So tell me what you want, what you really, really want

Mobile network operators are quite vocal. They are, on the whole, not shy of telling us what they think about things. They generally speak with one voice—that of the GSMA—and their views come through loud and clear. This is as it should be. Communication is their business. Here in the UK, one of them used to market itself using the slogan “it’s good to talk”. That famous tagline is now part of the language. That’s why it popped into my head just then. But what about the companies that make all the equipment? Ericsson, Nokia, Cisco and the others? They too make themselves heard, but not to the same extent, and not in the same way. Take the 6 GHz band, for example. We know that MNOs want it to be allocated for IMT. To paraphrase the immortal Mandy Rice-Davies, they would say that, wouldn’t they? But did you know that not all the vendors feel that way? In fact, they have quite a wide range of views. It’s the same for the higher bands. The vendors are all interested in using 26 GHz and 28 GHz for 5G, but they don’t all support IMT identification for spectrum in the 60 GHz band. Why not dive into our newly-updated profiles of the vendors and find out what they want (what they really, really want)?