Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before, but reliable wireless connectivity has become an essential facet of daily life. The new survival kit contains food, water, comfortable shoes, and bandwidth. 2021 is in the rear-view mirror and now we look forward to what’s on the horizon in 2022. Data consumption continues to grow exponentially, and the main data drivers are starting to become machines rather than Tik Tok videos. The 5G era is a connected vision, and providing data capacity to satiate the hungry masses of devices will continue to be a challenge.
Panic on the streets of San Jose
We have seen our share of COVID-19-induced panic buying the last couple of years, but instead of toilet paper and disinfecting wipes, in 2021 we saw the US mobile carriers participate in panic buying of mid-band 5G spectrum. Between the two 5G spectrum auctions held in 2021, the carriers spent more than a jaw-dropping, eye-popping ONE HUNDRED BILLION dollars! These wireless operators are on a shopping spree because they know something that the average person does not … we are running out of spectrum. A report published in 2021 by GSMA recommends that urban areas make an average of 2 GHz of mid-band spectrum available in order to support the growth of data traffic through 2030.
The 2021 US spectrum auctions are just a small drop in the ocean toward the GSMA recommendation, but before you start stocking up on shotgun shells and bottled water, don’t panic yet. There are a variety of tools in the arsenal to help deliver ubiquitous 5G connectivity. Mobile data traffic will, of course, rely on Wi-Fi offload, but to handle the non-mobile 5G use cases such as IoT, automotive, industrial, etc. we will need to dig deeper into the toolkit. Spatial reuse is an ideal solution for mid-band spectrum, requiring a combination of multi-antenna MIMO technology as well as smaller cell sizes (aka small cells). However, a conundrum this year for mid-band small cells is the deployment cost: capital cost, the logistics of getting the permission to install radios on city infrastructure (light poles, buildings, et al), as well as the sheer number of site deployments that are required for coverage and capacity.
An emerging trend that seeks to address the capital cost is the democratization of cellular radio units (RU). The O-RAN Alliance is working to open the closed ecosystem of cellular infrastructure equipment by disaggregating the components of the system, enabling RUs to be interoperable between different vendors and even enabling them to be shared by multiple operators. Inviting additional hardware competitors to the space will drive down the capital expense of the equipment through the creative destruction of capitalism. Interoperability testing will be key for O-RAN in 2022 to ensure the feasibility of driving this new ecosystem.
Addressing the deployment challenge of the required number of sites requires a business case beyond the mobile handset. The operators need to be able to ensure a return on investment to blanket a city in mid-band coverage beyond a little market share shift in mobile subscriptions. Fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband services could be the revenue stream that justifies this investment. Additionally, many of these wireless carriers are already sitting on a reserve of relatively unused mmWave licensed spectrum, which can be tapped to provide additional capacity. The combination of mid-band and mmWave infrastructure can truly “cut the cord” for areas where fiber internet services are not available.
Rolling out FWA services additionally requires deployment of customer premises equipment (CPE) to translate the wide-area 5G signal to Wi-Fi inside the home or office. A key metric for CPE devices is the data throughput, as there are two potential bottlenecks for the user experience. Testing must ensure that a quality 5G signal is measured and transmitted to the core network, and equally on the other end, the quality of the Wi-Fi signal must be ensured so as not to degrade the peak throughput from the network.
October spawned a monster
As we were on the cusp of getting into the holiday season in 2021, Facebook announced that it was changing its name and embossed one of the buzzwords of the year on our brains: the metaverse. While I’m not predicting that 2022 is the year where humans become a tacitly zombified energy supply for a horde of sentient machines, it is worth pondering what technology advancements are required in order to deliver on a more pleasant portrait of the metavision.
What is it like to be in the metaverse today? Fortunately, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal spent 24 hours in the metaverse so that you don’t have to. We get a glimpse into the multi-avatar, legless voyage through some inconsistent app experiences as well as some uniquely exciting visuals, separated by short breaks between latency-induced motion sickness. On our journey to The Matrix, we need improvements in processing, latency, and many more sensors.
A big puzzle piece to delivering on the virtual reality experience is the actual wearable. From a wireless technology point of view, several technologies have been employed to cut the umbilical to the accompanying processing unit. Wi-Fi is the most practical wireless tech for cost-performance – it has the consumer-grade price point, the deployment practicality of unlicensed spectrum, and has the speed to deliver high-definition video to the head-worn unit. However, even with the latest generation of Wi-Fi 6, it suffers from inconsistent latency, making prone to inducing waves of nausea on the user after prolonged usage.
Development is already underway for the next generation of Wi-Fi, which will inevitably be called “Wi-Fi 7,” based on the 802.11be IEEE standard. Wi-Fi 7 is poised to be the ideal wireless connectivity technology for virtual reality applications. Where Wi-Fi 6 has the speed to wirelessly deliver high-quality, high-speed video, Wi-Fi 7 brings scheduling and reliable quality-of-service which results in significantly shorter latency. It also doesn’t hurt if you can deploy in the 6 GHz band where legacy Wi-Fi devices do not operate and generate unwanted packet collisions. We won’t be seeing Wi-Fi 7 devices hitting store shelves in 2022, but silicon development is proceeding, and we are working on ensuring that these next-generation products can deliver on these new, real-time features.
The more you ignore me, the closer I get
Technology adoption and security has always been a game of cat and mouse. The convenience introduced by devices that incorporate wireless technologies inevitably includes potential vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit. It is becoming difficult to imagine inserting a physical key into a physical keyhole on your car, but the same technology that enables you to enter and start your car without removing the key from your pocket can also be used to steal your car out of the driveway while you sleep.
Ultimately, a big factor in wireless security is how you authenticate identity or position. In the case of a wireless car key fob, a thief doesn’t need to be an expert in cryptography to decrypt the encoded signal between the key and the car, they simply have to make the car believe that the key is closer to the car than it really is – a relatively simple record and playback attack. The reason that this is possible is that the key is authenticated as being close to the car by the signal strength. The key could be on your kitchen table, but from the car’s point of view in a “man in the middle” relay attack, it is right outside the driver’s door.
A wireless technology is specifically seeking to solve this authentication vulnerability in a different way, using time, rather than signal strength, to enable secure access. Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology uses time-of-flight to determine distance, which is not only a more secure method, but is also considerably more accurate (centimeter-level vs. meter-level precision).
UWB has been quietly proliferating in a variety of devices, starting with the smartphone. In 2022 we will see it adopted in a wider variety of products – from cars to the smart home to industrial applications. The accurate ranging capability that UWB enables not only improves security, it also creates “positional awareness” for devices, which opens up the possibility of new use-cases: convenience, safety, or even energy efficiency. When devices can understand where they are in their environment, they can understand context.
A key piece of building this ecosystem of contextually aware devices is making sure that they are interoperable. In the second half of 2021, the FiRa Consortium introduced a certification program, that is focused on ensuring that products that incorporate UWB technology adhere to a set of rules that aid in providing a seamless user experience. The FiRa PHY Conformance specification validates that different providers’ certified devices successfully transmit and receive these extremely wideband, low power signals.
How soon is now?
We are living on an exponential curve of data consumption. When you are early on an exponential curve, it might not be so apparent how significant the growth rate is. If you were standing in an empty pool where water was doubling every minute, by the time the water hits your ankles, you might think that you still have plenty of time to get out, but you’re just four minutes from drowning. We are now getting into a steeper part of the curve. At the current rate, wireless data capacity needs to double every two to three years. Fortunately, wireless data doesn’t need to just flow through a single channel, but it is going to take a combination of new spectrum deployment, spatial reuse, and smaller cell sizes to keep up with insatiable generation and consumption of data.
