AR/VR: China's Gov says Go!

China is already far ahead in VR, experts tell me.  The gap is likely to widen as this MIIT opinion puts the full force of government behind AR/VR promotion. Cities and provinces are expected to provide support. Banks are "encouraged" to provide financing. Any "patriotic" company will be expected to provide support.  

 ‘Guiding Opinions of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Accelerating the Development of Virtual Reality Industry’, provides guidance for the development of virtual reality technology in the country. Standards will be developed and supported. 

The goal is "By 2025, China’s virtual reality industry as a whole has entered the forefront of the world, mastering key core patents and standards, and forming a virtual reality backbone enterprise with strong international competitiveness." In Europe, the telcos are pleading for support from other industries like entertainment. The German automakers are pleading for the telcos to build networks ready for connected cars. The Chinese government has the power to make things happen. (Which, of course, also has a downside.) 

Separately, I'm reporting Minister Miao Wei has instructed the telcos to bring 90% of China within 25 ms of the cloud.

In Google translation, here is the 8 step program 

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Guo Ping complete speech: Huawei New Year: $108B sales, "The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory."

Huawei employees are among the hardest working in telecom, with a dedication rare in the West except at inspirational startups. Guo Ping now asks them to work harder. "We will encounter even greater difficulties." Ren has weathered far worse.

Sales in 2018 reached US$108.5 billion, up 21%. It shipped over 200 million phones, ahead of Apple and gaining on Samsung. 10,000 5G base stations had shipped by November.  (I wouldn't be surprised if that figure is 100,000 a year from now.) Huawei Cloud is deployed in 22 regions. 

Guo Ping has just delivered a message intended to inspire the people at Huawei. It's far more intense than annual messages in the West and gives you a sense of the spirit,

Fire is the Test of Gold

—A New Year's Message for 2019, Guo Ping, Rotating Chairman

Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman philosopher, once said, "The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory." Truer words were never spoken as we bring 2018 to a solid close. It has been an eventful year, to say the least. But we have never stopped pushing forward, and as a result our 2018 sales revenue is expected to reach 108.5 billion US dollars, up 21% year-on-year.

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US$170M fine for Charter consumer fraud, $330M Sprint tax cheating, FCC investigating Verizon & T-Mobile for False Claims

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge was paid US$98 million in 2016. For that kind of money, most of us would lie, cheat, or steal. Charter has just agreed a fine of US$170 million for consumer fraud. Working pro bono, Columbia Professor Tim Wu made crucial contributions to the case. The court decisions made clear telcos and ISPs must obey ordinary laws on fraud and false advertising. The national FCC does not pre-empt consumer law.

Marcelo Claure of Sprint is on track to make $61 million from Sprint. They have just been fined $330M for cheating New York State on taxes. The FCC is investigating Verizon and T-Mobile for false claims on coverage, which affect US$billions of subsidies.

Charter/Time Warner ripped off New York consumers for hundreds of millions, as I reported last February.

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Frontier, Windstream bankruptcy predicted by stock price

Windstream's total market cap is US$117 million on sales of US$5 billion. Frontier is valued at US$283 million with sales over US$9 billion. Those prices do not make sense unless the companies are likely to go bust soon.

I am not, repeat not, predicting the bust. I haven't done the research. I have no malice. Repeat: this is not my prediction. I hope this proves wrong.

What I am saying is the investor consensus implies a very high risk that cannot be ignored by regulators.

Government and vendors must have a contingency plan. I'm asking the FCC and state regulators what their plan is. I doubt many have one. I expect few if any will give me a meaningful answer. I'm writing this story as a wake-up call; being unprepared has been very costly in the past.

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Digital Kenya: A book about an extraordinary community.

Vint Cerf gave Digital Kenya by Bitange Ndemo and Tim Weiss a rave review.

“This is not your usual run-of-the-mill entrepreneurial business book. The authors are going after nothing short of a transformation in the African business environment, specifically in Kenya. Kenyans, along with many of their fellow Africans, have leapfrogged into the modern, smartphone world without passing through the historical wire-line telephone stage. 

But this book is not just about mobiles. In fact, it is mostly not about mobile technology. It is primarily about fostering innovation, harnessing talent, gathering capital, finding or defining markets, and asking the right questions.

The book gives very concrete examples of what has been done and how it was done. Their pragmatic examples provide essential guideposts for fulfilling the promise of African innovation.”

Kenya and the very thoughtful Dr. Ndemo have nurtured a remarkable class of businessmen. The download of the book is free, 150,000 have taken copies.

Nokia gets EUR 250M from govs to lend to AT&T

Some U.S. regional telcos, two of which are now threatened with bankruptcy, gloated to Wall Street about how much broadband subsidies were diverted to company profits. So when I saw the release that Nokia was getting government money for "research," I wondered how the Nordic Investment Bank could be assured the money would go to "increased research" rather than other corporate purposes. Government loans are usually at a very favourable rate and much sought after. Money is fungible and can be easily diverted. 

The headline is one possibility of what Nokia could do with the money unless the rules are strict. It was also my way to remind readers that Nokia is doing a great deal of vendor financing as well as receiving hundreds of millions or more in government support. Korea is loaning US$billions to customers of Samsung.

Huawei and ZTE are not the only ones getting government money. 

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BT & others fight back against the China boycott

Update Dec 17 Two weeks ago, BT was fighting back against the Huawei boycott. The Security Forces have since grown stronger. The cost to Britain will be in the US$billions.

The U.S. security agencies are currently pressing England and Germany to cut off Huawei, which everyone in the industry believes would be a very expensive move.  BT is smart enough not to take on MI5 and GCHQ directly, but would have to spend many billions more if it lost Huawei and ZTE as suppliers. Update 11/28 New Zealand, one of the Five Eyes working together since World War II, has now cut Huawei out of the 5G plans.

"There is only one true 5G supplier right now and that is Huawei -- the others need to catch up," says BT Chief Architect Neil McRae. That comment makes it easy to draw the inference that cutting off Huawei would significantly slow down England's 5G deployment. Even if BT says nothing, others can and probably will assert that it would be a mistake for England to boycott the Chinese.

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"Gigabit is almost everywhere"

Not really everywhere and not always a gigabit, but the worldwide trend is amazing. 22 networks around the world offer Gigabit LTE (peak) 979 megabit downloads, per the GSA findings below. 25 more are likely to reach that speed as they refarm spectrum. Peak speeds are measured in the laboratory. Average speeds are usually 50-70% slower, less at the cell edge or inside many buildings. I think of Gig LTE, as well as the variation mid-band 5G NR, as 100-400 megabits. In the field, 500-800 megabits are occasionally measured on lightly loaded networks.

80% of U.S. cable homes - including mine - can order a gigabit downstream. I took the headline from Alison Diana, who reported CableLabs' figure of gigabit of 63% of the U.S. in June, growing by 7% per month.

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