Join us as we gather around the hedge,
where we dig into technology, business, and culture
with the finest minds in computer networking.
Hello, Tom. Hello, Tom's plant.
Good morning, Russ.
The plant says good morning.
We need a we need a plant interpreter.
You need to put, like, a big,
like, a big device around it and say,
this is the plant interpreter. I can put
it up here so we can hear what
the plant
it would look very, you know, sci fi
looking. Yeah. Yeah. Well and we I'd like
to announce that Yvonne,
for anyone who didn't listen to the last
episode, Yvonne has named the plant. The plant
shall be called Audrey henceforth.
Audrey. I like Audrey. I think that's really
great. Do you know where it's from, George?
Well, it could be from a lot of
places. It's from a movie.
I'm sure Audrey's in a movie somewhere.
It's in the it's the name of the
plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
Oh, is that the oh, perfect. That's what
it is. Yeah.
I I think the plant interpreter wouldn't be
some amazing high-tech Gizmo. It'd be like two
wires,
crinkly wires with crocodile clips, and one of
them's had to be twisted on. You know?
And it goes through a plant o matic
meter that goes,
yes, no, or good, bad.
I I don't think plants have a higher
logic going on here with a lot of
interpreting.
Water. Yeah. That that could be. And
hello. Good morning, George.
Good morning.
Oh my goodness. Yeah. We got George Johnson.
Here. No plants here?
Well, if they were there, they'd be hanging
from the ceiling in our perspective. They would.
They would.
Do not ask about the shark attacks. Why
do we get three in one week? I
mean, that is just insane.
You know?
Oh, interesting. Anyway Not good. Alright. So
let's talk about what comes after five g.
Now, we're gonna have a couple of shows
here on five g because and what comes
after because it's an interesting topic,
and it does truly impact
network engineering,
particularly when you live in a
resource constrained
environment
where
some people
may not be able to build the Wi
Fi network they want. They may have to
use five g or,
god forbid,
six g
or 18 g
or 99 g He gave away he gave
away the whole show.
What are you doing?
So, George, talk to us. What happens after
five g? And and and and do we
care?
So
what happens after five g is the inductive
reasoning from asking the question, what happens after
two g?
And the do we care part
is
yes
and probably no. And so I kinda wanna
roll I wanna roll the clock back. You
know?
Image of the calendar not peeling away, image
of the calendar growing up as we put
the leaves back on the sheet
and go back to the heady days of
AMPS,
the predigital
mobile telephony world. Oh my goodness.
You remember those days? Oh my goodness. Yes.
Continue.
They they were actually pretty good pretty good
days. And if you wanna talk about constraints,
think about the constraint of the size of
the handbag you need to put one of
those funky phones in.
I mean, they were big. Right?
So the actual constraint in those days was
really essentially
space. These devices were large and powerful. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And lifetime.
Yeah. And lifetime. And Yeah.
This technology
was about as straightforward
as you can get. You take a microphone
and a speaker, and you bang them onto
some circuitry that plugs them out on the
radio,
and
that's kind of it, guys.
Yeah. In fact a mic, you attach it
to a front end to a front end
not even a front end processor. You attach
it to
basically
a a tank circuit
that modulates a carrier frequency,
and off you go. That's the whole system.
And if you're prince Charles and his girlfriend
Dujour and you wanna take talk sweet nothings
to each other over a mobile network, hey.
You can do that. And the guy sitting
in a car two blocks away with a
journalist with him can tune in and listen.
It it wasn't a private conversation.
It was just radio, man.
So
what we have been engaged in from those
heady days
is essentially
stepping up ladders.
We can do better. Right? We can do
better than this. Why are we doing this
analog stuff when we could be doing digital
encoding and have constant strength radio instead of
all this amplitude modification
nonsense, when we could have
encrypted contents, when we could packetize this thing,
when we could do all these additions?
And the g's,
two g. Interesting it kicks off with two
g. Why did nobody wanna go with one
g as the branding?
And it's because it's the second generation. Right?
The first generation,
you don't have a name for it. It's
just what it is. But when you're doing
version two, you're in the second generation. So
two g is kind of the entry point
for a world where we were thinking, maybe
it's not about people speaking. Maybe it's actually
about data.
And I don't know about you, but I
found two g pretty unsatisfying.
Do you remember an ETF when,
the WAP protocol was gonna be shown off
to us, and a guy came on stage
to demonstrate the amazing technology that was gonna
take over the world and be revolutionary. And
there had been so much energy put into
it called WAP.
And straight after him, a lovely Japanese engineer
got up and said, hey. We've been working
on this idea in Japan where we're just
gonna put IP in the phones.
It's IP. There's no magic. It's just IP.
And the room got up and went, yes.
And the WAP engineer is like, oh my
god. How am I gonna tell my bosses
that they don't want what we've just sold
them?
WAP was a disaster.
So two gs,
kind of interesting, cut over to full digital
ish,
virtually
zero
real energy behind making this technology interesting.
And
I don't wanna go there this strongly, but,
essentially,
it's all about patents.
It's totally about
patents. We are used to working in a
technology space where people are doing patent free
technology design,
and it's available for
round, reasonable,
and neutral
Yeah. Technology. Right. Yeah. It's like a level
playing field. Well, three g
is
the worldwide telephony
community coming together saying, man, it would just
totally suck if we wound up deep in
a patent war. Wouldn't it be better if
we all agreed that we were gonna work
to own the patents
and agree a technology base to do this?
Because this market I mean, we've sold, like,
what,
one telephone for every 20 people? This is
insane.
We have so much growth ahead of us.
Let's build a bigger market, guys. Let's actually
make this technology fly a bit. So that
cutover, two g to three g,
that was really interesting because it's like, wow.
People want bits. They don't actually wanna talk
to each other. We can do bits. We've
been doing bits forever.
So three g
was like this amazing moment where people went,
okay. It's gonna be digital.
Let's really make digital do something interesting.
It was like for an old timer technology
hand converting from slip
as the protocol to manage bits on wire
to PPP.
Right?
We actually need a frame here. We need
a frame structure that says something. We need
a way to say this packet is from
a foreign network and I'm transiting it. We
need a way to say that it's got
these behaviors. We've got interesting codecs. We need
a way to signal the codecs. Do you
remember in three g when you'd have a
phone call and one sender used one codec
and the other guy used another codec, and
the two wouldn't talk to each other? And
you'd have these weird things going on.
I mean, people were having fun. Right?
And they were exploring things like,
how small can we make the base station?
How small can we make the power burden
here? How do we make this legacy idea
of text messages, which was only an add
on using
spare bits in the framing from when they'd
originally designed this technology and brought paging into
the modern era. How do we design this
stuff?
The three g,
you couldn't do multiple protocols well. It was
actually pretty difficult to live in a multiprotocol
world, and we were emerging into this dual
stack Internet world. We needed framing that could
actually
handle four and six, and we needed to
talk about
using a complex substrate of digital data.
So three g actually wound up pretty early
on being
not quite good enough.
Plus there's a second thing going on here.
When you start selling phones at volume to
the whole world,
you need to think really carefully about how
much capacity you are gonna need inside the
radio waves. Right?
I mean, you gotta plan for the future.
You have to behave as if you're gonna
be in a world when you've doubled the
market share and then doubled the market share
and doubled it again. How many bands do
you need to have people using a device
like that?
So old school telephony, it was based on
the idea of scarcity. Oh, you don't wanna
be sending those bits, man. They are so
expensive. So we're gonna send bits, and then
we'll stop. And
if you lived in a world where you
were in the real world and you didn't
care about data, that was just peachy.
Now you start to make data so good
that people start saying, oh, I think I
might leave it on like, you know,
stations tuned to country and western. I'm on
a long drive along the road. People are
leaving their data on. Are you using it?
No. But I'm I'm on.
So those bandwidths that you planned the scaling
function that you'd have enough bandwidth for one
phone conversation per person per day. No.
That bandwidth is being used permanently. You need
to make those bands smaller. You need a
way to get more data down. So what's
the classic way in the radio spectrum
that you get more data
into more bands. You got two tricks.
You make the bands thinner,
and you have to start using smarter encoding
so that they don't collide with each other.
And you move up the frequency map because
the higher the frequency,
the higher the information density
inside that coding.
Higher frequency just means that I can actually
put more bits or more symbols
per second
Per Per per second per wavelength because my
yep. Because my wavelength is shorter.
And it also means my sidebands are narrower.
Yeah. Okay. So the overlaps and the boundaries
between things and you shave everything down, the
engineering gets precision. We're getting a bit formula
one here. Oh,
hang on a moment. But but yours but
your length,
the if you lose three dB every wavelength,
your power ratio goes way down,
and you can't penetrate
solid objects as well with low or higher
bandwidth. What are we gonna do
if there aren't enough mathematicians in the world
to do smart coding to get data into
narrower and narrower bandwidth? We need to start
training more mathematicians.
So you gotta plan long term when you
start doing this.
So
three g to four g.
What about all those handsets we sold that
were doing two g? Do they still live
in this world? Well,
no. Because those two g handsets, you turn
one of those babies on, and it's spreading
data out to the edges of the signal.
It's flooding the zone with bands. That's not
good use of everyone's time. How about we
tell everyone that two g is gonna get
turned down and that you've got to be
either three g or four g now?
And then
we could reuse those two g signal spaces
to do things now that we know how
to use tighter bands,
narrower gaps between them, guardrails can be thinner.
We could still use that because there's this
horrible story emerging.
Higher the frequency, more data,
higher the frequency,
less penetration through bricks and mortar.
And higher power required to make the same
distance. Higher power.
So four g comes out,
and we're starting to say it's digital. So
the voice is encoded
into digital bits.
Now
when four g was on the horizon, I
went to some meetings where engineers were talking
about the brave new world of four g,
and they were telling us
four g is gonna solve
every problem you've got. It's the housewives
housewives dream. It's the microwave cooking
of our era.
No more coal fires. You're gonna love four
g. It's clean. It's new. It cooks your
chicken in thirty seconds with radar.
And their version of that was telling us
that we were gonna have this amazing ability
to roam between Wi Fi and cellular, and
we'd carry our conversations with us. And it
would be doing this thing. You've never heard
of this thing. It's called beamforming.
What we do is we put trained ants
inside every telephone and base station, and they
swing the dishes
to make your phone point at the tower
so that the beams go just to you
and we can have more customers with beams.
Four g is beams.
Four g is mobile
voice circuitry,
four g is cutting over to Wi Fi.
So But it didn't solve one problem, George.
What was that?
Being able to sell the new generation of
phones after the four g phones were all
sold.
I've got a plan here.
So we've done two g to three g,
and we've just done three g to four
g. Let's start the hype machine and make
people be interested in five g
While we're putting four g out, we'll tell
them there's a bright new future. Over the
hill, when you get to the crest of
hill, you will catch glimpses of this new
technology. We call it five g. So four
g goes wide. Four g has full dual
stack,
good framing. We're not in slip anymore, guys.
It's full PPP. It's got voice over IP,
and it is crisp and clean and beautiful.
It's got voice over Wi Fi, and people
see it flicker on in the indicator on
their phone. Nobody knows what it actually means.
It says
VO Wi
Fi enabled.
And
there's this hint
that you could buy a thing if the
carrier wants to sell it to you called
a femtocell,
which you can stick in your own home,
which in principle
would allow you to have stronger signal because
people are starting to recognize now that this
four g, him no go very far.
If you're not close to a tower,
four g is kind of off the cliff.
So suddenly, the telephone companies are what we
would call hoist on their own petard.
They've sold this amazing technology
that for people living in rural and remote
areas is actually not better than two g,
let alone three g. So there's a few
hints that this three g g to four
g transition
didn't work well for some communities of people.
This power budget,
who's paying for all this power?
This tap cell tower problem. You mean that
cell towers have, like, eminent domain and can
just say we're sticking a tower on your
territory
and I have to put up with this
thing? Oh, that's okay. We're gonna make them
look like pine trees.
But we don't have pine trees here. We
have maple trees. I'm sorry. We don't have
maple tree shaped poles. You get a pine
tree if you wanna
hide your four g mask.
So
five g,
what's five g gonna deliver that four g
didn't deliver?
More,
more.
Yep.
And it's gonna have beam forming. Yes. Beams.
It's gonna have beam forming.
Five g, the ants can steer these dishes.
So
five g comes out.
I don't think I have ever cared
that my hand said could or could not
do five g.
I cared about two g to three g,
and I had to care about three g
to four g because I had to go
out and buy a new handset.
But the thing is,
every single g generation
subsumes,
it engulfs
its predecessors. And so all four g phones
would also talk three g and two g,
and all five g phones will all automatically
talk four g and three g.
And so an awful lot of the world
is living in three g and four g
radio space with a five g capability
that they are not aware they're using if
they use it.
And I do know people who are using
five g who live
in constrained
environments,
like cities with planning regulations that restrict
the amount of cell towers that can be
deployed because they're heritage.
And
the chatter
amongst those people is,
cell sucks now. I used to be able
to pick up cell no matter where I
was inside the store. Now it's five g.
I can't get anything.
I was reading a story the other day
about the new Cross River Rail system in
London
and how they were determined to make all
telephones work inside that environment.
And what they did is they built a
gigantic
single common carrier in the underground of London.
The way they do it is that they
put this cable throughout the tube system where
they deliberately
break holes in the insulation,
and the thing becomes what's called the leaky
pipe.
It's radiating
miniature radio signal
out of holes every 50 meters down this
thing, and they function
like tiny cells. So as you go past
them in a train, you can go.
You flip between the cells going down there,
and people are going,
seriously?
They're saying,
I get better five g reception in the
underground
than I do up on the street.
So a network engineer would be going, well,
yeah, because, a, it's a single carrier network,
and we're doing, like, tenancies for all of
the phones, and, b, there's an antenna every
50 feet away from you. What did you
expect? Mhmm. And this is starting to mean,
so if we want five g to work
in the general space,
we have to agree to be able to
see
multiple
endpoints, cellular radio points. Yep. And that's like,
yeah. Those ads need a lot of places
to direct the beams to because it's all
about beamforming.
Yeah. Well, it's a big boat, by the
way. A big boat, a ship. What we
would call a ship. Right?
Cruise ships, you don't realize how many
Wi Fi access points there are or little
femtocells
there are on a cruise
ship. That those boats, they are stuffed
with wireless gear
because bulkheads by code have to be a
certain depth, and you just can't get five
You can't punch a signal through them. Yeah.
So there so there aren't just like, there's
not just, like, one Wi Fi or one
femtocell
per there's, like, one Wi Fi or femtocell
per stateroom.
Like, it's Oh, yeah. Crazy. It's how many
of the rooms there are. So
let's come back a bit.
These things are now running at frequencies
that are
everywhere.
There are frequency bands that are right up
the top of the radio spectrum we're used
to using.
They're
they're fringing
into the region that we call terahertz. And
there's a whole conversation to be had about
what these labels mean, but they are astronomically
high frequency
data rates
up at the top, but they also include
bands that go all the way down into
the spaces we used to use for VHF
TV
that we loved because they would punch I
Love Lucy
through bricks and mortar to get to your
TV with rabbit antennas sitting in home. And
we have
stolen
all of that radio spectrum
to use it to provide this telephone service.
Now the thing is,
you can't actually
steal radio because other people put their hand
up to say they need it. The police,
the military, the emergency response teams, local government,
engineers who are out in the field, truckers,
ten four, big buddy,
microwave ovens.
Wi Fi.
Everybody wants a chunk of radio
they can use to do some of the
things they need to do.
And it's interesting to say Wi Fi because
an awful lot of these cell bands
fringe into the area that is kind of
the neighbor next door to the Wi Fi
bands.
Right?
Now
you're making chips
that are able to consume radio in
slots,
and you have an upper limit and lower
limit that is kind of defined that you
can't
break out of.
You are constrained at the low and the
high end. They are like fence lines
you just cannot get out of. And that
essentially is the problem that hit two g
to three g and three g to four
g. Four g had to have wider fence
lines to get all these wonderful high frequencies,
and they had to fringe down into the
low ones to use them. The two g
phones could only share bandwidth
in that lower segment.
So five g has got this
enormous spread of footprint
that fringes into the Wi Fi region,
And people are starting to look at Wi
Fi going,
awfully nice bandwidth you've got there in the
unregulated
bandwidth space. It would be a shame if
somebody fringed into that and started using it
for commercial
services,
wouldn't it?
So behind the scenes,
in the three g p p, the forum
where people do spec design on this work,
and in the IEEE
where people do the engineering work to constrain
chips and make them behave.
There is a lot of engineering horse trading
going off where people are saying,
same chip. I could I could sell you
one chip that does this stuff.
Yeah. I can I can lock out that
region that's Wi Fi, and there's other people
muttering,
why don't we allow these phones to just
use the Wi Fi and do stuff there?
If we if we ever tried that, have
we ever tried just sharing Wi Fi and
using it? Why, yes. We have. There's a
technology system called FON,
f o n, that a friend of mine
was working on engineering, where if you agreed
to allow a percentage of your Wi Fi
bandwidth to be used for general
purpose, you got a rebate on your bill.
And while I was walking down the street,
I could fringe into different people's Wi Fi
and send messages.
And
I'm looking at that going,
okay. That was FON was kind of when
home Wi Fi was operating at, like, 50
megabits,
and my home network now is maybe 300
megabits, and my home fiber connection
is 500 megabits in and maybe a 150
to 200 out,
and I'm using, like,
2% of that,
I I could be offering that radio bandwidth
to hundreds of people and barely notice.
If we organize this commons
of radio frequency
better, we could be doing this stuff. This
stuff could be too cheap to meter.
It's so ubiquitously
fantastic,
and it's pretty much the same chipsets at
the radio layer
that could do it.
Could make it work. We could have an
interesting world. The problem is it's kinda hard
to charge for it, so it's probably not
gonna happen.
So what comes next after five g?
Well, inductive logic tells us it's gonna be
called
six g.
Right. And
inductive reasoning tells us that somebody's gonna say
it involves significant amounts of beamforming.
I was gonna say, yeah. It's gonna be
it's gonna be beamforming.
So whatever.
But there is something that has been going
on in telephony lately that actually has potential
to be very interesting, and that is the
fact that although these incredibly high frequencies
don't have good signal strength in some ways,
it is actually possible to punch this stuff
upwards
in a fairly unconstrained
manner. And so the big deal that's been
going on
in the four g, five g space that's
kind of been bubbling under the counter and
not really getting sold
is cellular telephone
to low earth orbit satellite.
It's called d to c, direct to cell,
or d to d, direct to device. Which
we're seeing with, like, Starlink and Kupia and
stuff like that. We're starting to see
direct Yeah.
And
the world,
as in the engineers who run
cellular communication systems,
are looking at that cost problem of power
budget and available sites to put antenna
and the need for more antenna, and they're
looking at the availability
of cellular space in a worldwide framework.
And they're looking at things like that leaky
pipe model where you construct a common carrier
bus, and then people just rent bandwidth on
top of it. And they're looking at the
low Earth orbit satellites thinking,
maybe this is the model
we have to go to. So five g
introduced this thing called NTN,
the non terrestrial
network,
which is the beginnings
of the ideas that were shoehorned into four
g to do direct satellite. Four g's satellite
was like low bandwidth. It was putting people
back into SMS.
And the cell line was, be out in
the world, be in the hills. If you
get lost, your satellite commons is gonna work
its EPIRB, the emergency
beacon
of satellites. Right? Right. Yeah.
You've got a Because it's low band it's
low bandwidth. You're not sending a whole lot
of data. You know? It's just it's just
it's like your cell location or whatever.
So five g, the NTN,
people are saying, well, why do we have
to say that it's not actually much data?
I mean, these these dishies, these square antennas,
they're getting, like, two, three hundred megabits out
of this service.
Inside the technology of one of these fractally
designed antennas in a handset, we ought to
be able to get five, ten,
15.
That's usable bandwidth, guys. I mean, there are
places around the world where you don't get
that on the cellular frequencies terrestrially.
So
how about we punch up? So I think
it's reasonable to say that six g is
gonna take the NTN model five g has
as a concept
and run with it a lot harder.
We're not maybe gonna be seeing beams in
the sense of steerable stuff on the ground,
but we may well be seeing beaming
in terms of steerable stuff going into space.
But that also means a technology shift in
terms of implementing this stuff because rolling out
a new g
is just about selling a handset.
I mean, you sure want to sell that
handset.
That is a lot of income here is
selling people upgradable handsets.
But behind the scenes, you have to go
out and reengineer
every single cellular radio mast with new technology.
We might have reached the point where
the bandwidth constraints, the upper and lower gates
on those chipsets doing the radio layer. Maybe
that's got big enough that it's got the
capability
baked in to be reprogrammed
so that you can do narrower signal processing
tricks here. Maybe they're not gonna have to
do a significant amount of work to go
five g to six g, But I wouldn't
hold my breath on it because I'm pretty
damn sure they had to do major uplift
to go three g to four g. And
I've been getting a sense that the technology
shift four g to five g has been
shrinking the radio
distance footprint of a cell tower and putting
a lot more cell towers out there on
the ground.
We see
billboards posted on telegraph poles here when a
new cell is being deployed, And it's the,
you know, you have the right to complain,
you may write to, if you are concerned
about type thing. And you'd see them
you'd probably see three or four on a
walk downtown, and it's like you see one
every other telegraph pole now. Yeah. So those
cell counts are rising massively.
I think it's possible that they're gonna try
and avoid having to do major reengineering at
the physical layer and do software tricks to
do the uplift, but there's a lot of
back end technology that's gonna have to go
on here. So what so what I I
wanna go back to direct to device real
quick.
So do you see a future where that's
a hybrid thing, sort of like Wi Fi
was allowed to oh, yeah. We can use
Wi Fi. We get this other thing. Do
we see a a
terrestrial low earth orbit hybrid type of arrangement
with multiple beams at the same time?
Well,
if you ask on the technology space, I
think it's possible the technology is gonna, in
principle,
pumping this stuff down low is more than
making people go high.
But the problem is I don't think the
constraint here is technical.
The constraint here is people who want to
make that a money stream.
So
you said just earlier, Starlink and Kuiper,
and we've got the European equivalent and the
emerging Chinese equivalent.
I don't understand the money behind these guys,
but I don't believe the AT and Ts
and the T Mo's and the SoftBank's
have got a huge amount of sway in
this. So if this stuff is gonna happen,
Tom,
there's gonna be some money conversations
going on here about cross licensing and charging
to make it happen.
And that is gonna be fascinating.
Yeah. That's gonna be the big thing is
who makes money and how. So
so you would say that six g is
primarily the hype around six g is primarily
the direct
to satellite
play that I haven't
yet
I haven't yet seen anyone describe a device
because the horizon for six g deployment is
twenty thirty.
And in some senses,
it's like they're sweating the asset a lot
harder than they did. When four g came
out, we kind of knew there was technology
that hadn't made the cut. And I think
if they'd been honest, they would have said
it's actually 3.5
g, but nobody liked the branding.
And I think four to five g, they
packed in some of the technology that didn't
make the cut for four, and the stuff
that got left off the edge is what's
gonna be packaged into what's coming in six.
Now there are various aspects to this that
I think are a reflection of the shift
in behavior. I mean, when it was three
g to four g, it really was the
beginnings of my phone is always on.
Before then, people had viewed the phone as
the constrained channel. I get a message. It
stops. I'm billed per message. Four g is
I'm paying for the service of data all
the time.
Five g is now saying,
wow. We have the entire population of developed
economies carrying two devices, an Ooyah Ring and
a phone and an Apple Watch, three devices,
and a pacemaker that can be remotely managed
by the doctor, and their car has a
chip, five devices
permanently on per person walking around.
We need to have a heck of a
lot more device capacity in the network.
And I think that's also partly why people
are saying service no good here, Because they
were used to being bleeding edge, new phone.
I get 300 megabits of download. I'm watching
the NFL finals on my screen.
And then suddenly now there's, you know, 200
more customers sharing the cell. You're not getting
that experience anymore. You're getting a more constrained
bandwidth.
Five g is bringing a lot more bandwidth
to the table because it fringes up into
terahertz.
Six g is gonna be living its best
life
solidly
in terahertz frequency rates when it can. There
is not gonna be ubiquity of bandwidth, but
there's going to have to be a lot
more.
Okay. A lot. And I think that satellite
uplift could well be we can all see
the sky. If we can see the sky,
we can see the sky cells.
Yeah. Which is which is going to improve
bandwidth
dramatically.
Now will it harm delay and jitter? Yes.
And so I always find it funny when
when we get into this thing of, well,
six g is gonna be better for gaming.
Well, it's gonna be better for gaming,
or five g is better for gaming than
four g. And you're like No. It's not.
Not. It's not.
I mean, higher bandwidth does give you lower
delay
and potentially lower jitter depending on how you
play things.
But that doesn't necessarily translate because you're using
so much more bandwidth.
That doesn't necessarily translate into anything useful.
And I mean,
this this
compulsion
to say
because it's higher frequency and smarter encoding, it's
better
in those spaces. I look at it and
think, and in aggregate, across all the customers
available,
there is less loss, there is less drop,
there is less jitter and less delay.
For a single individual,
is that necessarily
gonna be your Lyft experience if you choose
to absolutely
soak this machine
with a stream of bits so that you
can be what we call colloquially
a loping bastard.
Well,
no. I don't think so. Yeah. Because I
think the layering effect of taking care of
all that forward error correcting down in the
link layer and doing the cell to cell
jump and the frequency hopping
in broad brush sense, and then on top
of that, intruding an IP packet, and then
on top of that, intruding the question, where
is the game server?
I I don't think there's some Nirvana of
fantastic gameplay out there. No. I don't I
don't either. I think, you know and and
even so the other thing you talked about
was, like,
cars
in particular are becoming data hogs.
They are becoming holy mackerel. How much data
a car puts off or consumes is insane.
And Yep. You know, so here you are
on your gaming console in your house using
five g or six g.
Bada bing bada bing. And then an all
electric,
all autonomous car drives by and consumes a
100% of the revenue.
And you and your character dies.
That's So
you talked
a little bit earlier when we started this
rap
about
strength
for the engineers was the amount of power
you could physically carry around with you to
drive these
in an almost pre VLSI world. And we
have somehow arrived at this rather odd situation.
We want the phones to be as thin
as a sheet of paper, and we want
them to send the highest frequency
signals
we have ever done.
And we need to have the cells
significantly
closer to me, the phone holder, to do
the join over
tiny battery, thin device, and high frequency.
So all we've done is take the power
budget that was in the handset with the
giant battery, and we've moved it to the
static site where the cell is. But that
cell
now needs a lot of volts and current,
and it's radiating a lot of heat budget.
And there is a back end burden of
fiber connecting these things together that has to
go to the moral equivalent of a main
data frame somewhere in the streetscape.
We're building out street furniture to provide this
communications hub. And, like, kitties sleep on top
of these things because they're radiating so much
heat.
Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's We we are
consuming
amazing amounts of power
to flood the world with radio waves. And
for what, I ask you, so that Audrey
can have an ongoing conversation with her fellow
plants. That's right. That's right. That's exactly right.
And and, you know, beyond all that, there's
still the centralizing effect of all of this.
You can't break into being a cell provider
any longer. Oh, no. No. That No. No.
No. This
this market is no longer about a competitive
hub of 15 or 20 local providers.
We are seeing the reconcentration
down to a much more
rational number of providers.
Which, comrade, begs the question, why do we
even have competition?
Yeah. Exactly. Do we? I mean, if this
is a utility function, don't we just want
one substrate that is available to everyone? Yeah.
It does Is that where we're going? Is
physical connectivity
such
a such a thing as a commodity
that we shouldn't even bother? Like, there should
just be physical connectivity providers in each geographic
location.
Now, of course, we all know
that
that doesn't necessarily
work out well for the consumer.
I'm living in an economy with a national
broadband network,
and we're not delighted, but we're not so
angry we're rioting on the streets. We have
vibrant
competition
above that in the provision of Internet services
over the common substrate.
And I would be perfectly happy if the
radio masts were all owned by
a single provider and were implemented as a
common data fabric.
And my ability to move between masts was
about their engineering of cell handoff, and the
build cycle is just like a thin veneer
on top. I'd be fine in that world,
Russ. I really don't have a problem. If
we sweat the acid a bit more rationally
and compete
in a more abstract layer above it, I
could be okay.
Interesting. Not not that it's an equivalent, but
in a previous life, I had some exposure
to metropolitan,
you know, city run networks.
And Oh, yeah. It was it was interesting
the things that were there because it's not
like they could hire lots of engineers.
Right? It's not like these and and I'm
talking city government. I'm not talking national government.
But but,
you know, I it it does make me
wonder, you know, in in the in The
United States at least, what the the federal
government is seeing it in exodus of talent
for various reasons. But, like, if you can't
like, I I the federal government in The
US has always had a problem having competitive
salary.
Like, if there's an and and, obviously, this
becomes regional very quickly. But I I don't
know. Like,
what happens when you want if you want
this national substrate, but you can't pay anybody
to build it for you.
You know, and and in the meantime, we
poured all this tax money into building this
thing and then and we can't pay engineers
to make it actually work.
I don't know. I'm I'm skeptical.
Well, so so so in The US, of
course, it would never be federal government.
It would be regional
like TVA,
the Texas grid,
the Florida grid, whatever.
All the regions have their grids.
Power grids, it'd be the same thing. It
would be regional.
It would not be the federal government doing
it. That's that's my impression.
So the funny thing is that before cellular
phones really took off as a national
activity with this competitive tension between the providers.
There were some early attempts to do this
in the markets that people thought would work,
and one of them was London. There was
a pre cellular
distributed network put up around the Finance District
to be the way that day traders and
people like that could be online all the
time. And it involved the equivalent of what,
I guess, we call femtocells,
because the street furniture in London is just
everywhere.
Sticking up another white pole with a antenna
on the top of it was like, well,
who's gonna notice against the background of all
the other things we have in the streetscape?
It tanked.
I don't think they lasted two years. It
was just financially unviable.
But on a technology
basis,
everything they were doing then to radiate the
whole of the cityscape
with a fabric that people can use to
do what they're going to do, It's pretty
much what we are now living in right
now, but with a different market model, with
a different charging model. And so
five g to six g, we're all going
up into the sky. How many carriers are
there up in the sky? Well, right now,
there's one.
And yet the cellular provider model is that
there's probably four viable three or four viable
cellular carriers per nation state.
All of those guys competing for airtime to
speak with one company floating up in Liye,
that is a political nightmare.
Something's gotta give here. And I think your
skepticism, Tom, is well grounded. I can dream
of a nirvana where the city is run
by people like you, and I would, of
course, as a consumer, be absolutely delighted
that you're paid beans.
But as a comms engineer,
I can't say the prospect fills me with
glee because
it's not a viable living if you can't
afford to pay them. And if you don't
have people coming into the sector, you don't
have the engineers, and the maintenance goes down,
and the whole thing's looking pretty shaky.
So there kind of has to be an
equipoise. Right? We have to have enough people
behind the scenes running this stuff, pulling good
wage to be at the level of competency
and capacity
to provide what we want. And we demand
five nines out of this baby. Right? I
mean, individually,
all of us experience a lot less than
that, but this technology
is now
lifesaver technology.
You're gonna die if your cell phone goes
off because you can't call emergency services.
You can't call the police. Your mom can't
call to say I'm having anaphylactic
shock. This fabric has become
must work.
Yeah. Yeah. That's true. And the other thing
is without the competition,
it's not only just hard to justify
the pay,
it's hard to build a career
that
is anything other than stability focused.
Put it that way. Right? Like,
road engineers don't become multimillionaires
most of the time because they work for
state governments. They're guaranteed never to lose their
job for the most part, that is true,
but they're never,
like, you know, you don't you don't see
a road engineer on YouTube
with a following of 10,000,000,
you know, or what? No. It's more a
following of 5,000.
But those 5,000 kids with their Tonka trucks,
at least a thousand of them are gonna
grow up to be road engineers. They're feeding
the beast. But those guys also have a
significant component of pay that is effectively danger
money Yeah. Because they signed on the dotted
line. They will be out at 2AM
in the snow hooking the wires up. Yeah.
And this is serious stuff. Yeah. That's true.
So I don't know. It's it's a different
kind of career field. And so it's it
is hard sometimes to figure out
economically how to make that
viable,
in some way. This is part of what
you get with the electrical grid in The
United States, is that
while consumers
don't move someplace because of consistency of electrical
grid, it's not something we think about,
businesses
do.
And therefore,
electrical grids
do compete with one another
in the sense of,
can we draw that new factory? Can we
draw that new office building
into our city? And if we don't have
good electrical grid,
if we don't have the reputation
of supporting
always on,
then that company is gonna look at us
less seriously for for putting that new building
in our in our environs, which is gonna
hurt us
from a tax base and other things like
this. So there's still some
some kind of competition there, I would think.
So there is a sell in six g
that we haven't talked about.
And I have a feeling it probably is
going to figure in the marketing materials when
eventually people decide it's coming around the corner
and they need to start selling it. And
it's a two letter acronym,
and it starts at the beginning of the
alphabet.
Six g is going to be
AI.
Oh, oh, yes. Yeah. We know that's gonna
be the big thing.
So
let's riddle me this.
What is the component
of AI in six g?
And I have a couple of ideas
about how this might work. Bandwidth utilization and
beamforming.
You're too cynical.
Yes. But also no, because
I think there's a thing emerging here
that is probably,
in part,
hopefully, gonna improve the horizon.
It's improve the local experience.
So the handset is gonna have NPUs,
GPUs. The handset's gonna be operating
a complex local agent model.
There's going to be a lot more memory
in the handset once we get over this
bump in the road of availability of RAM
chips. These devices
are gonna be operating some kind of constrained
machine learning,
LLM
environment.
And so I think the hope is
you or I will be walking along going,
hey, Siri.
Could you construct the purchasing list for the
food I need by asking the fridge what
we're gonna have for dinner tomorrow? And then
when I get to the shop, could you
guide me round the shop so that I
can pick the cans
of premade ultra processed fat to put in
my shopping pod that is autonomously
following me along the road? And Siri's gonna
say, I can do that.
And what Siri is not gonna say is,
I'm sorry, George. I can't do that because
the cell tower doesn't have the bandwidth for
me to speak to the AI remotely in
the DC
for it to do the job and tell
me what to do. Siri's gonna say, I'm
running in your phone.
I can do that. I can handle that
right now. I'll do low data rate behind
the scenes. I can handle delay and jitter
because it's not you experiencing it. I'm gonna
handle the packet loss and delay. I'll construct
the world model of George's ideal meal of
pizza,
and I will help you buy that pizza
for one low, low price
and take it home. I think the belief
is the AI
fronted services running in your device
are gonna homogenize
the data plane out the back,
and the phone engineers are all gonna go,
we dodged a bullet
because now it's constant plane. George is consuming
50 megabits all the time,
but he doesn't peak
up into the hundreds of megabits.
He's just on a layer, and I can
engineer a layer cake of bandwidth behavior to
handle George's AI constrained agent
in his handset,
I think that's gonna be the sell.
That's interesting. That's a very interesting concept.
You have been speaking to a simulacrum
of George Michaelson.
Yeah. That's
yeah. That's an interesting that's an interesting sell
point.
Now will people want that? Yes.
Will it be good for them? Well, that's
another entire show.
Yeah. Yeah. That's that's another entire set of
problems.
I ain't doing that. No. I'm not doing
it either, but, you know, that's me.
And I know a lot of people, they
choose convenience
over everything, and I'd I worry anyway, that's
another entire
that's another, like I said, another entire show.
You young whippersnapper.
Yeah.
I don't know. You know, I go back
to music, and I think everybody on the
last podcast recording when I was talking to
Mike about this, about when we were talking
with Mike about this, and I was saying
how much better the music was back in
the nineties
and the eighties.
And even going back a bit into the
seventies
when there was that bend over
where the people who knew how to play
musical instruments were giving act given access
to digitalized
versions of those instruments.
And they knew what they were trying to
do, but they could never express it before.
And all of a sudden, you have people
like the guy who did Boston, which was,
by the way, one guy
sitting in
in his garage,
making up things that you attach to electrical
guitars to make them sound different.
A lot of people don't realize that's how
Boston ever really was. And, you know, Kansas
and all these other big groups.
But anyway, I was also noticing that I
was watching, like, the year by year number
one hits because there's a video out there.
All the different record labels
and
how they competed against each other in different
styles of music
and with different artists, and they were looking
for something.
And nowadays,
all music is owned by, like, three companies.
All of it.
And and you get to this homogeneity
that's like,
no. It's just it's just,
stop.
So I don't know. Maybe that's that's just,
but that that's actually kind of what worries
me about the scenario you're talking about.
George's ideal pizza
is gonna be identical
to 500,000
other people's ideal pizzas,
and George is never gonna realize
that he's actually not getting his ideal pizza
anymore.
He's getting the average of all ideal pizzas.
And that's there's, like
But the but the thing here is we
didn't enter this talking about what you or
I or Tom as consumers
would want from a ubiquitous
data
lake of
cellular capability.
We talked about what are the companies going
to want to do. Yep. What are they
trying to sell us?
And I gotta tell you, it's beams.
Yeah. It's beams. It's beam forming.
Yeah. Instead of instead of ball bearings now,
it's beams
or plastics.
The future is plastic. Wait a minute. Isn't
that, is that, Dustin Hoffman? Is that the
graduate?
It is.
The plastics. All ball bearings or the yeah.
Or plastics? Plastics.
Yeah. Yeah. It actually goes all the way
back to It's a Wonderful Life.
Plastics, I tell you. I'm offering you a
a place on the Ground Floor of plastics.
Like
Yeah. George got the better deal. He got
the girl. Just say it.
You have your plastics. I'll take the girl.
Thanks.
You made the right choice. Yep. So anyway,
alright. Well, I think we've kinda beat this
to death,
and maybe we ought to give up
on any further six g for the moment.
We'll eventually have Doug Dawson on to talk
about
hype, how the hype cycle works on this.
And, so anyway alright. Great.
George, anything else before we No. I had
a blast talking here. I love you guys,
and Audrey's looking better and better.
He's got he's gotta do some Audrey needs
a haircut.
Oh, Audrey. He didn't mean it.
Okay. A leaf cut. Whatever.
So, Tom, anything else?
Nope. Alright. Nope. Cool. It's been good. Alright,
Tom. Say your word.
LinkedIn. Alright. Cool. George, where can people find
you if they want to follow you? Or
I'm on the IP Nick blog. Okay. Cool.
I'm Ross White. You can find me here
at the hedge, rule eleven dot tech.
On LinkedIn,
occasionally on x, more or less depends on
the time of day and what I feel
like. And most of the time, it's I
don't, but anyway. And you can also find
me connected to a five g network someplace.
Likely. Likely. Very, very likely possibility.
And,
anyway,
alright.
We know we live in an attention driven
economy, and we thank you for listening all
the way to the bitter end of this
episode of The Hedge, and and we will
catch
you next