4G, IPv6 & Related Apps
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2010 is a time and a world filled with 7 billion people, thousands of technologies, and thousands of new technology opportunities. One of the greatest technologies is mobile communications, which has reached the milestone of 4 billion subscriptions, and which is expected to reach an additional 4 billion subscriptions within the foreseeable future. Mobile communications, mostly 2G wireless voice and SMS and including a slowly growing percentage of 3G wireless voice, MMS, and short video and music, has advantages over every other mass media in the potential to know who is listening to what message, where, in what context, and if desired make a purchase using the subscriber’s billing arrangement, or otherwise give a response to input.
Given the advantages of mobile communication, FNC believes that one of the great opportunities of the decade from 2010 to 2020 is in 4G mobile wireless communications. 4G is not completely standardized, and some companies, notably Sprint, have ignored even the basic standards to give the impression of being first to market in the US, but the 4G that will come to market starting in 2010, and which will be more fully solidified, from the perspective of standards, networks, and applications, by 2015, will be a wonder to behold, and a major focus of FNC.
FNC will provide a white paper later in 2010 about FNC’s own unique vision of 4G technology details. For early 2010, however, we will only give introductory indications of what 4G is worth watching, investing in, and partnering to provide. In brief, 1G wireless is analog and uses/used frequency division, meaning that limited spectrum had to be devoted to each call. 1G (G for generation of technology) was also "hard to roam, easy to clone" as well as being an inefficient user of the (electromagnetic) spectrum. 2G wireless is digital, more spectrally efficient using time division (breaking communications into short pieces of time that allowed sending multiple conversations across the same spectrum) and, for a fraction, code division which used processing power to encode conversation so that they could even more efficiently use the same spectrum. 2G also saw the European Union compel a unified standard, based on Nordic Mobile Radio, that became GSM, and now connects over a billion people. 2G was thus "easy to roam, hard to clone" compared to 1G. SIM chips enabled GSM users to make changing providers, including prepaid, as easy as changing batteries. The massive volume of 2G users also enabled manufacturers of handsets to bring the marginal cost of production way down. A rule of thumb, from the Boston Consulting Group, is that for every doubling of aggregate production volume, the marginal cost of production drops by 10%. 2G handsets have now been produced in the billions of units, and a vast industry exists in China, among other places, to manufacture 3G handsets.
A saying is that “no good deed goes unpunished”. The commercial success of 2G led to most of the European government, which had been so smart about cooperating for the good of 2G, to create very costly auctions for the right to offer 3G. This led to extra capital costs that did not get invested in cell towers or research or development of new hardware or software, and the deployment of 3G was slowed financially. 3G market acceptance was also slowed by the extra power consumption of the devices, and by the lack of breakthrough applications. Even eight years after the deployment of 3G in Europe, data rates are only 384 kilobits per second (kbps) to 2 megabits per second (mbps), not enough to quickly download videos or do inexpensive mobile videoconferencing, some of the applications that had been promised.
Deployment of 3G in the US was further stalled because the most popular 3G access device, the Apple iPhone was offered exclusively on the ATT 3G network. (The iPhone brought in over $5.6 billion in revenue for Apple in the most recent quarter, Q4, 2009, and was bigger by over a billion dollars than either the iPod division or the Mac division.) ATT has become infamous for limited 3G coverage (Verizon shows the ATT 3G map in red side by side with its own 3G coverage map in blue, and claims over three times the coverage of ATT in geographic area), which, coupled with the very short battery life of the iPhone 3G (a few hours of talk time between recharges) has limited the enthusiasm of the American market for 3G.
This very brief summary 1G, 2G, and 3G brings us to the 4G opportunity open from 2010 to 2015 to investors and technology entrepreneurs and FNC. To oversimplify, 4G is technologically a Goldilocks opportunity, as well as a political and social opportunity. The story of Goldilocks deals with her tasting oatmeal, and finding it "too hot, too cold, and just right to eat", testing the bed and finding it "too hard, too soft, and just right to sleep upon". With respect to 4G, Sprint and the others who claim (prematurely, history will prove) to have 4G already are too slow. Sprint’s fine print says that their “4G” is only 3 times as fast as average 3G speeds, or still a few Megabits per second. However, the primary standards groups are claiming that 4G needs to be 100 Mbps when moving (or outdoors) and 1000 Mbps when stationary (or indoors). This sounds very impressive when engineers are around a table, but, in practice, this will typically require 100 Megaherz (MHz) of spectrum, far more than is needed for 2G or even 3G calls. Also, the power consumption will be even higher than for 3G, and there are already concerns about health effects. It is possible that 100 - 1000 Mbps is much faster than is necessary, spectrally inefficient on a per user basis, and inconvenient for consumers in terms of their battery life.
FNC’s Goldilocks opportunity is to find the “just right” trade-off between data rate (20 Mbps is enough for high definition video – why does the average user need more than that on a mobile device?), spectral efficiency (20 MHz of spectrum is much easier to obtain and provide to users than 100 MHz), and power consumption (a user would probably rather have a battery that lasted five hours and fit in his pocket than 1 hour). While FNC’s 4G might not necessarily have bandwidth to run an entire Navy cruiser (which have long gotten by on much less than the proposed data rate for a single 4G user in the near future), FNC will have something much more important, and which is not a strength of most mobile operators: new and novel technology and services.
FNC sees a vast array of opportunities for partners and host countries in seeing 4G not as an end in itself, but as a platform for the development of tens of thousands of new applications. Apple’s App Store for the iPhone has been a massive success, with billions of apps downloaded, out of a choice of over 100,000 different apps. 4G will have a much greater capability for video and video conferencing, and greater awareness of presence (ability to know whether a person is available to communicate with you or not) and location in part because of the use of smart antennas and spatial division multiple access, and in part because of universal use of the Global Positioning System or GPS.