The Mobile World Congress question: Is it better to go visit people on their stands and filter their undiluted marketing, or to sit in your meeting room like the Sybil and hear truth in the distillations of others? Being hopelessly overbooked the whole week, mine was the latter path. Here’s my take on a few of the shadows dancing across the walls of the ip.access cave (which was in Hall 7, by the way).
Four things struck me through the week: the rapid evolution and commercial relevance of the internet of things; the continuing mystery of open source radio access network; the emerging importance of extreme low latency as the key differentiator in the “Alice in Wonderland” of “5G” technology; and my personal favorite, a few neutral host announcements. The common theme? Connectivity. Below the radar for most, but the essential underpinning to everything.
IoT
I attended the GSMA preshow IoT event and was impressed by the three case studies presented. One was academic rather than commercial – tracking harbor seals in Orkney by the University of St Andrews – but no less valuable for that.
The other two epitomized that universal truth of innovation: you can’t tell where you’re going until you get there.
One presentation from RM2 talking about their work in equipping high-tech pallets with IoT sensors looks to transform the logistics industry from being the ultimate in zero-tech to being one of centrally managed and coordinated efficiency. You can imagine the elevator pitch: “We’re going to take the 15 billion wooden pallets in the world, double their cost (at least), make them out of glass-fiber composite, equip them with the most up to date electronics and transform the whole supply chain industry.” No shortage of ambition, but anything that proposes to double the base cost of a wafer-thin margin business is on a challenging journey. The emerging benefits in terms of always-ready delivery, route security, theft and hi-jack prevention more than make up for it, it turns out. Who’d’a thought it?
And the third use case proved the rule again – equipping the water supply and waste network with IoT sensors. South East Water from Australia showed the benefits of doing that not just in the obvious applications of flow, pressure and temperature measurement, but also if you listen to the flow you can deduce the efficiency of the pumps from the sounds of the turbulence they induce. And if you collect enough of that data from around the network, you get a much improved view of the state of repair of the whole network – programming maintenance, preventing leaks and downtime, saving cost and improving customer satisfaction on a vast scale. They can even provide an early warning system for the elderly and infirm by tracking changes in water consumption patterns while they’re at it. This is something you can’t see from a distance – you have to make the journey to appreciate the view (and its value).
To be honest, people are still feeling their way with IoT in some places, especially where the technology and politics collide – one parking space management application we heard about at the show was vetoed by local government because they wanted everyone to use the bus. But the balance of evidence from the show is that the transformation of IoT from interesting technology to commercial imperative is nearly complete.
Open source
Canonical/Ubuntu hosted an ecosystem of players in Hall 3, including IoT and most relevantly for us, cellular RAN. Last year, if you remember, there was a lot of buzz around Mark Zuckerberg launching the Facebook Telecom Infrastructure Project. Less buzz around that this year, but the open source model seems to have taken some root. Canonical was sponsoring the idea of the “snap” framework to allow applications to be installed and hosted simply and reliably at the network edge. I’m still confused about how end users benefit (and the rest of us make money) from what appears to be semicontrolled chaos. Is this simply a neat deployment framework for network edge applications, including access, or is there more to it?
There’s nothing new under the sun, it’s true, but its passage through the sky brings new things to light, taking others into shade. How the open source community deals with the definitely not new and always in broad daylight issues of carrier-grade quality, regulatory compliance, and seamless feature continuity is yet to be tested at this level. Feels like there is something qualitatively different about open source infrastructure compared with end user applications, but I’m keeping an open mind.
5G
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
And so it is with “5G.” Did two characters in combination ever create so much confusion as these? But one aspect of 5G seemed to me to be emerging as the differentiator – its latency. There were lots of virtual reality demos on stands – all more-or-less 5G related. One conversation made the important distinction between augmented reality and VR: augmenting reality (with real-time translation, direction finding and map overlay for instance) has a lot more commercially identifiable use cases and is easier to deliver technically than creating a whole universe from a blank slate – a point on which science and religion might agree, for a change.
But back to latency – the key to augmenting or virtually creating reality convincingly is to do it faster than the eye can follow. Interdigital showed an AR demo on their stand (which was right opposite ours, so its light as well as the sound of their end-of-day Spanish reggae band penetrated our cave) showing the importance of latency in accurately guiding the surgeon’s knife in a remotely controlled procedure. Framed as a computer game, it nevertheless showed that 4G networks can only go so far in ultra-time critical applications such as these.
Neutral host
We announced the evolution of our multi-operator, neutral host vision Viper2020 and a range of new products to support it, but a couple of other announcements caught my eye. Distributed antenna systems providers Zinwave and Solid both extended their neutral host support in their solutions, each in their own way. Zinwave provided a point-of-interconnect for multiple small calls, whereas Solid went the whole hog and provided the signal sources themselves.
And what do these have in common?
The reliability of connectivity is an unspoken requirement in all of these. Whether it’s simply the coverage required for the internet of things that cannot be achieved from the existing macro network alone (despite the assurances of many who portray it as simply a software upgrade to the macro), or the coverage and capacity requirement to serve the Ubuntu “snaps” from the edge or the innovative edge architecture required to offer millisecond latency hand-to-eye coordination, it’s all nothing without a good quality small cell radio access network.
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