Tag: 5G

Categories
Technology The Industry

The Next Big Thing

I’ve always been somewhat amused to read about the colossally important technology trends that are right around the corner. These trends are mostly driven by the wishful thinking of vendors, and they have rarely come true, at least to the extent that is predicted. Even when the next big thing comes to pass, it’s almost never at the predicted magnitude. There has been at least one of these big trends announced every year, and here are a few of the more interesting ones.

I can remember when it was announced that we would be living in an Internet of Things world. Not only would our houses be stuffed full of labor-savings IOT devices, but our fields, forests, and even the air around us would be full of small sensors that would give us feedback on the world around us. The reality was not the revolution predicted by the industry press, but over a decade, most of us now have smart devices in our homes. But the fields, forests, and surrounding environment – not so much.

The IOT trend was followed by big pronouncements that we’d all be adopting wearables. This was not only devices like Google Glass, but we’d all have wearables built into our everyday clothes so that we could effortlessly carry a computer and sensors with us everywhere. This prediction was about as big of a flop as imaginable. Google Glass crashed and burned when the public made it clear that nobody wanted everyday events to be live streamed. Other than gimmicks at CES, there was no real attempt at smart clothes.

But wearables weren’t the biggest flop of all – that is reserved in my mind for 5G. The hype for 5G swamps the hype for all of the other big trends combined. 5G was going to transform the world. We’d have near gigabit speeds everywhere, and wireless was going to negate the need for investing in fiber broadband networks. 5G was going to enable fleets of driverless cars. 5G would drive latency so low that it was going to be the preferred method for connection by gamers and stock traders. There was going to be 5G small cell sites on every corner, and fast wireless broadband would be everywhere. Instead of 5G, we got a watered-down version of 4G LTE labeled as 5G. Admittedly, cellular broadband speeds are way faster, but none of the predicted revolution came to pass.

A few predictions came to pass largely as touted – although at a much slower pace. Five years ago, we were told that everything was going to migrate to the cloud. Big corporations were going to quickly ditch internal computing, and within a short time, the cloud would transform computing. It didn’t happen as quickly as predicted, but we have moved a huge amount of our computing lives into the cloud. Tasks like gaming, banking, and most of the apps we’ve come to rely on are in the cloud today. The average person doesn’t realize the extent that they rely on the cloud until they lose broadband and realize how little of the things they do are stored in the computers at their homes and offices.

This blog was prompted by the latest big trend. The press is full of stories about how computing is moving back to the edge. In case the irony of that escapes you, this largely means undoing a lot of the big benefits of going to the cloud. There are some good reasons for this shift. For example, the daily news about hacking has corporations wondering if data will be safer locally than in the cloud. But the most important reason cited for the movement to edge computing is that the world is looking for extremely low latency – and this can only come when computer processing is done locally. The trouble with this prediction is that it’s hard to find applications that absolutely must have a latency of less than 10 milliseconds. I’m sure there are some, but not enough to make this into the next big trend. I could be wrong, but history would predict that this will happen to a much smaller degree than being touted by vendors.

All big technology trends have one big weakness in common – the fact that the world naturally resists change. Even when the next big thing has clear advantages, there must be an overwhelming reason for companies and people to drop everything to immediately adopt something new, and that usually is untested in the market. Most businesses have learned that being an early adapter is risky – a new technology can bring a market edge, but it can also result in having egg on one’s face.

Categories
Meet CCG

Ten Years

Today is the tenth anniversary of writing this blog every day. That equates to 2,527 blogs, and that got me thinking about why I write this blog. It also got me thinking about the things I have gotten right and wrong over the years in my daily musings about the broadband industry.

I give full credit for this blog to my wife Julie. Ten years ago, I told her that I was having trouble keeping up with the rapid changes in the industry. Julie suggested that I start writing a daily blog as a way to force myself to read and think about the industry. Writing a blog every day was incredibly difficult at first. I struggled to find topics, and I struggled to condense my thoughts into 700-word essays. But I stuck with it until writing became a habit. I now can’t imagine not writing a blog, and I usually have a longer list of potential topics than there are days to write about them.

Before writing this blog, I went back and read some of my blogs over the years to see what I got right and wrong. One thing about having a public blog is that you can’t escape what you’ve said in the past – it’s all still out there to read.

One of the first things I got wrong happened in the first year of writing the blog. I was highly skeptical of Tom Wheeler being named Chairman of the FCC. Mr. Wheeler had an interesting career as CEO of several high-tech companies but had also served as the President of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA). I assumed that his experience in lobbying for the biggest companies in the industry meant that he was going to bring a bias to the FCC strongly in favor of big companies over everybody else. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Tom Wheeler ended up being one of the most even-handed heads of the FCC during my career. He sometimes sided with large corporations, but he also was a champion of consumers and municipal broadband – something that I think surprised everybody in the industry. He was what you want to see in an FCC Chairman – somebody who independently supported what he thought was right instead of what was wanted by corporate lobbyists.

Another thing I got wrong was something I wrote near the end of 2019. By that time, I had heard for years from rural communities that despaired that they had no broadband and were being left behind. I wrote that I sadly didn’t see any real hope on the horizon and that rural communities were on their own to get creative and find a way to fund broadband – even though I knew that the financial lift was beyond most communities. There was no way to know that we were only a few months away from a pandemic that would change everything. We sent students and workers home to somehow cope with school and work without broadband, and the cry for better broadband could no longer be ignored. We’re now awash in broadband grant funding. It’s going to take a few years to see if the grant funding is enough to serve everybody, but broadband solutions are on the way for most rural communities that were unimaginable in 2019.

I also got some things right. From the first time that I heard about the supposed wonders of 5G, I was extremely skeptical because I couldn’t find a business case for the technology. Almost everybody in the country already had a cellphone, and it was hard to imagine that people would be willing to spend more to get the rather obscure benefits promised by 5G. If anything, the trend seemed to be in the opposite direction, with competition driving cellular prices lower. I watched in amazement as the power of large corporate lobbying invented a fervor for 5G out of thin air. The public and politicians were sold on the idea that 5G meant a broadband revolution, and the 5G message was suddenly everywhere. There is still no great business case for 5G and there has been very little actual 5G technology introduced into networks. Yet even today, I keep reading about how 5G will soon change everything.

I also got it right in predicting that broadband demand would continue to grow. Akamai reported in 2013, when this blog started, that the average broadband download speed in the U.S. was 8.6 Mbps. Pew said that 2013 was the year when home broadband connections hit a 70% market penetration. The digital divide was already evident in 2013 when 90% of homes that included a college graduate had broadband compared to only 37% for homes where the adults didn’t have a high school degree. From the beginning of writing my blog, I predicted that home broadband consumption would double every three years – and it has grown even faster. Amazingly, politicians and policymakers still act like broadband demand is static. In 2015, the FCC amazingly handed out $1.5 billion annually for six years of CAF II funding to support the rural DSL provided by the largest telcos. Even today, policymakers are ignoring the broadband growth trends by allowing BEAD grants to be given to technologies as slow as 100/20 Mbps. We embarrassingly still have a national definition of broadband of only 25/3 Mbps at a time when a large majority of folks are able to buy gigabit speeds.

People often ask me how long I’ll keep writing this blog, and my answer is easy. I’ll keep writing for as long as there are interesting topics to talk about – and for as long as it’s fun.

Categories
The Industry

The Disappointment of 5G

Karl Bode recently wrote an excellent article highlighting the overhyping of wireless technologies. He’s right, and for the last twenty years, we’ve been told that a world-changing wireless technology is coming soon, but none ever materialized. No wireless technology has been a bigger flop than 5G when comparing the hype to the eventual reality.

The hype for 5G was amazingly over-the-top. The wireless carriers and vendors blitzed the country in a coordinated effort to paint 5G as the solution that would bring broadband everywhere. 5G was going to bring us self-driving cars. 5G would enable doctors to perform surgery remotely from across the country. 5G was going to fuel an explosion of smart factories that would bring complex manufacturing back to the U.S. And 5G was going to use millimeter waves to bring us gigabit-speed broadband everywhere, eliminating the need for investing in expensive fiber networks.

The hype fired up the general public, which bought into the 5G promises, but the public wasn’t the real audience of the hype. The cellular carriers did a non-stop blitz on federal officials, getting them to buy into the amazing wireless future. The cellular companies launched gimmick networks in downtowns to deliver gigabit cellular speeds using millimeter-wave spectrum as a way to sell the 5G vision. It’s clear in retrospect that the rhetoric and gimmicks were aimed at getting the FCC to release more mid-range spectrum for cellular usage – and it worked. There was pressure on the FCC to move more quickly with proceedings that were examining spectrum availability. The wireless carriers even talked the FCC into allowing cellular carriers to poach free WiFi spectrum in cities. The hype worked so well on elected officials that there was a serious discussion about the U.S. buying one of the big wireless vendors like Nokia or Ericsson so that the U.S. wouldn’t lose the 5G war with China.

The main problem with all of this hype is that the rhetoric didn’t match the specifications for 5G that were adopted by international standards bodies. The 5G specifications included a few key goals: get cellular speeds over 100 Mbps, allow for more simultaneous users at a given cell site, allow a cellphone to use two different spectrum bands at the same time, and allow a user to connect to more than one cell site if the demand needed it. The primary purpose of the 5G spec was to eliminate cell site congestion in places where there are a lot of people trying to simultaneously use the cellular network. Nothing in the 5G specification is earth-shattering. The specification, as a whole, seemed like the natural evolution of cellular to better accommodate a world where everybody has a cell phone.

I wrote several blogs during the height of the 5G hype where I was puzzled by the claims that 5G would bring about a broadband revolution because I couldn’t see those claims backed up by the technical capabilities of 5G. I also wrote several blogs asking about the business case for 5G because I couldn’t find one. We will likely never build a dense cellular network along the millions of miles of roads to support self-driving cars. The biggest business use of 5G touted by the carriers was to get people to buy subscriptions to use 5G to support the smart devices in our homes – but people will never buy a subscription to do what WiFi can do for free.

There is still not a good business case that can drive the new revenues needed to justify spending a lot of money on 5G. Because of this, most of the 5G specification has not been implemented. How many people are willing to pay extra for the ability to connect a cellphone to two cell towers simultaneously?

Instead of 5G that follows the specifications, we’ve gotten more marketing hype where the cellular carriers have labeled the new spectrum from the FCC as 5G. There is almost none of the 5G specification in this product, and the product labeled as 5G still uses 4G LTE technology. The introduction of the new spectrum has relieved the pressure on overloaded cell sites, and we’ve seen cellular speeds rise significantly. But that faster speed is wasted on most cellular customers who don’t do anything more data-intensive than watch video.

It was interesting to see how the rhetoric died down once the cellular carriers got access to more spectrum. The big winner from the marketing hype has been the handset manufacturers, which have convinced customers that they must have 5G phones – without really telling them why. Cellular customers are generally pleased that speeds have increased since this means stronger coverage indoors and in outdoor dead spots. But surveys have shown that only a minuscule percentage of people are willing to pay more for faster cellular speeds.

The most ludicrous thing about the 5G story is that the industry is now hyping 6G. This new marketing hoax is focusing on some of the mid-range spectrum that was originally touted as being part of the 5G war – but the marketers rightfully assume that most customers won’t understand or care about the facts. It seems like the industry has embarked on subdividing what was originally considered as 5G spectrum into small chunks so that the carriers roll out subsequent generations of 6G, 7G, and 8G – all of which were supposedly part of the original 5G revolution. I have no doubt that the public will buy into the hype and want 6G phones when they hit the market, but I also know that none of them will see any difference in performance. The formula seems simple – announce a new G generation every eighteen months and sell a lot of new handsets.

Categories
Technology

A New Definition of 6G

We now know how the wireless carriers are going to continue the string of new G generations of cellular technology.

5G was originally defined to include spectrum up to 90 GHz or 100 GHz. In the last few years, international standards bodies have been developing new 6G standards in what is called the terahertz wavelengths between 100 GHz and 1 THz. By definition, these higher frequency bands are the remaining part of the radio spectrum, and the so the 6G being defined by international scientists will be the final generation of G technology.

These super-high frequencies have a lot of interesting potential for indoor uses since this spectrum can transmit an immense quantity of data over short distances. But the high frequencies might never be used for outdoor broadband because the extremely short radio waves are easily distorted and scattered by everything in the environment, including air molecules.

Scientists have speculated that transmissions in the terahertz frequencies can carry 1,000 times more data than the current 5G spectrum bands. That’s enough bandwidth to create the 3D holograms needed for convincing virtual presence (and maybe my home holodeck).

But terahertz frequencies are going to be of little use to the cellular carriers. While cellular companies have still not deployed a lot of the 5G standards, the marketing folks at these companies are faced with a future where there would be no more G generations of cellphones – and that is clearly a lost marketing opportunity.

Several of the wireless equipment vendors have started to refer to bandwidths in the centimetric range as 6G. These are frequencies between 7GHz and 20 GHz. I have to admit that I got a really good belly laugh when I read this, because much of this frequencies is already in use – so I guess 6G is already here!

When 5G was first announced, the big news at the time was that 5G would open up the millimeter-wave spectrum between 24 GHz and 40 GHz. The equipment vendors and the cellular carriers spent an immense amount on lobbying and advertising, talking up the wonders of millimeter-wave spectrum. Remember the carefully staged cellular commercials that showed gigabit speeds on cell phones? That was done using millimeter-wave spectrum.

But now, the marketing folks have pulled a big switcheroo. They are going to rename currently used spectrum as 6G. I guess that means millimeter-wave spectrum will become 7G. This also leaves room for several more generations of G marketing before reaching the 100 GHz terahertz spectrum.

This will clearly cause a mountain of confusion. The international folks are not going to rename what they have already labeled as 6G to mollify the cellular marketers. We’re going to have articles, advertising, and lobbying talking about two completely different versions of 6G. And before the ink is dry, we’ll also be talking about 7G.

The cellular vendors also want us to change the way we talk about spectrum. The folks at Nokia are already suggesting that the newly dubbed 6G spectrum bands should be referred to as midband spectrum – a phrase today that refers to lower spectrum bands. That sets the stage to talking about upper bands of frequency as 7G, 8G, and 9G.

What is funniest about this whole process is that there still isn’t even any 5G being used in the world. The cellular carriers have implemented only a small portion of the 5G specification. But that hasn’t deterred the marketers who have convinced everybody that the new bands of spectrum being used for 4G are actually 5G. It’s a pretty slick marketing trick that lets stops the cellular carriers from not having to explain why the actual 5G isn’t here yet.

Categories
The Industry

A Slowdown in Cellular Expansion?

Mike Dano had a series of articles recently in LightReading talking about how the big cellular carriers plan to significantly cut back on 5G spending in 2023. Dano cited one analyst, Tom Nolle of CIMI that said that the cellular carriers are having a hard time making the business case for expanding 5G. The cellular companies are not seeing an uptick in new incremental revenues as a result of 5G investments. He says the cellular companies are clueless and don’t see a path to increase revenues next year.

This feeling of falling 5G expectations was bolstered by a somber outlook from Crown Castle. The biggest owner of cell sites said that it doesn’t see the big cellular carriers spending heavily in 2023 for cell towers or small cell sites.

As might be expected in complicated economic times, not all analysts agree. Dano cites analysts from Raymond James that say that 2023 will mark the year when the cellular companies start spending at a slow steady pace over multiple years to put in the promised 5G expansions.

As with most topics, I ask what this might mean for rural broadband. T-Mobile and Verizon have made a big recent splash in the industry with the rollout of the FWA fixed cellular broadband product. In the second quarter of 2022, Verizon and T-Mobile added 816,000 FWA customers. For the quarter, the largest seven cable companies collectively lost 60,000 customers. The six largest telephone companies lost 88,000 customers. Before the first quarter of 2022, we heard almost nothing about FWA.

I have to wonder what the news of a cell site expansion means for rural broadband. For customers lucky enough to be able to buy it, the FWA product has been a huge improvement over other kinds of rural broadband. I talked to one farmer who lived adjacent to a cell site and was seeing speeds of 200 Mbps. For this farmer, the faster FWA speeds meant being able to finally utilize his smart farming applications. But his neighbors, only two miles away, weren’t seeing speeds over 50 Mbps.

I’ve always wondered why a cellular company would make the FWA upgrade or even the 5G upgrade at a rural cell site. For a cell site located in a farming area there probably aren’t more than a handful of potential customers within a few miles of a tower. It doesn’t seem like an investment that is ever going to see a return. Voice is a little different because a voice signal can carry many more miles from an upgraded cell site – but most upgrades are leaving voice traffic on 4G.

Both T-Mobile and Verizon said that they were seeing many of the new FWA customers in cities and suburbs and not from rural areas. This makes sense. First, a lot more people are candidates for the product in more densely populated areas. The FWA product is also priced attractively, and I’ve been thinking of it more as a DSL replacement than a direct competitor to cable broadband. The FWA speeds are not as fast as cable broadband, and the signal strength will vary as it does with any wireless product.  Just look at how the cellular bars vary at your house and ask if you want that kind of variance in a home broadband connection. If your only existing choice is lousy rural broadband, you’ll gladly take it as an upgrade. But it seems like a harder sell to folks who have faster alternatives.

I can’t do any more than speculate because even the analysts don’t agree on the trajectory of the cellular industry, although the poor outlook from Crown Castle seems fairly persuasive. We are now sitting at an odd economic time where inflation and interest rates affect everybody, including the big companies. I suspect we’re going to get mixed signals about the near-term future from others, and not just the cellular companies. 2023 is going to be an interesting year to follow the big ISPs.

Categories
Regulation - What is it Good For?

The CHIPS Act and Wireless

The recently enacted CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 is providing a lot of funding to bring more chip manufacturing back to the U.S. This funding fills a big hole in the U.S. supply chain. We have some chip manufacturing in the U.S., but we only make about 12% of the chips that we use in cellphones, cars, computers, and broadband technology.

Making domestic chips became a national priority when we saw during the pandemic that international chipmakers took care of regional demand before U.S. demand. U.S. automakers are still largely on hold due to a lack of chips, and there has been a rumor floating around the broadband industry that we’re going to see another round of chip shortages for broadband gear. It will take some years to turn this new funding into chip factories, but in the long run, this is one of the more sensible things Congress has done in many years.

The CHIPs Act approved $52 billion to bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S. But like all big legislation, not all of the money appropriated goes to the main goal. For example, there is funding in the bill for new research and development in the technical sciences. Today’s blog looks at funding from the CHIPs Act that is being used for the mobile industry. Specifically, the CHIPS legislation:

Appropriates $1.5 billion for the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund, to spur movement towards open-architecture, software-based wireless technologies, funding innovative, ‘leap-ahead’ technologies in the U.S. mobile broadband market. The fund would be managed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), with input from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Department of Homeland Security, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, among others.

This sounds like funding for wireless product research to find new market uses for 5G. I’m a big believer that the federal government should have a large role in funding basic science research and development. One of the reasons that the U.S. has had technological success in the past is that we funded the basic research that has made the breakthroughs that turned into our current technology industries. National funding for pure research has fallen in recent years to woefully low levels.

But I’m not a big fan of the U.S. government undertaking product research. That is something that ought to be left to the industries that will benefit from the research. This $1.5 billion feels like a handout to the big wireless companies – and they don’t need this money.

Consider dividends. Verizon paid out $10.4 billion in dividends to stockholders in 2021, or almost $2.50 for every outstanding share. In recent shareholder meetings, the company says the goal is to increase dividends in the coming years. AT&T most recently paid $8 billion per year in dividends or $1.11 per share in recent quarters.

T-Mobile is the most cash-flush of the big cellular carriers and told shareholders earlier this year that the company plans to spend $60 billion by the end of 2025 to buy back its own stock.

These three companies don’t need a $1.5 billion government handout, but as often happens, the industries that lobby the hardest often get rewarded with funding. If the $1.5 billion is spent wisely, it might turn into future profits for these companies. But this is research that these companies should be routinely funding directly.

This feels like a residual benefit to these companies from all of the effort they put into persuading the government that we were losing an imaginary 5G war with China. That discussion is still not completely dead, and we still occasionally hear a politician talking about our 5G crisis.

I love the concept behind the CHIPS Act, and I hope it spurs 100,000 new permanent manufacturing jobs and greatly expands the domestic chip supply. But I am not a fan when big legislation is used to pay back industries that spend huge money to lobby politicians.

Categories
Technology

7G – Really?

I thought I’d check in on the progress that laboratories have made in considering 6G networks. The discussion on what will replace 5G kicked off with a worldwide meeting hosted in 2019 at the University of Oulu, in Levi, Lapland, Finland.

6G technology will explore the frequencies between 100 GHz and 1 THz. This is the frequency range that lies between radio waves and infrared light. These spectrums could support unimaginable wireless data transmission rates of up to one terabyte per second – with the tradeoff that such transmissions will only be effective for extremely short distances.

Scientists have already said 5G will be inadequate for some computing and communication needs. There is definitely a case to be made for applications that need huge amounts of data in real-time. For example, a 5G wireless signal at a few gigabits per second is not able to transmit enough data to support complex real-time manufacturing processes. There is not enough data being transmitted with a 5G network to support things like realistic 3D holograms and the future metaverse.

Scientists at the University of Oulu say they are hoping to have a lab demonstration of the ability to harness the higher spectrum bands by 2026, and they expect the world will start gelling on 6G standards around 2028. That all sounds reasonable and is in line with what they announced in 2019. One of the scientists at the University was quoted earlier this year saying that he hoped that 6G wouldn’t get overhyped as happened with both 4G and 5G.

I think it’s too late for that. You don’t need to do anything more than search for 6G on Google to find a different story – you’ll have to wade through a bunch of articles declaring we’ll have commercial 6G by 2030 before you even find any real information from those engaged in 6G research. There is even an online 6G magazine with news about everything 6G. These folks are already hyping that there will be a worldwide scramble as governments fight to be the first ones to master and integrate 6G – an upcoming 6G race.

I just shake my head when I see this – but it is nothing new. It seems every new technology these days spawns an industry of supposed gurus and prognosticators who try to monetize the potential for each new technology. The first technology I recall seeing this happen with was municipal WiFi in the 1990s. There were expensive seminars and even a paper monthly magazine touting the technology – which, by the way, barely worked and quickly fizzled. Since then, we’ve seen the guru industry pop up for every new technology like 5G, block-chain, AI, bitcoin, and now the metaverse and 6G. Most new cutting-edge technologies find their way into the economy but at a much slower pace than touted by the so-called early experts.

But before the imaginary introduction of 6G s by 2030, we will need to first integrate 5G into the world. Half of the cellphones in the world still connect using 3G. While 3G is being phased out in the U.S., it’s going to be a slower process elsewhere. While there are hundreds of Google links to articles that predict huge numbers of 5G customers this year – there aren’t any. At best, we’re currently at 4.1G or 4.2G – but the engineering reality is obviously never going to deter the marketers. We’ll probably see a fully compliant 5G cell site before the end of this decade, and it will be drastically different, and better, than what we’re calling 5G today. It’ll take another few years after that for real 5G technology to spread across U.S. urban areas. There will be a major discussion among cellular carriers about whether the 5G capabilities will make any sense in rural areas since the 5G technology is mostly aimed at solving overcrowded urban cellular networks.

Nobody is going to see a 6G cellphone in their lifetime, except perhaps as a gimmick. We’re going to need several generations of better batteries before any handheld device can process terabyte data without zapping the battery within minutes. That may not deter Verizon from showing a cellular speed test at 100 Gbps – but marketers will be marketers.

Believe it or not, there are already discussions about 7G – although nobody can define it. It seems that it will have something to do with AI and the Internet of Things. It’s a little fuzzy about how something after 6G will even be related to the evolution of cellular technology – but this won’t stop the gurus from making money off the gullible.

Categories
Technology The Industry

The Battle for IoT

There is an interesting battle going on to be the technology that monetizes the control of Internet of Things devices. Like a lot of tech hype, IoT has developed a lot slower than originally predicted – but it’s now finally becoming a big business. I think back to a decade ago when tech prognosticators said we’d soon be living in a virtual cloud of small monitors that would monitor everything in our life. According to those early predictions, our farm fields should already be fully automated, and we should all be living in the smart home envisioned by the Jetsons. Those predictions probably say more about the tech press that hypes new technologies than about IoT.

I’ve been noticing increasing press releases and articles talking about different approaches to monetizing IoT traffic. The one that we’ve all heard the most about is 5G. The cellular companies told Wall Street five years ago that the monitoring of IoT devices was going to fuel the 5G business plan. The wireless companies envisioned households all buying a second cellular subscription to monitor devices.

Except in a few minor examples, this business plan never materialized. I was reminded of it this week when I saw AT&T partnering with Smart Meter to provide patient monitoring for chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure. The monitoring devices worn by patients include a SIM card, and patients can be monitored anywhere within range of a cellular signal. It’s a great way for AT&T to monetize IoT subscriptions – in this case, with monthly fees likely covered by health insurance. It sounds like an awesome product.

Another player in the IoT world is LEO satellites. In August of last year, Starlink made a rare acquisition by buying Swarm. This company envisions using satellites to be able to monitor outdoor IOT devices anywhere in the world. The Swarm satellites are less than a pound each, and the Swarm website says the goal is to have three of these small satellites in range of every point on earth by the end of 2022. That timeline slowed due to the purchase by Starlink, but this could be a huge additional revenue stream for the company. Swarm envisions putting small receivers in places like fields. Like with Starlink, customers must buy the receivers, and there is an IoT data monitoring plan that will allow the collection of 750 data packets per month for a price of $60 per year.

Also still active in pursuing the market are a number of companies promoting LoRaWAN technology. This technology uses tall towers or blimps and CBRS or some other low-power spectrum to communicate with IoT monitors over a large geographic area. The companies developing this technology can be found at the LoRa Alliance.

Of course, the current king of IoT is WiFi. Charter recently said it is connected to 5 billion devices on its WiFi network. WiFi has the advantage of a free IoT connection for the price of buying a broadband connection.

Each of these technologies has a natural market niche. The AT&T health monitoring system only makes sense on a cellular network since patients need to be monitored everywhere they go during the day. Cellular should be the go-to technology for mobile monitoring. The battle between LoRaWAN and satellites will be interesting and will likely eventually come down to price. Both technologies can be used to reach farm fields where cellular coverage is likely to never be ubiquitous. WiFi is likely to carry the signals from the devices in our homes – the AT&T vision of everybody buying an IoT cellular data plan sounds extremely unlikely since we all can have the same thing for the cost of a WiFi router.

Categories
Technology The Industry

When Will We See Real 5G?

The non-stop wireless industry claims that we’ve moved from 4G to 5G finally slowed to the point that I stopped paying attention to it during the last year. There is an interesting article in PC Magazine that explains why 5G has dropped off the front burner.

The article cites interviews with Art Pouttu of Finland’s University of Oulu about the current state and the future of 5G. That university has been at the forefront of the development of 5G technology and is already looking at 6G technology.

Pouttu reminds us that there is a new ‘G” generation of wireless technology about every ten years but that it takes twenty years for the market to fully embrace all of the benefits of a new generation of wireless technology.

We are just now entering the heyday of 4G. The term 4G has been bantered around by wireless marketing folks for so long that it’s hard to believe that we didn’t see a fully-functional 4G cell site until late in 2018. Since then, the cellular companies have beefed up 4G in two ways. First, the technology is now spread through cell sites everywhere. But more importantly, 4G systems have been bolstered by the addition of new bands of cellular spectrum. The marketing folks have gleefully been labeling this new spectrum as 5G, but the new spectrum is doing nothing more than supporting the 4G network.

I venture to guess that almost nobody thinks their life has been drastically improved because 4G cellphone speeds have climbed in cities over the last few years from 30 Mbps to over 100 Mbps. I can see that faster speed on my cellphone if I take a speed test, but I haven’t really noticed much difference between the performance of my phone today compared to four years ago.

There are two major benefits from the beefed-up 4G. The first benefits everybody but has gone unnoticed. The traditional spectrum bands used for 4G were getting badly overloaded, particularly in metropolitan areas. The new bands of spectrum have relieved the pressure on cell sites and are supporting the continued growth in cellular data use. Without the new spectrum, our 4G experience would be deteriorating.

The new spectrum has also enabled the cellular carriers to all launch rural fixed cellular broadband products. Before the new spectrum, there was not enough bandwidth on rural cell sites to support both cellphones and fixed cellular customers. The many rural homes that can finally buy cellular broadband that is faster than rural DSL are the biggest winners.

But those improvements have nothing to do with 5G. The article points out what has always been the case. The promise of 5G has never been about better cellphone performance. It’s always been about applications like using wireless spectrum in complex settings like factories where feedback from huge numbers of sensors needs to be coordinated in real-time.

The cellular industry marketing machine did a real number on all of us – but perhaps most of all on the politicians. We’ve had the White House, Congress, and State politicians all talking about how the U.S. needed to win the 5G war with China – and there is still some of that talk going around today. This hype was pure rubbish. What the cellular carriers needed was more spectrum from the FCC to stave off the collapse of the cellular networks. But no cellular company wanted to crawl to Congress begging for more spectrum, because doing so would have meant the collapse of cellular company stock prices. Instead, we were fed a steady diet of false rhetoric about how 5G was going to transform the world.

The message from the University of Oulu is that most 5G features are probably still five or six years away. But even when they finally get here, 5G is not going to bring much benefit or change to our daily cellphone usage. It was never intended to do that. We already have 100 Mbps cellular data speeds with no idea how to use the extra speed on our cellphones.

Perhaps all we’ve learned from this experience is that the big cellular companies have a huge amount of political and social clout and were able to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes. They told us that the sky was falling and could only be fixed with 5G. I guess we’ll find out in a few years if we learned any lesson from this because we can’t be far off from hearing the hype about 6G. This time it will be 100% hype because 6G deals with the use of extremely short frequencies that will never be used in outdoor cellular networks. But I have a feeling that we’ll find ourselves in a 6G war with China before we know it.

Categories
The Industry

The Speed of Thought

Verizon has created a 1-hour documentary on the potential for 5G called the Speed of Thought. It’s available on Amazon Prime, on Comcast’s Peacock, as well as on Verizon FiOS on demand. Here is the trailer for the film.

It’s an interesting video that looks a decade into the future from the eyes of 5G developers. The main thrust of the video is that the future of 5G is going to offer a lot more than just faster data speeds for cellphones. The documentary looks at some specific examples of how 5G might interface with other technologies in the future to provide solutions that are not needed today.

The documentary looks at the potential for marrying 5G and augmented reality for firefighters to better let them navigate inside buildings during fire to find and save people. This will require having building plans on file for the fire department that could then be used by firefighters to navigate during the near zero visibility during a fire. I have to admit that this is a pretty cool application that would save lives if it can ever be made to work. The application requires fast wireless broadband in order to communicate a 3D image of the inside of a building in real-time.

The documentary also explores using 5G to assist in emergency medicine in remote places. In Western North Carolina where I live this is a real issue in that residents of many western counties live hours away from a hospital that could save lives for heart attacks, strokes, and accidents. The example used in the film is the use of a robot that assists with a heart procedure in San Francisco, but controlled from Boston. I have a hard time thinking that’ll we’ll ever trust broadband-enabled surgery in major hospitals since an unexpected broadband outage – something that happens far too often – means a loss of life. But the idea of being able to administer to remote heart attack and stroke victims has major potential as a lifesaver.

There is also a segment where students are taught about the civil rights movement in an interactive environment using augmented reality. I have to think this technology will be introduced first in schools which largely have been connected to gigabit fiber in most of the country. However, the idea of tying augmented reality to places like a battlefield or an art museum sounds appealing. It’s hard like immersive learning – actually seeing and participating in events – would be a much more effective way to learn than reading books.

Finally, there is a segment on a test program in Sacramento that uses 5G to provide instant feedback on traffic conditions to drivers, pedestrians, and bicycle riders. This is obviously the first generation of using 5G to create smarter or self-driving vehicles while also benefitting pedestrians and others who enter traffic lanes. Verizon has been talking about using 5G for smart cars since the earliest days of talking about 5G. There is still a long way to go, and even when this gets here it’s likely to appear in places like Sacramento and not in rural America.

The documentary is well done and ought to be interesting to anybody in the industry. But it is still an advertising piece intended to convince people that 5G is a great thing. What I don’t see in all of these applications is a giant new revenue stream for Verizon. Using augmented reality for education is likely to evolve and use landline broadband long before it’s made mobile. Applications like the one that makes life easier for firefighters are intriguing, but it’s hard to envision that as a mover and shaker of Verizon’s bottom line. I think the one that Verizon is hoping for is smart vehicles and traffic control. The company hopes that every car of the future comes with a 5G subscription. Verizon also hopes that people in the future will wear augmented reality glasses in daily life. I really like the imagery and stories told in the documentary, but I remain leery about the predictions.

Exit mobile version