Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Capacity, capacity, capacity
Funny how the wireless world changes fast. I spent a few days at Rutberg's Wireless Influencer this week in San Diego (awesome event, if you get an invitation do not miss it) and I kept hearing the same word over and over: capacity. The network capacity. We do not have enough bandwidth. The iPhone is sucking our network dry. The networks are at risk of collapsing. Screw network neutrality, we need bandwidth management and app profiling. We have to deploy 4G quickly, but someone has to pay for it.Ok, I get it. The AT&T network in San Francisco (and New York, I am told) are collapsing under the iPhone influence. You get in the city and your phone says "resource not available", when you are trying to make a call. The data portion of the network is saturated (I am told, because of the backhaul, whatever that is :-) and all of a sudden I can't even call 911. Weird and scary at the same time.
If you go back one year or maybe two, the message you would hear from carriers was: we have too much capacity. We built this 3G network for data and there is no data. We spent all this money for what?
Now, it is the opposite. It is all ooooops, data growth is exponential. With conservative prediction, we are all screwed ;-)
One of the solution carriers are talking about: wi-fi. I mean, wi-fi!! Their enemy… They now want to push as much traffic to wi-if to offload their networks. An Asian carrier summed it up: "A year ago, wi-fi was our worst enemy. Today, it is our best ally". See, the world changes fast in wireless.
Will the network collapse taking the mobile internet with it, leaving us all out naked in the cold? I do not think so. I am an optimist. I can't help but think about the third World Wide Web conference I attended in Boston in 1995 (good memory, even more because I am in Boston today). A pundit stood on stage and said: "With this rate of growth in traffic, I predict the Internet will collapse. If it has not happened in a year, I promise I will be back on this stage and eat this piece of paper". I did not go to the fourth WWW - if there was one - so I do not know if he swallowed his paper, but I can tell you the Internet did not collapse.
The mobile Internet will not collapse either. There is way too much money at stake. Way too many business plans built on it. Clearwire pushing for 4G, which forces everyone else to upgrade to LTE quickly. Better devices, better experiences for users, better monetization for everyone, from device manufacturers, to carriers, to portals, to application developers. Capacity is going to be there to sustain all this.
Capacity is always there, when there is money to be made. And the mobile Internet is the greatest money-making opportunity in our lifetime (yes, more than the wired Internet). No chance a bunch of iPhones will take that away from this industry. It might be painful for a bit, but it is going to go quickly. Capacity will be there.
Believe me, the world changes quickly in wireless. Next year at Wireless Influencers people will talk about something else.
Posted by Fabrizio at 16:31
5 Comments:
Current Pix said...
Interesting!
Just to complete your usage picture:
The carriers are wireless tubes in the middle: doing their best to accomodate the growing Bandwidth demand from both sides of the tube:
1) "iPhone sucking our network dry" on the terminal end
2) The Virtualized/Cloud Computing offers (Twitter, Gmail, Skype, YouTube, etc.) pumping data from the Content/Service end.
Comment Posted at 02:41
Sachin said...
Well said.
In my opinion mobile operators dont doubt that capacity will become available. Instead, they are concerned about the pace of traffic growth as compared to their networks' evolution.
Forget the operator's network, even nimble terminal manufacturers (Apples and Nokias) aren't able to soup up their offerings to match the data driven needs of users. For example, Wifi works, but drains batteries fast. It just wasnt designed for battery operated smartphones in the first place.
I think suitable high-bandwdth technology is going to roll out in the timeframe of several years and not months and this will pace mobile Internet growth in general.
Comment Posted at 10:02
Current Pix said...
Sachin, Fabrizio, there are some clever people here!
My days with a one of the biggest Operators in the US, and then dealing with the top 5 Operators in EMEA have convinced me that capacity is not the issue... it is about how the Operators can MONITIZE the content on their networks (the old "fat minutes on the network model that they used to love). For this, they have to become content managers/providers, which they are NOT good at.
Comment Posted at 14:54
Until recently Verizon resisted supporting WiFi. Now that WiFi is found to complement wireless rather than be a predator, Verizon is finally caving to customer demand and, ever so slowly, offering WiFi enabled phones. Thanks to competition from AT&T, Verizon seems to have also dropped their practice of disabling Blue tooth profiles, but they still seem to limit GPS use. Until Verizon truly opens up their networks they will continue to bleed customers. Maybe this bandwidth crunch is just what is needed to get Verizon to provide their customers with the features they want?
Comment Posted at 14:12
Stephen A. Brown said...
Verizon's GPS limitations are going to be their downfall in the near future if they don't stop playing around.
Their 'walled garden' approach may be fine for application development and related security issues, but to include that approach by limiting GPS availability to third-party software is just going too far.
I had a BlackBerry 8830 when it first came out. I was disappointed with the crippling of the 8830's internal GPS chip--so that the device only worked with their proprietary VZ Navigator app/service--so much that I eventually traded it to a private party for an unlocked 8800 I used on T-Mobile for a while. The 8800 had a great SiRF GPS chipset that is still tops in the embedded, on-chip-GPS world.
GPS is an integral part of my life.
Business-wise, I use it for finding client locations, use it to keep track of new stores to visit or that I happen upon, places to eat, etc. Anything even remotely related to business usage.
Recreation-wise, I use it for the GPS-dependent sport of Geocaching (www.geocaching.com). It's the biggest, world-wide 'treasure hunt' ever conceived, and is active on the North American continent, Europe (Germany, in particular, has a high percentage of Geocachers), Asia, and even on some of the island nations.
Saying 'Geocaching and Geocachers are everywhere' wouldn't be too far off the mark, and it is my chief, outdoor pastime these days.
I have a Garmin Etrex Vista HCx--a high-senstivity, mapping-enabled GPS Receiver--on my hip in a belt-holster 95% of the time. This is so I can take a quick GPS reading of where I am, save a waypoint, and post-process it into Google Earth, Garmin's MapSource mapping software, or just about any other program that will convert a Garmin GPS waypoint. (Most available mapping software will do this type of conversion.)
I use a Palm Pre for everything else, and that phone's GPS is stellar! A built-in compass--like the iPhone 3Gs-- would've been nice, but other than that, it's great! Once it's locked on, it tends to stay that way, and I can't flout WebOS enough. I'm learning-disabled with organizational difficulties, and the way that the Pre handles information and multi-tasks is a godsend! I used to use a BlackBerry Curve before I got the Pre, and, to me, the difference is incredible!
I'd be quite--pardon the pun--'lost' without it.
Summarizing, GPS isn't a 'might be nice to have' add-on. A robust, highly sensitive (to the slightest movement) GPS receiver circuit--preferably with an internal electronic compass (magnetometer)--is mandatory for today's handheld devices...at least if they're meant to be serious ones!
Warmest Regards,
Stephen (Firefishe)
