Wildebeests cross the Mara River
The advent of the mobile internet has massively accelerated the information revolution brewing since the start of the 20th century. The impact on civilization has been staggering. But the new capabilities and efficiencies in mobile systems promised by 5G are tangled up in causal fallacies, cognitive biases, technical conundrums and geopolitical turmoil. Let’s try and cut through the thicket.
20 February 2019 (Brussels, Belgium) — 5G, the fifth generation of mobile cellular systems. Emboldened by projections that it will trigger unprecedented growth in the economy, most suppliers, operators, and many other stakeholders operating or involved in these systems are like a herd of wildebeests screeching across the Serengeti to cross the Mara River … betting on a hunch that they’ll find much needed green grass on the other side. But none of them know exactly where nor when they’ll find that grass; nor can they articulate why the herd is crossing the river at this particular location and not another; nor at this particular time.
And consumers, baffled by the mobile alphabet soup … LTE, 4G, 5G, 5G-NR, eMBB, mMTC, etc., etc. … and the complexity of what has happened in cellular technology over the past two decades are just plain confused. And the question “what is 5G?” probably floats around a lot of corporate headquarters almost as much as “what is machine learning?”
I will have a much longer, more intense piece about 5G after the conclusion of MWC. The aim of this post is to provide you a primer on 5G and mobile technology (which does include a short highlight video at the end), sort of “5G in a nutshell”.
NOTE: over the past year I had the opportunity to meet with many mobile network experts at Cisco, Ericsson, LG, Qualcomm and others (many of whom are noted below)
But it was Nokia who generously opened their labs and “customer only” facilities at numerous technology conferences so we could film the nuts & bolts of 5G and bring it to you. As well as to explain (with a great deal of patience, thank you) those nuts & bolts. So a shout out to Tamas Dankovics, Bernd Hildebrandt, Pekka Sundberg and especially Päivi Kalske … Head of Corporate Social Media at Nokia, a social networking extraordinaire … who coordinated everything. At the end of this post you will find the video we produced with their assistance.
1 Just a wee bit of mobile technology history
What follows is a short mash-up of a much longer piece I wrote on the history of the mobile industry, just to set the table for you:
- The internet first took off with dial-up, and the first consumer mobile internet service to get mass adoption had 2G data speeds. DSL (Digital Subscriber Line is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines) and the first deployments of 3G gave us a couple of hundred Kbits/sec. Then improvements to 3G (‘3.5G’) and then 4G gave us tens of Mbits/sec and also much better latency (which is the amount of delay, or lag in response, in a network) and improvements to DSL and DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification which is an international telecommunications standard that permits the addition of high-bandwidth data transfer to an existing cable television system) gave us fixed home broadband speeds in the tens or low hundreds.
- With each of these surges in speed, two things happen:
- First, the things we are already doing get smoother and easier and quicker, and also get more capable (or sometimes bloated). Pages get more images and become more dynamic.
- Second, new things become possible. You could not have done Flickr or Google Maps on dialup, and you could not have done Netflix (or at least not well) on the broadband of 2003. In the following generation, Snapchat only worked when you could presume that all of your users can connect at tens of Mbits/sec (when they’re not on home WiFi, of course). That in turn means networks with the overall capacity to give that speed not just to one person at a time but to lots of people, and network infrastructure that can do that at a vaguely reasonable price. As Ben Evans Andreessen Horowitz said in a presentation “if you’d shown Snapchat to a mobile network executive in the early 2000s, their hair would have gone white – there was just no way the early 3G network could have supported that kind of load”.
In the same way, then, 5G speeds, and ever-faster home broadband, will mean that existing applications will get richer, and also that new applications will emerge – new Flickrs, YouTubes or Snapchats. We don’t know what yet, exactly, though we can make some early guesses, but the creativity of entrepreneurs and platforms and the choices of consumers will decide. This is the great thing about the decentralized, permissionless innovation of the internet – telcos don’t need to decide in advance what the use cases are.
2 Cellular connectivity: its role in the massive acceleration of the information revolution … and the new geopolitical battleground
There are so many ways I could begin my 5G analysis. If I was still a telecoms analyst, I would be spending a lot of time talking about spectrum, deployment schedules and capex (capital expenditure). Mobile operators around the world spend several hundred billion dollars a year on network capex, and 5G will become a big part of that. And I’d add network efficiencies, the big bad wolf Huawei, chipsets, etc., etc.
I will mention a few of those things in this piece but only briefly, just to orientate you to The Big Picture. We’ll leave the details to the longer piece to come:
The basic principles of radio transmission were established in the 19th century; the foundations of computer science and information theory were laid out by the middle of the 20th century; it took, however, the advent of the transistor and the semiconductor industry for these ideas to become practical and scalable over the past 50 years. As Azeem Azhar (Senior Advisor on AI at Accenture) has noted many times on his bog Exponential View:
The passionate contribution of many scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs eventually converged to the global information exchange platform and devices we all depend on today. After a long journey, a tipping point was reached around 2010, when internet services met global broadband mobility in a personal device, the smartphone, loaded with a modern operating system and an intuitive user interface; the rest is history.
The aggregation and compounded effect of this entire body of work (not of a single specific breakthrough, industry visionary or company) resulted in the largest and most impactful system ever created by civilization.
So impactful, that we stand at the inception of a very unique revolution. We have moved from millenniums of information exchange that were executed on physical access to a medium on which data had to be copied, to an era of ubiquitous, instantaneous, frictionless flow of all information at once. This has had a profound, irreversible and sometimes destabilizing effect, most recently discussed by lawyers at a premier legal technology event appropriately titled LegalTech. Said Craig Ball, a lawyer and leading light in that legal ecosystem who takes the long, holistic approach to technology:
The thing about technology is our perceived scale of space and time: it is collapsing more rapidly than the pace at which society and industries can adapt. And I do not mean just in the legal arena, of course. Just read the headlines. There is a massive source of system and social stress, dominated by negativity such as fake news and data abuses. Although one hopes for some promise on the horizon, perhaps a new dynamic in the political landscape. We’ll see.
The rollout of 5G networks will take more than a decade and will be one of the most complex and expensive technology projects ever undertaken. The pace of 5G deployment in a given country will depend on an array of factors that include the following (with a hat tip to Jeremy Olivier at Cisco for letting me crib his list):
– carrier preferences
– government regulatory policies and strategies
– infrastructure and handset equipment maker product timelines
– costs and scalability of 5G infrastructure
– progress in developing compelling uses and applications of 5G networks, and
– the ability of various players to capture value in a complex technology ecosystem
To a much greater extent than the deployment of 4G, 5G timelines will also be influenced by political and national security concerns, which will likewise vary from market to market. This is because unlike previous generations of mobile data networks, which were built with consumer voice and data services in mind, 5G will also dramatically expand the capabilities of mobile data networks by enabling new types of machine-to-machine communication.
This is huge. Why? Because these capabilities will for the first time allow industrial-scale deployments of autonomous vehicles, factory automation, and other technologies that require large numbers of devices to remain in near-instantaneous communication across a wide area. As Jackie Paxter at Qualcomm noted:
By serving as a foundation for the next phase of the digital revolution, 5G will not just offer a quantitative improvement over previous technologies via higher speeds, but it will be qualitatively different from earlier data networks in terms of the innovation that it enables. 5G networks will enable a new breed of digital applications that depend on ultra-fast, low latency, high-throughput communications, including driverless cars, advanced factory automation, and smart cities.
These applications will be the biggest source of long-term economic and political advantage from 5G, and they will be the subject of intense competition between leading U.S. and Chinese companies. The U.S. has an edge in innovative capacity, but China will gain a head start developing new applications and use cases. China’s first-mover status in 5G may translate into a geopolitical advantage in countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, where financing and other incentives available through the Belt and Road Initiative will be difficult for governments to pass up, allowing China to extend its digital influence globally. But it is why the U.S. and like-minded allies are pushing back against the use of Chinese hardware in 5G networks (think Huawei) over concerns about national security.
Note: and might I add I am writing this after attending the Munich Security Conference where U.S. officials made it very clear that it would be hard for the U.S. to co-operate with countries using Huawei’s technology (that’s you, Europe) and they urged those countries to do a “rethink” if they wanted to continue working closely with the U.S.
And the new European smartphone shipments data, just released, makes it more difficult, and more compelling. European smartphone vendors saw their shipments fall 4% in 2018. It was Chinese mobile vendors who gained significantly. Huawei was the stand-out vendor, growing 54%.
It gets to the point I have banged on for awhile: the political situation between Chinese companies and the U.S. government has actually benefited European consumers. The U.S. administration is causing Chinese companies to invest in Europe over the U.S. The European market is mature, and replacement rates have lengthened, but there is an opportunity for Chinese brands to displace the market incumbents. The likes of Huawei (and Xiaomi) bring price competition that has stunned their rivals as they use their size against the smaller brands in Europe.
A bifurcated 5G ecosystem will increase the risk that the global technology ecosystem gives way to two separate, politically divided and potentially noninteroperable technology spheres of influence — one led by the U.S. and supported by technology developed in Silicon Valley. This is a huge topic and beyond the remit of this post. But a closer look at 5G will can help explain why it has become such an important battleground in the U.S.-China confrontation over the future of advanced technologies. And the following section will also give you an overview on what the 5G chatter is all about.
3 Understanding 5G networks … and the role of artificial intelligence
The design of 5G networks marks a significant departure from 2G, 3G, and 4G networks, which were built primarily around handset-to-handset voice and data communications. As smartphone cameras and screens became better and afforded much higher resolutions, demand for data applications such as video streaming required equipment makers and operators to adjust the performance of 4G networks. However, the underlying network architecture continued to face limitations in terms of density of devices and achieving very high data rates for applications such as streaming high-definition video.
Note: and 4G/LTE solutions ain’t disappearing. Beyond smartphone, the expansion of cellular connectivity to an increasing number of objects is undeniable. This is happening at a faster pace than ever, driven by the maturity of 4G/LTE solutions and similar progresses in low power compute and data analytics. Tens of millions of things and vehicles are newly connected with LTE every year. As a result of this growing installed base, with decade long service expectations, LTE will be around for years to come; that’s why you hear it referred to as “Long Term Employment”.
Enter 5G, which is designed from the ground up to handle massive numbers of devices, high-data rates, and applications that require very fast and reliable communications with minimal latency, or lag, such as connected and autonomous vehicles. To deliver these features, 5G networks are divided into three primary network “slices,” each serving a different primary function (hat tip to several folks at Ericsson for this list):
– Enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB): This portion of the network, likely to be rolled out first and to use aspects of existing 4G LTE architecture, will enable much higher download speeds for smartphones and other devices, up to ten times faster.
– Ultra-reliable low-latency communications (uRLLC): This segment is designed for applications including autonomous vehicles, which require there to be little or no gaps in communication for mission-critical applications such as road obstacle sensing and command and control. This portion of the network will require considerable investments in new equipment to get communications capacity nearer to roads and buildings. It also requires new antenna designs and smaller equipment that will provide dense coverage.
– Massive machine-to-machine communications (mMTC): This segment is designed to handle billions of new sensors and other “edge” devices that will communicate among themselves and with other parts of the network, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT).
And while we are here, let’s look at the more frequent members of the “alphabet soup” with which you are probably familiar:
5G (Fifth Generation of mobile systems)
This occasionally gets confused with WiFi in the 5 GHz band. Otherwise, an “all you can fit” label that could refer to a broad vision resulting from everything being connected wirelessly, to 5G-NR (see below), or even (as proposed by the mobile industry) to an advanced version of 4G/LTE.
5G-NR (5G New Radio)
5G New Radio is the latest mobile system designed by the industry. A 5G-NR radio can be operated “standalone” or, in a simplified “non standalone” form, as an augmentation of the LTE radio (I will expand on “standalone” and “non standalone” in the longer post after MWC). The take-away point is the 5G-NR channel is used as a booster whenever available. This helps operators improve capacity in crowded hot spots without the need to deploy 5G-NR across large areas.
5G networks’ primary functions will be software-based, as opposed to the hardware that drives traditional data networks, making use of concepts such as “software defined network” and “network function virtualization”. In industry jargon, 5G will be largely “cloud native.” So to control these functions and to ensure that specific applications are allocated the proper network resources, 5G networks will make extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI) to manage network complexity. One practical consequence is that infrastructure equipment manufacturers will design and deploy operating and management systems that use AI, both separately and in collaboration with carriers.
Note: 5G networks present several security concerns and this requires a lengthy explanation but in brief: (1) in part because of the role of AI discussed above, equipment integrators will play a much bigger role in the process of operating a network than in previous generations of mobile technology. This is likely further feeding U.S. and other Western security concerns related to Chinese equipment vendors’ role in 5G networks; (2) the next generation of mobile networks will also blur the traditional distinction between the radio access network (RAN), consisting of base stations and antennas that handle the radio frequency (wireless) portion of the network, and the core portion, including central switching and transport networks that carry large amounts of data traffic. This is because the architecture of 5G pushes a lot of what would be formerly core functionality out to the “edge” of the network, with big implications for 5G network security.
At MWC this year, I will have a longer chat with the folks at Nokia who can put all of this (brilliantly) in perspective.
4 Networking slicing and industrial uses
This is an enormous piece of 5G and I am giving it its own section. The video below has an explanation by Brandon Walsh of the Finnish company Cloudstreet. One of the cooler features of 5G is that it lets you split out dedicated capacity for particular use cases – so-called ‘network slicing’. Today (and this is a great simplification), although network operators try to do traffic management, all traffic in the cell is fundamentally using the same capacity. 5G lets you create dedicated private capacity in the radio network with specific characteristics. So, you could sell a truck operator dedicated capacity on the two miles between a specific freeway exit and a specific warehouse. Or, you could offer an IoT operator (or alarm company) much lower bandwidth but over a wider area.
Hence, you could theoretically customise any mix of data speed, coverage, quality, latency, and reliability, or even more narrow things like power consumption (potentially interesting for IoT), and there will probably be a layer of resellers that emerges to aggregate and implement these kinds of services on behalf of MNOs (mobile network operators). This seems interesting – it also seems likely to be an enterprise and vertical application story, not a consumer story. On this theme, we are already seeing a trend for large industrial organizations to use private 4G networks instead of WiFi or even Ethernet. These issues will also apply to 5G.
5 The big promises of 5G networks … and some of the dubious claims
Without going into a lot of the technical details (any more than absolutely necessary), what do we actually get from 5G? In brief:
– As with each previous generational change, 5G makes it cheaper and easier for mobile operators to build more capacity. So, they can continue to accommodate growing usage.
– Mainly because of this new spectrum, mobile 5G speeds in good conditions could be well over 100 megabits/sec and potentially several hundreds megabits/sec (mobile speeds of over a gigabit/sec are technically possible but unlikely in the real world).
– 5G is promised to have much better latency (the amount of delay, or lag in response, in a network) than 4G – perhaps 20-30ms in the real world, down from 50-60ms for LTE (4G).
Better latency is a biggie. Why? Networking companies believe the incredibly low latency of 5G paired with its fast speeds will enable all sorts of uses, from controlling manufacturing machines in real time, to facilitating car to car communication, to the dream of IoT, where everything talks to everything else at the speed of thought. But let’s get some needed perspective. As Tamas Dankovics of Nokia explained it to me:
High-level latency. Yes, 1 gigabit per second downloads, compared with some national averages of about 20 Mbps on today’s networks. It means you’ll be able to download that first episode of “Game of Thrones” in a few seconds, rather than a few minutes. But if you find yourself critically ill, say, in some medically-ill-equipped area of the world and your heart surgeon is conducting a bypass on you using a virtual reality headset to communicate with a critical medical team not in the operating room but 4,000 miles away you want to be 200 percent certain the Internet is not going to lag by even a second.
That’s what it’s all about, Alfie. And you’ll meet Tamas in our video below.
There are some messy technological downsides. To achieve all that low-latency goodness and deliver those delicious download speeds, network companies have been looking at millimeter wave bandwidths (explained in the video below), meaning high-frequency spectrums: 30 GHz to 300 GHz. Verizon uses 28 and 39GHz, for example. The challenge is, those waves don’t travel far at all. Remember when cordless phones went from 2.4GHz to 4.8GHz? You couldn’t walk in the next room and keep a call going. These frequencies present technical hurdles that researchers are still struggling with.
To address this issue, carriers anticipate using “small cells” instead of enormous antennas that blanket city blocks or whole neighborhoods. Small cells are bricks or maybe toolbox-sized pieces of gear that can fit outside your house, on buses, high on telephone poles, wherever. And to guarantee the type of coverage consumers will expect, they’ll need to. In order to build a 5G network (which will sit alongside the 4G net for the foreseeable future), carriers will need small cells on every flag and telephone pole, street sign, building, whatever. Finding places to put all those antennas will be a preposterous challenge in itself.
Oh, and here’s another fun fact: Since every carrier is using different spectrum for their 5G experiments, you probably won’t be able to use a 5G phone on different networks. I will explain that in the longer version of this post.
There are also societal issues, especially in the U.S. Despite efforts to deploy 5G in big cities, there’s little financial incentive for the major telecom firms to spend the billions of dollars necessary to serve rural communities. According to data published by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, 31% of rural residents don’t have fixed broadband service, compared to 2% of city residents. It’s already tough to get basic broadband connections in remote areas, and some fear these places may fall further behind. As Joanne Hovis (Co-Founder and CEO of the Coalition for Local Internet Choice) told me “if you can’t get the economics of 4G to work in rural areas, other than some downtowns and interstate highways, who is going to build the much more expensive 5G? It’s laughable. We shouldn’t assume that this will solve our rural broadband gaps”.
And a few of the statements you need to question:
“5G will change everything!”
Ah … questionable causality. “Build it and they will come”. Well, thankfully, industries have not been waiting for 5G to innovate on data services and benefit from mobility and personalization. Further growth and innovation in data services will surely gain from more efficient and more capable mobile systems. But the exact timeline, specific requirements and pay-offs are yet to be calibrated and demonstrated with hard data.
“5G will unlock the IoT opportunity!”
Well, ok. Yeah. But reality check (from Umar Cheema, Cisco) :
Despite the maturity and benefits of LTE-IOT, some regions (e.g. EU) have yet to reach peak 2G/GPRS shipments for IOT applications. Besides the time it will take for 5G-NR to mature. The first version of 5G-NR does not natively include IOT optimized capability; it merely points to the 2018 version of LTE-IOT (eMTC & NB-IOT); it ensures that both are “spectrum compatible”; that is, a 5G-NR channel can be wrapped around an already deployed LTE-IOT channel without disrupting legacy devices.
Moreover, as the folks at Ericsson explained to me, pointing a 5G network at many IoT use cases is like using a fire hose to fill a pipette. So while there are some use cases that need a fire hose, focusing on the network rather than the use cases is dumb. Yet that’s what most media and industry vendors have been doing in their efforts to get us all excited about 5G. Ericsson divided the IoT world into four components which rank devices based on requirements and “use cases”. So, as an example, those requiring small amounts of data and that are not sensitive to latency. Think sensors and devices that need to phone home once or twice a day to share a piece of information.
“4G deployment led to GDP growth. We must rush to 5G!”
Correlation is not causation. Talk to the folks at Mobile Market Research and they’ll tell you “No, GDP growth led to LTE deployment”. Good infrastructure does matter and mobile broadband coverage is one of multiple components in the “good” infrastructure equation.
“We have already shipped/installed xxx 5G-NR units!”
No you haven’t. What you’ve shipped is “5G-NR ready” equipment, with multiple software updates required to reach commercial grade 5G-NR operation and compatibility. Maturing and hardening complex systems, such as 5G-NR, with many deployment configurations across a multi-vendor eco-system takes time.
Now, to our video and the extraordinary people at Nokia:
It probably isn’t a revolution – or maybe, rather, it means it’s the revolution that’s been going on since 1995 or so and will keep going for another decade or more, until we get to ….
