~500M Africans, Indonesians, and Indians are regular Internet users without a landline. Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico add ~200M more. In total, something like 1B people were wireless-only at the end of Q3 2017. I'm comparing the number of Facebook users (over 250M in India) with the number of landlines (< 20M in India) for a rough guess at how many are wireless only. In the developed world, 70-90% of all homes have a landline connection, implying fewer than 100M are wireless only.

The Global South has ~500M "connections," ~ 450M wireless and 50M wired. The Global North has about 450M. About 65% of Internet users are now in the Global South. The gap is increasing by about 50M/year.

"Smartphone application processors (AP) worldwide will grow 1.5% to 1.67 billion units in 2018," DIgitimes estimates. Consensus is smartphone sales in 2018 will be about flat. Since accuracy for forecasts like this is +- several percent, don't make too much of the exact estimate. Some China Q1 sales are low enough to suggest a decrease in 2018. Digitimes has become a reliable source which I regularly check.

What's interesting here is the market shares. As smaller phone vendors fall out, the share of Samsung, Apple, and Huawei HiSilicon self-produced chips rises. They are usually the three biggest vendors and predominate in the more profitable high end chips. Company after company have failed in the wireless chip business.

No. CEO Tom Rutledge goes too far claiming "Using unlicensed and licensed Spectrum working together" as a definition of 6G. T-Mobile did that years ago, and BT and many other Europeans have long treated Wi-Fi as part of their network. LAA, taking over Wi-Fi spectrum for LTE, is one of the pillars of 3GPP Rel. 15.

Do not miss the Brooklyn 5G Summit, livestreamed by IEEE.  Arogyswami Paulraj of Stanford, perhaps the most distinguished communications engineer alive, is joined by Gerhard Fettweis (Tactile Internet,) MacArthur Fellow Dina Katabi of MIT and a dozen others. Executives include CTO Seizo Onoe of NTT, Marcus Weldon of Bell Labs, and an extraordinary panel on phased array antennas..

They are speaking to their peers, so they bring the most recent and important results. Four and five years ago, Ted and team presented the data that convinced the industry mmWave will work, with hundreds of thousands of base stations in the works now. Marcus brought an inspiring call for 1 ms latency, still to be realized. This year, Paulraj is bringing insights into 60 GHz, above the current 5G range. That's nothing: Kaushik Sengupta of Princeton is working with terahertz. 

Chengliang Zhang's keynote at OFC revealed that China Telecom will build ~2M base stations (doubling) for a national network at 3.5 GHz. Most will be built between 2020 and 2025. A bigger telecom story is hard to imagine, but only the great Ray Le Maistre caught it. Thank you Ray.

Currently, CT uses 1.16M 4G cells for China's population of 1.379B, or about 1,200 people per cell today. In 2015, CT was at about 1,700 people per cell. That was about equal to Spain and Korea and three times fewer than AT&T or Verizon.  (Chart)

Balázs Bertényi of Nokia is the 3GPP RAN Chairman, who recently oversaw some remarkably intense work to finalize "5G NR." That's otherwise known as Release 15. Guy Daniels of TelecomTV got clear answers to questions every pr person has been ducking: What is it exactly? How does it differ from LTE radio? The "two main elements" apply to the older definition of 5G, high frequencies only.  

5G NR operates in higher bands, such as 28 GHz millimeter wave. There's a great deal of unused spectrum up there. Also More bandwidth in wider channels, up to 400 MHz. Few today have more than LTE's 100 MHz limit. But the U.S. 28 GHz band has ~2,000 MHz.

1-2 ms is on the 5G roadmap but years away almost everywhere. 90% of "5G" before next decade will be at 3.5 GHz, with speeds almost identical to LTE. The Emperor has no clothes.

These figures are from Ericsson, which has been working on 5G since 2011. All Ericsson radios since 2015 have been able to switch from 4G LTE to 5G with software. (below) Nokia probably is the same or worse but I'm still waiting for the data. Depending on the upgrade cycle, LTE in some places will have lower latency than 5G at 3.5 GHz.

"From mid-2018 Ericsson will have support for latency (Round Trip Time, RTT) down to 9ms on the LTE air interface (Based on the 3GPP Rel-14)."

"6G" wireless is technology that is beyond "5G." Minister Wei Leping has already called for China to be the 6G leader, although no one quite knows what it is. Technologies moving from the lab to deployment should improve capacity by 5-15X over "5G." Three technologies will almost certainly be included, with more to come: 

• "Cell-free" or "Distributed" Massive MIMO
• Dynamic use of different frequencies, especially unlicensed
• Frequencies up to 120 GHz.