Network management

Some city light poles around Oahu (HI) are being equipped to produce more than street lighting. A contractor representing mobile phone service provider Sprint is installing data transmission equipment on 67 poles largely concentrated in Honolulu’s urban core but also in Central Oahu, Leeward Oahu and Laie. The equipment turns the light poles into miniature cell antenna towers that eliminate service coverage dead spots and increase data transmission capacity as more phone users consume more data, largely by watching videos.

CTIA’s Annual Wireless Industry Survey finds the industry beginning the transition from 4G to 5G wireless networks with significant growth in cell sites and data-only devices. That growth and continued demand for everything wireless contributed to Americans using an unprecedented amount of mobile data in 2017. The key wireless trends in this year's survey:

The good news is that, after years of having to pay per gigabyte, unlimited plans are now the norm at all of the major US wireless carriers. The bad news is that, somehow, those same companies have managed to create different categories of unlimited. At the low-end, some have data caps before speeds are throttled. At the high-end, many come with premium video services (the latest battleground).

AT&T: The biggest challenge with AT&T's unlimited plans is that the options and combinations keep changing.

Comcast's Xfinity Mobile service is imposing new speed limits on video watching and personal hotspot usage, and the company will start charging extra for high-definition video over the cellular network. Videos will be throttled to 480p (DVD quality) on all Comcast mobile plans unless you pay extra, while Comcast's "unlimited" plan will limit mobile hotspot speeds to 600kbps.

The scramble among mobile carriers to amass airwaves for fifth generation (or 5G) wireless networks is picking up steam — and the frenetic pace will continue, even as industry players promise to begin rolling out 5G networks to consumers as soon as 2019. Regulators are rushing to make more spectrum available for what the industry promises will be super-fast speeds and quick response times perfect for applications like virtual reality and self-driving cars.

Last week, T-Mobile and Sprint officially filed their public interest statement on their merger to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile device standard used by billions of people was designed to fix many of the security shortcomings in the predecessor standard known as Global System for Mobile communications. Mutual authentication between end users and base stations and the use of proven encryption schemes were two of the major overhauls. Now, researchers are publicly identifying weaknesses in LTE that allow attackers to send nearby users to malicious websites and fingerprint the sites they visit.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that the company’s work to upgrade its network with FirstNet’s 700 MHz spectrum will position it to move to 5G network technology via a software upgrade. “To build out this FirstNet capability, this first responder network, we have to go climb every cell tower. Literally, we have to go touch every cell tower over the next couple of years,” explained Stephenson. "As we're touching those cell towers, every single one of them, we have a lot of spectrum in inventory.

T-Mobile and Sprint have filed with the Federal Communications Commission for approval of their proposed merger, and promised in their public interest statement that the deal would create more jobs, more choice in video and business service, and world-class 5G service, while lowering consumer prices and helping close the rural high-speed divide. They said the goal is to beat AT&T and Verizon, not emulate them. They pointed to Verizon and AT&T getting into other businesses, saying that is not their strategy. 

Verizon is pledging to stop selling information on phone owners’ locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy. The data has allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners’ knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known CA-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly — LocationSmart and Zumigo.