Dr Marty Cooper
There is an irony in there somewhere because he goes on to suggest that 'open' platforms are part of the solution, which is to say open markets. I'm not sure if he was a one-time advocate of the 'Open RF networks' myth, which says that any device can do what it likes, which, by the way, has not been proven to work with any RF technology (and we will get to the spatial multiplexing idea in a minute).
Following the credit-crunch fiasco, worshippers at the altar of uncontrolled markets might not be so keen any more on the notion that the market works in our best interests - i.e. logically. In fact, markets, were they a person, would most likely be seen to be quite irrational creatures. Certainly, according to various theories of innovation, irrationality is exactly what it takes to produce seismic shifts in an industry.
The double irony is that the success of the wireless industry is in large part due to the open standard of GSM and the relatively open competition brought about be deregulated telco markets that allowed multiple players to obtain RF licenses. Moreover, it is not a wireless industry. It is very much a wireless-voice industry with the anomaly of texting, although not so anomalous when we consider that texting was really conceived in the image of an ancestral industry called paging.
But let's get to the five, as they make interesting conversation, which is what we're here to engage in.
1. Most cell phone conversations are held indoors, yet all the base stations and towers are located outdoors.
There isn't really an indoor/outdoor decision to be made about base stations. What matters is where the RF waves end up, not where they start. The issue is coverage. Also, what users really want from cellular is ubiquitous coverage, not 'mostly indoor' coverage because they are 'mostly indoors.'
What Dr Cooper is getting at here, as he says, is the use of Femtocells, which are tiny indoor base stations with a cell that nominally covers the house. This is not a new idea. Most GSM infrastructure providers built prototypes like this many years ago, for a number of reasons. Femtocells provide a nice solution for those who don't get any 3G coverage in their homes. In some markets, there is potentially a business case for providing Femtocell base-stations for this reason alone. 
Ubiquisys Femtocell
Of course, the added benefit is that with such optimal coverage in the home - your own dedicated cell - you get the bees-knees performance from your mobile and might want to use it all the time instead of a fixed landline. Thus, fixed-mobile convergence becomes attractive. The operator can charge a different rate for access via the Femtocell, exploiting fixed broadband access for the backhaul.
As I have argued before, the availability of Femtocells is potentially very exciting as a catalyst for crossing the chasm of consumer data services on mobiles, notwithstanding the ongoing issue with user interface limitations.
With all that reliable and super-fast 3.5G bandwidth available at low cost, we could do lots of things to encourage users to take advantage of it. We can even think about squirting data into user's phones in the background (caching) and giving an unsurpassed user experience. There are various opportunities here, which is perhaps what made Google excited enough to invest in Femtocells. (the company - Ubiquisys - is just around the corner from me.)
We might then find, as Dr Cooper says about voice, that lots of users end up surfing the net in their homes on their mobiles - what's the betting that kids will do this more than on the desktop? I think that the odds are high. Even my wife does a good deal of her surfing in the home on her iPhone.
And then there's the whole home automation and IPTV-convergence scenarios to think about. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself, as usual. That's more future innovation stuff, but where a lot of the product innovation is right now.
This all hinges on finding a business model to put Femtocells in the home in the first place. The jury is still out.
2. The Internet proved that an open network will invite a myriad of applications to serve the needs of just about everyone, yet the wireless industry still clings to the “walled garden” idea of closed networks and development.
2. The Internet proved that an open network will invite a myriad of applications to serve the needs of just about everyone, yet the wireless industry still clings to the “walled garden” idea of closed networks and development.
This is an exaggeration, but we all know the problem. It doesn't need regurgitating here. Fellow mobilist Ajit Jaokar came to the fore with the 'open gardens' argument, which is ongoing. I refer you to his Open Gardens blog.
3. The idea behind efficient wireless signal transmission is to deliver radio frequency energy to specific individuals at the time each individual’s device needs to transmit or receive information, yet wireless signals are constantly broadcast every which way, in all directions, which is a really inefficient way to connect.
3. The idea behind efficient wireless signal transmission is to deliver radio frequency energy to specific individuals at the time each individual’s device needs to transmit or receive information, yet wireless signals are constantly broadcast every which way, in all directions, which is a really inefficient way to connect.
Ah yes, the spatial multiplexing wotsit. I used to work in Motorola R&D, so I know the thirst for this type of solution because it is one of those technologies that is so alluring because of its promise to deliver close to the theoretical maximum capacity for an RF network.
Squirting the RF to where it needs to go - the mobiles.
You see, the fundamental limitation with wireless is interference. RF is messy stuff. Once you let the magic out of the antenna, it tends to whizz off in all directions, not unlike a game of Quidditch (spelling?) in Harry Potter.
Interference is what limits the capacity of a cellular network, where all the available frequencies get reused by other mobiles (otherwise the capacity would be very small indeed). Put simply, if you want to stop a signal from one mobile interfering with another, then one way is to point the RF beam at that mobile only and not anywhere else. This is the basic idea of spatial multiplexing. We all have out pet solutions. Mine used to be Fuzzy Logic (read my paper, if you dare - not even I understand it now and I think that merely mentioning Fuzzy Logic seems taboo these days!)
Anyhow, good luck to Dr Cooper with SM. I worked alongside brilliant minds for years who also pursued this idea, to no avail. Like many technologies, the most elegant solution is seldom the one that succeeds in the market, for a number of reasons. No one foresaw how much the ongoing march of Moore's Law was going to allow us to build denser and denser cells that solved the capacity problem in another way. And now we're talking about a cell in every home! (Isn't there a contradiction here with SM?)
Most likely, SM will turn up in some future generation, but, as I discussed my book, talk of anything beyond 3G became very upsetting to a lot of people, so best not talk about 4G (or any G) and beyond. (By the way, when I first wrote the book, 'Next Generation...' was an acceptable and meaningful term. This time around (recent 2nd edition) it is more problematic, but my publisher didn't allow the title to be changed.)
4. Phones are primarily used (70% of the time) to talk and listen, secondarily for text messages (which use small bandwidth), and tertiary for e-mail (which uses small to medium bandwidth), yet we, as consumers, get constantly bombarded with marketing for expensive high speed data services that people don’t use all that often.
4. Phones are primarily used (70% of the time) to talk and listen, secondarily for text messages (which use small bandwidth), and tertiary for e-mail (which uses small to medium bandwidth), yet we, as consumers, get constantly bombarded with marketing for expensive high speed data services that people don’t use all that often.
I'm not quite sure why this is a problem, unless you're a consumer who is fooled by some kind of hype. I'm not sure that anyone still believes in the 'high speed' experience on the mobile. Consumers are more informed than those early farcical days of WAP 1.0 - 'surf the internet.' There is still a tendency to hype the 'One Web' view that says that we can mimic the desktop experience on the web, but that's just another marketing fad.
5. When purchasing devices, consumers are persuaded that they are getting something for nothing and then urged to throw their old devices away.
I really need to hear the explanation for this one because it doesn't seem like a problem in the same vein as the others.
Interestingly, the bulk of the problems identified here are technological, or presented within that light. They are also heavily biased towards suggesting solutions that Dr Cooper wants to sell us. Good for him.
As I've recently commented, if we basically assume that the mobile telcos are the bottleneck to a new era of successful mobile services - let's call it the 'data revolution' for now, then the problems are not technological. Becoming an 'Operator 2.0,' let's say (see Chapter 3 of my book for discussion), is technologically possible and economically possible. However, it seems, at least for now, politically impossible, by which I mean the general institutions within the industry, such as mindset, staffing structures, reward schemes, financial-reporting structures, are not geared towards change.
In other words, the way people in the industry value the industry is not aligned to the values that would allow many of the new technological and business possibilities seen on the Web to flourish in the wireless markets. Sooner or later, everyone realises how much they value survival and things are forced upon us that we don't want to do.
The solution is still innovation. However, we have to figure out what type of innovation is needed and where to apply it. We don't know where it's going to come from. Perhaps the emergence of low-cost netbooks (like Asus) is going to trigger a different type of wireless data revolution.
We await the next illogical flight of fancy by some hitherto unknown renegade(s) to open our eyes to the right type of innovation. I have my own ideas, of course.
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