McGuire’s Law

I’ve spent the last two days in a meeting of Intel’s Communications Board of Advisors along with 20 other representatives from service providers around the world. It has been a very informative session. Since it has been under NDA, I can’t share with you the specific content, however, my key takeaway is public information and yet is eye opening.

It all starts in Intel’s wheelhouse - silicon. This week, Intel brought to market their Moorestown platform. Moorestown offers very competitive processor performance for the netbook and smartphone market. Intel would argue that Moorestown provides significantly higher performance than anything else on the market. However, the real game-changing factor here has less to do with performance and more to do with architecture. What Intel has done is take the same Intel Architecture (x86) that developers are used to developing for, which is always designed for forward and backward compatability, and driven breakthroughs so that it will work in a smartphone implementation with competitive battery life. The engineering achievements are huge, but the potential impact of having the exact same processor architecture in a smartphone as scales up to laptops, desktops, and even into data center environments has the potential to dramatically broaden the application landscape and sweeten the business case for mobile application development.

That Intel is pushing the envelope in the silicon space is no surprise. As Paul Otellini reminded us this morning, from an Intel perspective, at the end of the day everything has to conform to Moore’s Law and the laws of physics, and no one is better than Intel at scaling that Moore’s law progression into technology advances.

What was surprising to me is that Intel’s aggressiveness doesn’t stop at the silicon layer. As Otellini pointed out, Intel is increasingly becoming a software company.

On top of the silicon layer, Intel has made a big bet with MeeGo, a mobile platform intended to compete with the iPhone OS, Android, and other platforms. MeeGo has been contributed to the Linux Foundation, so it is truly open source with full transparency. MeeGo is the result of the combination of separate efforts from Intel and Nokia. By aligning with Nokia, Intel has significantly upped the ante in their software game, quickly translating MeeGo into a viable platform option that can gain operator support. MeeGo is intended to operate across smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and laptops. I believe that much of the question of whether Intel will succeed as a software company rests in their success with MeeGo, so this really is a huge bet for them.

Finally, on top of the operating system sits applications. The third step in Intel’s aggressive agenda is with a new approach to the app store phenomenon. The AppUp Center supports applications for MeeGo and Windows on devices ranging from smartphones to netbooks to tablets to “smart” TV platforms (another part of Intel’s strategy). Intel is also positioning the AppUp Center as an app store behind the app store, so folks like us mobile operators could have a fully customized store without having to worry about managing the developer program behind it.

Bottom line, when looking at these three separate initiatives, Intel has aggressively moved to take the best capabilities that have driven their success in the PC world (backward and forward compatibility, scalability, a vibrant developer ecosystem) and brought it into the mobile world. They have also created and open sourced the replacement for Windows in that mobile world, and have learned from the recent history of what drives adoption and habituation (the app store phenomenon) and tied it all together into a package that is designed to be attractive to the rest of the ecosystem (operators, OEMs, and application developers).

This is a very aggressive agenda. It will be interesting to see how this big bet plays out.

From last Friday’s Dilbert:

Raleigh, North Carolina has just been named “America’s Most Wired City” by Forbes magazine. Ironically, it’s Raleigh’s wireless chops that earned it this title!

“The city’s downtown is covered by a wi-fi network that is free to users. Operator Sprint Nextel ( S - news - people ) recently launched its “4G” next-generation mobile broadband in Raleigh and the rest of the ‘Triangle’–months before larger cities like Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., will get the service.”

Having started my telecom career working in Research Triangle Park, and enjoying the benefits of being surrounded by North Carolina State University (Raleigh), Duke University (Durham), and the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), I can appreciate the forward thinking-ness of the Triangle and why it’s been a great place for Sprint’s 4G service.

In fact, the Triangle was the first place we ever trialed “4G” services - way back in 2004, Nextel launched trials of a new service using technology from Flarion. What we learned there was instrumental to the definition of the services we later launched as Sprint 4G.

Way to go Raleigh! Maybe next year you can win the real prize - being named by Forbes America’s Most Wireless City!

I think I may have mentioned this before, but it still continues to puzzle me, so I thought it deserved its own post. Feel free to post a comment if you can help me figure this one out.

At the CES show earlier this month, Sprint dropped the pricing on dual mode 3G/4G plans to be the same as the price that everyone charges for just 3G ($59.99/month).

So, given:

• With a 3G/4G plan, if you’re in the 10% of the country where Sprint has 4G, you get average download speeds of 3-6Mbps (where 3G has average download speeds near 1Mbps).
• If you’re in that 10% of the country, you get truly unlimited usage - no cap. (All 3G plans from all carriers have a cap - best case at 5GB/month.)
• (By the end of the year, that 10% will grow to be about a third of the country.)
• If you aren’t in an area where Sprint has 4G, you almost definitely are where Sprint has 3G. Sprint’s 3G network covers about 5x as much territory as AT&T’s 3G network and is about the same coverage as Verizon.
• In Sprint’s 3G territory, you get what Gizmodo found to be the fastest download speeds of any 3G network. (Although, you still have the same 5GB/month cap in 3G territories that you’d get on any 3G-only plan.)
• (And if you work for a large business, you probably already know how well Sprint treats it’s customers.)

So - back to my question - why would anyone buy standalone 3G, when they can get all the benefits of 3G, plus the extra benefits of 4G in a growing slice of the country, all for the same price?

My latest article on mobility for Christian Computing Magazine has just been published in the January issue. You can read the full article here, but here’s a snippet to give you a taste:

In the book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christenson introduced the concept of disruptive technologies. “Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. “

Cellphones generally don’t provide as good of sound as their wire-line grandfathers. This is simply a matter of physics – the need to compress the audio signal to consume less available bandwidth, and then operating all of that in a dynamic, somewhat unpredictable environment. Wireless voice service also generally costs more than landline voice service. When initially introduced, the new value proposition of mobility only appealed to a very limited audience. However, as prices have fallen, call quality and reliability have improved, and as we have become a much more mobile and connected society, increasing numbers of us are cutting the cord and taking all of our voice traffic wireless.

The same phenomenon holds absolutely true for mobile data. Wireless data provides less bandwidth at a higher price than the existing wired solutions, initially addressing the needs of a very limited market. But technology advances and increasing scale have improved performance and reduced costs, which, combined with our increasing mobility, results in very broad adoption of wireless for data. Today, the wired Ethernet market is suffering at the hands of various flavors of WiFi. Meanwhile, mobile broadband choices (especially the now emerging 4G offers) are making it viable to cut the cord on data as well.

In Christensen’s terminology, the traditional telecom industry has been disrupted by new wireless technologies.

Wireless Connectivity Built In
However, I think there’s a larger (but hidden) revolution happening.

I believe that, just as microprocessors have been built into virtually every type of product that has a power source, over the next several years; wireless connectivity will be built into virtually every type of product that has a microprocessor. For the past few years I’ve been tracking this trend with a monthly post at my blog called “Beyond the Phone.” I see this trend increasing, and becoming increasingly strategic to the definition of competition across industries. What does this look like? There are a couple of examples that are easy to understand.

Personal Navigation
The first example is GPS-based personal navigation devices (PND). You probably know these products by their manufacturers, with the industry leaders being Garmin and Tom Tom. This sector has come under tremendous pressure from cellphone-based navigation software in a typical Christensen-like disruptive play.

Early cellphone GPS solutions cost just $10/month, putting price pressure on standalone GPS devices which typically cost (at the time) nearly $1000. To make matters worse, in 2008 Sprint started bundling free navigation service in their Simply Everything price plans, further pressuring PND companies. More recently, Google has started providing a free version of their Google Maps web-based service with turn-by-turn directions. While these cellphone-based solutions don’t perform as well as standalone units in terms of satellite acquisition, battery life, and in-car integration, they do offer hard to beat prices plus real-time information including construction detours and traffic delays.

Garmin, Tom Tom, and others in the PND business have responded with reduced pricing, but have also had to respond by integrating wireless connectivity into their devices in order to match the real-time information provided by cellphone-based solutions. (For example, see Garmin’s nuLink services.)

Electronic Book Readers
The second example is the electronic book reader market. eReaders have been available for years, with Sony being the most aggressive of consumer electronics companies in pursuing the opportunity. However, the market has been very limited.

Just over two years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle, an eReader with one very powerful differentiator – Amazon had worked with Sprint to integrate wireless connectivity into the device. This enabled Amazon to make it very easy for consumers to search Amazon’s large (and rapidly growing) catalog of electronic titles, purchase, download, and within about a minute, start reading a new title. The Kindle was an immediate phenomenon, and this most recent Christmas, Amazon (one of the world’s largest booksellers) sold more eBooks than physical books!

The company went on to launch two more versions of the Kindle with Sprint, including a version intended to replace your daily newspaper (in partnership with the New York Times and other publishers) and intended to lighten the load of textbooks carried by college students (in partnership with Princeton and four other universities). In the past few months, a number of competitors have launched eReader products with features similar to the Kindle, and Amazon has launched a new version of the Kindle with AT&T connectivity to expand globally.

More important than the actual devices, these eReader products are redefining the business model for publishers. Some believe eReaders can save the publishing industry, while others believe it will eliminate the need for publishers. In any case, the entire industry will be changed.

My interview at the Telco 2.0 event in December (from TelecomTV):

Rudy De Waele invited me to participate in a broad view of the coming decade. An impressive set of visionaries from across the mobile ecosystem provided their perspectives on the next 10 years. Set aside some time to be able to absorb the presentation below (you’ll want to view it in full screen).

Here are the 5 trends I contributed:

1. Just as microprocessors have been built into virtually every product that has a power source, over the next ten years, it will become expected that wireless connectivity will be built into virtually every product that has a microprocessor.
2. Businesses will redefine virtually every internal process and virtually every service they offer customers to leverage wireless access to information and contextual data to create new value for customers, to grow their addressable markets, and to reduce their operating costs.
3. Fixed line broadband will overshoot the performance needs of the market, resulting in increasing data cord cutting as individuals, families, and businesses appreciate the value of mobility more than the value of excess bandwidth.
4. By the end of the decade, mobile devices will be thought of first for the applications they run rather than for their ability to make voice calls.
5. In the U.S., the Obama administration will stimulate significant expansion of the mobile market through regulatory policies (e.g. reduced backhaul costs) and direct and indirect stimulus investments (e.g. wireless broadband, smart grid).

Over at Seamless Enterprise, I’ve just posted a set of ten predictions for businesses and telecom/mobility for the new year. In that post, I provide some commentary about each of the predictions, so head over there to read it, but here’s the list to give you an idea of what you’ll find:

1. Businesses accelerate arming the mobile workforce
2. Businesses invest in productivity gains
3. 4G fixed line replacement
4. Irrelevance of 3G single mode
5. Businesses broaden their internal M2M deployments
6. Wireless connectivity becomes increasingly popular in consumer electronics
7. Applications for businesses
8. Smartphone adoption
9. Mobility built into processes
10. Mobility built into services

Wikipedia defines a smart mob as “a form of self-structuring social organization through technology-mediated, intelligent emergent behavior…. A smart mob is a group that, contrary to the usual connotations of a mob, behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially increasing network links. This network enables people to connect to information and others, allowing a form of social coordination.” and “The concept was introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.”

Roughly two millennia ago we hear of this story involving angelic communications technology:

And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. (Luke 2:8-20 ESV)

and

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet:

“‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler
who will shepherd my people Israel.’”

Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.” After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way. (Matthew 2:1-12 ESV)

Merry Christmas!

My most recent column for Christian Computing Magazine is the cover story for the December issue. I think the topic is of interest to my loyal blog readers as well!

Check out the full story, but here are a few excerpts. As I’ve noted before, the CCM audience is a bit less wireless-savvy than readers here, so I apologize that this is a bit over-simplified in places:

Now that it seems the whole world has adopted mobility for more than just talking, everyone’s focused on the data network as the critical element for the future. In fact, while most of us are just getting our arms around 3G, you may have started seeing ads for 4G services. So what is 4G and why does it matter?

4G is shorthand for fourth generation cellular services. The first generation of cellular was a simple, analog voice-only network. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) started auctioning spectrum for 1G networks in 1982 and by 1985 there were 340,000 wireless subscribers. The second generation was digital, which provided significantly better utilization of the radio frequencies (spectrum) to support more calls. 2G also supported data transmissions, roughly at dial-up modem speeds (generally up to 64kbps). The first 2G network was deployed in Finland in 1991. In the U.S., 2G networks eventually evolved to either GSM (based on Time Division Multiplexing or TDMA) or CDMA (Code Division Multiplexing) technology standards.

Starting in the mid-1990s, people began speaking of advanced mobile communications services that often were referred to as “personal communications services” (PCS). A third-generation cellular architecture, with high-speed packet switching at the core, was expected to support these new services. The FCC began auctioning new spectrum for these services in 1994. However, it took over a decade for 3G networks to actually be ready. In between, most carriers launched networks that were referred to as 2.5G. These interim networks inserted a packet network, but only stepped up the bandwidth to about 144kbps.

Finally, in 2005, Verizon and Sprint started rolling out true 3G services. Today’s 3G services (EV-DO for Verizon and Sprint, HSPA for AT&T and T-Mobile) deliver roughly DSL speeds – typically about 1Mbps downstream and about 400Kbps upstream. 3G coverage is fairly comprehensive for Verizon and Sprint, while AT&T and T-Mobile cover the major metropolitan areas. Outside of 3G coverage areas, most carriers still provide 2.5G services, so you aren’t completely out of luck.

As cellular technology, 1G, 2G, and 3G all operate with a cellular architecture, meaning that a cell site (think of the towers you see alongside the highway, although many cell sites are more discrete these days) covers a given area, typically with a radius of 1 – 5 miles. As you reach the boundary of that cell, your signal is handed off to the next cell. If you’re on a call, the call continues through the handoff. If you aren’t on a call, the network recognizes that you’ve switched cells in order for it to route the call to you when someone dials your number.

So, what is 4G? As you would guess, fourth generation cellular networks take it to the next level. Architecturally, packet switching is more deeply embedded, creating an end-to-end IP network. Technologically, time division multiplexing and code division multiplexing are replaced by orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). 4G networks make much better use of spectrum. Individual connections are typically in the 5Mbps range or higher (think cable modem speeds). And the cost to operate is expected to drop to about 20% per megabit compared to 3G networks.

Sprint launched the first 4G network, starting in Baltimore in October 2008. Today, Sprint has expanded the service to about 25 cities covering about 10% of the U.S. population. The company expects to have about a third of the country’s population covered by the end of 2010. Verizon expects to launch its first 4G markets late in 2010 and similarly expects to cover about a third of the country by the end of that year. Sprint is using a 4G technology called WiMax. Verizon plans to use a technology called LTE. They are both OFDM-based technologies. Neither AT&T nor T-Mobile plan to launch 4G during 2010.

So, why would anyone care about 4G? 4G services promise a 5 fold increase in speed at roughly the same price. I believe that unlimited is an important differentiator for 4G, and one that is hard for the carriers to match on 3G because of the significantly higher operating costs.

But moving beyond the immediate “what’s in it for me,” the other reason to care about 4G is the broader picture of available network capacity. In a paper titled “Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era,” Chetan Sharma observed that for 2009, the global mobile data traffic will reach one Exabyte (1000 Terabytes). This year, some carriers suffered from not having enough capacity in their networks to keep up with growing mobile data usage. By 2017, Sharma expects the global mobile data traffic volume to reach one Zettabyte (1000 Exabytes). If 3G networks are struggling today, how will they handle a 1000 fold increase over the next several years?

The answer is 4G. The new networks are not only using technology that makes more efficient use of the available radio spectrum, but are being built with big new blocks of that spectrum. For example, Sprint has about 50MHz of spectrum for its 2G and 3G networks. But the company’s Clearwire business holds over 120MHz of new 4G spectrum. That new spectrum with efficient radio technology, combined with new micro-network technologies like picocells and femtocells which offload the needs of users in predictable less-mobile areas like the home and office, will significantly stretch the networks to be able to meet the coming tidal wave of bandwidth demand.

What does that mean for you and me? Most importantly it means that we’ll actually be able to enjoy the speed promised by 4G when and where we need it.

And that’s what mobility is all about! So, I say – bring on the 4G!