Just finished the COMSOC East Asia Society Summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, and I should say the reports presented triggered a few thoughts.

We had representatives from China, Taiwan, India, Vietnam (in the photo), and a few reports from other East Asia Countries (there were 40 people from Asia plus a 100 Vietnamese).

I have to confess, I am still not used to big numbers and when I heard that India is adding 8 million new cell phone users a month and still they will have to go ahead at this pace through this decade to get close to 100% penetration I feel small. And today there are still over 500,000 villages in India that do not have proper telecommunications service.

Vietnam used to be rivers of bikes just few years ago. Now there are rivers of motorbike, and each rider has a cell phone….

I was impressed by the report that they have reached in 2009 17 million land line connection (out of a population of 88 million people) AND that in 2010 the number went down to 14 million and now is down to 12 million! At the same time the cell phone “population” has grown to 111 million…

The cell phone is killing, at least in Vietnam, the land lines. The penetration in Internet terms is much lower, only 15% use the cell phone to connect to Internet but it is easy to predict that this percentage will increase as more and more people will be able to buy a smart phone. Their price is still too high for most Vietnamese. Consider that a basic cell phone in Vietnam cost as little as 20$, whilst a smart phone costs at least 8 times as much…

In Vietnam the cost for unlimited wireless (3G) connectivity is 2$ per month. Even considering the lower cost of life in Vietnam this is still dirty cheap!

There does not seem to be, in spite of the large penetration of wireless Internet in all East Asia, a use of Internet as a foundation for e-government services. It is still more related to personal entertainment (or social communication).

In the next few days all presentations will be available on the COMSOC web site.

We have been talking a lot about augmented reality. That is the way technology can provide more information and sensation about the reality around us, like overlapping a text or an image on what we would be seeing normally. But now we can move a step further and consider “expanded reality”

The concept here is to “expand” the reality we are experiencing by adding other elements that are not overlaid on it but are extending it.

It sounds very science fiction like, but we have it already in our home, specially with the wifi devices that enables one to play games, do exercise by himself or dance with others. The technology is here, what we can expect in the near future is an expansion of quality of image, expansion of the interactivity and the amount of information exchanged.

Since the systems operate on movement and position sensors that require a high quantity of data exchange and quality image, capturing and projecting video and 3D: the optical fiber is the best solution available today for the exchange of the amout of data required. It is many times thinner than a normal cable and can carry up to 100 times more information, energy and light. It also functions as a sensor, a video capturer and a projector devise.

Combining the new available technology and the use of the right materials the possibilities are within our fingertips and beyond our imagination.

This requires a significant amount of bandwidth to trick our senses and this is what the fiber in the access network are providing.

Today I chaired the Opening session of the Future Network and Mobile Summit and polled the audience on this question: “What kind of bandwidth would you think will be required, as peak, beyond 2020 on wireline and wireless?”.
The audience split evenly on the fixed between the 100 Mbps and the 1 Gbps. Only a few daredevils said more than 1 Gbps. I should say that I have no specific comment to this feedback, with a slight propensity towards the 1 Gbps (because of the bandwidth required by the 4k television standard that is of the order of 100 Mbps and the likelyhood to have in a home more than one channel at a time).
For the wireless part most people sided on the 10 Mbps. On the move it is not a bad connection at all!
Only a few indicated the need for 100 Mbps and those few considered this demand for connecting computers to download bulky files.
No doubt, as experience as shown, files will get even bulkier throughout this decade and therefore once in a while some higher download (or upload) speed might be needed.
One person stated that he was not seeing any need for 100 Mbps in the case of a cell phone since in this case there was no point in high speed given the limited screen dimension.
Here I beg to differ. By 2020 NED, Nano Emissive Display, will be a reality. This technology, prototyped by Motorola back in 2005, crams 300 nanotubes in the space that today is taken by a single pixel. That means one could use a lense to enlarge the screen vision getting the perception of looking at a 52″ screen, even though that screen would be resting comfortably on his hand.
One might wonder if such a technology can win the market, since 5 years have gone by without seeing a product. My feeling is that the progress of LCDs has basically killed the new technologies born in the last decade (not just NED, also SED and to a certain extent Quantum Dots and OLED) but once the LED will reach (they are pretty close now) the peak of performance the industry will have to turn to something new to create the need for replacing existing screens and at that point these almost forgotten technologies may take the upper hand.
For this kind of streaming consistently broader broadband is needed.
Therefore, my pick, is towards more than 10 Mbps for our cell phones of the future.
What about you?

Just two days ago I posted a blog on the MIC, Multicore architecture annouced by Intel. According to that, in the next 5 years the number of cores, processors, on a single chip will grow to hundreds and one may wonder what kind of use we can find for that multitude.

It is clear that more processors (cores) means more processing power, but with a caveat: if your problem can be split into parallel computations than you can take advantage of having many processors working in parallel, if not you are out of luck.

It is not just that you cannot exploit the massive parallelisms, it is also that each single core has relatively less processing power than a normal monoprocessor chip since this latter operates at a higher clock speed.

Of course there are plenty of activities where processing can take place in parallel (some of these in tomorrow’s blog, but here I am thinking of one that can change the rules of the game by the end of this decade: the circumvention of the Shannon Theorem.

Back in the forties Shannon found a limit (now known as The Shannon Limit) where you can squeeze only as many bit per Hertz of spectrum. In a nutshell: the more spectrum you have available the more bits you can carry, the more power you give the signal the more bits you can cram into a single Hz, the more noise out there the less bits you can cram into a single Hz. This latter is known as the Interference problem.

In the second part of the nineties a nice theorem was proven, stating that as long as you have n+1 receivers separated one another by at least half wavelenght, then you can resolve the interference generated by n transmitters. What you need to do is to have each single receiver to communicate with all the others to get a map of the signal distribution. That allows the separation of individual signals, solving the interference problem and multiplying the spectrum capacity.

Now, such a thing would be wonderful, since we would be able to multiply the capacity of the radio spectrum, that is a severe limiting factor in broadband wireless.

Do we have these many receivers available? Of course! We can use our cell phones and have them communicating one another. That requires a lot of processing power and it is precisely a processing power that can be split over many processors, one for each communicating pair.

Therefore by the end of this decade we can expect to see real unlimited broadband wireless, as much as we can get on an optical fibre. Now, this is going to be a disruption and this is bound to change a lot of rules (why would there be a need for licensing the radio spectrum if you have an unlimited capacity?)

Amazing times are just round the corner!

The future of the biz, according the Verizon CTO Richard Lynch, lies in broadband, the copper biz is fading out. The growth of data transported by 2G systems in Verizon has basically stayed stable in the 2004-2008 period whilst 3G has moved from 0 to 4,000 TB per year and the forecast for LTE is a growth in the range of 2,000,000 TB, that is a 500 times growth and this will happen in the next 5 years. The content streamed is similarly growing, along with the User Generated Content.

In front of this figure a company like Verizon has no option but become a broadband company based on fibre and LTE.

FIOS today provides multi-room DVR, 500 television channels, 120 HD channels, 15,000 movie titles per month, widgets and 50/20 Mbps (down/up) speed. Video subscription grew from 1.6 M 3Q2008 to 2.7 M 3Q2009, and 2.2M bought data connection in 2008 growing to 3.3M in the 3Q2009, most of them happy with 10Mbps (not paying surcharge for higher speed).

Although they have plenty of fibre, Verizon looks at its biz as a wireless one and is committed to LTE, they have created an LTE Innovation center open to industry and is performing an LTE network trial, including streaming video.

Verizon is thinking on moving from proprietary shops to sell their services and devices with their own apps store and customer support to a mall paradigm where customer will find Verizon offer, can buy apps there or somewhere else, get support from Verizon or from the “geek squad”.

Openness is the way to go: it cuts costs and increase the market reach. Additionally it may incentivise Consumer Electronics to use Verizon Networks (and a good step in that direction has been the 700MHz auction).This Openness can also be seen at the level of service creation where Verizon is enabling third parties developing services making use of their data centre to get customer data like position, terminal type… and Verizon gets paid per “dip” (that is for every query related to one of their customers). IMS is seen as a way to control these accesses and maintain value in the network.

Think about electrical power. When Edison activated the first power plant in New York, on Pearl St. on Sept.4th 1882, he said that the future of electricity was bright because there will be a bulb (a lamp) in every room in every home. And he was correct, of course.

However the killer application for the electricity “ecosystem” was not the bulb but …the socket! Nobody had imagined, nor could have, the variety of appliances that will be produced and the huge market that was enabled.

I wonder if this is not the case for Telecommunications as well. Change the bulb with the telephone and the socket with the open broadband infrastructure and tell me what you think.

There are some significant differences, of course. The increased use of electrical power, consequence of the ever growing number of appliances and motors connected to the socket, steadily increased revenues for the Electrical Power Company. They never fell into the trap of a flat rate tariff.

It is however undisputed that in both cases we see (will be seeing) a tremendous growth in value in the overall ecosystem enabled by energy on one side and communications on the other.

Th challenge for Telecom Operators, therefore, is how to get  a share of this value they are instrumental in creating.

I was reading Technology Review the other day and I stumble on an article reporting that a team of researchers managed to measure the processing speed of a human brain in responding to visual stimula, http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24030/

I was intrigued at two levels. The first goes back to my youth times when I studied physics and the various aspects of entropy. Of these, and there are many, I did not remember anyone related to measuring speed of some phenomena. This is what was used by a researcher of the University of Provence in France, Fermin Moscoso del Prado Martin -does not sound like a French name to me….

You may want to read the article to know more about this intriguing relation between entropy and measuring reaction time of our brain.

The second aspect that made me think was the amazingly slow speed at which our brain seems to process information, on the one hand, and the incredible results it can derive from such processing, on the other hand. We usually say we need broadband communications to match our visual sensor reception capability. How could it be that we need to transmit at several megabit/s to fool our eyes and our brain into believing it is looking at something real, when it processes visual information so slowly? Indeed, all comments from readers attached to the article were of disbelief. The unanimous outcry was that that scientist got it wrong.

Well, I do not know if he got it right or not but although the result is somewhat unbelievable it is …possible.

This has to do with the power of connectivity in a meshed network. The meaning, the perception we have of the world around us is not coming from an algorithm producing a single value, like 324 is red, 7864 is a rose,…rather it is a state of mind, or better the state of activation of a certain (huge) number of neurons. This activation may result from very few bits, and then create an avalanche leading to the activation of all that neurons’ network. It is like a bomb: it may take just one switch (two bits) to activate it and the results may be felt over a very large area.

It made me think about the similarity with business ecosystems. A tiny action on the part of a single player, generating in comparison very few bits of information, may trigger significant changes in a whole ecosystem and as a result the behaviour of several actors may change, even though there is no direct exchange of information from one to the other. It is the change of state in the business ecosystem that triggers the response.

We see this happening more and more as we move from value chains to ecosystems. The former has a sort of regulated information flow (regulated by contractual obligation from one ring in the chain to the next one and although the efficiency in the value chain may be high the time it takes to perculate to the end of the value chain may be significant), the latter is the result of a change of state and it propagates instantaneously to all actors in the ecosystem. Of course some of them will take notice and react, some others will disregard the information. In an ecosystem all actors are basically autonomous systems and react based not on communications with other actors but based on the change of context.

The broadband deployment, the upgrading of the network in order to enable the ultrabroadband is something considered essential for the economic growth.

But who will support the required investments?

Telcos operators, governaments, firms?

 

And if the answer would be….. Customers?

A new business model has been proposed as a new way to encourage broadband deployment: consumers purchase and own fiber connection, the “last mile” that run from their homes. This allows them to connect to a variety of service providers, including internet television, phone services, ultrabandwidth services.

 

Fiber would form part of the property right in the home

 

The proposal, called “Homes with tails” comes from Dedrek Stater , Policy Analist for Google, and Tim Wu  professor of Law at Columbia Law school in a working paper of the Wireless Future Program of the New America Foundation http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/homes_tails

 

What do you think about?