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A new wave of mobile technology is on its way, and will bring drastic change
Feb 20th 2016 | NEW YORK
THE future is already arriving, it is just a question of knowing where to look.
On Changshou Road in Shanghai, eagle eyes may spot an odd rectangular object on
top of an office block: it is a collection of 128 miniature antennae.
Pedestrians in Manhattan can catch a glimpse of apparatus that looks like a
video camera on a stand, but jerks around and has a strange, hornlike
protrusion where the lens should be. It blasts a narrow beam of radio waves at
buildings so they can bounce their way to the receiver. The campus of the
University of Surrey in Guildford, England, is dotted with 44 antennae, which
form virtual wireless cells that follow a device around.
These antennae are vanguards of a new generation of wireless technologies.
Although the previous batch, collectively called fourth generation , or 4G, is
still being rolled out in many countries, the telecoms industry has already
started working on the next, 5G. On February 12th AT&T, America s
second-largest mobile operator, said it would begin testing whether prototype
5G circuitry works indoors, following similar news in September from Verizon,
the number one. South Korea wants to have a 5G network up and running when it
hosts the Winter Olympics in 2018; Japan wants the same for the summer games in
2020. When the industry holds its annual jamboree, Mobile World Congress, in
Barcelona this month, 5G will top the agenda.
Mobile telecoms have come a long way since Martin Cooper of Motorola
(pictured), inventor of the DynaTAC, the first commercially available handset,
demonstrated it in 1973. In the early 2000s, when 3G technology made
web-browsing feasible on mobiles, operators splashed out more than $100 billion
on radio-spectrum licences, only to find that the technology most had agreed to
use was harder to implement than expected.
The advent of 5G is likely to bring another splurge of investment, just as
orders for 4G equipment are peaking. The goal is to be able to offer users no
less than the perception of infinite capacity , says Rahim Tafazolli, director
of the 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey. Rare will be the
device that is not wirelessly connected, from self-driving cars and drones to
the sensors, industrial machines and household appliances that together
constitute the internet of things (IoT).
It is easy to dismiss all this as a lot of hype , in the words of Kester Mann
of CCS Insight, a research firm. When it comes to 5G, much is still up in the
air: not only which band of radio spectrum and which wireless technologies will
be used, but what standards makers of network gear and handsets will have to
comply with. Telecoms firms have reached consensus only on a set of rough
requirements . The most important are connection speeds of up to 10 gigabits
per second and response times ( latency ) of below 1 millisecond (see chart).
Yet the momentum is real. South Korea and Japan are front-runners in wired
broadband, and Olympic games are an opportunity to show the world that they
intend also to stay ahead in wireless, even if that may mean having to upgrade
their 5G networks to comply with a global standard once it is agreed. AT&T and
Verizon both invested early in 4G, and would like to lead again with 5G. The
market for network equipment has peaked, as recent results from Ericsson and
Nokia show, so the makers also need a new generation of products and new groups
of customers.
On the demand side, too, pressure is mounting for better wireless
infrastructure. The rapid growth in data traffic will continue for the
foreseeable future, says Sundeep Rangan of NYU Wireless, a department of New
York University. According to one estimate, networks need to be ready for a
1,000-fold increase in data volumes in the first half of the 2020s. And the
radio spectrum used by 4G, which mostly sits below 3 gigahertz, is running out,
and thus getting more expensive. An auction in America last year raked in $45
billion.
But the path to a 5G wireless paradise will not be smooth. It is not only the
usual telecoms suspects who will want a say in this mother of all networks.
Media companies will want priority to be given to generous bandwidth, so they
can stream films with ever higher resolution. Most IoT firms will not need much
bandwidth, but will want their sensors to run on one set of batteries for years
so they will want the 5G standard to put a premium on low power consumption.
Online-gaming firms will worry about latency: players will complain if it is
too high.
The most important set of new actors, however, are information-technology
firms. The likes of Apple, IBM and Samsung have a big interest not only in
selling more smartphones and other mobile devices, but also in IoT, which is
tipped to generate the next big wave of revenues for them and other companies.
Google, which already operates high-speed fibre-optic networks in several
American cities and may be tempted to build a wireless one, has shown an
interest in 5G. In 2014 it bought Alpental Technologies, a startup which was
developing a cheap, high-speed communications service using extremely high
radio frequencies, known as millimetre wave (mmWave), the spectrum bands
above 3 gigahertz where most of 5G is expected to live.
To satisfy all these actors will not be easy, predicts Ulf Ewaldsson, Ericsson
s chief technology officer. Questions over spectrum may be the easiest to
solve, in part because the World Radiocommunication Conference, established by
international treaty, will settle them. Its last gathering, in November, failed
to agree on the frequencies for 5G, but it is expected to do so when it next
meets in 2019. It is likely to carve out space in the mmWave bands. Tests such
as the one in Manhattan mentioned above, which are conducted by researchers
from NYU Wireless, have shown that such bands can be used for 5G: although they
are blocked even by thin obstacles, they can be made to bounce around them.
For the first time there will not be competing sets of technical rules, as was
the case with 4G, when LTE, now the standard, was initially threatened by
WiMax, which was bankrolled by Intel, a chipmaker. Nobody seems willing to play
Intel s role this time around. That said, 5G will be facing a strong
competitor, especially indoors: smartphone users are increasingly using Wi-Fi
connections for calls and texts as well as data. That means they have ever less
need for a mobile connection, no matter how blazingly fast it may be.
Evolution or revolution?
Technology divides the industry in another way, says St phane T ral of IHS, a
market-research firm. One camp, he says, wants 5G to take an evolutionary
path, use everything they have and make it better. It includes many existing
makers of wireless-network gear and some operators, which want to protect their
existing investments and take one step at a time. On February 11th, for
instance, Qualcomm, a chip-design firm, introduced the world s first 4G chip
set that allows for data-transmission speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second. It
does the trick by using a technique called carrier aggregation , which means
it can combine up to ten wireless data streams of 100 megabits per second.
The other camp, explains Mr T ral, favours a revolutionary approach: to jump
straight to cutting-edge technology. This could mean, for instance, leaving
behind the conventional cellular structure of mobile networks, in which a
single antenna communicates with all the devices within its cell. Instead, one
set of small antennae would send out concentrated radio beams to scan for
devices, then a second set would take over as each device comes within reach.
It could also mean analysing usage data to predict what kind of connectivity a
wireless subscriber will need next and adapt the network accordingly a
technique that the 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey wants to
develop.
One of the most outspoken representatives of the revolutionary camp is China
Mobile. For Chih-Lin I, its chief scientist, wireless networks, as currently
designed, are no longer sustainable. Antennae are using ever more energy to
push each extra megabit through the air. Her firm s position, she says, is
based on necessity: as the world s biggest carrier, with 1.1m 4G base stations
and 825m subscribers (more than all the European operators put together),
problems with the current network architecture are exacerbated by the firm s
scale. Sceptics suspect there may be an industrial agenda at work, that
favours Chinese equipment-makers and lowers the patent royalties these have to
pay. The more different 5G is from 4G, the higher the chances that China can
make its own intellectual property part of the standard.
Whatever the motivation, Ms I s vision of how 5G networks will ultimately be
designed is widely shared. They will not only be super fast , she says, but
green and soft , meaning much less energy-hungry and entirely controlled by
software. As with computer systems before them, much of a network s specialised
hardware, such as the processor units that sit alongside each cell tower, will
become virtualised that is, it will be replaced with software, making it far
easier to reconfigure. Wireless networks will become a bit like computing in
the online cloud , and in some senses will merge with it, using the same
off-the-shelf hardware.
Discussions have already begun about how 5G would change the industry s
structure. One question is whether wireless access will become even more of a
commodity, says Chetan Sharma, a telecoms consultant. According to his
estimates, operators share of total industry revenues has already fallen below
50% in America, with the rest going to mobile services such as Facebook s
smartphone apps, which make money through ads.
The switch to 5G could help the operators reverse that decline by allowing them
to do such things as market their own video content. But it is easier to
imagine their decline accelerating, turning them into low-margin dumb pipes .
If so, a further consolidation of an already highly concentrated industry may
be inevitable: some countries may be left with just one provider of wireless
infrastructure, just as they often have only one provider of water.
If the recent history of IT after the rise of cloud computing is any guide with
the likes of Dell, HP and IBM struggling to keep up network-equipment makers
will also get squeezed. Ericsson and Nokia already make nearly half of their
sales by managing networks on behalf of operators. But 5G may finally bring
about what has been long talked of, says Bengt Nordstrom of Northstream,
another consulting firm: the convergence of the makers of computers and
telecoms equipment, as standardisation and low margins force them together.
Last year Ericsson formed partnerships first with HP and then with Cisco. Full
mergers could follow at some point.
Big, ugly mobile-phone masts will also become harder to spot. Antennae will be
more numerous, for sure, but will shrink. Besides the rectangular array that
China Mobile is testing in Shanghai, it is also experimenting with smaller,
subtler tiles that can be combined and, say, embedded into the lettering on
the side of a building. In this sense, but few others, the future of mobile
telecoms will be invisible.