Verizon has been on the back foot throughout the first phase of 5G roll-out in the USA. Although it was first to deploy, even going to the lengths of using a pre-standard technology to ensure it beat AT&T by a nose, it has grappled with a shortage of the midband spectrum in which most of the world’s operators are rolling out first-stage 5G – because it provides significant new capacity, and so can deliver a visibly different user experience in selected locations, while broad coverage can be delivered, for now, by 4G.
With the 3.5 GHz band occupied in the USA, and only set to be freed up federal and satellite incumbents after auctions later this year, Verizon and AT&T were forced to deliver capacity using millimeter wave spectrum, which can support very high speeds, but comes with many limitations – of range, indoor penetration, device availability, cost of ownership and ease of deployment.
While AT&T has been using pieces of neglected or refarmed spectrum, and its 600 MHz licences, to chase T-Mobile USA into providing broader 5G coverage and full mobility, Verizon has stuck with its initial fixed wireless access (FWA) focus and its mmWave bands. Unlike AT&T and TMO, it acquired no spectrum in the 600 MHz broadcaster incentive auctions, and it has even fewer midband assets than its arch-rival (AT&T has spectrum in some odd, underused bands like WCS around 2.3 GHz).
Verizon has argued that FWA is a good standalone business case in its case, whereas for most MNOs it has been a fairly niche element of the overall 5G case. But the real riches, of course, will lie in broad reach and advanced consumer and enterprise mobile services, so it will need to use every tool at its disposal in 2020 to catch up with the other two operators.
The tool it has touted most has been dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), which will allow it to use its midband LTE spectrum for 5G as well as 4G, greatly improving its coverage and overall performance. Ericsson can already support DSS commercially and Verizon’s other base station suppliers, Nokia and Samsung, have pledged to do the same this year. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said last week that DSS will be important in helping the telco to reach its goal of 60 5G cities by year end – this week saw its 35th roll-out plus an upgrade to its uplink capabilities.
Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told LightReading: “The addition of upload capabilities is a positive development for Verizon, and the delayed feature is underlined by the fact that upload has always been more challenging than download.” This is also the first time Verizon has used paired (FDD) spectrum as well as TDD in its 5G network. By contrast with previous generations, in which unpaired spectrum played a junior role, in 5G the first network platforms and deployments have been in TDD bands.
But Verizon will need to keep innovating, and probably taking risks on some newer technologies, like FDD-5G, in order to catch up with the others. In the past week, it has announced deals with three innovative suppliers – Movandi, Pivotal Commware and Wistron NeWeb – which are all, in different ways, addressing the key challenge of mmWave, its limited coverage and penetration through obstacles.
RF start-up Movandi is providing its mmWave repeater technology, which will be implemented at chip level to extend the range of Verizon’s 5G Home CPE. The box will be made by Taiwan’s Wistron NeWeb and powered by processors from NXP, Movandi’s main semiconductor partner.
Movandi launched its BeamXR technology at 2019’s Mobile World Congress and it recently became commercially available. The company, which has focused on Bluetooth and WiFi in the past, supports both the main US mmWave bands, 28 GHz and 39 GHz, and offers a dual-band product.
Founded in 2016 by siblings Maryam and Reza Rofougaran, the California start-up has raised $66.7m in venture capital to date. Most recently, it raised $27m last month, in a round led by WRVI Capital, along with Cota Capital and DNX Ventures.
Movandi claims its solution can help reduce the cost of achieving LTE-like cell coverage with mmWave 5G, by about 75% in capex terms, as well as reducing opex compared to adopting the alternative approach of small cells backhauled by fiber. The repeaters are cheaper and simpler to deploy than small cells, and allow users to attach more devices than they can with just the 5G CPE.
Joe Madden, chief analyst at Mobile Experts, told FierceWireless he believes Movandi outperforms even the giants like Qualcomm in some aspects of RF amplifier efficiency.
CEO Maryam Rofougaran says the programmability of its repeater technology sets the end products apart from a previous generation of low cost but dumb extenders, with support for capabilities like synchronized network relays. With programmability, “they can either make a narrow band on the relay, or make it widespread and shape the beam” as needed, she said. It will also support a mesh configuration in the next release.
CTO Reza Rofougaran said another key differentiator is that Movandi enables a fully integrated system-on-chipset, which includes RFICs, ASICs, controllers and algorithms. “Movandi chipsets are also used for radio heads, as well as radios for 5G modems such as CPE. We make a complete system-on-chip,” he added.
Movandi’s other products include its BeamX RF front-end for fixed wireless CPE, mobile devices, small cells and O-RAN radio units. These products target deployments across the complete 5G value chain from consumes to IoT, mobile, artificial intelligence, software defined networks and automotive.
Verizon is also working with Pivotal Commware on extender technology for mmWave. It has been an open secret that the start-up, which numbers Bill Gates among its investors, has been working with the US telco but this is now official.
Pivotal offers the Echo 5G and Pivot 5G repeaters to extend mmWave 5G coverage at lower cost than deploying large numbers of fully-fledged small cells.
“We’ve turned the perceived underpinning weaknesses of mmWave into strengths using innovations in electromagnetic science,” said CEO Brian Deutsch, using a technology that the start-up calls holographic beamforming technology. This counteracts reflection, penetration and shadowing loss indoors, Deutsch said, “to achieve the gigabit speeds end users expect and to deliver cost, size, weight and performance that is orders of magnitude improvement over legacy technology like phased array and MIMO.”
The Echo 5G is a fixed wireless repeater that can be attached to a window to improve indoor penetration by the millimeter wave signal. It has focused on Verizon’s 28 GHz band so far, but a product for 39 GHz – the main mmWave spectrum held by AT&T – will be ready soon.
“Not only can extenders expand coverage inside, they allow more customers to add more devices to the network and enhance millimeter wave coverage at outdoor locations,” Verizon said in a statement. “As we continue to expand mobile and home coverage across the country, Verizon will work with leading technology partners to further advance the 5G ecosystem and bring revolutionary 5G experiences to our customers.”
Pivotal came to prominence in 2018, when it unveiled its beamforming technology, with the hope of pushing it into standards. In 3G and 4G, antenna tilt functionality was fairly limited in impact, and was standardized outside of 3GPP by the Antenna Interface Standards Group (AISG). But with advanced beamforming being far more integral to 5G performance, 3GPP aims to define an abstraction layer of beam options supported by an open interface, in order to support interoperability between different vendors of networks and antennas. This will be a target for Pivotal in future 5G releases.
The firm says 5G – especially the millimeter wave spectrum and Massive MIMO which are key elements – is making beamforming essential. In previous mobile generations, antennas were directed by upper layer functionality, but 5G is seeing the emergence of software-defined antennas (SDAs). These acquire information about the user environment in order to determine the shape and steering of the beam, and negotiate as full partners with upper layers to optimize the link.