5G and a Change of Paradigm

As we have been arguing for a few years now, the evolution from 4G to 5G will be significant. 5G will allow 100X the speed of 4G. But that is not the half of it. If the carriers are smart, a big if however, they can see this in a distributed mesh network, using intelligent customer based mesh routers so that coverage can be seamless and costs reduced.

In ArsTechnica there and article on the work at ATT. They state:

AT&T is collaborating with Ericsson and Intel on outdoor trials. "We expect field trials of 5G technologies to provide wireless connectivity to fixed locations in Austin before the end of this year," AT&T said. "The trials will help guide our 5G standards contributions and set the stage for widespread commercial and mobile availability once technology standards for 5G are established." LTE could remain AT&T's primary mobile network technology for a few years. AT&T said it wants to be ready to switch to 5G once the technology standards are set by 3GPP, the international standards body. 3GPP "will likely complete the first phase of that process in 2018," AT&T said.
Besides smartphone data, AT&T says 5G will be used for virtual reality, self-driving cars, robotics, smart cities, and massive sensor networks. On the back end, AT&T said it is relying heavily on network function virtualization and software-defined networking to reduce the cost of delivering data and to support new applications more quickly. AT&T is trying to ditch the "traditional model [that] relied on complex and cumbersome hardware" in favor of one that "turn[s] routers, firewalls and other network equipment into virtual functions running on commodity hardware," the company said.

The cost can be minimized by having the customer become part of the network at their cost.

The only barrier will be the carrier's greed in delimiting access to what they feel is of value. A smart carrier will see the ever expanding value in distributed access and not try to follow the CATV carriers down the road to perdition.

Very Cute!

I just ran across Open Garden and their offerings. Simply what they appear to do is as follows:

1. Each mobile device has three wireless access modes; a carrier, a wifi, and a bluetooth.

2. The carrier interface is one to one with the carriers base station. The carrier then connects to the Internet backbone.

3. However the wifi and bluetooth can connect to any other wifi or blutooth. Thus unlike the carrier mode one can create ad hoc mesh networks of combined wifi or bluetooth. These are off the Net networks, they are ad hoc and come and go as users come and go.

4. The range of bluetooth is short but wifi may be hundreds of meters. Thus if we have a town of say 10,000 users and 10 sq km, then we have more than adequate density if everyone has the software on their mobile devices.

5. If a critical number load the software and keep devices on then one has a local mesh network that is NOT an Internet connection. It is a Meraki network without a carrier.

This is being used in Iraq by many who want to avoid being intercepted. The BBC reports:

About 40,000 users downloaded Firechat last week, compared with 6,600 over the previous few months, the company says. The internet has been blocked in some Iraqi provinces, as authorities seek to prevent militants from communicating. Access to social media sites has also been severely restricted. Firechat allows users to take part in group chats with between two and 10,000 people, without the need for an internet connection. Using a technology known as "mesh networking", messages can be sent to people within the immediate vicinity, as long as they too have the app installed. However, discussions are not private, and can be seen by anyone in the area. The software is available for both Android and iOS devices, and has a range of roughly 70m (230ft). However, if enough people use the app, messages can travel over far greater distances, hopping between intermediary devices in a chain-like effect.

This is an interesting turn and potentially has substantial disintermediation applications! The applications is worth following.

What Business are You In

When Google bought Motorola's mobile handset business I wondered what business they thought they were in. MIT Technology Review, in my opinion the industry rag from Cambridge, no longer an alumni publication, has a short piece speaking of their approach.

They state:

According to the Times report, Woodside plans to reduce the number of devices Motorola makes from the 27 it introduced last year down to just a few, and wants those devices to have super-long battery life, improved cameras, and possibly even new features such as voice recognition technology that can recognize people chatting in a room. Dugan is reportedly hiring metal scientists, acoustics engineers, and artificial intelligence experts, too. 

But whether the DARPA research model can work in the fast-evolving world of smartphones is unclear, says Chetan Sharma, a wireless analyst in Seattle. "Regina does bring in outside perspective specially related to projects that are leaps, versus incremental steps," he says. "However, this will need to be executed under the constraints of competition, time, and money." ....

Sharma says a big task will be convincing other handset makers that use Android that Google won't give Motorola preferential treatment. "The biggest challenge for them is to keep the Android ecosystem together while launching their own Google branded devices," Sharma says. "It is a tough battle to attract the ecosystem and effectively compete against them at the same time."

 The strategy seems to be:

1. Buy the company.

2. Get the IP

3. Try to make money on what is left.

4. Play with the technology.

I am again reminded of a conversation I had with Bob Galvin the then CEO of Motorola in 1985. He wanted to expand Motorola into the service business from its then position in the hardware business. The business was then then Digital Radio Network. Namely providing brick sized data handsets working on a wireless band and selling the service to companies. I assembled a team, sold several companies on the idea but soon saw that the Motorola types were hardware types, the DNA was fixed. They had no idea what a service was.

Thus when I see Google which is a simple service business spend time and money on a product company then I assume that someone has a grand service strategy or this is a really big mistake. The Android cannibalism is a real concern. The culture is different. And with all due respect, DARPA is no Huawei.

Frankly the biggest challenge is culture. The key to success is focus. I remember what happened when the RBOCS, Bell Atlantic et al, were let loose, they spent hundreds of millions on things they had no idea about. I spent a couple of years getting rid of them too. Why some brilliant minds in them also wanted to get into the movies, and lost over $100 million or so. My time at Warner made me just chuckle. Thus it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Hubris, read the Greek plays folks, the gods always have strange tricks afoot!

Bandwidth and the Negroponte Switch

About 20 years ago Prof Negroponte published his switch concept: simply TV would go from wireless broadcast to fiber and telephony would go from copper wires to wireless. We show the idea above.

But what has happened. Twenty years ago I also proposed in an FCC Pioneer Preference Filing the extensive use of multi beam base station antennas, a technique I had worked on for thirty years by that time. Too early. Marty Cooper also started a company just after that which also was too early.

But what has happened since. The above graphic details some of the issues:

1. QPSK/CDMA led to OFDM, which is why Qualcomm bought Farinon, and we saw BPS/Hz gone from 1 to 10.

2. Video codecs have brought down HDTV from 200 Mbps to 2 Mbps.

3. Multi beam antennas have allowed beam pointing per subscriber.

The result, the number of instantaneous, yes I mean instantaneous, video channels per user can explode. How:

Stick fiber in the backbone and wireless at the edge, all IP. The we have the re-switch as below:

This shows the Negroponte switch goes back on video, namely video for the "last mile" can be all wireless, and yes with the same or even less spectrum.

So why are the incumbent wireless carriers demanding more spectrum? Ever heard of monopoly? And the DoJ/FTC is chasing Google, while the foxes run rampant! Lawyers.

Some Thoughts on Bandwidth

The NY Times has recently reported on wireless that the carriers are seeking more bandwidth. They state:

The wireless carriers say that in the next few years they may not have enough of it to meet the exploding demands for mobile data. The result, they ominously warn, may be slower or spotty connections on smartphones and tablets. They imply in carefully couched language that, given the laws of supply and demand, the price of cellphone service will soar. 

I would suggest several observations:

1. With the change from QPSK to OFDM we have gone from 1 bps/Hz to almost 10 bps/Hz.

2. With smart antennas we will go from 10 bps/Hz to over 100 bps/Hz.

3. At the same time data rates for video using MPEG X, 4 to 5, we see rates for HDTV dropping from 20 Mbps to 4 Mbps to 2 Mbps.

So as capacity increases and as demand decreases where is the gap?

Somehow this set of simple facts was missing from the article, and from the carriers as well.

Unlimited Mobile to Mobile Calling: It's the FCC not Monopoly

I am amazed by the lack of understanding on the part of some folks. In Public Knowledge there is a young man who states that the existence of free wireless to wireless calls is a sign that there is no competition. He states:

Today AT&T announced that it was offering a new feature to some of its subscribers: unlimited calling to any mobile number.  This comes after the news that they were also offering free microcells  (little boxes that boost reception in your home) to some iPhone users, and that Verizon was offering unlimited wireless data to its own iPhone subscribers.  Why is this flood of enticements evidence that there is not very much competition between wireless companies?

 He then goes on to explain what is not the real explanation. The fact is that the FCC has forced interconnection and access fees for fixed carriers whereas it never managed to mess up mobile that way, yet.

You see I wrote of this almost twenty years ago. I thinks I did this almost a dozen times in different venues. The issue is simple, it is the same as the Tier 1 Internet backbone players, they peer, they share traffic so the cost is balanced. The free market plays a role and when it does the consumer benefits. Here is a classic case of consumer benefit. I tried to do this in the early 1990s and the FCC tried to block me. Fortunately they got side tracked on PCS auctions and managed to screw that up with the Next Wave give away. But alas I digress. This is the free market and competition and not the lack of it, read the history young man, it may tell you something.

Wirless Carriers and Standards

In the NY Times today some author is commenting on the ATT iPhone mess and standards. Well let me make a few comments since he could probably blame me.

It was 1989 and I was then head of R&D at NYNEX. We saw that the analog cellular systems were soon to run out of capacity and we needed to go digital. We needed to do this change quickly. This was a time when we had no single R&D group, Bell Labs was gone, and historically they were always too slow. We had to now rely on American entrepreneurial leadership, a change for the regulated telephone world.

Irwin Jacobs, from Qualcomm, my former advisor from MIT some 25-30 years earlier came pitching CDMA. This was an elegant and doable approach which solved so many problems. I saw the potential immediately and became "Paul on the road to Ephesus". Sitting besides by biblical horse I went about selling the idea.

But, ATT, and especially SW Bell, now ATT, had chosen a TDMA standard and Jacobs and myself and a few others chose to go CDMA, because it was clearly better.

The SW Bell folks were adamant, and wrong. They chose TDMA.

Thus there was a war on amongst the cellular carriers in the US.

Meanwhile, slowly the Europeans were developing a different standard, GSM, but mobile was slower to develop in Europe yet we had a real problem in the US, cellular was growing faster and we had introduced portable phones at lower power.Thus we saw portable phones, more users, greater demands and a need to get out of analog before it was impossible to do so. You see the FCC had mandated auctions which made getting more spectrum impossible in the short run.

Thus we in the US had to make a decision earlier. And decide we did.

By late 1990 I became COO at NYNEX cellular and my prime task was clearly to sort out this mess. I brought all carriers together in September 1991 in California and we got a significant agreement, five of the 7 agreed on CDMA. SW Bell, now ATT, was the prime hold out, they stuck with TDMA. They later bought a company which had GSM, which is why they are GSM now. So many accidents of history.

One thing we, the carriers, did not want was the FCC saying or doing anything. The FCC, incompetent as usual, would have taken longer and made the wrong choice.

The Times states:

The continent’s system is looser in part because Europe settled on a single technological standard for wireless carriers 20 years ago. Countries there wanted to ensure that their citizens’ phones would work as they traveled throughout the Continent. No such agreement was reached in the United States, which had recently deregulated its telephone industry, and carriers built their networks on separate technologies. 

“I’d call it the culture of competition,” said Alex Hills, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, explaining why a single standard was not set in the United States. “There was interest in allowing the standards to compete with one another, and let the market decide who would win.” 

 It was not a culture of competition. As the one who worked the problem it was the exploding market growth and the fact that the technology was changing rapidly and there were people in the system who "felt" their way was the best way. Was CDMA better, yes, is GSM good as a standard, yes, is GSM better, as a single standard yes, not as a technology.

We now are entering 4G which because of the advances in technology uses a much more efficient standard. Hopefully we will not see the Tower of Babel here, but the reason is not because we did not have enough regulation, if we had we would still be using auto based luggable phones.

Google's Next Step in Wireless

The Financial Times has reported on the Google entry into the handset market using its software platform. As we have written over the past few years here and in detail in our White Papers we still see Google as a one trick pony, yet continuing to wander around for alternative opportunities.

The FT states:

"The online Google phone store will sell the handset with service from Verizon Wireless in the US and Vodafone in the UK immediately, but will quickly be expanded to include more handsets, mobile operators and countries, Google executives said. The early test countries, which also include Singapore and Hong Kong, are only the “first baby steps” in a global push, said Andy Rubin, head of the Google mobile software efforts.

Google’s move into online retailing marks its latest attempt to change the ground rules in the mobile business and to stimulate mobile internet use to boost its search advertising business"

The Google strategy is to place itself in as many places as possible, to get in front of as many eyes as is possible. Yet at the same time the clarity of their business model, beyond advertising, is yet to be determined.

As we have argued before we still see the development of the electronic shopping mall model and yet the FT article sees a focus on selling the "retail service" whatever that may be.

The winner we continue to believe will be the player who cracks the electronic shopping mall operator paradigm.