Tag Archives: Apple

Starlink Promising Satellite Cellular Service

Starlink recently launched a new webpage that advertises the future ability to deliver text, voice, and data to 4G cell phones via satellite.

The texting service is supposed to be available in 2024 with voice and data coming in 2025. The service will require a user to have a view of the open sky. I would also guess that a user will have to be stationary and not in a moving vehicle. The service is likely going to be aimed at people who spend a lot of time outdoors, in places out of reach of cell towers. There is no talk yet about price, but this seems like a premium service and will probably be priced accordingly.

T-Mobile’s service will be able to connect through any of its many satellites, and reports have said that speeds will be relatively slow, at perhaps only a few Mbps.

Starlink says that users of the service will be able to connect to users in cellular networks that participate in the program. The initial list of network partners includes T-Mobile in the U.S., Rogers in Canada, Optus in Australia, One NZ in New Zealand, Kodi in Japan, and SALT in Switzerland.

There is already an early version of satellite texting. Apple provides texting to 911 through a satellite connection to those using an Apple 14  or newer iPhone. The text connection to 911 is slow and takes about 15 seconds to complete a transaction. The service allows very limited follow-up texts between public safety and the person initiating the 911 call. Apple is providing this service for free today but will eventually likely charge for using it.

AT&T claims to have made the first broadband connection with an unmodified cell phone and a satellite in September. The company used AT&T’s 5G spectrum and a Samsung Galaxy S22 to connect a caller from a dead cellular zone in Maui, Hawaii to one in Madrid, Spain. This test was done in conjunction with AST SpaceMobile. The first test achieved a download speed to the phone in Maui of 10 Mbps, but AST has subsequently been able to boost the speed to 14 Mbps. AST plans to launch five BlueBird satellites in the first quarter of 2024 to support the cellular satellite effort.

It’s unlikely that any of these services are going to be competing with mainstream cell phone connectivity. The speeds will be slower, and the satellite constellations will not be equipped to process the amount of data associated with normal cellphone service. There is no need to pay extra to use a satellite connection for anybody in reach of a cell tower or a WiFi connection.

I’m not sure if most people appreciate how much of the land mass of the U.S. has little or no cell service. Practically every county I’ve worked in has large dead cellular zones. Providing even rudimentary cell coverage in remote areas is a valuable new service for the many people who work in remote places. I can picture that farmers, park rangers, and anybody who spends a lot of time in unconnected areas will want this service as soon as it is available. I envision the satellite companies and cellular companies generating good revenue while filling this needed market niche.

The Death of Millimeter-wave Cellular?

Apple recently announced that is not building millimeter-wave spectrum antennas into the next generation SE iPhone. Interestingly, this is a phone sold by Verizon, which spent a year advertising on TV and showing us speed tests on cellphones that were receiving gigabit speeds.

As a reminder for those who have never encountered the technology, Verizon and AT&T both deployed some millimeter-wave hot spots in downtown areas of major cities at the height of the 5G marketing craze. The frequency was only available on special phones made at the time to receive the faster speeds.

I always assumed that this was a marketing gimmick because it makes no sense as a deployed technology. The speeds can be blazingly fast, but the millimeter-wave signal only carries perhaps 1,000 feet from a hotspot – and that is with zero objects in the path. Millimeter-wave spectrum penetrates nothing, and the technology is so finicky that if you were receiving a signal and turned away from the transmitter, your body would cut off the transmission. The frequency is not well suited for busy urban streets. It can’t reach around corners, barely goes through glass,  and is blocked by anything moving into its path.

Pushing the millimeter-wave fast 5G story was a big part of the early 5G strategy for the cellular carriers. Remember all of the talk about the U.S. losing the 5G war to China? I still chuckle when I occasionally hear that old chestnut today. The federal government had serious discussions about buying Nokia or Ericsson so that we wouldn’t fall behind in 5G. The cellular carriers stirred up everybody in D.C., and we had Congress, the White House, and The FCC all issuing dire warnings about falling behind with 5G. I remember being particularly amused when a big federal government 5G summit was held in South Dakota in 2018 – the last place where 5G, a technology to solve urban cellular data issues, is likely to ever have any impact.

It turns out that the cellular companies had some big motivations for pushing the 5G narrative so hard. In 2018, the 4G networks were getting into trouble. We didn’t see the first fully compliant 4G LTE cell site until that year, so most of the country was still working on some early version of what might be best described as 3.5G. Urban networks were getting so congested that calls and broadband connections were regularly being dropped. Cellular broadband traffic growth was doubling in less than every three years – and network engineers were warning management about the likely collapse of urban networks during busy times.

The primary thing the cellular carriers wanted was more spectrum. It looks like stirring up the public and politicians worked, and the FCC released several choice mid-range bands of spectrum in a shorter time frame than might have been expected. The industry was also hoping for federal handouts to somehow help propel them to 5G – but that never happened in any big way that I could ever see.

The funny thing to me is that I think the cellular companies could have gotten the same thing by just telling the truth – they legitimately needed the FCC to release much-needed spectrum. Every cellphone user would have supported the idea. But nobody ever told the real story, because that would have meant admitting that networks were underperforming. My theory is that the carriers didn’t want to take a hit on stock prices – so they instead orchestrated the 5G circus that had America convinced that 5G was going to solve all of our ills. What is funniest about the whole 5G fiasco is that Oulu University in Finland, which leads the world in 5G research, said at the end of 2021 that it’s still likely to be 2027 until we see the first mature 5G cell site. We’re not behind China with 5G – because nobody has 5G!

It’s not a surprise that Apple is dropping the spectrum from its phones. It costs chip space and power for every additional spectrum that is supported by a cellphone. Cell manufacturers care more about long battery life than they do about a technology that never made it out of the downtowns of a few major cities.

Apple Buys into 5G

Apple is coming out with a full range of new 5G iPhones. The phones have been designed to use the full range of new frequencies that the various cellular companies are touting as 5G, up to and including the millimeter wave spectrum offered in center cities by Verizon. In addition to 5G, the phones have new features like a better camera, better ease at using wireless charging, and a lidar scanner. The last change is the most revolutionary since lidar allows apps on the phone to better see and react to the surrounding environment.

But Apple is going all-in on the 5G concept. It’s a natural thing to do since cellular carriers have been talking non-stop about 5G for the last few years. However, by heavily advertising the new phones as 5G capable, Apple is possibly setting themselves up to be the brunt of consumer dissatisfaction when the public realizes that what’s being sold as 5G is just a repackaged version of 4G. The new features from an upgrade in cellular specifications will get rolled out over a decade, like we saw with the transition from 4G to 5G. In terms of the improvements of these new phones, were probably now at 4.1G, which is a far cry from what 5G will be like in ten years.

What I find most disturbing about the whole 5G phenomenon is that the cellular companies have essentially sold the public on the advantages of faster cellular speeds without anybody ever asking the big question of why cellphones need faster speed. Cellphones are, by definition, a single user device. The biggest data application that most people ever do on a cellphone is to watch video. If  4G phone is sufficient to watch video, then what’s the advantage up spending a lot of money to upgrade to 5G? Home broadband needs fast broadband to allow multiple people to use the broadband at the same time, but that isn’t true for a cellphone.

People do get frustrated with smartphones that get poor coverage inside big building, in elevators, in the inevitable cellular dead zones in every town, or rural areas too far away from cell towers. 5G phones won’t fix any of these problems because poor cellular coverage happens in areas that naturally block or can’t receive wireless signals. No technology can make up for lack of wireless signal.

The big new 5G feature in the iPhones is the ability to use all of the different frequencies that the cellular companies are now transmitting. However, these frequencies aren’t additive – if somebody grabs a new ‘5G’ frequency, the bandwidth on that frequency doesn’t add to what they were receiving on 4G. Instead, the user gets whatever frequency is available on the new spectrum channel. In many cases, the new 5G frequencies are lower than traditional cellular frequencies, and so data speeds are going to be a little slower.

The cellular companies are hoping that Apple is successful. The traditional frequencies used for 4G have been getting crowded, particularly in urban areas. Cellular data traffic has been growing at the torrid pace of 24% per year, and the traditional cellular network using big towers is getting overwhelmed.

Cellular companies have been trying to offload the 4G traffic volumes from the traditional cellular networks by opening up thousands of small cell sites. But their biggest hope for relieving 4G was to open up new bands of spectrum – which they have done. Every data connection made on a new frequency band is one that isn’t going to clog up the old and overfull cellular network. Introducing new bands of frequency doesn’t do the cellular networks any good unless people start using the new frequency bands – and that’s where the iPhone is a godsend to cellular companies. Huge volumes of data will finally migrate to the newly opened frequency bands as these new iPhones hit the market.

Unfortunately, users will likely not see any advantages from the change. Users will be migrating connection to a different frequency band, but it’s still 4G. It will be curious to see who takes the heat when the expensive new phones don’t outperform the old phones – will it be Apple or the cellular carriers?

Apple Satellites?

Word has leaked out that Apple is working on a satellite project. The company is at the beginning of the research project, so there is no way to know exactly what they have in mind. For example, is the company considering launching satellites or would they lease capacity from one of the other planned satellite networks?

The fact that Apple is working on the concept is a good segue to discuss the many ways that satellite connectivity could be useful to Apple or other companies. It’s hard to find any press that doesn’t assume that the satellite constellations will be used mostly for rural broadband, but there are numerous other ways that Apple or others could use low-orbit satellites.

One of the more obvious ways that Apple could use satellites is by offering its own branded broadband to go with their devices. It’s not hard to imagine iMacs or IPads having the option to be bundled with Apple satellite broadband, particularly for customers that don’t have adequate home broadband today. With the current vision of satellite technology, any customer connected this way would need the same sort of dish at their home as envisioned by Starlink – a flat dinner-plate-sized antenna that doesn’t have to be ‘aimed’ at the satellites.

Apple might instead be thinking of using satellites to communicate with cellphones, which would allow the company to un-tether from cellular companies. It’s unlikely that the fleets of low-orbit broadband satellites could communicate with something as small as a cellphone. However, a new company – AST & Science – recently announced that they have found a way that cellphones can communicate through satellites. This involves putting up large satellites that would act as a cellular repeater in the sky. For a space nerd like me this brings back memories of Echo 1, pictured above, which was a giant balloon that acted as a passive reflector of microwave signals. AST & Science says that this kind of satellite would act as a cellular repeater rather than as a cell site – it would connect cellphones to a cell site elsewhere.

Apple might also be considering an automobile antenna that can work with satellites. A satellite-to-car antenna would open up a host of products for Apple including smart car connectivity products. This would not be the data-intensive connections imagined by the self-driving car folks, but even a relatively slow satellite connection of even 25 Mbps would open up a whole range of broadband products for use in vehicles.

Apple’s early research might go nowhere and they might just be brainstorming on what is practically possible. The fact that companies like Apple are looking at satellites points out that there are likely many applications for satellite broadband that nobody is talking about. It makes sense that the press, for now, is concentrating on whether any of the proposed satellite constellations ever get launched, because until they are in the sky all of this discussion is purely speculative.

However, the possibilities are endless. How many uses can be developed for a worldwide broadband network that’s available everywhere? Some applications seem obvious, like tying together communications for all of the locations of a worldwide corporation into a big private network. It’s not hard to imagine school systems using the satellites as the way to get broadband for homework to every student. I’m betting there are hundreds of other ideas that have market potential. It will be interesting to see which ones are of the most interest to Apple.

How We Use More Bandwidth

We’ve known for decades that the demand for broadband growth has been doubling every three years since 1980. Like at any time along that growth curve, there are those that look at the statistics and think that we are nearing the end of the growth curve. It’s hard for a lot of people to accept that bandwidth demand keeps growing on that steep curve.

But the growth is continuing. The company OpenVault measures broadband usage for big ISPs and they recently reported that the average monthly data use for households grew from 201.6 gigabytes in 2017 to 268.7 gigabytes in 2018 – a growth rate of 33%. What is astounding is the magnitude of growth, with an increase of 67.1 gigabytes in just a year. You don’t have to go back very many years to find a time when that number couldn’t have been imagined.

That kind of growth means that households are finding applications that use more bandwidth. Just in the last few weeks I saw several announcements that highlight how bandwidth consumptions keep growing. I wrote a blog last week describing how Google and Microsoft are migrating gaming to the cloud. Interactive gaming already uses a significant amount of bandwidth, but that usage is going to explode upwards when the machine operating the game is in a data center rather than on a local computer or game console. Google says most of its games will operate using 4K video, meaning a download speed of at least 25 Mbps for one stream plus an hourly download usage of 7.2 GB.

I also saw an announcement from Apple that the users of the Apple TV stick or box can now use it on Playstation Vue to watch up to four separate video steams simultaneously. That’s intended for the serious sports fan and there are plenty of households that would love to keep track of four sporting events at the same time. If the four separate video streams are broadcast in HD that would mean downloading 12 GB per hour. If the broadcasts are in 4K that would be an astounding 29 GB per hour.

The announcement that really caught my eye is that Samsung is now selling an 8K video-capable TV. It takes a screen of over 80 inches for the human eye to perceive any benefit from 8K video. There are no immediate plans for anybody to broadcast in 8K, but the same was true when the first 4K TVs were sold. When people buy these TVs, somebody is going to film and stream content in the format. I’m sure that 8K video will have some improved compression techniques, but without a new compression scheme, an 8K video stream is 16 times larger than an HD stream – meaning a theoretical download of 48 GB per hour.

Even without these new gadgets and toys, video usage is certainly the primary driver of the growth of household broadband. In 2014 only 1% of homes had a 4K-capable TV – the industry projects that to go over 50% by the end of this year. As recently as two years ago you had to search to find 4K programming. Today almost all original programming from Netflix, Amazon, and others is shot in 4K, and the web services automatically feed 4K speeds to any customer connection able to accept it. User-generated 4K video, often non-compressed, is all over YouTube. There are now 4K security cameras on the market, just when HD cameras have completely replaced older analog cameras.

Broadband usage is growing in other ways. Cisco projects machine-to-machine connections will represent 51% of all online connections by 2022, up from 40% today. Parks and Associates just reported that the average broadband home now has ten connected devices, and those devices all make internet connections on their own. Our computers and cellphone automatically update software over our broadband connections. Many of us set our devices to automatically back-up our hard drives, pictures, and videos in the cloud. Smart home devices constantly report back to the alarm monitoring service. None of these connections sound large, but in aggregate they really add up.

And sadly, we’re also growing more inefficient. As households download multiple streams of music, video, and file downloads we overload our WiFi connection and/or our broadband connection and thus request significant retransmission of missing or incomplete packets. I’ve seen estimates that this overhead can easily average 20% of the bandwidth used when households try to do multiple things at the same time.

I also know that when we look up a few years from now to see that broadband usage is still growing that there will be a new list of reasons for the growth. It may seem obvious, but when handed enough bandwidth, households are finding a way to use it.

More Crowding in the OTT Market

It seems like I’ve been seeing news almost weekly about new online video providers. This will put even more pressure on cable companies as more people find an online programming option to suit them. This also means that a likely shakeout of the OTT industry with such a crowded field of competitors all vying for the same pool of cord-cutters.

NewTV. This is an interesting new OTT venture that was founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Walt Disney and headed by Meg Whitman, former CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and also from Disney. The company has raised $1 billion in and has support from every major Hollywood studio including 21st Century Fox, Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Viacom.

Rather than take on Netflix and other OTT content directly the company plans to develop short 10-minute shows aimed exclusively at cellphone users. They plan both free content supported by advertising and a subscription plan that would use the ‘advertising-light’ option used by Hulu.

AT&T already owns a successful OTT product with HBO Now that has over 5 million customers. John Stankey, the head of WarnerMedia says the plan is to create additional bundles of content centered around HBO that bring in other WarnerMedia content and selected external content. He admits that HBO alone does not represent enough content to be a full-scale OTT alternative for customers.

AT&T’s goal is to take advantage of HBO’s current reputation and to position their content in the market as premium and high quality as a way to differentiate themselves from other OTT providers.

Apple has been talking about getting into the content business for a decade, and they have finally pulled the trigger. The company invested $1 billion this year and now has 24 original series in production as the beginning of a new content platform. Among the new shows is a series about a morning TV show starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.

The company hired Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg from Sony Pictures Television to operate the new business and has since hired other experienced television executives. They also are working on other new content and just signed a multiyear deal with Oprah Winfrey. The company has not announced any specific plans for airing and using the new content, but that will be coming soon since the first new series will probably be ready by March of 2019.

T-Mobile. As part of the proposed merger with Sprint, T-Mobile says they plan to launch a new ‘wireless first’ TV platform that will deliver 4K video using its cellular platform. On January T-Mobile purchased Layer3 which has been offering a 275 channel HD line-up in a few major markets.

The T-Mobile offering will be different than other OTT in that the company is shooting for what they call the quad play that bundles video, in-home broadband (delivered using cellular frequency), mobile broadband and voice. The company says that the content will only be made available to T-Mobile customers and they view it as a way to reduce churn and gain cellular market share.

The Layer 3 subsidiary will also continue to pursue partnerships to gain access to customers through fiber networks, such as the arrangement they currently have with the municipal fiber network in Longmont, Colorado.

Disney. Earlier this year the company announced the creation of a direct-to-consumer video service based upon the company’s huge library of popular content. Disney gained the needed technology by purchasing BAMTech, the company that supports Major League Baseball online. Disney also is bolstering its content portfolio through the purchase of Twenty-First Century Fox.

Disney plans to launch an ESPN-based sports bundle in early 2019. They have not announced specific plans on how and when to launch the rest of their content, but they canceled an agreement with Netflix for carrying Disney content.

Industry Shorts – March 2018

Following are a few topics that I find interesting, but which are too short to cover in a full blog:

Surge in Online Video Subscriptions. The number of households buying online video is surging. Netflix added almost 2 million US and 6.36 million international customers in the 4th quarter of 2017. That’s 18% more than the same quarter from a year earlier. There are also a growing number of vMVPD customers. At the end of last year CBS All Access has nearly 5 million customers. Showtime OTT also has nearly 5 million customers. Sling TV now has nearly 2 million customers. AT&T DirecTV hit the 1 million customer mark in December. PlayStation Vue reported 670,000 customers in mid-December. The new YouTube service has about 300,000. Hulu is also growing but doesn’t separately report it’s live TV customers from it’s video on demand customers (reported at 17 million total in December). Note that Hulu let’s customers buy one TV series or movies without needed a subscription.

Cellphone Data Usage Growth. According to the research firm NPD the average US smartphone now is used for an average of 31.4 GB per month of data. This is combined usage between cellular and WiFi data and is evidence that people are starting to really accept the small screen for video. This is up over 25% from a year earlier. The firm reports that video accounts for 83% of the usage.

The number of people willing to use a cellphone for video has also surged. NPD reports that 67% of cellphone users watched at least one video during the 3rd quarter of 2017, up from 57% in the 2nd quarter. Another research firm, Strategic Analytics reported that worldwide cellular data usage grew 115% in 2017, or more than doubled.

Global Streaming Doubled in 2017. Conviva, which provides systems to monitor and analyze online usage also reports that online video content more than doubled last year. They report that there were 12.6 billion viewing hours of online video in 2017 measured across 2.4 billon viewing devices. They report that 58% of video viewing came from North America; 21% from Europe; 19% from Asia 2% from the rest of the world.

Satellite TV Taking the Brunt of Cord Cutting. For some reason cord cutting seemed to be hitting the two big satellite TV providers even harder than landline cable companies. Dish Networks and DirecTV together lost 4.7% of their subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2017. We can only speculate for the reasons for the shift. The bundles of the landline cable companies make it harder for customers to drop their cable subscription. But to offset this, many satellite customers are in rural areas where there is often not a good broadband alternative to cable. But perhaps the FCC’s CAF II and ACAM programs are speeding up rural broadband enough for households to consider cutting the cord. It should be noted that AT&T is pushing their DirecTV now product more than their satellite TV, which also might account for part of the shift from satellite TV.

Apple Jumps into Programming. Apple quietly has gotten into the programing business. They’ve allocated over $1 billion in 2018 for the creation of new content. They’ve landed some big-name talent such as Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon for projects. Apple doesn’t have a content platform and the industry is buzzing with speculation on how they might market and distribute the content.

Pirated Video Content on Rise. Sandvine reports that 6.5% of North American households have accessed pirated video content in the last year. I’ve read reports from Canada of companies openly advertising pirated content, including providing settop boxes that can download IPTV content directly from the Internet. Yesterday’s blog talked about new efforts by content owners to force ISPs to enforce copyright infringement.

OTT News – August 2017

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It’s been a busy time in the OTT market with players coming and going and the choices available to customers growing more complicated and confusing.  Here are some of the bigger recent events in the industry.

Continued Cord Cutting. The major cable providers lost 946,000 cable customers in the second quarter – the worst quarterly loss ever. This puts cord cutting at an annual loss rate of 2.7% of customer, up from only 1% a year ago. It’s obvious that cord cutting is picking up momentum, and the wide variety of OTT viewing has to be a contributor. Nielsen recently reported that 62% of homes now watch OTT content at least occasionally.

It’s getting harder for analysts to count cable customers. For example, Dish Networks is not reporting on the specific performance of its satellite service versus SlingTV. The losses for the quarter were also eased a bit by the fact that Charter began counting seasonal customers even when they go dormant, such as the snowbird in Florida who subscribe only in the winter but who keep the account active.

ESPN / Disney OTT Offering. Disney announced that it would be launching two new OTT offerings in 2019 – a standalone ESPN offering and a standalone Disney offering. Along with this announcement they announced they will be withdrawing Disney content from Netflix. The ESPN offering will not duplicate the cable version of the network and will not include things like the NFL and NBA. But it will include major league baseball, the NHL, major league soccer, grand slam tennis events and college sports. Analysts think this offering is mandatory since ESPN has lost 13 million subscribers since 2011 and advertising revenues dropped 8% last quarter.

The standalone Disney offering is also interesting in that the company has decided to take Netflix on head-to-head. Because of contractual arrangements Netflix will still have access to content produced by Disney such as the numerous shows produced by Disney’s Marvel Studios. But starting in 2019 Disney is going to make new content only available on their own platform. This prompted Netflix to purchase Millarworld, a major comics producer.

NBC Closing Seeso. NBCUniversal says that it will be ending the Seeso OTT offering later this year. This is an offering that consisted largely of NBC comedy and related entertainment such as Saturday Night Live and the Tonight with Jimmy Fallon.

This failure is a big warning to the many cable networks that have been contemplating using the strategy of shoving existing content online. Industry analysts say that simply taking linear content online is not a recipe for success. It seems that the platform is just as important as the concept and the bigger platforms like Netflix keep customers engaged and enabling them to move from show to show without leaving the platform. But it’s too easy for a customer to leave a limited-offering platform, thus diminishing the perceived value for customers to buy a subscription.

Facebook OTT Offering. Facebook has announced the launch of Watch, an OTT service that will include content from A&E, Univision, Major League Baseball and other content such as worldwide soccer. For now the new service is being launched overseas with some limited US trials, but is expected to hit the whole US market later this year.

The offering is being structured like YouTube to enable content creators to launch their own channels. Facebook is currently funding some content providers to seed content on the new service. They are hoping that within time the platform becomes self-sustaining and can be an alternative to the wildly popular YouTube. Facebook is counting on their ability to lure enough of their billion plus users to the new platform to make it a success. The company’s goal is to keep people on their platform for more than just social networking.

Apple. Apple will be entering the OTT world and announced that they will spend $1 billion to create programming content over the next year. This puts them into rarified company with Netflix that is spending $6 billion, Amazon at $4.5 billion and HBO at $2 billion. There is no news yet of the nature or timing of an Apple OTT offering.

The Death of 2.4 GHz WiFi?

Wi-FiIt’s been apparent for a few years that the 2.4 GHz band of WiFi is getting more crowded. The very thing that has made the spectrum so useful – the fact that it allows multiple users to share the spectrum at the same time – is now starting to make the spectrum unusable in a lot of situations.

Earlier this year Apple and Cisco issued a joint paper on best network practices for enterprises and said that “the use of the 2.4 GHz band is not considered suitable for use for any business and/or mission critical enterprise applications.” They recommend that businesses avoid the spectrum and instead use the 5 GHz spectrum band.

There are a number of problems with the spectrum. In 2014 the Wi-Fi Alliance said there were over 10 billion WiFi-enabled devices in the world with 2.3 billion new devices shipping each year. And big plans to use WiFi to connect IoT devices means that the number of new devices is going to continue to grow rapidly.

And while most of the devices sold today can work with both the 2.4 GHz and the 5 GHz spectrum, a huge percentage of devices are set to default to several channels of the 2.4 GHz spectrum. This is done so that the devices will work with older WiFi routers, but it ends up creating a huge pile of demand in only part of the spectrum. Many devices can be reset to other channels or to 5 GHz, but the average user doesn’t know how to make the change.

There is no doubt that the spectrum can get full. I was in St. Petersburg, Florida this past weekend and at one point I saw over twenty WiFi networks, all contending for the spectrum. The standard allows that each user on each of these networks will get a little slice of available bandwidth, which leads to the degradation of everyone using it in a local neighborhood. And in addition to those many networks I am sure there were many other devices trying to use the spectrum. The WiFi spectrum band is also filled with uses by Bluetooth devices, signals from video cameras and is one of the primary bands of interference emitted by microwave ovens.

We are an increasingly wireless society. It was only a decade or so ago where people were still wiring new homes with Category 5 cable so that the whole house could get broadband. But we’ve basically dropped the wires in favor of connecting everything through a few channels of WiFi. For those that in crowded areas like apartments, dorms, or within businesses, the sheer number of WiFi devices within a small area can be overwhelming.

I’m not sure there is any really good long-term solution. Right now there is a lot less contention in the 5 GHz band, but one can imagine that in less than a decade that it will also be just as full as the 2.5 GHz spectrum today. We just started using the 5 GHz spectrum in our home network and saw a noticeable improvement. But soon everybody will be using it as much as the 2.4 GHz spectrum. Certainly the FCC can put bandaids on WiFi by opening up new swaths of spectrum for public use. But each new band of spectrum used is going to quickly get filled.

The FCC is very aware of the issues with 2.4 GHz spectrum and several of the Commissioners are pushing for the use of 5.9 GHz spectrum as a new option for public spectrum. But this spectrum which has been called dedicated short-range communications service (DSRC) was set aside in 1999 for use by smart vehicles to communicate with each other to avoid collisions. Until recently the spectrum has barely been used, but with the rapid growth of driverless cars we are finally going to see a big demand for the spectrum – and one that we don’t want to muck up with other devices. I, for one, do not want my self-driving car to have to be competing for spectrum with smartphones and IoT sensors in order to make sure I don’t hit another car.

The FCC has a big challenge in front of them now because as busy as WiFi is today it could be vastly more in demand decades from now. At some point we may have to face the fact that there is just not enough spectrum that can be used openly by everybody – but when that happens we could stop seeing the amazing growth of technologies and developments that have been enabled by free public spectrum.

Too Many Gadgets?

ibm_chip1It seems that we have reached a point where the typical consumer thinks there are too many gadgets in his (or her) life and the average person is becoming less interested in buying new ones. A poll conducted earlier this year by Accenture showed that consumer demand for personal electronics is greatly reduced compared to recent years.

The drive to have personal electronics was spurred by the smartphone revolution, which has outperformed sales compared to almost any other product in history. But there have also recently been other personal electronics products like the Fitbit and health wearables that have done very.

But it looks like the shine might be coming off of the personal electronics industry. The Accenture survey showed that fewer people are considering buying every category of personal electronics. For example, the poll showed that only 13% of respondents were considering buying a new smartphone in 2016. That is far below the levels seen in recent years where a significant percentage of smartphone users upgraded their phone every 2 or 3 years.

And the survey also showed weak demand for wearables like Fitbit, for virtual reality, for drones and for the Internet of Things. If this poll is true, then all of these industries are going to underperform compared to expectations. We are certainly seeing this in the real world. Apple stock just stumbled due to falling demand for the iPhone. Samsung and the other smartphone makers went through the same thing last year.

The poll didn’t ask why this was so, but just measured consumer demand. I can think of several reasons why demand is down. First is cost. None of these personal electronics are particularly cheap and it’s unrealistic for the market to expect that all of these electronics will sell as wildly as is predicted by industry insiders. If you listen to the hype each year at places like CES you would expect that everyone in America will soon be buying drones and piles of IoT devices for their homes.

I think another primary reason for the decline is performance. My wife has a sports device to track her running. It works great for what she wants from it and there is no particular reason for her to upgrade it. And every runner she knows has one. Once the market for runners and walkers is saturated there is only so much that can be expected in demand for a device with such a specific function. There is just not much difference between the newer sports wearables and ones sold just a few years ago.

And performance is now a bit issue with smartphones. There is not much difference any more between one generation and another. The new smartphones look the same, feel the same and do about the same things and the old ones. And this is more the fault of the slowing of Moore’s law than anything else.

Since the early 70s chip makers like Intel have released a new chip about every two years that crammed about twice as many transistors into the same chip space. This is the primary reason why each new generation of the iPhone has been a noticeable improvement over the previous model. Each new chip has meant a big leap upward in speed, energy-efficiency and performance of the smartphone.

But in the 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of 2015 Intel disclosed that the pace at which it will launch new chips is going to be slower in the future. Intel’s latest mass-production chips for smartphones now have a gap between components of 14 nanometers. Physics is going to limit that ultimate gap to perhaps 4 or 5 nanometers at the smallest due to the size of the molecules of the chip materials. There isn’t very much more room for improvement.

This is not to say that there won’t continue to be improvements in computers – but soon the improvements are not going to come from more compact chips. There are amazing new breakthroughs coming in other areas. IBM has a new chip that works in 3 dimensions that has a lot of promise for supercomputers. There are computers becoming faster by using light instead of electricity. And there is a lot of promise from quantum computing. But all of these improvements, at least for now, are likely to help larger computers and don’t lend themselves to the cheap mass-produced chips that drive personal electronics.

And none of this means that the market for personal electronics is dead. There are still huge numbers of all of these devices being sold. But when you use the performance of Apple over the past decade as the way to measure success in the electronics world it’s likely that nothing is ever going to measure up to that yardstick.

This is a cautionary tale for any carrier that is considering selling home automation, energy management or security. There is a decent living to be made in all of these areas, but don’t get sucked into the hype that every home in America is going to want all of these devices and services within the next few years. Because it appears that is definitely not true.