re: No Need for Dr. Neuvo to be Disingenuous that Time ...
<< Yryö Neuvo (Nokia) and Herschel Shosteck (Shosteck Associates) see no applications for UMTS ... The link on the Disaster web page is unfortunately gone, but it gives me a good clue as why Neuvo grins, ahem, so disingenuously. >>
Gone, but not forgotten ...
[and to think that yesterday I criticised you for linking a 3 month old article.]
... and you need a lot of clues it would seem.
I realize that you are a big picture type of Moonie and usually have difficulty getting beyond a headline and comprehending the detail that lies beneath ...
... but in case you are interested in what Dr. Neuvo was referring to back in May of 1997 before Qualcomm, Motorola, and Lucent announced their plans to develop a third generation technology, and not too long after both Ericsson and Nokia had separately aproached NTT DoCoMo with the identical strategic intent (combining an evolved GSM network with DoCoMo's WCDMA air interface) here is what he stated to Arielle (who btw lists Qualcomm as one of her clients):
"We have to distinguish between [air interface] and the infrastructure that supports the network; the latter can be based on GSM, the Internet, broadband ISDN and others.... Infrastructure determines how mobility management is done, how security aspects and services are delivered. That's a big block that people often overlook. The infrastructure is determined by the customer base, and that determines services and how they function."
"[Ironically, different air interfaces, such as wideband CDMA and TDMA,] can emerge from thin air [mostly a matter of provider deals and preferences.] Different interfaces can be connected to the same infrastructure like GSM. [In the third generation, however,] a certain commonality with infrastructure is easier for the operators...especially if you can maintain a certain compatibility with the existing service. But the air interface has to be done differently."
"Third-generation should provide additional services beyond the current speeds; and multimedia, image, video communication and higher data rates will require up to 2 megabits per second [adding that the upper speed limits may be achieved only in steps]."
"The application pull is a dilemma. We're focusing on developing platforms that can support advanced applications, yet we need to have the advanced applications developed [so we know what we're building for]."
The complete text of the article is here:
>> Third-Generation Obstacle Race
The wireless industry scrambles for data-rich services-hoping that people will find a use for the technology even before they know what the technology is.
Arielle Emmett
America's Network
Jume 1, 1997
americasnetwork.com
Third-generation wireless news flash! Teenagers on Huntington Beach prefer to surf the Internet rather than hurl their bodies into real water! Martian drug lord conducts "secure-channel" video conferencing with Colombian angel-dust cartel kings riding in bullet-proof stretch limousines! From a speeding ambulance, patient gets full-body X-rays and CT scans, which are transmitted to the hospital via wireless hook-ups while technicians perform CPR, intubation, blood work and MAST (shock) trouser application!
True? False? Impossible? Stories like these may sound like a stretch, but the Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo, in cooperation with L.M. Ericsson, Fujitsu, Lucent Technologies, Matsushita, Motorola, NEC and Nokia, is hoping you will believe something like them.
"These futuristic applications, all of which involve manipulating large amounts of multimedia data wirelessly, are exactly the applications NTT DoCoMo hopes to enable with its next-generation wireless communication systems," an Ericsson press document reads.
With 10 million cell phone subscribers, NTT DoCoMo soon will become the first wireless carrier to preview the future on a commercial scale. Sometime around 2000 or 2001, a 5 MHz wideband CDMA technology will become sufficiently ubiquitous in Japan to support "third-generation" multimedia applications-from Intranet access to ambulance chasing to stretch limousine video conferencing to teenage pocket phone Internet surfing-all with data transfer rates ranging from 384 kbps to 2 Mbps. Could this happen anywhere else but Japan?
Ake Persson thinks so. A reporter reaches the Swedish vice president of marketing and sales for Ericsson on a North Carolina golf course just before his Cellular One pocket phone cuts out. "Do people want to be sitting in the back of their cars watching films on CD or surfing the Internet from the beach?" Persson asks, a little incredulously. "What did we know about the Internet five years ago? Is the Internet necessary? Now that it's here, it's indispensable, you need it. I think we're doing the right things."
Tools That Retrofit The Brain
An entire industry is hoping that Ericsson is right. With visions of third-generation revenues and applications not yet dreamed of, wireless Web gurus, carriers, Internet Service Providers and infrastructure suppliers are pushing for more software-centric, wideband, third-generation networks. These likely will support more than one air interface and the ability to "hop around" and piggyback services through a highly distributed network architecture. In addition, third-generation networks will support very high data speeds for video telephony, toll-quality voice, specialized applications such as automated security monitoring and weather prediction, special interest group "paging systems," interactive gaming, E-911 services, global roaming, enhanced e-mail with graphics, wireless local loop (WLL), SMS and more.
Companies such as Ericsson, Nokia and InterDigital are throwing their support behind a wideband air interface (5 MHz or greater) for wireless multimedia-useful not only as a data transport tool, but also to solve radio propagation and interference problems in crowded urban environments. "The world recognizes the need for providing high-bandwidth data services via a radio or wireless format," says Gary Lomp, InterDigital's chief technical officer responsible for B-CDMA, a proprietary wideband CDMA technology the company is developing with Siemens and Samsung for WLL and mobile data-intensive applications. "Services such as digital data, ISDN, video and multimedia cannot be provided by narrowband technologies," he says.
Some analysts' greatest fear is that the tail is wagging the dog-killer technology still begging for a useful application.
"Third-generation wireless is going down the path that won't prove most fruitful," claims Herschel Shosteck, principal of Herschel Shosteck Associates (Wheaton, Md.). With declining revenues for wireless voice and a need to reduce, rather than increase, the cost of network infrastructure, Shosteck says that expensive multimedia broadband support is not the way to go.
What is? Companies like Ericsson espouse the faith that marvelous little communications tools help retrofit the human brain (and not the other way around), forcing the brain to adapt to new technology and finding useful applications once the tool is grasped. But third-generation technology is less easy to grasp than any of its predecessors, says Nortel's Peter MacLaren, assistant vice president of business development-wireless networks.
"There are no firm answers on any of the technical challenges," MacLaren says. "Understanding the network infrastructure and architecture to support an undefined range of services is at least as critical as an air interface," if only vendors had inklings of what those undefined services will be.
"Right now, we tend to think of wireless as a paradigm for individual people to communicate; voice or laptop communications, for example, [is] person-mediated," MacLaren explains. "The future of wireless may be in autonomous communications devices. For example, you plug a modem card into your laptop so it automatically keeps synchronized with e-mail and sends it once you approach a compatible network. Also, think of third-generation as a kind of functionality for monitoring your cars...for security, maintenance, fleet tracking or devices in the home or business. Remote diagnostics, in other words. There's a wide range of applications for next generation whose fundamental underpinning is connectionless or packet services for short transactions."
Extravagant Nippon
In Japan, however, multimedia wireless means right-now, soup-to-nuts, same-paradigm-as-"big-pipes"-broadband, wireline communication. "Japan has decided to go to a third-generation wireless system by 2000," confirms Crispin Vickars, an analyst in the mobile communications planning service at The Yankee Group (Boston). "In Europe and Japan, we're already starting to talk about heavy wireless replacements for wireline in terms of MoUs. The average minutes of use in wireless today are about 100 [per month]; to replace wireline, it's got to go up around 500 minutes."
As that happens, wireless terminals in Japan are becoming "a primary communications tool," Vickars continues. "We're starting to see the averages rising over the next decade. In Europe and Japan, especially, we've seen explosive growth in wireless services-not only cellular, but personal handiphone services [PHS], which are priced between cellular and wireline."
Japan is willing to take the risk for a third-generation project, taking the lead in a consumer-driven economy that loves high-status electronic gadgets. No participating vendor in the five-vendor NTT DoCoMo will say how much monetary risk is involved. But NTT DoCoMo is not alone. The Europeans, Japanese and even U.S. vendors long have been considering wireless standards that exceed so-called "second generation" digital personal communications services (PCS).
Globally, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU; Geneva, Switzerland) has advocated a robust, software-driven standard for third-generation radio access known as FPLMTS (Future Public Land Mobile Telephone Service) based on a technology known as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access. The ITU has assigned a 2 GHz frequency band to FPLMTS; in Europe, the same frequency band is called UMTS (Universal Mobile Telephone Service). Progress on both standards has been mixed at best; solutions are still looking for the right applications to support them.
"Third generation is basically a mobile concept," explains Ericsson's Persson. "Though it's certainly deployable as wireless local loop, the technology is focused on mobile applications and provides the ability to be untethered [from the office], still doing all the things you're doing today sitting at your desk."
That's only one interpretation. "In my view, the real drive to third generation is interoperability," contends George Zysman, chief technical officer for wireless infrastructure at Lucent Technologies, also an active infrastructure provider for the DoCoMo project. Besides such applications as data-intensive wireless Internet access, image retrieval and video services, "one of the responsibilities of standards bodies is to make sure wireless networks can communicate through some interworking function," Zysman says. Standards bodies will have to adopt something similar to the North American Wireless Intelligent Network (WIN) to define the necessary open protocols and interfaces between switches, home location registers and subscriber databases, he notes.
Further, "in GSM-adopted countries, mobile applications cards which sit on an Intelligent Network link should permit roaming and the identification of mobiles, also call delivery and back office functions, including the rendering of a bill," Zysman says. "But the networks that are in place today are second generation [and lacking in many of these functions]. Standards bodies will have to work on getting protocols to interoperate and communicate with each other."
Three Big 'Ifs'
Some analysts and experts are more worried about third generation than they let on. According to Yrjo Neuvo, senior vice president of production creation for Nokia Mobile Phones (Finland), several issues must be addressed separately, yet equally: infrastructure, air interface and applications.
"We have to distinguish between [air interface] and the infrastructure that supports the network; the latter can be based on GSM, the Internet, broadband ISDN and others.... Infrastructure determines how mobility management is done, how security aspects and services are delivered," Neuvo says. "That's a big block that people often overlook. The infrastructure is determined by the customer base, and that determines services and how they function."
Ironically, different air interfaces, such as wideband CDMA and TDMA, can emerge "from thin air"-mostly a matter of provider deals and preferences. "Different interfaces can be connected to the same infrastructure like GSM," Neuvo explains. In the third generation, however, "a certain commonality with infrastructure is easier for the operators...especially if you can maintain a certain compatibility with the existing service. But the air interface has to be done differently," he argues.
With developments in microelectronics and support for dual-mode terminals, it's quite possible that phones in the future will run a third-generation UMTS-like interface and another, such as GSM, in the same terminal. Any third-generation interface, however, will not be in the same frequency band. But virtually all are likely to be backward-compatible with a second-generation PCS predecessor air interface (e.g., GSM, CDMA, TDMA or IS-136). This is to assure operators and users a maximum return on their original investments.
Applications, however, should drive the need for more bandwidth and higher data rates-not the other way around. "Third-generation should provide additional services beyond the current speeds; and multimedia, image, video communication and higher data rates will require up to 2 megabits per second," Neuvo claims, adding that the upper speed limits may be achieved only in steps.
Does the world really need all of this? Neuvo is concerned about the apparent dearth of 'killer,' absolutely necessary applications. "The application pull is a dilemma," he acknowledges. "We're focusing on developing platforms that can support advanced applications, yet we need to have the advanced applications developed [so we know what we're building for]." This expresses the industry's dilemma exactly.
Indeed, today's second-generation wireless systems already can achieve data rates of 144 kbps and higher; certain specialized cellular digit packet data (CDPD) products, high-speed circuit switched data and other solutions can produce data rates of 64 kbps or more. While hardly spectacular when compared with landline data standards, the rates can often do the jobs intended: wireless Web browsing from small PCS handsets, for example, can be optimized in software (through languages known as HDML, a derivative of HTML) and run off Web servers with current wireless technology.
Weird User Groups
Where, then, are the 'killer' third-generation applications? Shosteck suggests that voice alone won't do it. "Revenues per subscriber are dropping," he says, flatly. "Each new tier of service means less use; and on top of that, [wireless] tariffs are dropping." While some major metro markets have experienced tariff reductions to as low as $0.11 to $0.13 per minute-the equivalent of 25% per minute reductions and higher-the overall trend for carriers is disturbing.
"We're seeing $120-per-month subscribers drop down to being $60-per-month subscribers," Shosteck says. "Revenues are dropping on the one hand, while cost of infrastructure is escalating."
In 1996, in fact, the cost of wireless infrastructure for new subscribers went from approximately $550 to $800 per subscriber. "That's virtually a 50% increase," Shosteck says. "This means the industry is facing a real crisis: voice is not able to deliver revenues the service providers need; the industry has to find new revenue sources and a new infrastructure which is lower cost. That revenue source has to come from data, but the challenge is that no one knows whether there's enough revenue there to make a business case."
What if there isn't? Shosteck makes the following pronouncements:
Third-generation carriers must aim for distributed architectures to lower the costs of their networks. "That means opening up network interfaces," he says. "Anybody who has to get into a Lucent switch, an Ericsson or Motorola switch should be able to in order to provide the advanced services."
Infrastructure vendors should focus on core competencies, leaving the risk of software development for wireless multimedia and other data-intensive applications to third-party software developers. "This removes the fiscal risk, and it leaves providers free to focus on what the functionality should be beyond the core to these new software providers," he says.
Open up a switch, providing a testing center that enables software entrepreneurs to test and certify software on a particular switch. Carriers do not assume the risk of having the software take down their switch, Shosteck advises. "If you have a lot of independent entrepreneurs come up with new services that are going to provide minutes of use, delivering them through an open interface on the network, this removes the risk of developing them on one's own," he notes.
Here's the surprise: Shosteck doesn't believe in the well-tendered, almost-establishment notion that wireless multimedia applications will save the day. Instead, he notes that little guys will-small, entrepreneurial, special-interest wireless groups that will evolve their own sets of idiosyncratic data needs. These represent an almost risk-free opportunity for carriers.
"I see a whole new class of entrepreneurs emerging," Shosteck says. He cites a businessman who developed a specialized pager. "It sells for $260 and is configured to provide information to wind surfers," he notes. "The guy has 800 subscribers in California; he provides them with surfing conditions and uses paging from the Internet to people's pagers [or cell phones].
"Example: If you're in a construction job, for $19.95 per month you can get a specialized service telling you all about the sudden thunderstorms or tornadoes coming through. If you're a skier, you'll want to know about ski conditions. An entrepreneur that has unique knowledge about a certain industry or sport will come up with these ideas,' Shosteck says. "They can offer subscribers a Web site for their terminals off the Web. So if you get 1,000 of these [Web sites], each with 1,000 subscribers, you now have a million subscribers, and the cost of the applications development belongs to the innovator. All the carrier has to do is provide access through networking and share the revenues."
Ingenious and, Shosteck believes, absolutely necessary. "Value software providers can come in and provide non-voice services to carrier at lower cost. Because the network interfaces are open, they will work with the carriers' network," he says.
Large-vendor talk about air interface and infrastructure issues aside, Shosteck maintains this is the fundamental paradigm shift for carriers promulgating third-generation services. "If someone has a new solution, the carrier looks at that," he says. "But the carrier puts all its R&D into developmental efforts into what it does best, which is building networks."
Using the Internet as a model, carriers provide the soil for new ideas, but they don't take on the risk of testing or software integration or even new-service development. "It would never pay a carrier to go out and look for applications, but if someone comes along with a solution, the carrier then looks at it, saying 'I'm happy to share that added revenue. As long as [they] generate minutes for which the carriers are paid, it doesn't matter how bizarre the applications are."
Moreover, "data won't be the silver bullet, like voice," Shosteck adds. "There will be a large portfolio of applications, all of which require data transmission. Slowly added together, these will provide meaningful revenue for the carriers," and many won't require either a wideband air interface or a sophisticated display.
"If you have applications that don't require a lot of sophisticated display, and you have apps that don't require a lot of data," he says, "then you have a proposition where you don't have to have greater network density in order to deliver it, or a terminal that's beyond the capabilities of the conventional." <<
- Eric - |
