News

América Móvil’s rivals AT&T and Movistar have already said they will not participate in the auction if spectrum prices are not revised

According to local media reports, América Móvil’s Mexican subsidiary Telcel has confirmed its interest in bidding for 5G spectrum in Mexico’s upcoming spectrum auction.

“We already have 5G spectrum and we will always be evaluating the tenders called by the regulator,” América Móvil’s Director of Legal and Regulatory Affairs Alejandro Cantu told El Economista.

If the company does want to take part in the auction, it could do so uncontested, with rivals AT&T and Movistar having both said that the prices set by the regulator are too high for them to participate.

The Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) first announced its intentions for its latest auction back in February 2022, saying that the tender process had been designed “to assign the greatest amount of spectrum possible and to enable new players in the mobile market to access this resource”.

The auction aims to allocate 70MHz of spectrum in the 600MHz band, a 50MHz block in the 3.5GHz band, and 90MHz in 1.5 GHz ‘L-band’. Additional spectrum in the 800MHz, 850MHz, 1.9GHz, 2.1GHz, and 2.5GHz bands could also be made available, according to the regulator.

However, the auction’s initial proposal was immediately lambasted by the local telcos, who argued that spectrum usage charges were too high to make purchasing the spectrum economically viable.

According to the IFT themselves, spectrum usage charges can be up to 186% higher in Mexico than the international average.

As a result of these high prices, both AT&T and Movistar – despite their scale and the depth of their pockets – have said that they will not take place in the upcoming auction.

The high prices also present a significant barrier to entry for new market players, despite this being the IFT’s stated goal.

An official date for the upcoming spectrum auction has yet to be announced, so operators will be hopeful that the regulator will lower the prices to make the auction more appealing.

That Telcel would be the only player willing to potentially take part in the spectrum tender process should not come as much of a surprise. The operator dominates the Mexican mobile market, with over 80 million subscribers and a market share approaching 70%.

The operator launched commercial 5G services in 18 major cities in February last year and has been expanding coverage ever since. These current services, however, make use of the company’s spectrum in the 2.5GHz band, which was previously used to deliver 4G LTE services.

That said, Telcel does already have 5G spectrum in the form of 100MHz in the 3.5GHz band, half of which it purchased from Axtel in 2020, while the other was transferred from América Móvil’s subsidiary Telmex the same year. Bolstering these holdings with additional spectrum should allow for broader 5G deployment and higher speeds for customers.

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News

Reports suggest the European Commission is unsatisfied by the efforts being made by some countries to secure their 5G networks against perceived high-risk vendors

According to a report from the Financial Times, the EU could be considering a bloc-wide ban on network equipment vendors that are deemed to present a security threat, such as Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.

Anonymous sources suggest that the European Commission is deeply concerned that some members states have taken too little action with regards to securing their 5G networks; in particular, some states are failing to follow the security guidelines published by the Commission and unanimously agreed by the bloc back in 2020.

EU Internal Markets Commissioner Thierry Breton reportedly revealed last week that only a third of EU countries had moved to ban Huawei from critical parts of their 5G networks, a total he deemed “too few” and thereby a risk to the bloc’s collective security.

This news comes just weeks before the Commission is expected to formally report on member states’ implementation of security recommendations, doing so for the first time since July 2020.

The furore over Huawei and 5G network security dates back to 2019, when the US began to implement bans on the company’s technology over perceived threats to national security.

The US government claimed that Huawei had direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party and their 5G network technology could allow the company to spy on US citizens.

To this day, Huawei maintains that these fears are unfounded, noting that they have consistently followed global security standards and operate independently of the Chinese government.

Nonetheless, in 2020 the US undertook a major foreign policy drive to see Huawei equipment similarly banned from its allies’ 5G networks, both in Europe and the rest of the world. Over the following year, these efforts bore fruit, with Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the UK all implementing bans on Huawei technology and mandating the removal of the company’s equipment from their networks over the coming decade.

Elsewhere in Europe, however, the response was more mixed. While most countries implemented additional security measures of some description – typically in line with the EU’s security toolbox – the severity of these measures differed greatly from country to country. France, for example, issued what was known as the ‘5G law’ in August 2019, requiring the French National Cybersecurity Agency to approve additional 5G network equipment deployments; this practice, this broadly equates to a de facto ban on Huawei equipment for much of the country.

Germany, by contrast, has been reticent to make a direct decision on Huawei, with various reviews delaying the decision-making process to this day. As a result, the Germany operators are now deeply reliant on Huawei for their 5G network equipment, with reports suggesting that 59% of the country’s RAN equipment is provided by the Chinese vendor.

In many countries, the debate over Huawei’s role in their 5G networks remains ongoing. In recent weeks, Portugal – initially one of Huawei’s staunchest defenders in the EU – has announced a new security assessment that could see the implementation a national ban on Huawei technology. Elsewhere, Malaysia is considering whether to allow Huawei to help construct its government-run 5G network, with both the EU and US lobbying against the company’s inclusion.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a more unified approach for the EU would be appealing to the European Commission. It should be noted, however, that actually implementing an EU-wide ban would be no small feat. Such a decision would require the legal approval of the European Parliament and the various member states – approvals that would be very difficult to secure before the expiration of the current European Commission’s term in office in 2024.

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Interview

At this year’s Connected America conference, we caught up with with Chris Sambar, President of AT&T Network, after his fiery morning keynote session to discuss the latest trends in 5G and the company’s strategic approach to Fixed Wireless Access

America’s 5G journey

The US was one of the first countries in the world to launch 5G services back in 2019 and, since then, the country has raced to become a world leader in the new technology. Nonetheless, the journey to 5G maturity is far from over, with AT&T’s Chris Sambar noting that there is still huge potential for the 5G ecosystem to develop.

“LTE showed us what’s possible when the ecosystem develops together. 5G’s going to be very similar,” said Sambar. “It’s taking its time, but its also more complex than LTE […] We’re beginning to see it slowly come together, and the experiences are getting better and better.”

Part of this 5G evolution is the rollout of the more powerful standalone 5G architecture, a process which is already underway at AT&T.

“We’ve rolled out our standalone core at AT&T, we’re scaling it, and we’re starting to put some of those new services on there, like gaming, augmented reality and virtual reality,” said Sambar. “We’re pretty excited about the monetisation opportunities that these new services represent.”

The Fixed Wireless Access debate

Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) has become a major talking point in the US over the past year, proving to be an exciting and often profitable use case for 5G at a time when monetising the new technology is challenging.

But while Verizon and T-Mobile are placing major bets on expanding 5G FWA services, AT&T’s FWA strategy is notably more reserved.

“Our view’s a little different from the other two operators in the US,” explained Sambar. “We see the RAN as the point of congestion. It’s a simple physics equation: how much load or bandwidth can spectrum provide to the users? One of our peers quoted that they are seeing up to half a terabit a month of usage on their fixed wireless network – that’s a lot. It’s a lot of bandwidth to put on a wireless network and congest the air interface very quickly.”

As a result, FWA can only be reasonably offered to limited number of customers in each sector before mobile service quality begins to be impacted – a fact that is only exacerbated by the growing consumer demand for bandwidth year-on-year.

The primary solution to this challenge is simply to deploy more mobile infrastructure to meet demand, which is very expensive, particularly compared to the average cost of a fixed fibre connection.

“[FWA is] not a true replacement for broadband,” said Sambar. “We’re going to reach a time when we’re going to struggle to provide services if we deploy it too broadly and I think that’s what the other two operators in the US are going to struggle with.”

Instead, AT&T’s primary target for FWA will be to offer services to those customers currently using legacy copper networks, a move that will both offer these customers an increase in service quality as well as allowing AT&T to sunset these older networks.

Building the sustainable network of the future

Finally, one of the biggest themes at Connected America 2023 – and, indeed, in the telecoms world more generally – was sustainability. According to Sambar, AT&T not only has a moral imperative to help take better care of the planet, but also a major economic incentive.

“AT&T’s power bill is well over a billion dollars a year. The faster we can get consumers off the copper network, the faster we can shut down the infrastructure in the offices where the copper is running, and that saves a whole lot of money,” he said.

He noted that AT&T’s power consumption is actually decreasing year-on-year as a result of more efficient technologies and the sunsetting of legacy network infrastructure, despite the increase in data demand. This is not only due to the deployment of more energy efficient infrastructure, but also the incorporation of AI, automation, and machine learning. These novel technologies allow for far greater network optimisation, not just for daily network functions but also for logistics, like site maintenance.

“A machine can look at a tower that’s scheduled for three upgrades over a year and, instead of sending an engineer three times, combine them all into a single visit. It sounds like a simple thing, but a human has a really hard time doing that with tens of thousands of towers in the network. It’s going to save us a lot of money and it’s also going to help us with our carbon footprint.”

You can view our full interview with Chris Sambar from AT&T from the link below

Planning for Connected America 2024 is already underway! For more information about how to get involved, contact Maddie Hicks at Maddie.Hicks@totaltele.com

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Press Release

Viasat Inc., a global communications company, today announced it was selected by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate (RV) to provide on-orbit space relay connectivity for its ARBALEST program, which aims to support a future space-based demonstration of operational capabilities for the Department of Defense (DoD). The future AFRL mission will illustrate the advantages of enabling real-time, global connectivity between DoD low Earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft and commercial geostationary (GEO) satellites.

The ARBALEST program and expected AFRL-led mission will demonstrate the military utility of LEO space relay over commercial high throughput satellites in support of space mission resilience, real-time data dissemination, command and control (C2), as well as the rapid retasking of government space vehicles. Viasat’s space relay solution is key to enabling these capabilities and will leverage the upcoming ViaSat-3 constellation, which includes three Ka-band terabit-class GEO satellites, to provide continuous coverage for LEO spacecraft anywhere and at any time in their orbit.

Under the ARBALEST program, Viasat will provide AFRL with a Ka-band space relay payload for integration into a spacecraft for the future AFRL mission, as well as provide engineering analysis, integration and test support. Viasat will also support the on-orbit demonstration phase of the mission.

“Viasat is very excited to expand its partnership with AFRL and to accelerate the delivery of advanced commercial space-based communications for the DoD,” said Craig Miller, president of Viasat Government Systems. “This real-time space relay capability will offer an efficient method of moving LEO satellite data to the ground for operations. Most importantly, this technology will help increase resilience for future U.S. space missions and benefit warfighters with more direct, immediate access to information and data to improve the situational awareness and decisions supporting the safety of those on the front lines.”

Viasat’s on-orbit connectivity solutions are designed to reduce data latency, provide real-time tasking of on-orbit assets, and enhance resilience through multi-path networking schemes. The space relay service will be a new offering to help commercial and government LEO operators share time-sensitive data more effectively and remain in constant contact with their spacecraft, allowing them to send commands and receive data at any time – all through the high-capacity, resilient ViaSat-3 constellation. This future AFRL mission will be the first pathfinder demonstration of Viasat’s space relay service. The Viasat space relay service is expected to achieve initial operational capability in late 2025.

Visit the Viasat website for more information about intersatellite communications capabilities.

Want to keep up to date with all of the latest telecoms news from around the world? Click here to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter

Also in the news:
More than two-thirds of U.S. commercial sites have no optical fibre access
Viasat completes Inmarsat merger deal
EXATEL talks expansion into subsea connectivity sector