WHITE PAPER

MAY 2022

AS DATA DEMAND GROWS,

‘EVENTUALLY EVERYONE
HAS TO GO TO mmWAVE’
SureCall sees a path for cost-effective mmWave 5G
coverage expansion as carriers globally deal with
capacity constraints

FOR MORE INFO PLEASE VISIT: www.surecall.com

 INTRODUCTION
The deployment of mmWave 5G networks has been a slow roll. First, there
was skepticism that mmWave was viable in a mobility use case which has
been proved out in the field. Now there’s scrutiny on the business case, which
through selective deployment in localized hot zones, as a fixed wireless
home broadband service, and in many other use cases, has clear upside. But
skepticism and scrutiny aside, mmWave is inevitable as demand for mobile
data is growing far faster than can be accommodated over time by currently-
deployed bands.

Indeed, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report published in November

2021, year-on-year data traffic growth was 42%. The quarterly growth figure,
8%, equates to 5.6 Exabytes of data per month over a three-month period.
Ericsson researchers say that’s the same data volume as all of the first quarter
in 2016.

With regard to mmWave 5G, “This is the future,” said SureCall CEO Hongtao
Zhan in an interview with RCR Wireless News. Referencing the tens of billions
of dollars spent by U.S. carriers on C-Band spectrum, he said, “If you look
longer term, it’s still going to run out and they will have to find new spectrum.

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 Where do they go? There’s no other place to go eventually. It’s just a
matter of time. All of the carriers in the world have to build mmWave. It
may take five years, it may take 10 years, but eventually everyone has to
go to mmWave.”

mmWAVE 5G: 2020 VS. 2022

To understand global mmWave 5G adoption trends, we’ll compare what
was happening at the end of 2020 with what’s happening today in terms
of degree of commercialization and spectral allocation.

In December 2020, U.S. operators AT&T, T-Mobile US and Verizon all had
commercial mmWave 5G offerings, as did Japanese carriers KDDI, NTT
DoCoMo and Rakuten Mobile. Singtel in Singapore also had a commercial
offering at that time and Italy’s Fastweb was in the early stages of
commercialization.

Fast forward to present and Claro in Puerto Rico, LGU+, KT, and SKT in
Korea, APT and Chungwha in Taiwan, China Mobile and HKT in Hong
Kong, and Optus and Telstra in Australia, are all in the early stages of
commercialization.

Elsewhere, regulators are working to allocate mmWave frequencies for

5G services in the following countries: Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria,
Chile, China, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, India,
Indonesia, Malaysia, Malta, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia,
Peru, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Arab
Emirates, United Kingdom and Uruguay.

To the business case point around mmWave 5G, there has to be a

coherent strategy because cell coverage is limited and densification
is difficult due to attendant needs for fiber, power and site-related
expenses. That’s where signal booster come in—Verizon, for instance,
is working with SureCall to expand the reach of its existing mmWave
network by placing signal boosters.

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 HOW CAN OPERATORS MONETIZE mmWAVE
5G INVESTMENTS?
While there isn’t a debate around the performance of mmWave 5G,
there are disparate points of view on the economics given the need for
dense deployments to deliver a consistent user experience. Working out
the business case of mmWave 5G has been a recent focus of Bell Labs
Consulting.

Finding the revenue potential for mmWave involves deploying the

technology strategically, according to Stephen Rose, Executive Partner,
Bell Labs Consulting. “We could see that most operators…would be able
to achieve an 8% growth in their top line. That’s massive,” said Rose. “That
would be a hard statistic to sniff at.”

Bell Labs identified what it terms as “hot zones” for mmWave 5G

deployments: indoor shopping malls, stadiums, train stations in urban
areas, outdoor hotspots and more. “The business viability of mmWave is
sensitive to certain factors like subscriber density, the size of the hot zone
and the penetration of mmWave devices,” he said.

Hot zones are high-density locations identified by operators, Rose

explained. They’re places where the operator perceives a business
opportunity based on demand. Finding the right mix is key, Rose said.

Bell Labs said that a range of 1,000 to 3,000 subscribers per hot zone is
the Goldilocks zone for U.K. mmWave 5G deployments. Go too high, you
run the risk of reducing your total addressable market, Bell Labs tells CSPs.
Go too low, and you won’t have a viable business to build.

For more information on how Verizon has deployed signal boosters,

download this free paper, “The role of boosters in densifying mmWave
5G networks.”

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 mmWAVE 5G SIGNAL BOOSTERS ARE KEY TO
DENSIFICATION
Based on challenging economics of mass mmWave 5G small cell
densification, Zhan said there’s no viable alternative to signal boosters.
“The booster will be more than 80% of the future network. It’s only
through the combination of booster technology and traditional
technology to all work together and make it possible.”

But, at this point in the mmWave 5G story, the individual boosters are
still expensive, Zhan said. He called for focused ecosystem development
in pursuit of economies of scale. “The bigger the better,” he said. “It’s
almost like we’re making 5G light bulbs. You need them outside on the
street; you need them inside homes and buildings. mmWave 5G is the
same thing except right now the whole world is dark. The light bulbs, in
this case the repeaters, need to be dirt cheap if it’s at a global scale. If all
the carriers sign up for this, it’s going to happen.”

Click here for more on the field performance of SureCall’s Horizon

mmWave 5G signal booster.

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