It was CES last week. Generally, this is not an event about mobile, mainly because the big show for that industry is Mobile World Congress (MWC), which takes place in Barcelona a month or so later. For the last couple of years, I have attended and written about it. This year, I decided not to go, and will go to Embedded World in Germany instead. The original motivation was partly that we were going to make a (since pushed out) announcement there. But also MWC won't give me a press pass (since I don't work for a media company) which makes the whole business of trying to get where I need to be too difficult. However, things are changing with 5G. What was previously all about phones is increasingly about cars, and drones, and IoT, which is more the CES domain. In fact, I predict that MWC will increasingly become a network operator conference, and the rest of mobile will increasingly move to CES. 5G will change a lot about connectivity, and it won't mostly be about phones. As it happens, CES last week had a keynote panel session about 5G. It was more interesting and on-topic than any of the equivalent sessions I have seen at MWC. The panelists were Verizon, Baidu, and Qualcomm, so a network operator, a major company using mobile (and a two-fer, a major tech company in China), and a technology and chip company. The panel was moderated by Sue Marek who covers 5G for SDxCentral, and, as she said "I've covered all the Gs. 2G, 3G, 4G, and now 5G". The other panelists were Christiano Amon, president of Qualcomm's semiconductor business; Hans Vestburg, CTO of Verizon; and Qi Lu, COO of Baidu. Qi (Baidu) went first in his introduction, and said that they are pivoting the entire company to AI. He got a big round of applause when he said that it is all about commercializing the technology, otherwise it is just talk. We had all sat through several feel-good presentations by companies who were vague about how the technology was going to be delivered. The big two drivers for AI are self-driving cars, and conversational AI. He said that innovation is going at a rapid pace due to AI, and in China where it is all going faster than anywhere else. Hans (Verizon) said that he had recently joined Verizon after years in "an equipment company". He didn't say so, but he used to be CEO of Ericsson in Sweden. He said that in his previous job he was giving advice to all the carriers in the world on what they should do—and now he has to do it. Verizon have already announced 5G in the first 3 markets for rollout. Christiano (Qualcomm) was asked how they think about 5G as an equipment company. The first thing he pointed out was that the auditorium was full to capacity even though mobile is currently "between Gs". But 5G is coming and it will transform the mobile industry. He drew a comparison with electricity: 5G will be like electricity. We don’t talk about the use cases any more, we just assume it is there. 5G is going to take the scale of mobile to other industries. Plus, it will be able to support mission-critical services, so it will be everywhere. 2G, 3G, 4G were primary consumer technologies, with speed getting better. However, 5G brings more than just better performance: no latency, security, multi-connectivity. Consumers will get the benefits, of course, but it is 21st century infrastructure and will transform entire industries. Qi pointed out in a too-cute analogy that mobility is a fumdenental essence of intelligence: animals have brains, plants don't. To move you need to generalize, and for Badu self-driving cars are the new frontier and will carry innovation into new systems. Privacy will be a big deal in all of this, not just in cars, but voice in the home, and elsewhere. The panel was asked when it was all going to happen. Hans said that Verizon has already announced 3-5 markets for this year, focusing on resdential broadband using mm wave to get superior performance quickly to market. They are ahead of some of the standards but can get 1-2Gb/s over 1,000 to 2,000 feet. Historically, standardization was all about the air-interface (radio) but now with 5G it goes all the way to the datacenter and back. Sue pushed Hans on their big competitor, AT&T, who have said 12 markets in mobile by the end of the year. Hans said he couldn't comment but that "Verizon will be first!" She moved on to Qu of Baidu to find out about 5G in China. Is it going as fast as the US? Qi pointed out that Baidu is not in the communication business but they are partners and investors with all of the players. This year is the year of lots of trials, especially narrow-band IoT (such as bike-sharing). Baidu is working with several city governments to create new open infrastructure. New city being built ground up bigger than Dubai/Shenzen. New communication infrastructure. Autonomous mobility from the ground up. Once infrastructure is in the ground, innovation will occur. But you need some big on-ramps (self-driving cars, conversation ai on smarthphnes, these are the two big ones). Cristiano said that there was a group of over 40 companies that got together to accelerate 5G. A big Christmas gift was the standard was finalized (NSA 5G NR approved on December 22nd). So be early 2019 there should be flagship smartphones on the shelf and the transition will really start. One thing that Cristiano pointed out was that the increased cost of the 5G components will be balanced by the reduced requirement for memory on the device, since the cloud is always there. Not to mention Qualcomm will have a bigger share of the semiconductor content, versus memory suppliers, although he was too polite to point this out. This could turn out to drive a very fast transition since there won't be an offputting big price increase. Hans of Verison said that 2G to 3G was one rate, 3G to 4G was quicker, and the transition to 5G will be quicker still. Of course 4G will be around for a long time, and 5G will adopt first in US, Korea and some parts of China. But the same phone will work in 193 countries all over the world. Qi (of Baidu) said that there is a fundemental change going on with data as a new form of capital. "It is less than a year since I joined Baidu," he said. "This year the autonomous minibus, next year 3 sedans. Level 4 platform like Android for cars but more open. My team when I was at Yahoo...you have it now...[Verizon owns Yahoo]...created Hadoop because we needed it but we made it an open platform." He predicted several changes: always-on will make social presence a thing, low-latency will change business models as you can rely more on the cloud, IT infrastructure will move up to the cloud and there will be a blurring of public-private networking. Qi said that when he was doing his PhD thesis at CMU that they optimized everything for 1ms assuming that low-latency was coming. And now it is. Hans pointed out that when latency comes down you can take away assets that are local today, and thus can do stuffin the cloud that today is done on the edge (like video processing). Of course this requires the network to be designed carefully, and not just the network, but everything up to the datacenter. Sue said that she had been asked not to get too technical but everyone is talking about edge-computing and stuff. So she wanted to talk about mm wave, since it's never been used for htis before. Hans said that it is very high frequency, of course. That means the range is not that long but the throughput is enormous. There are some worries about non-line-of-sight but it has so far been proven to work very well. Indoor coverage is tougher (he didn't say it but mm wave is basically at such a high frequency it won't go through building walls). Qualcomm will support mm wave in their first 5G chipset, and they have also had very positive experience. It is a game changer. If you add mm wave on top of existing networks you see coverage increase 60% but still have gigabit LTE as a foundation. Last mile data will be wireless. 'Resistance is futile, allocate everything to wireless'. We are designing the chips for this. On Monday we announced a disruptive solution for the RF front-end with a tunable front-end, which we will need as we go to 10s of thousands of combinations of bands. Qi said that in China mobile internet is more advanced than in the US since there is no strong PC network. This will only accelerate. Video will replace a lot of written language. Based on my last job at Microsoft, I think everyone needs to have a mobile strategy, no matter what business, even a steel mill. To wrap up, Sue asked everyone what would be different next year, at CES 2019. Hans of Verizon: we will have a Verizon 5G network, but the ecosystem will be really imortant to make everything work together. Qi of Baidu: much more AI. There will be more commercialization of the technology. It will start in China but go beyond China. Cristiano of Qualcomm: a Snapdragon phone on a live network Check back here next January to see how all those predictions panned out. Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.![]()
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