Airlines will now be allowed to provide in-flight 5G services, the European Commission announced. Its updated decision on spectrum for mobile communications on aircraft will enable passengers to use their phones in the same way they do terrestrial networks, paving the way for widespread 5G deployment. The in-cabin service will use pico-cells to connect users and route calls, text and data, usually via a satellite network. The EC also amended an order on 5 GHz bands to make them available for Wi-Fi in cars, buses and other road transport. EU countries must make the spectrum available as soon as possible, or by June 30, 2023 at the latest.

Ericsson asked the FCC to act on its request for a waiver allowing the company to offer a multiband radio across the 3.45 GHz and C bands, both auctioned by the FCC for 5G. The FAA raised concerns (see 2209200030), but the proposal got general support from industry (see 2208240045). “Six industry commenters, including both Ericsson customers and equipment manufacturer competitors, all supported granting the requested waiver,” said a filing Friday in docket 22-298. Ericsson also addressed FAA concerns about interference to radio altimeters: “Ericsson confirms that the multiband radio … will meet the spurious emission performance Ericsson has demonstrated for 3.7 GHz Service devices with respect to emissions into the 4.2-4.4 GHz band.”

Extended Reality (XR) applications, which include augmented-, virtual- and mixed-reality, will be important to the future of 5G, 5G Americas said in a paper released Thursday. XR “creates either fully virtual, immersive environments or blends those virtual landscapes and features with the ‘real’ world,” the paper said: “Its use cases are not limited to consumer applications like gaming, but also include enterprise, institutions, and manufacturing. XR will influence the way people play, work, learn, and interact with each another.” VR, “and particularly AR,” require “significant development in multiple areas including but not limited to multi-media, artificial intelligence, computing, display systems, and communication to provide experiences that incorporate XR into our daily lives,” the report said.

Pockets of the U.S. served by T-Mobile remain LTE only, but “the vast majority” of the network is now 5G, said Neville Ray, T-Mobile president-technology, during a New Street and Boston Consulting conference Monday. Ray said in some areas T-Mobile is leaning on a roaming agreement with AT&T, which has opened up some rural markets through its FirstNet build. T-Mobile’s 5G build hit a peak this year and the company will shift “to what we call customer-driven coverage … making sure that we are investing where it really matters, where there is differentiated need for new coverage or additional coverage from T-Mobile,” Ray said. That includes more in-building coverage and some locations T-Mobile hasn’t yet reached, he said. Ray also noted T-Mobile’s work with SpaceX on satellite connections (see 2209150072). The service will be “text- and messaging-based in the early running” but will evolve to provide more “ubiquitous connectivity,” he said. T-Mobile should be positioned to support as many as 8 million fixed wireless customers in 2025, Ray said. “There is a lot of latent demand for the product that we are bringing to the marketplace,” he said: “From a capacity perspective, we have always been very careful and diligent to make sure that we grow this network for fixed wireless in the right places.” T-Mobile announced Monday that it's now lighting up its stand-alone (SA) core network with its 2.5 GHz spectrum. The SA network has been using 600 MHz spectrum since 2020, Ray said. “The move immediately advances T-Mobile’s network -- unleashing faster speeds for customers across the country while further reducing any lag in the network with lower latency, improving applications like gaming that require near real-time responsiveness,” T-Mobile said.

Reports T-Mobile is seeking partners for a fiber joint venture aren’t new or surprising, but doing so likely makes long-term strategic sense for the carrier, New Street’s Jonathan Chaplin told investors Tuesday. Reports suggest T-Mobile could invest up to $4 billion in the venture, he said. Last year, T-Mobile quietly launched a “very limited” fiber internet pilot in New York City to supplement fixed wireless coverage (see 2108110056), covering buildings in Manhattan. “We have argued for some time that in the long-run T-Mobile (and others) will need a terrestrial network,” Chaplin said. “First, the product market for fixed and mobile is converging. T-Mobile is accelerating the convergence with the tremendous success they have had with FWB [fixed wireless broadband]. FWB is capacity limited, and so they will need terrestrial broadband offering at some point,” he said. “Second, the industry will burn through spectrum below 6 GHz over the next 5-10 years and will need to start using millimeter wave spectrum. Deploying this spectrum without a terrestrial network will be extremely costly, leaving T-Mobile at a disadvantage to carriers with a terrestrial network.”

Ericsson said Monday it hit a data rate of 1 Gbps in a 5G stand-alone network field trial, setting a data speed record with citizens broadband radio service spectrum in an indoor environment. “Conducted at Ericsson’s North American headquarters in Plano, Texas, and coordinated by the OnGo Alliance, this trial was supported by Ericsson’s 5G Distributed Innovation Network and harnessed Radio 4408 for outdoor CBRS connectivity and the Radio Dot 4459 for indoor CBRS connectivity,” Ericsson said: “In addition to record-setting speed, the trial also resulted in seamless outdoor-to-indoor connectivity transitions, paving the way for benefits to consumers and enterprises alike.”

The number of calls handled by contact centers as a service (CCaaS) will near 48 billion by 2027, from 20 billion this year, driven by advanced capabilities made possible by 5G networks, said a Tuesday Juniper Research study. Integration of 5G technologies into voice channels will drive the launch of new voice services, such as interactive calling, said analyst Elisha Sudlow-Poole. Businesses using CCaaS will be able to provide interactive content and screensharing natively on a smartphone app without the need for a third-party application, she said. 5G will also improve existing CCaaS services such as interactive voice response, using AI to reduce customer wait times and business costs.

Operator‑billed 5G service revenue will reach $315 billion next year, up 60% from $195 billion in 2022, reported Juniper Research Monday. Rising revenue will be driven by the continued migration of cellular subscribers to 5G as operators minimize or remove premiums over 4G offerings, Juniper said. Despite economic challenges, Juniper forecasts more than 600 million new 5G subscriptions will be created in 2023. Growth of 5G will be “resilient against this economic downturn,” Juniper said, due to the “vital importance of mobile Internet connectivity today.” More than 80% of global operator‑billed revenue will be attributable to 5G connections by 2027, it said.

CTIA supports a proposed notice of inquiry on the 12.7 GHz band, teed up for an FCC commissioner vote next week (see 2210060062), said a filing posted Thursday in docket 22-352. “By focusing on high power, exclusive use licenses, the Commission can provide certainty and predictability to licensees, which are needed to continue driving innovation and investment in network development and deployment,” CTIA said: “Allocating flexible, exclusive use licenses in the 13 GHz band could play a key role in supporting rapidly growing consumer and business needs for next-generation mobile broadband services.”

5G-advanced requires mobile data traffic consumption to increase at higher rates than is now expected to justify investment, Dell’Oro Group said Tuesday. Expected annual growth rates for data are 30% over the next five years, the firm said: “At these rates of growth, existing sub-6 GHz and Millimeter Wave (mmWave) spectrum allocations will be more than enough to support another 10x of mobile data traffic expansion by 2030.” Video could be a “game changer,” Dell’Oro said. “With the typical phone user still spending less than 5% of total smartphone screen time streaming videos on the wireless network, the successful introduction of a new virtual reality or augmented reality device for the masses that would trigger a change in behavior -- increasing the amount of time users spend consuming video on the mobile network.” Industry also needs to rethink the role of high-band spectrum, Dell’Oro said: “While mmWave has come a long way in just a few years, the reality is that the sub-6 GHz spectrum continues to represent the most economical solution, enabling operators to minimize the need for incremental cell sites. Not surprisingly, mmWave still comprises less than 2% of global RAN investments.” The radio access network is “just one piece of the larger connectivity puzzle,” the firm said. “As Huawei representatives pointed out during the company’s Connect 2022 Summit, the shift toward 5G-Advanced needs to be accompanied by improvements in core, storage, computing, optical, and data communications, to name just a few areas,” it said.