The ICT Optimist

Just flying back form San Francisco on Virgin America and got a chance to try out their on-flight Internet access via GoGo . My first reaction is that its pretty good from a stability and experience perspective. I didn’t try to run any voice or real time services but for email and web browser activity it was as good or better than I get on my cellular broadband connection. As a geek, I ran a few tests and while its pretty high round-trip latency it does not impact web and email services.

Pinging Yahoo.com from the plane:

Pinging yahoo.com [209.131.36.159] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=254ms TTL=50
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=772ms TTL=50
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=551ms TTL=50
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=628ms TTL=50

Ping statistics for 209.131.36.159:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 254ms, Maximum = 772ms, Average = 551ms

Also went to DSL Reports.com and ran a speed test and had throughput of around 300kb/s upstream and 500kb/s downstream. Not bad at all given the network topology and the fact that I am on a plane traveling a little over 500 MPH. What I could not tell is how many other people on the plane where also using the system so local and down link congestion may get worse as this system is more heavily used.

From a cost perspective it is pretty reasonable and are tiered from $5.95 for a short flight to $12.95 for long haul flights. Given how boring it is to be on a plane these days the cost of being connected is pretty reasonable.

Given how long the industry has been trying to make this work and the huge failure of Connexion, its is nice to see a working technology and business model (so far) . Given that this system is using existing mobile technology the interesting future will be if and how this service improves when new mobile broadband systems based on LTE and WiMAX become applicable to this use case. Regardless, we continue to be more connected every day.

Recently there has been a bit more dialog about the fact that Wireless networks (802.11 based Wifi specifically) are moving to a position of prominence in the enterprise market. I follow this with great interest because in my career dealing with Enterprise CIOs two of the most often asked questions are “when will I be able to rely fully on wireless access?” and “when will I no longer invest in broad cabling of my buildings?” The reason CIOs have been asking me this for the past 10 years is that when you take a hard look at user patterns on the edge of an enterprise (home, small office, hotel, airport, or even campus LAN) it is clear that with every year the use of Wifi as the primary access technology has increased. What is interesting is that this was not be design. In fact most enterprises offered Wifi as an overlay network that was optionally available but as soon as the workforce adopted laptops as their primary compute hardware the WiFi network became the primary network of the user base.  Additionally the workforce has become accustomed to WiFi in their home and when they travel and since most people conduct their work in more places than the fixed office, the users figured out,well before the IT groups did,  that you can indeed use wireless for business.

In a recent Network World article titled “Is it time to cut the Ethernet access cable?”, the topic was discussed and what was interesting was that the vast majority of end customers acknowledged that wireless is playing a much more primary role in their networks. Not surprisingly, the vendors where split. The wireless switching vendors suggested a wireless only experience while Cisco, the largest provider of wired LANs, asserted that you actually need wired, wireless and a cellular overlay. It was fairly interesting to note in this article that many of the customers interviewed wanted to remain anonymous when asked about wireless use, as if there was a shame or career risk to acknowledging that their business used wireless technology.

So when will we be able to unwire our enterprises? Well that is still a hard thing to predict. Clearly with advanced such as 802.11N, WiFi is a much more robust technology. There are still challenges in relying on Wifi that are not present in wired LANs. Specifically since WiFi operates in unlicensed frequency bands, the possibility of interference or jamming is a real risk. The reality though is that given the 2.4 and 5Ghz bands and the significant enhancements most Wireless systems have today, interference is a far less likely issue. Consider, if you rely on WiFi at home, how often the wireless network failed versus how often the broadband connection (DSL, Cable…) failed. In giving it some though I cant remember when a wireless issue stopped me from connecting but disruptions on the broadband link are a common event. In your experience in the office, consider how often your WiFi service stopped? Probably not very often and clearly more resilient than many of your business applications.

An additional concern that has haunted Wireless is that it is a “shared network”. Because the bandwidth is shared between all users on the access point, it is possible that an active user might occupy enough bandwidth to starve other users. One could deploy complex QoS in the wireless domain to try to solve this but the reality is that with 802.11N the amount of capacity on the “shared” wireless network is probably far greater than the capacity of the “shared” WAN link that 99% of your traffic is traversing. I just looked at my home network and my .11N networks are providing about 144Meg of capacity and my Cable link is 15meg downstream and 1 Meg upstream using a test suite on DSLReports.com . The bigger challenge today is to assure fairness on the broadband up-link (I sit on the board of company that does this called Smart Share Systems) as that is the actual congestion point in most cases.

In any event enterprises are still suspect of a fully unwired experience. They may not have specific examples of wireless failure but they do know that there is uncertainty when you move data over a shared wireless medium leveraging unlicensed spectrum. Another Network World article this week titled “Wireless Netowrks must overcome Interfearence , Latency and Security Challenges” lists the current concerns but on a closer read, it shows how broadly Wifi is currently used and in almost all of the examples used successfully today.  The reality though is that we have enough data to know that if you model your existing user patterns almost all enterprises will see that there has been significant shift towards using wireless and a dramatic reduction in the use of the wire-line LAN. A realistic approach would be to redistribute resources and focus to the new usage distribution and spend more time engineering, improving and enhancing the network people are moving to (Wireless) and looking for ways to decommission or reduce the footprint of the network they are moving away from (Wired access). How much you wish to shift is up to you but a good exercise would be to audit the current usage and ask if you are spending your capital and time on where your users are going towards or if you are simply perpetuating a network that is dramatically under utilized. If every year you ask and answer the usage distribution question and map your IT spend and resources to that trend, you will be aligned to the reality of your user communities true dependencies. As an added bonus you IT bill for access will most likely drop as you leverage more Wireless as it is common knowledge that the cost of a wireless network is far lower than wired and enables far better economics in terms of user productivity and Moves Adds Changes cost to IT.

It looks like the industry analysts have started to model the LTE market and it adds up to a big, a very big, market. Juniper Research is estimating that LTE will be a $70B market by 2014 with most of that being in the developed world. What is particularly interesting is that they are now starting to model that the LTE market will not be based exclusively on the number of human beings using the network but rather based on the number of diverse devices that will be attached. It has been my position all along that the scaling of revenue in cellular 4G would have little to do with more people on the network(since we are pretty well 100% connected today in the west) but rather that as the cost per bit came down the threshold to add consumer electronics, industrial and sensor systems would be crossed. Given that there are tens of billions of those devices out there the growth could be huge and these new numbers seem to validate this. The trick though is that the carriers must begin a process to change how they price and how they measure growth from the classic “Average Revenue Per User” to a diverse set of metrics dealing with device penetration, types of usage and cost of capacity. Its good to see that the industry is now seeing the potential and its great to see that the networks are becoming a reality even with the still needed business model changes to fully unlock the potential.

A few years ago during some of my travels around the world talking about the future of our industry, one of the technology advancements I was discussing was the inevitable delivery of faster, more Internet-centric wireless broadband. The idea of mobile broadband that would be similar in both speed and operating model to what we had in our homes and businesses over cable and DSL seemed to be inevitable. 

The reason I was optimistic about the technology was that I had seen the early technology being developed in the labs at Nortel when I was CTO and early tests demonstrated that new technologies, such as 802.16e (mobile WiMAX) and LTE (long term evolution), could offer 2-4 times the capacity in the same amount of frequency spectrum as existing cellular systems. Additionally, it was clear that the design of these networks would be in the image of the Internet (packet-based, simple, open, flexible and relatively inexpensive). When you see a need for something (in this case to create a mobile Internet experience) and you see promising technology (LTE and WiMAX), an optimist bets that the technology will fill the need faster than people anticipate.

Well, last week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the focus seemed to be on LTE and the need for mobile broadband seems to be evolving to a reality of mobile broadband. That was evidenced by news of vendor selections by Verizon for a 2009 LTE deployment, T-Mobile showing off real-world LTE solutions, and even AT&T  moving faster towards lighting up LTE networks for commercial use. All of this, coupled with the fact that the operators are willing to spend real capital to make LTE happen, means that the promise of a mobile broadband experience will occur much sooner than the 2015 dates some “industry experts” predicted as late as last year.

So what will this LTE network look like and what will it do differently? Well it’s interesting that in looking at the presentation from Verizon on their LTE vision, it contains many of the attributes I have been talking about for years now. An LTE network is for more than the cell phone (data devices, consumer electronics, gaming…), it is for robust applications (virtual environments, video conferencing, …), and it will consume a huge amount of capacity. Most importantly, it is consistent with something I said at a keynote in last year’s Mobile World Congress. When I was asked as a participant on the LTE standards panel “What will be the killer applications for LTE?”, my response was:

” The real killer applications are just the fact that every application (killer or not) that we currently use, enjoy or benefit from on our wireline broadband systems will suddenly become cost effective and possible over a mobile network experience. “

It appears that this is now the reality of the world in the 2009/2010 time frame. We will rapidly move to an era where we simply build innovation for the Internet (mobile or fixed) and expect the networks to support that innovation fully. The fun part now is that we have a new dimension of the overall market, creating value over the early LTE networks, that will spawn a host of new companies, offerings and opportunity. 

In fact,Verizon seems so serious about this need for new offerings that they have created an LTE R&D center in Waltham, Massachusetts to allow partners to prove out and deliver solutions for this new network. Given that I live about an hour north of that center I should have a front row seat for that activity and I am very much looking forward to it.