Qualcomm – POTs and PANs

One of the more interesting telecom announcements at the CES electronics show in Vegas was the announcement from the partnership of Qualcomm and Iridium of plans to bring satellite texting capability to many more cell phones and other devices.

We’ve already seen a few other announcements recently of the ability to make emergency text calls when out of reach of cell coverage. The team of T-Mobile and SpaceX say that T-Mobile customers will be able to reach 911 through a satellite some time in 2023. Apple launched an Emergency SOS system for its newest iPhone users in a partnership with Globalstar, but the service is only available in a handful of cities.

Qualcomm is building this feature into its premier Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chips, so any new phone or other device using that chip will have texting capabilities. The company says it plans to eventually build the capability into other more affordable chips as well.

For now, Qualcomm has established a 911 service similar to the T-Mobile plans where people can reach 911 when out of the range of the normal cellular network. But the company envisions that cellular carriers will develop price plans to let users text for a fee. That would provide folks with the ability to stay connected while hiking in remote wilderness or during a sea cruise.

Qualcomm is in the business of selling chips, and it would love to see this capability expanded to other places, like built into laptops or new cars. Putting the technology in cars is a major selling point since it would enable features like automatically contacting 911 after an accident.

This first-generation product will be far from perfect, but that’s to be expected from what is basically a beta test. For example, while Iridium satellites blanket the earth, there are times when there is no satellite overhead, and a user might have to wait ten minutes for the next satellite. It seems this issue can be resolved by cell carriers partnering with multiple satellite providers.

This new technology opens up the possibility for people to have some limited connectivity almost anywhere on the globe. For the younger connected generations, this has great appeal. Most people I know with GenZ kids tell me that it’s like banishment to take kids out of reach of connectivity. But more practically, much of the world does not have reliable cellular coverage, and this can bring some form of communication to all.

I know people will read this and assume that the next step is to use satellites to provide data connectivity to cell phones or laptops from anywhere. However, there are limits of physics that make that unrealistic for a handset. The latest Starlink dishy receiver is 19 by 12 inches, and that much surface area is needed to receive the signal from a satellite. However, it’s not hard to imagine a hiker rolling out a flexible receiver to communicate with a satellite – assuming they bring along some kind of power source, perhaps solar.

I track telecom announcements of new technologies and products to give me a baseline a decade from now to see how various technologies performed. It will be interesting to see if satellite texting becomes a routine part of every cellular plan or if it withers on the vine like many other seemingly good ideas that the market didn’t embrace.

There is a major battle brewing for control of the connections that control the Internet of Things. Today in the early stage of home IoT most devices are being connected using WiFi. But there is going to be a huge push to have connection instead made through 5G cellular.

I saw an article this week where Qualcomm said that they were excited about 5G and that it would be a world-changing technology. The part of 5G that they are most excited about is the possibility of using 5G to connect IoT devises together. Qualcomm’s CEO Stephen Mollenkopf talked about 5G at the recent CES show and talked about a future where 5G is used for live-streaming virtual reality, autonomous cars and connected cities where street lamps are networked together.

Of course, Qualcomm and the cellular vendors are most interested in the potential for making money using 5G technology. Qualcomm wants to make the hundreds of millions of chips they envision in a 5G connected world. And Verizon and AT&T want to sell data connections to all of the 5G connected devices. It’s an interesting vision of the world. Some of that vision makes sense and 5G is the obvious way to connect outdoors for things like street lights.

But it’s not obvious to me at this early stage of IoT that either 5G or WiFi are the obvious winner of the battle for IoT connectivity in the home. There are pros and cons for each technology.

WiFi has an upper hand today because it’s already in almost every home. People are comfortable using WiFi because it doesn’t cost anything extra to connect an IoT device. But WiFi has some natural limitations that might make it a harder choice in the future if our homes get filled with IoT devices. As I’ve discussed in some recent blogs, the way that WiFi shares data can be a big problem when there is a lot of steady and continuous demand for the bandwidth. WiFi is probably a great choice for IoT devices that only occasionally need to make a connection or that need short-burst connections to share information.

But the WiFi standard doesn’t include quality of service and any prioritization of which connections are the most important. WiFi instead always does its best to share bandwidth, regardless of the number of devices that are asking to connect to it. When a WiFi router gets multiple demands it shuts down for a short period and then tries to reinitiate connections again. If too many devices are demanding connection, a WiFi system goes into a mode of continuously stopping and restarting and none of the connections get a satisfactory connection. Even if there is enough bandwidth in the network to handle most of the requests, too many simultaneous requests simply blows the brains out of WiFi. The consequence for this is that having a lot of small and inconsequential connections can ruin the important connections like video streaming or gaming.

But cellular data is also not an automatic answer. Certainly today there is no way to cope with IoT using 4G cellular networks. Each cell site has a limited number of connections. A great example of this is that I often talk to a buddy of mine in DC while he commutes, and he usually loses his cellular signal when crossing the between Maryland and Virginia. This is due to there not being enough cellular connections available in the limited area of the American Legion bridge. 5G will supposedly solve this problem and promises to expand the number of connections from a cell site by a factor of 50 times or so – meaning that there will be a lot more possible connections. But you still have to wonder if that will be sufficient in a world when every IoT device wants a connection. LG just announced that every appliance it sells will now come with an IoT connection, and I imagine this will soon be true of all appliances, toys and almost anything else you buy in the future that has any electronics.

Of a bigger concern to me is that 5G connections are not going to be free. With WiFi, once I’ve bought my home broadband connection I can add devices at will (until I overload my router). But I think Verizon and AT&T are excited about IoT because they want to charge a small monthly fee for every device you connect through them. It may not be a lot – perhaps a dollar per device per month – but the next thing you know every home will be sending then an additional $50 or more per month to keep IoT devices connected. It’s no wonder they are salivating at the possibility. And it’s no wonder that the big cable companies are talking about buying T-Mobile.

I’m also concerned from a security perspective of sending the data from all of my IoT devices to the same core routers at Verizon or AT&T. Since it’s likely that the recent privacy rules for broadband will be overturned or weakened, I am concerned about having one company know so much about me. If I use a WiFi network my feeds will still go out through my data ISP, but if I’m concerned about security I can encrypt my network and make it harder for them to know what I’m doing. That is going to be impossible to do with a cellular connection.

But one thing is for sure and this is going to be a huge battle. And it’s likely to be fought behind the scenes as the cellular companies try to make deals with device manufacturers to use 5G instead of WiFi. WiFi has the early lead today and it’s still going to be a while until there are functional 5G cellular networks. But once those are in place it’s going to be a war worth watching.

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