Monthly Archives: February 2017

Regulating the IoT

Nest_Diamond_ThermostatThe FCC has joined other government agencies and private organizations that are concerned about the lack of security with the Internet of Things. The agency issued a 50-page research paper that discussed the issue and came to some troubling conclusions.

From the report: The large and diverse number of IoT vendors, who are driven by competition to keep prices low, hinders coordinated efforts to build security by design into the IoT on a voluntary basis. Left unchecked, the growing IoT widens the gap between the ideal investment from the commercial point of view and from society’s view.

That’s not nearly as strident as the sentiment expressed by most industry experts who understand that most IoT device makers look at security only as an afterthought. It’s been demonstrated repeatedly that almost every IoT device on the market can be hacked, often quite easily. There are exceptions, but a large percentage of devices have little or no defense against hacking.

The Department of Homeland Security is also looking at IoT and issued a set of guidelines they want to the industry to adopt. DHS believes that unprotected IoT devices are a national security threat. We now saw good evidence of this last month after massive denial of service attacks were launched from security cameras and home appliances. The DHS guidelines suggest some common sense requirements like allowing devices to have unique passwords and allowing IoT devices to receive needed software updates.

The Federal Trade Commission is also looking at IoT security issues. The agency recently announced a $25,000 prize to anybody who could offer a security solution for dealing with outdated software in IoT devices.

The Department of Commerce also recently issued IoT guidelines, but the guidelines seem to be aimed internally at the agency and not at the wider world.

This all raises the question of who should be regulating IoT? Right now the answer is nobody – there is no agency that has clear jurisdiction to impose any requirements on the IoT industry. And that is because such authority can only be granted by Congress. We’ve seen this same thing happen many times in the last fifty years as new technologies spring into existence that don’t fit neatly into any existing jurisdictional bucket.

The closest process we have to what is needed to regulate at least part of the IoT today is the way the FCC certifies new wireless and other telecom devices. Most people don’t realize it, but all phones and many other kinds of telecom gear undergo vigorous testing at the FCC to make the sure the devices do what they say they do and to make sure that they won’t interfere with the rest of the world. We need a similar process to tst and certify IoT devices because we can’t ever just take the IoT manufacturers’ words that their devices meet and standards that are developed.

But the FCC today has zero authority to regulate the IoT. For now they have created the ability to regulate ISPs through Title II regulations – but that is expected to be reversed or watered down soon. But even that authority doesn’t give them any jurisdiction over the IoT. Like many technologies, the IoT is something new that doesn’t fit into any existing regulatory framework.

It’s not really comforting, but there are a bunch of other new industries with the same situation. There is no agency that has any clear regulatory authority over driverless cars. Nobody has any real authority to regulate artificial intelligence. There are only very minimal regulations for gene-splicing.

I think most of us believe that some level of regulation is good for these big society-changing technologies. Certainly if nobody regulates the IoT we will have disaster after disaster from misuse of the technology. I hope we don’t wait too long to tackle this until it’s too late and there are billions of poorly manufactured IoT devices in the world that can’t be fixed.

New Technology – February 2017

grapheneThere has been so much going on in the telecom industry lately that I haven’t published a blog examining promising new technologies for a while. Here are a few new breakthroughs that ought to eventually affect our industry:

Metal that Conducts Electricity but not Heat. Physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley have found a metal that contradicts the Wiedermann-Franz Law.  This Law states that good conductors of electricity will also be proportionately good conductors of heat. The physicists were working with vanadium dioxide and unexpectedly discovered this property. There are a few other materials that are much better at conducting electricity than heat, but they only do so at temperatures a few hundred degrees below zero. It appears vanadium dioxide can do this at room temperatures. This property is derived from the fact that electrons move through the metal in a synchronized manner which is normally observed only in fluids, instead of individually which is normally observed in metals.

There is great potential for a material with this property – it could be used as an insulator in computers to keep components cool and to drastically lower the cooling costs experienced in data centers. On a more macro level this could lead to better insulation in homes and appliances and could drastically improve energy efficiency in a wide range of applications.

Superconductor Graphene. Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK have found a way to induce superconductivity in graphene. Today all superconducting materials only function at temperatures below -454 degrees Fahrenheit. But their research indicates superconducting graphene will work at much higher temperatures. The researchers created superconducting properties by layering graphene only on an underlying sheet of metal.

Superconduction is a big deal, because in the ultimate state a superconductor passes electrons with zero resistance. Compare that to normal materials, such as our electric grid that loses 7% of generated power getting to homes, and the difference is remarkable.  Finding a room-temperature superconductor would be a huge breakthrough because it could mean electric transmissions with no power losses and an end to the heat generated in electronics and appliances that comes from resistance.

Mass Producing Graphene. Scientists at Kansas State have found a cheap way to mass produce graphene. They discovered the process when working with carbon soot aerosol gels. The process is simple and only requires hydrocarbon gas, oxygen and a spark plug. The gases are forced into a chamber and graphene is formed with a spark. This is a low-power way to make graphene since it only needs a spark rather than continuous power.

Until now graphene has been expensive to make in quantities greater than milligrams and the process required caustic chemicals. With this method it’s easy to make graphene in gram quantities and the process ought to be scalable to much larger quantities.

Better Use of Wireless Spectrum. Engineers at UCLA have found a technique that might allow better use of wireless spectrum. They have found a way to use a tiny device called a circulator that allows a chip to use both incoming and outgoing signals of a given spectrum at the same time. Today’s technology only uses spectrum in one direction since dual use of spectrum has caused interference.

Circulators have been tried before, but earlier devices used magnetic materials which can’t be incorporated into chips. The prototype they built uses coaxial cables to route the signals through non-magnetic materials and they believe the design can be built directly into silicon.

The circulator works by sequentially switching signals using different paths in a similar manner that a busy train station can have trains coming in going in both directions. The design uses six transmission lines and five switches which are turned off and on sequentially to allow incoming and outgoing signals to pass each other without interference.

This would be a big breakthrough for cellphones since it would allow for better use of the spectrum. This wouldn’t increase data speeds, but would allow a cell site to handle more phones at the same time.

Cable Industry Shorts – February 2017

television-sony-en-casa-de-mis-padresHere are a few industry shorts, each not quite long enough to justify a full blog:

New York Takes on Charter. On February 1 the Attorney General of New York sued Time Warner Cable (which is now Charter Spectrum) for delivering inferior products that don’t match what was being advertised to customers.

The specific issue is that the majority of the cable modems provided to customers in the state are not capable of delivering the speeds being sold to customers. For example, in 2013 it was demonstrated that ¾ of the modems sold to supply 20 Mbps service were unable to process that much speed. And it appears that most of those modems still have not been upgraded. The lawsuit accuses the company of never notifying customers that they had inferior modems, and also of recycling inferior modems back to new data customers.

Charter says that the law suit isn’t needed because they have been making improvements since purchasing Time Warner. But the lawsuit alleges that the old practices are still widespread. The lawsuit is asking for significant refunds to affected customers.

Comcast Charging for Roku Boxes. In perhaps the best demonstration of why Comcast is rated so poorly by customers, Comcast says they will still charge customers if they use a Roku box to watch TV rather than a Comcast settop box.

Comcast currently has one of the highest settop box charges around at $9.95 per month, per box.  They also then charge $7.45 for each additional TV in the home using an ‘additional outlet charge.” Comcast hasn’t announced the rate for using a Roku box, but speculation is it will be at the $7.45 rate. This is clearly a case of a cable company charging for something for which they are providing zero value. Perhaps the company has already been emboldened by an FCC and Congress that say they will be reducing regulations.

For a customer to use the XFINITY TV app on a Roku box they must currently subscribe to Comcast cable TV and broadband service. They must have and pay for at least one settop box and also have a cablecard and a compatible IP gateway in the home.

Esquire Channel Disappearing. There is a lot of pressure by the big cable companies to cut back on the number of channels, and the expectations are that less popular networks are going to start disappearing.

The latest network that will vanish from cable line-ups is the Esquire channel. It’s a low-rated channel with content aimed at upscale men that is rated at 82 out of the 105 major cable networks. It was just launched in 2013 and had grown to 60 million subscribers. But last month AT&T and its DirecTV subsidiary decided to drop the channel, cutting 15 million subscribers. Charter is also considering dropping the channel, so NBC, the owner of Esquire, decided to kill the channel for cable systems. Some remnants of it will remain on-line.

Esquire joins the millennial channel Pivot and NBC’s Universal Sports as channels that disappeared in the last year. There are likely more to come and there are 23 networks with lower ratings than Esquire including Fox Business, Great American Country, Chiller and the Golf Channel.

Cable Companies Stop Sending Piracy Warnings. Just about every large cable company and telco has stopped forwarding messages to customers about piracy that were sent through the Copyright Alert System (CAS). These alerts were sent to customers who made illegal downloads of movies or music. The main purpose of these alerts was to warn customers that they were violating copyright laws. The content industry has always pressured ISPs to somehow punish habitual content pirates, but that has never happened to any significant degree.

Groups like the RIAA which were pushing ISPs for compliance have said they will look for an alternative. They said for now that they will probably back off from suing end user customers – a tactic that never seemed to make much difference. This is another case where technology outstripped the law. The CAS launched at the heyday of peer-to-peer file sharing, and while that still exists, it’s not the way that most copyrighted material is shared these days. We now live in a more nuanced world where there is copyrighted material on sites like YouTube sitting right next to mountains of non-copyrighted material, and it’s a lot harder to pinpoint copyright violations.

The Challenges of Fixed Gigabit Wireless

webpass_logoWe got a preview this week of what fixed wireless service might look like in urban environments. Google announced it is aggressively expanding the footprint of Webpass, the wireless ISP that Google purchased last year. The company has been operating in six cities and will now be expanding to nine more markets. These will all be downtown urban deployments.

The deployment uses high-capacity microwave links to serve high-rise buildings. Webpass already has 20,000 residential customers in the six markets, all which live in downtown high-rises. The company focuses more on serving business customers. This business plan has been around for years and I was actually helping to launch a business years ago with the same plan that died with the 2000 telecom crash.

The network consists of microwave shots to each building on the network. The first hurdle in getting this to work is to get enough quality radio sites to see buildings. As I noted in a blog last week, access to this kind of real estate is at a premium in urban areas, as cellphone providers have found when trying to deploy small cell sites.

The radios required to make the links are not gigantic, but you need one full radio and a dish at both ends of every link. This means that from any one given hub building there will be a limited number of links that can be made to other buildings, just due to space limitations. If you imagine half a dozen companies trying to this same thing (this will be the same basic deployment method for urban 5G), then you can picture a proliferation of companies fighting over available radio space on roofs.

Webpass in the past has limited their deployment to buildings that are either already wired with category 5 cable or fiber. They face the same issue that any broadband provider faces in bringing broadband into older buildings – only they are starting on the roof rather than from a basement wiring closet like other ISPs. There are very few ISPs yet willing to tackle the rewiring effort needed in large older buildings that serve residences. As you will see from the pricing below, Webpass and other ISPs are a lot more willing to tackle business buildings and absorb some rewiring costs.

The primary thing for the public to understand about this new roll-out is that it’s very limited. This won’t go to single family homes. It will go to downtown residential high-rises, but only to those that are pre-wired or easy to wire. And even in those buildings Webpass won’t go unless they get at least 10 customers. However, they will contract with landlords to serve whole buildings.

The Webpass pricing is interesting. For residential customers the price is $60 per month regardless of the speed achieved. Webpass says they deliver speeds between 100 Mbps and 500 Mbps, but in reading numerous reviews, there are complaints that speeds can get slower at peak evening time in some buildings (as one would expect when there are a lot of customers sharing one radio link).

Webpass’ pricing for businesses varies according to the number of other customers they get in a building. For example, if there are 10 or more business customers in a building they will sell a 100 – 200 Mbps connection for $250 per month with a 10 TB monthly data cap. But prices are much higher for customers in buildings with fewer than 10 customers:

Speed              Cost                 Data Cap         Price with no Cap

10 Mbps          $125                   1 TB                $375

20 Mbps          $250                   2 TB                $750

50 Mbps          $500                   5 TB                $1,500

100 Mbps        $1,000                10 TB              $2,000

250 Mbps                                                           $2,500

500 Mbps                                                           $4,000

1 Gbps                                                                $5,500

From a technical perspective Webpass is deploying in line with the way the technology works. The radios are too expensive to deploy to smaller customers or to smaller buildings. A building also need to be within a mile of the base transmitter (and hopefully closer) to get good speeds. That is largely going to mean downtown deployments.

We know there are a number of other companies considering a similar plan. Starry announced almost two years ago that they were deploying something similar in Boston, but has yet to launch. We know AT&T and Verizon are both exploring something similar to this Google product using 5G radios. But all of these companies are going to be fighting over the same limited markets.

The cellular companies keep hinting in their press releases that they will be able to use 5G to bring gigabit speeds. When they say that, this is the kind of deployment they are talking about. The only way they are going to be able to bring gigabit wireless speeds to single family homes and to suburbs is if they can develop some sort of mini transmitters to go onto utility poles. That technology is going to require building fiber close to each house and the radios are going to replace fiber drops. The above deployment by Webpass is not hype – they already have customers in six markets. But this technology is not the panacea for fast broadband for everyone that you might believe from reading the press releases.

Erosion of Cable Subscribers

Old TVA lot has been written about the impact of cord cutting and there are varying estimates about how significant the phenomenon has become. But there is a different way to examine the effects on the cable industry, which is to count the number of US homes that are paying to subscribe to each cable channel.

Below I am comparing the numbers of subscribers from August 2013 to the same subscriber counts today for some of the more popular channels. It’s easy to see that almost across the board networks have lost a lot of customers. I chose August 2013 because somewhere around that date was the peak of the cable industry in terms of customers. Since then total customers (and also customers for each network) have dropped.

These drops can’t all be attributed to cord cutting – cord shaving (where customers downsize their cable packages) is also a factor in these drops. Some cable systems are also working hard to cut back on the number of channels they carry. To put this chart into perspective, there are currently about 136 million housing units in the US.

In (000)
Network August 2013 Current Change
Weather Channel 99,926 84,683 (15,243)
ESPN 97,736 87,859 (9,877)
Travel Channel 94,418 84,862 (9,556)
MTV 97,654 88,137 (9,517)
Nickelodeon 98,799 89,663 (9,136)
VH1 96,786 88,085 (8,701)
TV Land 96,282 87,901 (8,381)
Comedy Central 97,838 89,857 (7,981)
A&E 98,302 90,478 (7,824)
SYFY 97,447 89,854 (7,593)
TNT 98,139 90,586 (7,553)
CNN 99,292 91,794 (7,498)
Discovery Channel 98,891 91,829 (7,062)
HGTV 98,229 91,169 (7,060)
AMC 97,699 90,767 (6,932)
FX 97,157 90,389 (6,768)
E! Entertainment 96,472 89,887 (6,585)
Disney Channel 98,142 91,611 (6,531)
Bravo 94,129 87,620 (6,509)
Food Network 99,283 93,062 (6,221)
MSNBC 94,519 89,764 (4,755)
Oxygen 78,208 75,651 (2,557)
NFL Network 70,910 71,252 342
Showtime 28,094 29,014 920
HBO 32,445 34,369 1,924
Hallmark Channel 85,897 88,885 2,988
National Geographic 84,446 89,865 5,419

These numbers tell a different story than articles about cord cutting. Industry estimates of cord cutting during this same time frame vary between 2.5 and 4 million homes that have dropped cable altogether. But these figures show that most major networks have lost between 6 and 10 million paying subscribers in a little under three and a half years.

Obviously not every network is experiencing the same changes. For example, the 15 million households lost by The Weather Channel are due to many cable systems changing to a cheaper alternative. And you can see at the bottom of the chart that there are still networks that are growing. These networks are gaining customers by attracting more subscriptions, like the premium movie channels, or by getting added to additional cable systems that didn’t carry them in 2013.

But overall this is a sobering chart, and one that all of the programmers are well aware of. The various factors of cord cutting, cord shaving, and of cable companies trying to cut back their channels are all steadily eroding the number of households that get to watch the various networks.

Michael O’Rielly’s Vision of Broadband Expansion

FCC_New_LogoA whole lot of the telecom industry is anxiously watching the news to see if there will be a federal program to expand rural broadband. We’ve already had new FCC Chairman Pai come out in favor of closing the digital divide and bringing broadband to everyone. And there are those in Congress pushing for money to expand rural broadband.

Last week FCC member Michael O’Rielly entered the fray with a blog post about funding rural broadband expansion. There are things in that blog I heartily agree with, and others that I disagree with (as you might expect).

O’Rielly warns that the government should not shovel money at a rural solution in such a way as to drastically overspend to get a solution. I completely agree and I wrote a series of blogs last year (1, 2, 3, and 4) that make the same point. The government wasted a lot of money when handing out stimulus grants in the past and I’d hate to see them make the same mistakes again. There is a long list of things that were done poorly in that grant program, but a lot of this was because it was cobbled together quickly. Hopefully, if we give out new federal money to help deploy broadband we can take the time to get it right.

O’Rielly suggests that any rural broadband expansion program be handled through the Universal Service Fund. No matter which part of government tackles this there will be a need to staff up to implement a major broadband expansion program. But I agree it makes more sense to hand this to an existing program rather than to hand it to somebody like the NTIA again.

He stated one thing that has me scratching my head. He stated that he has heard of ‘countless’ examples of where stimulus middle-mile fiber routes hurt commercial providers. I have hundreds of clients, most of them commercial ISPs, and I have never once heard anyone complain about this. Many of my clients instead are enjoying lower-cost rural transport on the BTOP networks. These complaints have to be coming from AT&T and Verizon who don’t like lower-cost alternatives to their massively overpriced special access. Special access transport is one of the biggest killers of rural business plans.

It’s clear that O’Rielly has a bias towards having commercial solutions for broadband rather than government ones. I don’t know anybody that disagrees with that concept. But by now it’s pretty obvious that the big commercial ISPs are never going to invest in rural America and it’s disingenuous to keep pretending that if government funds rural broadband that it will somehow harm them. The big ISPs have been working hard to withdraw from rural America and the providers that are left – the independent telcos, cooperatives, and rural governments – are the ones we should trust to deploy the broadband we know is needed.

I take major exception to his contention that “ultra-fast residential service is a novelty and good for marketing, but the tiny percentage of people using it cannot drive our policy decisions.” This statement has two glaring omissions. First, there are many households that need fast speeds today for home-based businesses, education, and reasons beyond just watching videos or playing games. When 10% of homes in the US don’t have broadband those homes are excluded from participating in the benefits of the digital economy. It’s hard to put a dollar value on what that is costing our economy – but it’s huge.

But second – and more importantly – this ignores the inevitable increase in demand over time. US households have been doubling their need for speed and the amount of total download every three years since 1980 – and there is no sign that growth in demand is over. This means any network that is just adequate today is going to feel obsolete within a decade – and this also means you don’t make policy for today’s demands, but for demands that we already know will be here in another decade. This is why there has to continue to be a focus on fiber first. As much as O’Rielly might hate some of the worst practices of the stimulus grants, his FCC approved the disastrous giveaway of billions to the big telcos to expand rural DSL in the CAF II program. We can’t take that path again.

Finally, O’Rielly says that the government should not be picking broadband winners and losers. That sounds like a great political sentiment, but if the government is going to supply funding to promote rural broadband that money has to go to somebody – and by definition that is picking winners. But O’Rielly does temper this statement by saying that funding shouldn’t just go to the ‘well-connected’. I hope he really means that and gets behind a plan that doesn’t just hand federal broadband funding to AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink.

Small ISPs and Net Neutrailty

Network_neutrality_poster_symbolLast week a small ISP asked me if they should be concerned about the potential end of net neutrality. It’s clear that the new FCC chairman is either going to reverse the net neutrality order completely or hobble it significantly. My response to the question comes in several parts.

First, net neutrality has had virtually zero impact on small ISPs. It is inconceivable to me that a small ISP could somehow find a way to violate the basic principles of net neutrality. It’s not something a small ISP can do on their own and they would have to somehow make a deal with a content providers that would give them the ability to discriminate against customers or against other carriers.

If anything, not having any real market power can be turned into a marketing advantage. Small ISPs should be advertising the fact that they are the one ISP in the market that does not spy on customers. Small ISPs generally offer bandwidth with few strings attached – customers are free to use what they buy in almost any manner.

If net neutrality goes away the real impact is going to come when the big carriers begin offering products that give them an unbeatable market advantage. We already have a hint at what such products are like by looking at the cellular carriers. It’s clear that AT&T and Verizon are each heading down a path where they can offer cellular customers free access to certain video content while charging all other data use against stingy data caps. And, with net neutrality going away, industry analysts expect them to step this up and begin offering exclusive content to their cellular customers that they can’t get elsewhere.

But that’s not the end game. The product that net neutrality is aimed to protect us from is what is called a curated web. Consider, for example, that some of the content providers join together to partner with AT&T. This could be traditional programmers like ESPN or newer content providers like Facebook or YouTube. These companies could help to subsidize customer data plans to entice people to buy a curated web product.

Such subsidies could mean cell plans that significantly less expensive than normal cellular service, but which comes with all of the web access baked-in. The content providers would encourage you to only use their portal. They would control which browser you use. They would control your search engine. And they would advertise specifically to you and collect everything they can about your preferences, buying habits, social contacts, etc. A curated cellphone product would severely curb a user’s ability to get to other content.

Such a product could become popular if it bundles in things people already like such as Facebook, YouTube and other popular web sites. The upside to the content providers is that they have exclusive control of you for purposes of data gathering and advertising – and they ought to be willing to pay for that right. And customers are going to love the savings.

You might ask, “Why worry about cellphone plans? I don’t compete against them.” Well, there is nothing to stop curated web plans from coming to landline broadband as well. Comcast might have a normal broadband product at $60, but a curated one at half that. A company like Comcast could offer multiple curated web products – perhaps one from Facebook, a sports package from ESPN, another that focuses on Star Trek and science fiction, and so on.

These curated plans don’t sound bad if somebody comes out with one that you would find of interest – and that is the danger. People are likely to want such plans if it saves money and has a lot of the content they already use.

But curated web access has several big problems. First, they give the ISP that offers them a major market advantage over any competition in the market. It’s hard for anybody else to compete against a web product that has been paid down to be under market rates by a content provider like Facebook. Second, the curated web will stifle new web content providers. It’s easy to think that companies like Facebook and Google are so large on the web that they can’t be supplanted by something else. But it has only been a few years since when the web was dominated by companies such as AOL, Yahoo and others. It’s almost in the nature of the web that people’s tastes in web content changes over time, sometimes rapidly. The next Google or Facebook is never going to get traction if a huge chunk of the web is curated by the current content giants. In that environment we might still be seeing a Facebook-curated web a century from now – and that would be an innovation killer.

But, to circle back to the original question: Small ISPs are not harmed today by net neutrality. But if it’s taken away, the big ISPs have already given us hints on what they’ll do – and it is those actions that will ultimately disadvantage small ISPs along with anybody else that wants a web which constantly innovates rather than one that would stagnate.

Cellular Voice is now a Commodity

apple-watchAs has always happened with every major telco product, cellular voice has probably reached the point where we can consider it to be a commodity. In economic terms, a commodity is a basic good that is reasonably interchangeable with other goods or services.

A brief history of cellular voice is probably the best way to show how the product has changed over time. I remember when cellular voice was introduced. At first it was an extremely rare product and only rich people or those whose jobs demanded mobility at any cost had cellphones. The units were huge and heavy and mostly were used in cars. Users paid a steep price to gain mobility, which was the first value proposition of the cellphone.

Cellular voice became a mass market product when the size of the cellphones shrunk and the batteries got good enough that they could hold a charge for a reasonable amount of time. Various versions of flip phones became popular and millions were sold. These early cellphones had lots of innovations other than just being mobile. For instance, I remember seeing a coworker buy an early flip phone that had features that we now take for granted. The phone stored your whole rolodex of contacts. But even more impressively, the phone kept visual track of who had called you and when. And long distance largely disappeared when the cellphone companies started selling minute plans instead of long distance plans.

But then came smartphones and cellular voice started taking a back seat. Data became the rage but all of the market emphasis was on using your phone to surf the web and to take advantage of the burgeoning wireless data business. The telephone part of the product was still important, but this is about the time when we saw cellphone companies start to blend in the pricing of voice, text and data into one bundle. People became less willing to pay high prices for voice and texting, and so the price of those products was buried into the monthly rate.

Skip forward to today and it’s easy to see that voice has lost all cachet. I have a teenage daughter and using the voice capability of her phone is at the bottom of her list along with email. She much prefers to communicate with pictures, emojis, text messages and social media sites rather than actually talk to somebody on the phone. She’ll do it, but she clearly would rather communicate in some other way. In fact, she does the majority of her communications these days using an Apple smart watch, where she talks into the watch which then sends her message as text. She doesn’t even need a smartphone for most of her communications.

And the business world has also moved away from traditional voice. For instance, it’s routine for me to have conference calls using various web conference services that allow me to talk and listen through my computer.

One of the best indications that cellular voice is now a commodity is that there are now many willing to give away voice for free. Billionaire Mukesh Ambani in India is now giving away free voice to anyone buying a cellphone data plan. In this country there are a number of cellular providers allowing unlimited free calling using WiFi.

Cell phone companies are going to be offering voice as part of their products for a long time. But one has to wonder as we move to smartwatches, smart assistants like Amazon Alexa and a future of various wearables if we won’t soon stop using the word ‘phone’. My daughter’s smartphone is rarely used for the ‘phone’ features, and the time comes soon when she can ditch the phone completely I think she’ll gladly do so.

The Internet of Everywhere

tostitos-logoForget the Internet of Things. That is already passé and I saw something yesterday that made me realize we have now moved on to the Internet of Everywhere.

Tostitos has put out a special ‘party bag’ of chips for the SuperBowl. The bag contains a chip and a tiny sensor that can detect traces of alcohol on your breath when you breathe on it. If you test as intoxicated the bag will light up red and flash “Don’t Drink and Drive.” But that’s only the beginning. If you set off the red flash you can tap the bag against your smartphone and it will automatically call Uber and give you a $10 discount on your ride.

This is obviously a super-cool marketing idea and I expect the company to sell lots of bags of chips and will get a lot of positive press. And I would expect a lot of people will strive to make the bag flash red. But this demonstrates how cheap computer chips have become when a company can design a campaign using millions of chips in throwaway bags for a one-time promotion. This goes to show how amazingly small sensors have become that this bag can give you a mini-breathalyzer. I’m sure the test is not super-accurate, but the very fact that it can do this and still be affordable is amazing.

Engineers have been predicting this sort of technology for a few years. For example, there are now chips that can be printed onto human skin and can act as a keypad for your smartphone. We are not far away from having chips printed on every grocery item in the store, which will simplify checkout and will fully automate inventory control. With cheap chips we can literally sprinkle sensors throughout a farm field to cheaply monitor for the localized need for water, fertilizer or the presence of pests.

The real Internet of Things isn’t going to be unleashed until we can develop affordable swarms of sensors and also provide a way for them to communicate with each other. Today the IoT is being used mainly to monitor factory production and in homes for alarm monitoring and other similar functions. But the revolutionary value of IoT will come when it can grow to be the Internet of Everywhere.

Then we can have constant monitors inside our blood stream to sense for diseases and to fight them off early. We can monitor sensitive environmental areas to protect endangered wildlife. We can monitor our homes to a degree never done before – want to know if a mouse just snuck in – done!

There have been a lot of breakthroughs in creating small, low-power sensors. But the real challenge is still to find a way to communicate easily and reliably with a cloud of sensors. We are not going to be able to create a WiFi path with a thousand different home sensors but will need some sort of mesh technology that can first collect and make sense of what the sensors are telling us.

But I have no doubt that if a potato chip bag can tell me if I’ve had too much to drink and can then call for a ride to take me home, that we are making great progress.

And as I write this blog I’m sitting here thinking of if only I could show this bag to one of my long-passed grandparents. What would they ever make of this flashing chip bag, of my smartphone and of Uber? But then again, perhaps their biggest question might first be, “What is a Tostito?”