Intel – POTs and PANs

Please Stop Hinting at Gigabit Cellular

Last week there were several press releases announcing that AT&T was working with a major corporation to provide a test of 5G technology. A few days later the industry found out that the company taking part in the test is Intel, which will be making the chips involved in the tests. Intel will apparently be beta testing early units for providing high-speed bandwidth at one of their locations.

It really bothers me every time I see one of these announcements, because the whole industry seems to have bought into the hype from companies like AT&T that conflate two totally different technologies under the name of 5G. The AT&T and Intel test is going to be for a technology to provide faster indoor wireless connections using millimeter wave spectrum in competition with WiFi.

But most of the world sees the term ‘5G’ and assumes it means the next generation of cellular technology. And that means that most people reading about the AT&T press release think that we are just a few years away from having gigabit cell phones. And we are not.

I don’t know who decided to use the term 5G for two drastically different technologies. My guess is that the confusion has been purposefully sown by AT&T and Verizon. Certainly the average consumer is more likely to pay attention if they think their cell phones will soon be blazingly fast.

But this kind of confusion has real life negative consequences. Politicians and decision makers read these articles and assume that there is a fast cellular alternative coming in a few years – and this allows them to take the issue of faster landline broadband off the plate. It’s not a hard mistake to make and I’ve even seen this same confusion from smaller telco and cable company owners who see the headlines but don’t dig deeper. I assume one reason this confusion is being promoted is that both AT&T and Verizon benefit if fewer companies are investing in fiber last-mile networks to compete with them.

The millimeter wave technology that Intel is going to alpha test is to provide gigabit speed wireless connections for very short distances. It’s a technology that can distribute gigabit speed connections around an office suite, for example. The gigabit speeds are good for about 60 feet from a transmitter which fits the indoor environment and desire for speed. But even in that environment the technology has a major limitation in that these frequencies won’t pass through almost anything. Even a wall or possibly even a cubicle divider can kill the signal. And so these early tests are probably to find the best way to scatter the bandwidth around the office to reach all the nooks and crannies found in the real world.

This technology is being called 5G because the technology will use the 5G standard, even though that standard is not yet developed. But we already know that the 5G standard will have one major benefit over WiFi. WiFi is a bandwidth sharing protocol which gives equal preference to every transmission. If one WiFi device in an office is demanding a large amount of bandwidth and another data-hungry device comes online the protocol automatically shares the bandwidth between the two devices. 5G will allow the router to guarantee the bandwidth at different levels to each device without sharing.

But this millimeter wave trial at Intel has almost nothing else in common with cellular data transmissions other than the fact that they use the same standard. Cellular networks use much lower frequencies which have been chosen because they travel a decent distance from a cell tower, and for the most part cellular frequencies are good at penetrating walls and trees and other obstacles.

Cellular networks are not going to use millimeter wave frequencies to get to cellphones. To make that work would require mini-cell sites of some sort every hundred feet or so. That can be made to work, but really is a totally impractical application in the real world unless we someday find a way to put little cell sites literally everywhere. Using these frequencies for cellular would be a niche application that might only work in a place like a conference center and the cellphone companies are not going to automatically build this technology into cellphones. It takes chip space, extra power and new antennae to add another frequency and nobody is going to add that extra cost to a cellphone until most of the world can use it – and that literally could take many decades, if ever.

Instead, the 5G standard will be used in cellphones to improve data speeds – but not at anything near to gigabit speeds. The early versions of the 5G specification have a goal of being able to deliver 50 Mbps data speeds to large numbers of phones out of a cell site. That’s a 4 – 5 times increase in cellular speeds from today and is going to make it a lot more enjoyable to browse the web from a cellphone. But 50 Mbps is very different than gigabit cellular speeds. The big companies really need have to stop implying there is going to be gigabit cellular. That is extremely misleading and is very far from the truth.

The FTC and Technology

Last week I wrote about how the Federal Trade Commission was going to start watching the Internet of Things. I will admit that this is maybe only the second or third time in my career that I can recall the FTC being involved in anything related to telecom. So I did some digging and I think we are going to be hearing about them a lot more. The FTC is turning into one of the primary watchdogs of technology.

The FTC was created by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 to fight against big trusts. In those days large corporations like Standard Oil and America Tobacco held monopoly power in their industries. The Sherman Act was passed as a way to battle the largest monopolies, but Congress wanted a second mechanism to control the worst practices of all corporations. The FTC was created 100 years ago to protect consumers against the practices of large corporations.

The FTC got their powers expanded in 1938 when Congress gave them explicit authority to combat “unfair methods of competition”. Since then the agency became increasingly active in protecting the public against unfair trade practices.

It is not surprising to see the FTC getting involved with technology since it is becoming the primary way that companies interface with people. The FTC has been engaged for years in a few areas that involve the telecom industry. For instance, they have been the watchdog for years for issues like deceptive advertising, poor billing practices, and violations of customer privacy.

As an example, there have been a number of FTC actions over the years with AT&T. Not that I particularly want to single out AT&T, because the FTC has been engaged with all of the large carriers over the years. However, just last year the FTC got AT&T to refund $80 million to wireless customers who had been crammed with fraudulent third party charges. In 2009, the FTC faulted the company for denying phones to people based upon having poor credit since they had not explained the policy to the public. And now the FTC is going after AT&T for fraudulent advertising since their unlimited mobile data plans are not actually unlimited.

One area of FTC focus for the last few years has been the security of customer data. For example, they have fined a number of companies that had security breaches that released customer credit card and other personal information if those companies had not taken reasonable precautions to protect the data.

While companies sometimes fight the FTC, the more normal response is for the agency and a company to come to a mutually acceptable change in behavior through a consent decree. Following are a few cases related to our industry that were not amicably resolved and that instead resulted in suits by the FTC to stop bad corporate behavior:

Amazon. Last year the FTC sued Amazon to get them to stop the practice where children could rack up huge bills on cell phones by purchasing add-ons for computer games without parental approval. There were even game apps for pre-school age kids who clearly cannot yet read that allowed a player to buy extra features of the game by hitting a button.
Snapchat. Last year the FTC sued Snapchat because they told customers that their data on the network was private and protected, while it wasn’t.
Dish Network. In 2012 the FTC sued Dish Network for making telemarketing calls in violation of the Do Not Call rules.
Robocalling. In 2009 the FTC sued to stop numerous companies who were using robocalls to sell fraudulent products.
Data Brokers. The FTC sued LeapLab of Arizona for selling consumer data that included details like bank account numbers.
Spam. The FTC took legal steps to shut down Triple Fiber Networks (3FN.net) which hosted huge quantities of spam emails.
Intel. In 2009 the FTC sued Intel for using its monopoly power to artificially inflate the cost of computer chips.

As privacy and data security become even more important, we will probably see the FTC become very active in our industry. Interestingly, most of the FTC’s work is done quietly and without press. It contacts companies against which there are multiple public complaints. They generally investigate the complaints and try to get companies to change their bad behavior. And most companies agree to make changes. But the FTC has the ability to levy large fines and will do so for companies who repeat bad behavior or who violate a prior consent decree.

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