Communications

Google and China — a very different view

Usman Latif (Techuser) has a fascinating take on what’s going on with Google and China.  I can’t guess if he’s right or not, but we’ll know in due course.  If what he suggests is true, Google will exit China by selling it’s Chinese business to the Alibaba Group.

In 2005, Techuser uncovered the strange nature of Google’s 2004 patent settlement with Yahoo.  The terms of that deal have never been revealed, but what was revealed in various SEC filings leading up to Google's IPO appears to have been, at least, obscure and misleading.  Usman’s point now is that 2004 deal included some substantial, probably very substantial, undisclosed obligations, perhaps due at the end of an unknown grace period.  So Google may need a way to make a big payoff to Yahoo without letting anyone understand the details of their patent settlement.  Turning over their rapidly growing Chinese business to Alibaba (40% owned by Yahoo) might be their answer.

Yes, it reads like a “conspiracy theory,” but Usman is a smart guy and, in any event, we soon know if he’s right or off track.

Wi-Fi's likely impact on 3G/4G services and operators

This morning at the 4G Wireless Evolution conference in Miami, I gave a talk about how Wi-Fi is going to impact both 3G/4G operators and fixed line operators over the next 2-4 years.  The slides are on SlideShare, and here:

Wi-Fi Opportunities In A 4G World

View more documents from Brough Turner.

I think the reason I’m invited back is I manage to be controversial and since, today, I was given more than an hour all for myself, I attempted to make at least a few provocative points:

• We’re at a wireless tipping point that will dramatically drive up performance of all wireless systems, but Wi-Fi is way ahead of WiMAX or 3G/4G mobile, thus Wi-Fi is where the excitement will be over the next 2-5 years.

• Femtocells will flop.  They do provide a way to extend voice coverage into homes that macro cells don’t reach, but they are not efficient for data offload.  Since Wi-Fi is efficient for data offload, and it costs less to buy and less to operate, Wi-Fi is will trump Femtocells.

• Wi-Fi is consistently ahead of the 4G community in commercial deployments of “4G technologies.”  Specific 4G technologies that Wi-Fi has pioneered include OFDM modulation (802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n), MIMO (802.11n) and beam forming (done via antenna element selection as early as 2002;  and done via antenna arrays with on-silicon signal processing under 802.11n, coming to market right now).

• MIMO makes 5 GHz spectrum as useful as 2.4 GHz spectrum or TV spectrum. 

• Beam forming via adaptive antenna arrays will dramatically drive up performance (for Wi-Fi beginning now and for WiMAX and LTE some years from now).  Beam forming increases range, reduces interference and allows spectrum reuse even in confined areas.

• But with beam forming 5 GHz spectrum becomes more valuable than 2.4 GHz or TV spectrum as shorter wavelengths (at higher frequencies) allow tighter beams.

• As Wi-Fi performance and range increase, it’s becoming useful for broadband wireless service delivery, thus driving down costs and helping fuel rapid growth in the Wireless ISP community.  (There are over 2000 WISPs in the US today.)

In my talk, I backed up these statements with data and arguments that may not be clear from the slides alone.  If there is any point you don’t agree with or don’t understand, fire away in the comments below and I’ll endeavor to answer within a day or two, or elaborate in a separate blog post.

Off to 4G Wireless Evolution in Miami

I'm off to Miami to attend (and speak) at the 4G Wireless Evolution conference.  Although I spent most of 2002-2008 providing technology and applications for mobile networks, my current interest is Wi-Fi, so I'm going to try and shake people up with a talk on Wi-Fi in a 4G world.  

Of course, I'll also peruse IT Expo that's co-located but, even through I spent two decades in computer telephony and have promoted Internet Telephony since 1996, it's now a distraction from all things wireless!

More explanation at some point.  Meanwhile, if you will be at 4GWE or IT Expo, please say hello.  I'll be there Wednesday morning until mid-day Friday.

Network Neutrality, Common Carriage and Layers - an international perspective

I'm attending an FCC workshop on 'The Open Internet" which means Network Neutrality. I am very much in favor of open access to the Internet. However, by settling for network neutrality rules, we won't solve the real problem, which is a lack of competing ISPs.  If we don't address this, we'll insure the US falls further and further behind other countries. Consider:

 

In the US, we claim to be supporting facilities-based competition. This means the rights-of-way are open to multiple competitors and you expect to see competing networks built from the ground up.  I call this open access at layer zero.  Unfortunately, this approach hasn't worked in the US. Most locations have only one or two access networks (the phone company-cable company duopoly).  

The reason is fairly easy to understand:

 

Building a new set of facilities represented a large fixed cost.  This investment must be paid back and typically only larger players have enough revenue to be able to make the interest payments. If you only capture 10% market share, you can't payback the investment.  As a result, facilities-based competition usually results in 2-3 competitors, at most.

Note that in Korea, facilities-based competition is part of a fairly complex history of government and private network evolution.  Hong Kong also has facilities-based competition, most notably by Hong Kong Broadband Networks Ltd.  But that's one fiber over-builder in a market that has open access to copper (i.e. layer 1 access) and many, many DSL providers. Facilities-based competition is a great idea, but by itself it doesn't work.

The ideal solution, at least for metropolitan population densities should be clear from this diagram:

The horizontal axis shows years of useful life. Notice that dark fiber is expensive to install but has a useful life of decades. But the equipment you use to light up the fiber will be functionally obsolete in 30 months just due to Moore's Law.

So what happened in Stockholm?  In 1994, Stockholm chartered a company, Stokab AB, to lay dark fiber and offer it to all comers.  Throughout the 90s, Stokab only offered dark fiber.  The result is many, many ISPs and corporate customers who lease fiber for diverse purposes.  A bigger result, is one of the lowest costs for some of the best Internet access of any city in the world.

What the US really needs

We need open access to bare copper and dark fiber from a utility that is regulated and is structurally separate from companies who provide telephony, TV or ISP services.

Rather than talk about network neutrality, we should be talking about structural separation, or at a minimum, functional separation with common carriage requirements. That would be a big change and is probably politically impossible, but that's the only way to get ISP competition and ISP competition is the only approach that will get us world class broadband.

FCC workshop on Open Internet at MIT this Wed January 13th

I haven't seen much publicity for this, but an FCC staff "workshop" on "Innovation, Investment and the Open Internet" will be held in the Bartos Theater at MIT"s Media Labs on Wedensday January 13, 2010.  "Open Internet" is usually political speak for Network Neutrality, although presumably some of speakers will differentiate between the advantages of open access versus the specifics of network neutrality, common carriage, structural separation and other approaches to achieving open access.

Details were provided in a press release which was picked up by a few people, but not many that I follow so, if you are in the Boston area, here's the scoop:

JANUARY 13 WORKSHOP ON INNOVATION, INVESTMENT, AND THE OPEN INTERNET

The Federal Communications Commission will hold a staff workshop on innovation and investment as part of the Commission’s Open Internet proceeding. This workshop will examine how the Internet’s openness affects the ability of network operators, Internet content and application providers, and other Internet technology developers to innovate and to drive investment, job creation, and economic growth throughout the Internet ecosystem. These issues will be explored from the diverse perspectives of innovators and entrepreneurs, investors, network operators and equipment vendors, and experts in Internet innovation and investment. 

WHAT: Innovation, Investment, and the Open Internet
WHEN: Wednesday, January 13, 4:30 p.m.
WHERE: MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater Cambridge, Massachusetts
ONLINE: www.openinternet.gov/workshops/ 

PANELISTS:
Ajay Agarwal, Bain Capital Ventures
Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
David Clark, MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Jeffrey Glueck, Skyfire
Shane Greenstein, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Nabeel Hyatt, Conduit Labs
Susie Kim Riley, Camiant, Inc.
Paul Sagan, Akamai
Lynn St. Amour, Internet Society
Amy Tykeson, BendBroadband
Barbara van Schewick, Stanford Law School
Marcus Weldon, Alcatel-Lucent
Christopher S. Yoo, University of Pennsylvania Law School 
Sharon Gillett, Wireline Competition Bureau (Moderator)
Paul de Sa, Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis (Moderator) 

The workshop will be open to the public; however, admittance will be limited to the seating available. Audio/video coverage of the workshop will be streamed live with open captioning over the Web at www.openinternet.gov/workshops/.

Wi-Fi in the TV White Spaces - 802.11af task group underway

The commercial success of unlicensed devices in TV whites spaces remains an open question, but Wi-Fi support could tip the balance, so it's good the IEEE standards association has officially chartered an 802.11 task group to:

... create an amendment whose implementation in solutions is likely to receive FCC approval for operation in the TV White Spaces under the 47 CFR Part 15 subpart H rules.

The group is 802.11 "TGaf." Their first meeting will be in Los Angeles the week of January 18th and their initial schedule calls for final votes on a new spec by the summer of 2011. My guess is they'll hit that 2011 date since many of the more difficult white space issues were figured out for 802.11y. In particular, 802.11y specifies "dependent station enablement (DSE)" where low cost devices (clients or access points) can operate under the supervision of a more intelligent (e.g. more expensive) device that actually consults FCC-mandated databases and provides sophisticated sensing.

TV White Spaces may yet be a commercial failure

At least as defined so far, TV white space rules are so restrictive that a market may never emerge. Indeed TV white spaces could follow the same path as Ultra Wide Band (UWB) - much hoopla, some significant investments, but no significant commercial success.  As specified so far, the only places where meaningful amounts of white space spectrum are available are rural areas where the population is small. This means sales volumes will be small and prices will be high - not exactly a formula for commercial success.

The good news is Wi-Fi operation will inherit much of the high volume silicon advantages created for other bands; only the actual RF amplifiers and antennas are specific to TV frequencies. If anything can succeed, Wi-Fi should be it.

Applications that could benefit from white spaces operation

Wi-Fi at TV frequencies could be useful for:

1. Rural broadband access for subscribers in densely forested areas.  If there is a line of sight, Wi-Fi at 5 GHz is more useful (and has more capacity and low cost) but when subscribers are hidden by trees, TV frequencies are scattered less.
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2. Wireless LANs inside heavy masonry buildings or those with plaster on metal wire lath.

In most other applications, 5 GHz is preferable to TV frequencies.  That may sound nuts to wireless engineers used to free space path loss calculations, but those calculations assume the antenna gets smaller as the frequency goes up.  With comparable antenna apertures, path loss in the atmosphere is roughly flat from 50 MHz to nearly 10 GHz.  Thus in open air, 5 GHz photons go just as far as 500 MHz (US channel 19) photons or indeed photons for Channel 2 or Channel 50. 

There's also a lot more spectrum available at 5 GHz.  What's more it's easier to form highly directional radio beams at 5 GHz than it is at TV frequencies.  Finally, at 5 GHz you need less open area around a line-of-sight transmission path, i.e. the Fresnel zone is smaller.

The primary place where 500 MHz does better than 5 GHz is going through heavy masonry.  The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has done detailed measurements of how radio waves are attenuated as they pass through various building materials.  Their report is here.  Masonry significantly obstructs radio signals but it's much worse at 5 GHz than it is at 500 MHz.

Dense forests also obstruct radio waves.  The situation is a lot more complex as the randomly distributed leaves, twigs, branches and tree trunks cause attenuation, scattering, diffraction and absorption. There's been quite a bit of study of radio in forests, both for radio communication and for satellite observation of natural resources.  A good summary is here.  In short, wet forests are more of a problem than dry forests and lower frequencies do better than higher frequencies.

Wi-Fi:  the best bet for commercial success with TV white space

Wi-Fi has several years lead over WiMAX or LTE in deployment of so-called 4G technology.  In addition, the Wi-Fi market is large so prices are low (versus WiMAX or LTE where handsets may eventually be low cost, but infrastructure is expensive).  If there there is commercial success in the TV white spaces, it's most likely to be with Wi-Fi, in the 2012-2014 time frame.