit percentage savings for Sprint's procurement department were consistently generated, Scopeworker will engage in multiple programs to automate cost, time and quality efficiencies,” the company said. Sprint Chief Procurement Officer Mariano Legaz said the move comes "as we prepare to deliver the nation's first 5G mobile network in the first half of 2019."

DOD approved restrictions on use of cellphones and some other electronic devices in the Pentagon in areas where classified information is present or discussed, the Associated Press reported Tuesday, citing a memo. DOD will still allow the use of cellphones in common areas and offices where classified information isn’t present. The memo reportedly has exceptions: Senior DOD officials with government-issued devices can get them approved for use in secure spaces provided camera, mic and wireless capabilities can be disabled. DOD didn’t comment.

The mobile business “is standing on the cusp of its own quantum leap” with the looming introduction of 5G, said Sumit Sadana, Micron Technology chief business officer, at a company investor day Monday. “If you see the type of improvement in download speeds that are possible with 5G,” 100 times those of 4G/LTE, “the important thing here is any time networks speeds go up by such a big magnitude, it enables massive amounts of innovation that are very difficult to foresee,” said Sadana. The 5G connections will be “significantly faster” than all the “high-bandwidth wired connections all of you have at home,” he said. “Imagine having all of that capability in your cellphone and all around us for machine-to-machine communication, which is going to become really a big growth driver once 5G comes along and is deployed in full volume.” 5G is “an extraordinarily important development which will enable you to download a 4K movie onto your mobile device within seconds -- just amazing capability,” he said. Micron sees 5G as bringing “really a complete transformation of important applications that drive real value for our customers, and that is not going to be possible without more memory and more storage inside the smartphone,” he said. The company thinks the 1-terabyte smartphone will become “pretty common” in the 2021 “time frame,” he said.

Toyota Motor North America is well aware of moves on the 5.9 GHz band and a proposal that favors cellular vehicle-to-everything technology as an alternative to dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), said CEO James Lentz in a letter to Commissioners Mike O'Rielly and Jessica Rosenworcel. The automaker said in a recent filing Toyota and co-owned Lexus plan to start deployment of DSRC on vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2021 (see 1804270048) and the two commissioners raised questions in a letter to Lentz (see 1805100062). “We have, of course, been closely monitoring developments” in the band, Lentz wrote, posted Monday in docket 13-49. “The decision by Toyota and Lexus to deploy DSRC in the U.S. is just the latest development in an ongoing and persistent move by automakers, infrastructure owners and operators, and other stakeholders to deploy the proven technology throughout the world.”

“5G is not just a faster version of 4G,” said Matt Stagg, BT Sport director-mobile strategy, last week at the annual summit of the U.K.’s Digital Television Group in London. He said the much-vaunted low latency for 5G “only happened because the automotive industry needs it for braking autonomous cars -- so that cars stop at a red light.” Low latency “is expensive to provide from the network equipment,” but not everybody needs it, said Stagg. VoD, digital TV, autonomous vehicles “all have different requirements,” he said. Simon Fell, former director-technology and innovation at the European Broadcasting Union, backed up Stagg’s scenario of networks collapsing when all users -- consumers and professionals -- share the same pot of data and something happens to increase demand dramatically. “4G does not work under extreme load,” said Fell. “I was in Munich when there was a series of attacks and as more and more people used their phones to access sites like Facebook, the network collapsed.” News crews with 4G cameras, he said, “could not communicate and they had to bring in a satellite truck.” With “sliced” 5G, he said, consumer overload wouldn't affect broadcasters in that scenario because they would not be competing for bandwidth. Asked whether using 5G might be the way to distribute data-hungry 8K broadcasts, Fell said NHK is experimenting with 8K over 5G: “But who will pay?” Guido Meardi, CEO of V-Nova, the British company that promotes the new Perseus IPTV compression codec, said tests his company did showed it's possible to reduce an 8K data stream of 50 Mbps to between 30 and 35 Mbps, which could easily be sent over a 5G link.