September 17, 2014 • 38 mins
Bandwidth is a finite resource. What happens when we reach the limit? And how close are we now?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking Either and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks at the future and says I just called
to say I love you. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm
(00:21):
Joe McCormick. So, guys, you know, we've talked a lot
about the concept of the Internet of things, right, it
sounds great. Yeah, it's fantastic. This idea of an environment
that's able to sense with what you are doing and
who you are, and be able to respond in real time.
My car and my toaster oven coordinating with each other flawlessly.
Fantastic future that we're all really excited about. This idea
(00:43):
that we could have a reality that's defined by our
own needs and wants and desires so that we just
live in hedonistic pleasure forever. Sounds great unless you've seen
the movie Maximum Overdrive. Yeah, that there is a downside
to this. If the machines do decide to crazy where
when they can coordinate, Yeah, they're extremely well organized. But
(01:05):
now also there's a there's there's a disclaimer. I don't
think there's much chance. Yeah, I think self aware machines
are quite a long ways away, let alone self aware
of very ticked off machines, and selfware toaster evans are
pretty far down on the list of machines that would
be ticked off. I think. Yeah, well, so I've got
a question about the Internet of things. Sure, ask away.
(01:27):
All of these things need to talk to each other, right,
that is correct. And so if you imagine that you
have a house in which you have fifty or maybe
even a hundred electronic devices that are communicating, Yeah, it
really doesn't make sense to try to wire them together,
even if they're stationary devices. Right. Yeah, you wouldn't want
all those cables all over the place or you know,
(01:48):
have to drill into your walls every time you get
a new toaster evan. Right, And a lot of these
things are things that you're going to want to be
mobile anyway. You want to be able to carry them
around with you or move them to a different place
and still have them communicate eight with all the things
in your Internet of things, realizing my permanent dream of
mobile test exactly right, So how many things can talk
(02:10):
to each other all at once before that cross talk
becomes a problem. Yeah, this is a this is an
issue that we need to talk about because in order
for the Internet of Things to become a reality, we
have to have the the foundation, the infrastructure that allows
them to communicate with one another without interference, without clogging
(02:32):
the system. And this is where we get into the
concept of a spectrum crunch or data crunch. This idea
doesn't sound nice. It's not good. It's not good. No,
it's not like. It's not like delicious crunch with a
new Gady Center, not like Captain crunch. No no, well,
I mean it will cut up your mouth if you
try and eat enough of it. But no, it's more
like the crunching of putting a part of your body
(02:53):
and advice. Yeah, it's the crunch of too much stuff
trying to fit through too narrow and opening. So like
you know three who just style, everyone's trying to get
through the door at the same time. Very much like that,
except with data with zeros and once. So what we're
talking about here is the actual physical infrastructures capability of
(03:13):
uh handling that much information, as well as the physical
limitations of frequencies to hold data in the first place. Okay,
so we're going to focus today on wireless communication. Right,
we got we got all those chords out of the way.
We don't want all the future just cluttered with chords
like Brazil, there is not the country. There is that
(03:34):
element as well. Right, the Internet, the Internet backbone does
have a limited bandwidth, and we can add to that.
We can keep adding capacity by adding essentially more tubes
to the series of tubes that is the Internet. But
that's not what we're focusing on here. We're focusing on
that wireless communication. And really a lot of what we're
going to talk about is really gonna focus on cellular
(03:57):
communication because that's the one that's probably the closest to
hitting capacity. But all of these things kind of bleed
into one another, right, Okay, so how do wireless devices
communicate with each other over the electromagnetic spectrum? Joe, ain't
that a great spectrum? It's it's one of my favorites.
Full of photons, Yell. The photons are definitely part of
(04:19):
the electromagnetic spectrum. Yes, so this is a spectrum is
of course an entire range here. We're talking about a
range of frequencies of waves and wavelengths. Right, it includes
the stuff that we see light. Yes, visible light is
in fact a tiny slice of the overall electromagnetic spectrum,
but it also includes the X rays that you get
(04:41):
at the doctor's office or the dentist's office, or the
gamma rays that are radiating your body when someone does
experiments on you, microwaves, radio waves that end up carrying information, right,
and so this is all the same stuff. It's just
a question of how long is the wave in that transmission. Yeah,
(05:01):
the wavelength is a big part of it. The frequency
is directly correlated to that. So the long wavelengths are
low frequency. So that means essentially what frequency we should
define as it's how often particles of the medium. So
whatever the wave is traveling through vibrate when a wave
passes through it. Uh. This is different from the period
(05:23):
of a wave, which is where you would take one
point along the waves form and say how long how
many times can that pass through in a second at
least a little bit difference to two very closely related concepts.
But we menasure frequency in hurts. So one hurts refers
to one vibration cycle per second. Alright, So one killer
(05:46):
hurts would be one thousand vibration cycles in a second,
and so on and so forth. Okay, so so on
the electromagnetic spectrum. If you start from what radio waves
are the longest wave? Yes, yeah, we're talking about the
lowest frequency. Yeah, you get to radio waves that are
kilometers long, right, they are incredibly long wavelengths until you
(06:08):
get down to the flip side, the opposite end of
the spectrum, where you're talking about wavelengths that are incredibly
incredibly short. Okay, so what what are they? In order?
Radio waves are the longest, microwaves. Microwaves are the second longest.
Then you have infrared, then visible light, then ultra violet light,
then X rays, and then gamma raise and favorite and
(06:31):
then unobtainium or whatever. It is not part of the no.
But if you are ever writing science fiction and you
realize that you have to come up with some sort
of energy that is not reflected on the electromagnetic spectrum,
you can only really go up because the past gamma waves. Yeah,
it's the reason turning the dial to eleven exactly. The
only reason we don't know about is because our instruments
(06:53):
are incapable of measuring it. Yeah that's inaccurate. Okay, But
so these different parts of the spectrum we've talked about,
they're not like a single isolated value. Within each of
these ranges, there are a whole lot of values. Absolutely. Yeah,
So you can have radio waves of much different frequencies. Yes.
In fact, anyone who's played with a radio at all
(07:14):
knows this because the radio station that corresponds to the
frequency of that radio wave. So, for example, in the
A M spectrum, you go from five five killer hurts
to one point six oh five mega hurts, So station
five thirty five to six five. That's a reflection of
(07:34):
the frequency of those radio waves, all right, And that's
how we can have so many radio stations floating around
in the air around us without having them interfere with
one another. Your radio is a is a specific instrument
that you tune to one of those frequencies and pick
that one up. Absolutely. So, if you ever enter an
area where two different competing radio stations have the same
(07:56):
or very similar frequencies, you might get that interference from
get that static kind of overlap. Yeah, you get you
can hear two things going on at once and it
sounds like you know that you really need to change
the station. Or perhaps you might hear secret messages only
you can decipher, and that gets scary. So on the
FM side, same sort of thing. From eight point eight
mega hurts to ten point eight mega hurts. That's where
(08:18):
you get the FM stations two and eight. Uh, that's
they correspond again to that range of frequencies. So that's
just in you know, broadcast radio here in the United States,
radio waves encompass a much broader spectrum even than that.
And this is this is where we're looking at using
(08:39):
electromagnetic radiation to carry data. And the problem is is
that not all wavelengths are ideal for carrying lots of data.
Some some are great at carrying small amounts of data.
But in order to carry a lot of data, you
need a lot of time. So we're really talking about
throughput here, you know, because the speed is still the
speed of light, right, It's gonna it's going to carry
(09:01):
a single bit of information the same speed, no matter
what the frequency of the wavelength is. But the amount
of information how many times can it send a signal
in that in that span of time, right, or or
how many bits can it carry along in that span
of time? All right, So the higher frequency the wavelength,
the more information it can carry. Generally speaking, generally speaking,
(09:24):
it gets a little complicated because it also depends upon
the implementation a little complicated. We're talking about wireless here.
This is really difficult stuff. Yeah, we're actually not going
Engineers who design this are crazy smart people. Yeah, we're
not going to go too deeply into the physics and
technology because to do so would require a suite of episodes.
I mean, these, what we're talking about right here, would
(09:45):
constitute an entire semester's worth of courses on the in
the university level. Yeah, we're simplifying, Yeah, we are. We are,
for the purposes of this discussion, simplifying so that we
can talk about what the problem is. But in order
to talk about the problem, we have to lay the ground. Okay,
so who decides who gets to use what parts of
the radio spectrum? Right? You can't have two different radio
(10:08):
stations in the same place broadcasting at the same frequency.
I imagine that applies to all different kinds of radio transmission.
A cell phone tower, if you're whatever you are that
needs to be sending data back and forth, you've got
to know who can use what frequency, Yes, because otherwise
you do have this interference problem, and you have to
avoid those interference problems as as best as you possibly can,
(10:32):
so uh it depends upon where you live. But in general,
most places in the world your local, as in your
national government. When I say local, I mean nationally. Yeah,
nationally local, because not everyone listening to the show. Everyone
listening to the show is from the United States. So
but generally speaking, the government decides which parts of the
(10:55):
spectrum go to which applications. So, for example, in the
United States, there are large, large UH bands frequencies that
are dedicated to things like military use, and no one
else is allowed to touch that, even if the military
is not making full use of it. It is reserved
for military use. And then there may be narrow bands
(11:17):
that are that are reserved for specific cell phone carriers,
so no other cell phone carrier can use that specific
band of frequencies. They might operate in a similar band
of frequencies, but they won't have overlapping ones necessarily. So
this gets really really complicated. You have to be able
to legislate this and say this goes to you, this
(11:37):
goes to you, this goes to you, and you you're
limited by this, and it's of course only gotten more
complicated in the past couple of decades as cell phone
use has zapped crazy out of the stratosphere. Well, yeah,
things like smartphones have put such a huge load on
the cellular networks because with smartphones, you're not just using
those radio signals to carry your voice. You're trying to
(12:00):
download pictures of cat videos and cat videos and and
get Axl Rose on your phone and yeah, singing to
your cat. Everything is cat relating face time with Axl
Rose and his cat. Yeah, exactly. We have to keep
the cats in this or else they will overthrow us. Well,
at any rate, Like you were saying, Lauren, the cell
(12:22):
phone use has definitely complicated matters. And then on top
of that, we have all the different wireless technologies they
debuted over the years, everything from WiFi to Zigby to Bluetooth. Uh.
These are different protocols that use wireless communication, usually in
the two point four or two point five giga hurts range.
A few of them are in the five giga hurts
(12:43):
range um, and that complicates matters more. Now we've got
some big, big issues here, like the idea of the capacity,
like what is the capacity for wireless communication. It's actually
really complicated to answer because if we were to say,
all right, this one frequency band within this one geographic
(13:05):
region can carry x amount of data and no more.
That's not entirely accurate. One thing that is helping is
that we have devices that have really good error checking algorithms,
and those error checking algorithms what they do is they're
able to help separate the signal from the noise. So
the noise would be all the different UH transmissions that
(13:26):
don't have anything to do with what you are actively
trying to do. It's a fine frequency tuner basically, right.
And on top of that, the actual infrastructure, the the
the things that receive messages and route information have a
limitation on how many connections they can actively handle at
a given time. That's largely based upon the state of
(13:46):
the art of the technology at the time, as well
as the density of those things within whatever geographic region
you're talking about. Yeah, it's due to our capacity to
program um a device to handle a certain number of
incoming connections. Has it? You know, computers get confused when
you have too many things trying to go on at once. Yeah,
if you if you think of it in the old
wired terms, that makes it a lot easier. Right. Let's
(14:08):
let's talk about like if you had an old router
that was not a WiFi router. It was just it
was a router that hooked up to your modem and
it allows you to physically plug Ethernet cables into that router.
I used to have. Yeah, they looked like a big
one looked like a harmonica. Yeah, it really did. Just
wanted to see if I could play a tune on it.
But yeah, well you can download tunes using them. But
(14:30):
because it's got all those parts, and it has a
finite number of parts, right, and once you reach that
finite number, you ain't plugging anything else into that router.
That's it. You would have to unplug something else before
you can plug a new thing in. And it had
a very easy to understand physical limitation of how many
devices could plug into that router. Well, when you get
(14:51):
to WiFi, uh, those those connections become invisible if you're
not hard wiring stuff to your router. I still hardwire
a lot stuff to matter what, because I like to
game and like to watch things on gaming consoles. But
at any rate, you have more connections than what you
can see, right, And so the thing is that the
limitation is still there. These devices have a capacity that
(15:14):
they can't really go beyond If they try to, then
they're shuffling, They're they're juggling all of these different tasks
and trying to respond to them as quickly as possible,
which slows everything else down. If you have ever been
in a high density area during a big event when
people are using their phones a lot, like a concert
or dragon con ce s something like that, then you've
(15:39):
had the experience of your phone not making a connection.
You might not even be able to make a phone
call in extreme circumstances, and that's really when the network
is starting to get overwhelmed. It's it's getting more requests
from devices than it can actually process simultaneously, and that's
where we start to see the real spectrum crunch. It's
(16:01):
not just the physical limitation of the spectrum, although that's
a part of it too, It's also a physical limitation
of the actual hardware that we're making. So the question
is what happens when you hit that And the answer
is that scenario I was talking about where suddenly everything
is slow or you can't make a connection in the
first place, which is a really frustrating I mean, I'm
(16:22):
sure you guys have had that example, right where you've
got it says you've got full bars on your phone,
but you can't call failed here. I often get that
in this building where we work. Yeah, so that may
just be a structural interference. I don't know, it could be,
but it's also something that if you go to one
of these big events, you'll see you'll have full bars
(16:45):
and you think, I've got complete four G service here,
I can't wait to download my schedule for the day
so I know where I need to go next, And
then you just get that little circular waiting you know,
icon and nothing ever happens. And it's because again, the
whole network has been jammed up by the way. Quick
word of advice to people who are attending something like that,
(17:05):
you can always try to switch to two gene networks
because often those are underused compared to the faster ones.
It doesn't always work, but sometimes it does. It's been
a lifesaver for me. Hit ces nice. Yeah, I mean
it takes it takes longer to get data than it
would on an unencumbered three G or four G network,
but it works so so it does have its advantages. Um. So, yeah,
(17:29):
this this ended up being real issues also in places
like London during the two thousand twelve Olympics, and this
was where we started to see it as a real,
like citywide issue, not just something that's located to sports
arena like that. Yeah, well, because I mean the city
of London was basically already at its capacity for for
(17:49):
cellular use at the time before millions of people are
I don't know how many, like like a whole bunch
of people came into the city, right and and not
just people, but like all the different news outlets that
are using all that data to wirelessly send stuff back
and forth between journalists. I mean, it was just an
incredible demand on the system. And so what London ended
up having to do what the UK did was for
(18:11):
a temporary basis, they ended up reallocating some bandwidth that
normally would be reserved for the military to go to
this wireless communication use for the general public and for
really for for media outlets in particular, to alleviate some
of that demand. So it spreads the demand out a
bit more and makes it a little more manageable. But
(18:32):
it's not something that they could necessarily do perpetually unless
they were too uh to look at the full spectrum
and say, which parts of these are of the spectrum
are really necessary for what they're doing right now, and
which ones can we repurpose so that we can uh
stave off the spectrum crunch. Keep in mind, if we
(18:53):
keep building more and more Internet connected devices, specifically cellular
connected devices. This, even if we alleviate it by adding
in more more spectrum, we're still we're still heading toward
that problem. We're just heading towards it. You know, the
problem is a little further out than it was before. Well,
and also it's not necessarily easy to just, for example,
(19:15):
build a whole bunch more cellular towers, right. Yeah, so
you guys know the whole nimby not in my backyard thing, right,
I mean that this applies to all sorts of things, right,
anything that, uh, that you think will end up affecting
the property value of your home or a quality of
life issue. Uh. It's one of those things that people
(19:35):
react very strongly too. So the idea of erecting more
cell towers is not really that attractive to a lot
of people. It's something that could potentially help alleviate the
problem a little bit. The idea being that with cell phones,
you have these cell sites that represent a certain geographic
area of service. You could divide those cells into smaller
(19:57):
units so that they're servicing smaller areas. That means you're
gonna have more handshakes between towers whenever you have people
moving through the area. But it also means that you've
spread out the service capacity and you've increased it as
a result. But because it's so hard, both financially and
politically to get these things built, it's not really seen
(20:22):
as an attractive solution to spectrum crunch. And also again,
it's one of the things that you can only keep
doing for so long before you have reached you know,
like I can't move because all the cell phone towers right,
I'm wearing one as a hat. My environment is responding
to me in real time, but I can't go anywhere.
So I guess it's a good thing that it gets
(20:43):
to be all things to me all the time. I
haven't seen a person in years. Yeah, So we are
talking about an issue that tends to be regional, not global.
So this is something that tends to affect densely populated
areas that have a high population of people with connected devices,
specifically cellularly connected devices and so that's really where we
(21:08):
would expect to see this, and it tends to be
um something that that has peaks and valleys as well, right,
because there are times of the day when there aren't
as many people on the network, and on those times
things might seem perfectly fine, but at peak performance it
may suddenly seem like you can't get a call out
at all, and in moments of extreme circumstances like what
(21:31):
we saw post nine eleven, where you had a lot
of people trying to use the network in order to
check on one another understandably, so then it's going to
overload the system to the point where it doesn't work
at all. So it is regional, not necessarily global. But
that doesn't mean that we shouldn't work on some sort
of solution just because it's not going to affect the
(21:53):
entire world simultaneously, at least not until we get to
a point where the Internet of Things is ubiquity across
the entire globe, we still need to worry about it.
So if we can't just build more cell towers and
divide up those cell sites, then what can we do.
One of the things is that reallocation. So you guys,
remember a few years ago when the United States made
(22:15):
that switch from analog TV to digital TV, and anyone
who was getting their television service over the air, uh,
and they were relying on old antenna had to get
a new converter box so that it could convert digital
signals to analog signals so they could watch it on
their television. You remember those all right. So, once we
(22:36):
made that switch, and it was painful, I mean, it
was kind of it was more painful than I anticipated.
I thought a lot of people had already upgraded, but
there was a large significant portion of the population that
was still on analog systems. I mean, it is an
investment to upgrade your your hardware like that. A lot
of the same There was overlap with the group of
(22:56):
people who sends a lot of email forwards, so there
were a lot of forwarded emails about this product. Yeah.
So so well, when that happened, when they switched from
analog to digital, it did mean that that entire spectrum
of the that entire section of the radio spectrum I
should say, became available because now it wasn't used for
(23:19):
analog transmission. That had ended. And once that ended, then
the government said, what can we do with this, and
the FCC said, we're gonna auction it off. We're going
to auction off bands of frequencies to anyone who is
ready to bid. Yeah, this was the story. There were
so many stories that came out of this, including Google
(23:39):
getting involved. Google made some bids, and the real reason
Google was bidding, at least the story anyway, was that
they weren't interested. The company wasn't interested in getting portions
of the spectrum. They were interested in driving the price
up to the point where a specific requirement would kick
in that would require net neutrality rules to apply. So
(24:00):
it wasn't so much that we want this, we just
it was more like, we want to make sure whoever
gets this has to play by the rules we want
to play by m hard. That's kind of wonderful. I
mean it as as a fan of net neutrality. Yeah,
that's a perfectly I was okay, I'm okay with certain
enormous corporations having to spend more money to get what
(24:20):
they want, and I'm okay with them having to follow
certain rules of net neutrality in order to do it.
I'm biased, I had met it, but yeah, that was
There were all these companies like Verizon, A, T and T, etcetera,
and pretty much any of the big wireless carriers. So
I'm sure everyone was interested. Yeah, they wanted to be
able to get at this extra spectrum because that way
they have the padding to expand once they start to
(24:44):
hit capacity on their own. And it might mean having
to upgrade existing cell phone towers to have new antennas
for these for these particular spectrum, for these particular frequency bands,
I should say, or just using existing hardware that they've
then have, you know, signed over to them. And keep
in mind, all of this is based on licenses. They're
(25:06):
they're they're not owning any physical property. They own a
license to a specific range of frequencies. So it's it's
it's gets a little uh whibbli wabbli tammy, Why me sure? Sure?
But okay, this is all a hypothetical instance, right, I mean,
we haven't reached capacity anywhere. What what happens when we do,
or if we do, well, what happens is if we
(25:28):
hit capacity, we are no longer able to make calls
or get dad. I mean it would be no more
cat videos, no more cat videos, and well at least
not on a mobile device. That's using a cellular network.
It would it would probably be things that would hit
specific carriers and specific regions at different times. So you
might suddenly get a story about how the carrier you
(25:49):
are on in the city you live in has become unreliable,
so suddenly everyone switches to a new carrier, and that
carrier ends up becoming unreliable because all that that weight
has just shifted to them, a sort of rolling blackouts
and in areas with with energy problem. Yeah, yeah, that's
not a bad example. That's a really good way of
putting it. So it's not it's it's something that would
(26:11):
be really bad for consumers and it would ultimately be
bad for companies because the consumer backlash would be incredible.
So we want to avoid this as best we can.
Um but there are there's some people who suggest that
maybe we're doing it already, that maybe this spectrum crunch
is already being put off quite a bit. And the
(26:32):
reasons for that are varied. One of them is that, uh,
if you have a handheld device that works on the
cellular networks but also is WiFi capable, a lot of
people have enabled the WiFi so that they're on WiFi
more frequently than they would be just on cellular. It's
it's a way of one avoiding getting too many data costs, right,
(26:53):
You're not gonna end up going over a data cap
that way, um, and it also means that you don't
encounter those problems that the cell at work itself gets
really busy. Right now. WiFi still uses of course wireless
radio to communicate, but it distributes the problem. Yeah, they
they access small unlicensed bits of bandwidth. I believe it's
(27:13):
also the it also is Yeah, you're connecting to a
local router, and so yeah, and I don't have to
worry about if there's space to connect to the cell tower,
right if if the local router, as long as the
local router isn't handling more requests than it has capacity for,
then you should be pretty much all right. That router
may not be uh running on the latest WiFi protocols,
(27:37):
which means that it could be slower than what you're
you are used to, but it means that it will
at least get your request through. So, especially if it's
something like voice, which tends to be pretty low on
the data chain, you don't have to worry some Also,
voice on cellular networks tends to be prioritized. It takes
the least amount of data for besides like a text message, uh,
(27:58):
for the kinds of things you see a smartphone used
as um and so it tends to be prioritized over
like the data intensive stuff like trying to get your
cat videos. So if you're trying to make a phone call,
it's more likely to go through then you're trying to
watch a video on on a system that's near capacity. Okay,
and I have some statistics on the amount of of
Wi Fi versus cellular use that's going on, and it's
(28:21):
pretty significant. This is according to a paper that was
published by the New America Foundation in October. And and
the paper I know you'll appreciate this was called Solving
the Spectrum Crunch Unlicensed Spectrum on a high fiber diet fiber.
See what they did there. I like to have a
regular service, but okay, So this paper said that more
(28:44):
than thirty of smartphone data and more than iPad data
is going out over WiFi and therefore eventually landline networks
rather sometimes called wire line. By the way, if you're
ever reading industry stuff, sometimes that entire network will be
called wire line and um rather than cellular networks. Yeah,
and that that that's the sort of thing I'm talking
(29:05):
about where this reliance upon WiFi has removed some of
that burden that cellular networks were under. In fact, it's
it's got some people like there are some researchers at
the University of Southern California who have said that the
the conversation around the spectrum crunch has been largely the
role of um or inside the realm of hyper bowl
(29:27):
or hyperbole. Yeah, so we are going to the hyperbowl.
I still love l Yes, that will always be with
me because I love it so much that it's it's yeah,
hyperbole is is certainly what the University of Southern California
researchers would say was the tone of the conversation, saying that, uh,
(29:49):
you know, these these networks have are these carriers have
a vested interest in getting hold of the spectrum. Uh
for multiple reasons. One, it gives them that padding to
it prevents other competitors getting at that spectrum, so they
are actively able to uh to to counteract competition before
it even happens. UM. But that that ultimately it may
(30:11):
not be as bad as what they had been saying
because of WiFi helping take some of this burden exactly,
I was going to say, It seems to me a
kind of crucial question whether the Internet of Things will
present a big problem for the spectrum crunch really seems
to depend on what percentage of these devices and the
Internet of Things connect through cellular well. It also depends
(30:32):
on how many routers do you have to handle all
of those Like, if if I have a dozen connected
devices in my home, my router might be fine. If
I have five dozen connected devices in my home, my
router might be overwhelmed, which means that I need to
have some other, better router that can handle more connections,
which may mean that I need to have a better
(30:54):
uh Internet connection to the backbone, you know, from the
last mile all the way over to the Internet backbone.
It all depends on how these devices are communicating with
each other and if they have to connect to a
larger network. If they do, then you still have some
other issues to work out. The cellular one is the
easiest one to look at because it was the one
that was closest to capacity. So and and it is
(31:16):
true that the more wireless devices you get in a
in an area, the more likelihood you have of things
like interference coming in UM and generally speaking, it's not
a huge problem. But then we don't we don't live
in that future where everything is connected yet, and we're
kind of moving towards it pretty quickly. Yeah. So if
we get to a point where we suddenly realize, oh,
(31:37):
this internet of things has multiple issues, the interference issue,
the communications issue. Uh, and now I've got all these
things that in theory could react in real time, but
in reality or having all these communication errors. So my
coffee never starts brewing when I'm on my way home,
or my toaster oven has decided that it's no longer
listening to me. But but lots of companies want me
(31:59):
to have my double test. Yeah, so what are some
of the solutions that they're working on. Well, frequency sharing
is a big one. I mean, we we talked about
the the reallocation, We talked about dividing up cell uh
service so that you can add in more towers or
you're adding more capacity in your routers, whatever that may be.
But frequency sharing is a big one. This is the
(32:20):
design of technology that can use different frequencies and if
it's senses that there's a lot of congestion on one band,
it can switch to another band, and thus you have
kind of a dynamic system so that you don't run
into these truly congested situations that we're talking about where
it's like a real time traffic management system for wireless data.
(32:41):
So that's one thing, and that's really promising. There are
already some examples of that technology out there. Um, there's
also the idea of installing more fiber and high capacity
wire networks in high traffic areas. So this is kind
of like the Google fiber approach, this idea of getting
more capacity that way. Um, it's a it's a big deal. Yeah. Yeah.
(33:02):
And by by doing that, you know, by improving that
overall system, you would be encouraging more users to make
use of those WiFi networks and you know, take more
of the drag off of their cellular systems. Right. And
and also with that added capacity, then when you have
those more advanced routers that can handle more connections, you
already have the conduit going to it that can handle
(33:24):
the extra traffic. Yeah. Yeah, that thoroughfare. That report from
the New America Foundation, by the way, also suggested that
only some of mobile device use occurs outside of WiFi
or at the very least WiFi capable areas, So so yeah,
that could be a huge hand off. Yeah, okay, So
what's this I hear about the open garden approach? I
love this. So we've talked a lot about the Internet,
(33:48):
but the Internet of Things may not need necessarily to
tap into our existing Internet. The Internet is a network
of networks. That's what it refers to the Internet. So
that network of networks are all these different networks that
can communicate with one another. The idea of the open
garden is an ad hoc network not necessarily connected to
(34:12):
the Internet. It could be self contained, it could be
enormous and self contained. So here's an example. Let's say
all three of us have a device that allows us
to communicate with one another, and we're in the same
general area, so they are able to send signals to
each other directly through a radio frequency. And I sent
(34:32):
a message out to the two of you saying something
like Okay, I'll meet you guys in the studio in
fifteen minutes, and you both get it because we're all
in range. Everything's fine. That doesn't ever touch the Internet.
So anything that's going on in the Internet, whether it's
congested or not, does not affect that particular message. Now,
imagine that we have a we're we're all in the
(34:52):
same building, but we're on different floors. The building's got
like five people in it, and we're all on these
devices and I and we're out of range of my
phone would reach maybe or my device would reach your devices.
So if I were to try and just send a
message and that was in a vacuum, it wouldn't get
to you. But if like Kristen Conger and Ben Boland
and Scott Benjamin are all in the same building and
(35:14):
they're closer to you, and also you know, they're at
a point between you and us, Yeah, and they all
have the same sort of device, it all becomes an
ad hoc network and a message I passed through to
the network will continue through their devices, eventually getting to
you guys. It's kind of like a ham radio operator
using someone else as a repeater, kind of. Yeah. So
imagine that now you're talking about an Internet of things
(35:36):
where all these different devices can be part of this
ad hoc network, dropping in or out as necessary, and
being able to relay this information without ever touching the
Internet at all. So it's just a network that's existing
on its own that is similar to but separate from
the Internet that we all know and love. So that's
(35:57):
an approach that would allow the Internet of Things who
continuously grow to a point where as long as there
wasn't like crazy interference going on from the potentially millions
or billions of devices that would be dropping in and
out of this. Uh, it could help solve some of
that congestion issue as well. So that's really exciting. And uh, yeah,
the Open Garden is actually a particular project that is
(36:20):
looking into this and using this kind of approach to
try and create these ad hoc networks. So I'll have
to keep an eye on it. But um, I think
that's a really cool idea. Yeah. So anyway, the spectrum
crunch may or may not really be the the cellular
apocalypse that we've been warned. I know that this was
a big deal in the news over the last three
(36:41):
or four years, particularly like I remember first seeing a
lot of stuff about it back in two thousand eleven.
But because of the shift in the use of WiFi,
it really does seem like, at least in the very
short term, it's not as huge an issue, and we
do have top people working on this problem. There's going
to be a global UH conference about wireless communication in
(37:06):
two thousand and fifteen where some of these issues are
going to be talked about by various world leaders and
UH to steal a word from the UK journalists boffins
to discuss the issue, Joe does not approve of the
term Boffin's. Uh, that seems like a word that should
describe some Antarctic bird. So so the boffin is cousin
(37:28):
to the puffin. Yes, okay, that's fair alright, So anyway
that wraps up this discussion. I actually, I actually don't
care for the term boffins because I think that it
downplays the the importance of scientists and researchers by making
it a little too cartoonish. But I still can't help
myself at poke fun at everybody at any rate. If
(37:48):
you want me to poke fun at you, or more importantly,
you have a topic about the future you would love
us to talk about, get in touch with us. You
can send us a message on Facebook by searching for
w thinking. We have fu Thinking as our handle both
at Twitter and Google Plus. We look forward to hearing
from you, and you'll hear from us again really soon.
(38:14):
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
I'll visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota.
Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking Either and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks at the future and says I just called
to say I love you. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm
(00:21):
Joe McCormick. So, guys, you know, we've talked a lot
about the concept of the Internet of things, right, it
sounds great. Yeah, it's fantastic. This idea of an environment
that's able to sense with what you are doing and
who you are, and be able to respond in real time.
My car and my toaster oven coordinating with each other flawlessly.
Fantastic future that we're all really excited about. This idea
(00:43):
that we could have a reality that's defined by our
own needs and wants and desires so that we just
live in hedonistic pleasure forever. Sounds great unless you've seen
the movie Maximum Overdrive. Yeah, that there is a downside
to this. If the machines do decide to crazy where
when they can coordinate, Yeah, they're extremely well organized. But
(01:05):
now also there's a there's there's a disclaimer. I don't
think there's much chance. Yeah, I think self aware machines
are quite a long ways away, let alone self aware
of very ticked off machines, and selfware toaster evans are
pretty far down on the list of machines that would
be ticked off. I think. Yeah, well, so I've got
a question about the Internet of things. Sure, ask away.
(01:27):
All of these things need to talk to each other, right,
that is correct. And so if you imagine that you
have a house in which you have fifty or maybe
even a hundred electronic devices that are communicating, Yeah, it
really doesn't make sense to try to wire them together,
even if they're stationary devices. Right. Yeah, you wouldn't want
all those cables all over the place or you know,
(01:48):
have to drill into your walls every time you get
a new toaster evan. Right, And a lot of these
things are things that you're going to want to be
mobile anyway. You want to be able to carry them
around with you or move them to a different place
and still have them communicate eight with all the things
in your Internet of things, realizing my permanent dream of
mobile test exactly right, So how many things can talk
(02:10):
to each other all at once before that cross talk
becomes a problem. Yeah, this is a this is an
issue that we need to talk about because in order
for the Internet of Things to become a reality, we
have to have the the foundation, the infrastructure that allows
them to communicate with one another without interference, without clogging
(02:32):
the system. And this is where we get into the
concept of a spectrum crunch or data crunch. This idea
doesn't sound nice. It's not good. It's not good. No,
it's not like. It's not like delicious crunch with a
new Gady Center, not like Captain crunch. No no, well,
I mean it will cut up your mouth if you
try and eat enough of it. But no, it's more
like the crunching of putting a part of your body
(02:53):
and advice. Yeah, it's the crunch of too much stuff
trying to fit through too narrow and opening. So like
you know three who just style, everyone's trying to get
through the door at the same time. Very much like that,
except with data with zeros and once. So what we're
talking about here is the actual physical infrastructures capability of
(03:13):
uh handling that much information, as well as the physical
limitations of frequencies to hold data in the first place. Okay,
so we're going to focus today on wireless communication. Right,
we got we got all those chords out of the way.
We don't want all the future just cluttered with chords
like Brazil, there is not the country. There is that
(03:34):
element as well. Right, the Internet, the Internet backbone does
have a limited bandwidth, and we can add to that.
We can keep adding capacity by adding essentially more tubes
to the series of tubes that is the Internet. But
that's not what we're focusing on here. We're focusing on
that wireless communication. And really a lot of what we're
going to talk about is really gonna focus on cellular
(03:57):
communication because that's the one that's probably the closest to
hitting capacity. But all of these things kind of bleed
into one another, right, Okay, so how do wireless devices
communicate with each other over the electromagnetic spectrum? Joe, ain't
that a great spectrum? It's it's one of my favorites.
Full of photons, Yell. The photons are definitely part of
(04:19):
the electromagnetic spectrum. Yes, so this is a spectrum is
of course an entire range here. We're talking about a
range of frequencies of waves and wavelengths. Right, it includes
the stuff that we see light. Yes, visible light is
in fact a tiny slice of the overall electromagnetic spectrum,
but it also includes the X rays that you get
(04:41):
at the doctor's office or the dentist's office, or the
gamma rays that are radiating your body when someone does
experiments on you, microwaves, radio waves that end up carrying information, right,
and so this is all the same stuff. It's just
a question of how long is the wave in that transmission. Yeah,
(05:01):
the wavelength is a big part of it. The frequency
is directly correlated to that. So the long wavelengths are
low frequency. So that means essentially what frequency we should
define as it's how often particles of the medium. So
whatever the wave is traveling through vibrate when a wave
passes through it. Uh. This is different from the period
(05:23):
of a wave, which is where you would take one
point along the waves form and say how long how
many times can that pass through in a second at
least a little bit difference to two very closely related concepts.
But we menasure frequency in hurts. So one hurts refers
to one vibration cycle per second. Alright, So one killer
(05:46):
hurts would be one thousand vibration cycles in a second,
and so on and so forth. Okay, so so on
the electromagnetic spectrum. If you start from what radio waves
are the longest wave? Yes, yeah, we're talking about the
lowest frequency. Yeah, you get to radio waves that are
kilometers long, right, they are incredibly long wavelengths until you
(06:08):
get down to the flip side, the opposite end of
the spectrum, where you're talking about wavelengths that are incredibly
incredibly short. Okay, so what what are they? In order?
Radio waves are the longest, microwaves. Microwaves are the second longest.
Then you have infrared, then visible light, then ultra violet light,
then X rays, and then gamma raise and favorite and
(06:31):
then unobtainium or whatever. It is not part of the no.
But if you are ever writing science fiction and you
realize that you have to come up with some sort
of energy that is not reflected on the electromagnetic spectrum,
you can only really go up because the past gamma waves. Yeah,
it's the reason turning the dial to eleven exactly. The
only reason we don't know about is because our instruments
(06:53):
are incapable of measuring it. Yeah that's inaccurate. Okay, But
so these different parts of the spectrum we've talked about,
they're not like a single isolated value. Within each of
these ranges, there are a whole lot of values. Absolutely. Yeah,
So you can have radio waves of much different frequencies. Yes.
In fact, anyone who's played with a radio at all
(07:14):
knows this because the radio station that corresponds to the
frequency of that radio wave. So, for example, in the
A M spectrum, you go from five five killer hurts
to one point six oh five mega hurts, So station
five thirty five to six five. That's a reflection of
(07:34):
the frequency of those radio waves, all right, And that's
how we can have so many radio stations floating around
in the air around us without having them interfere with
one another. Your radio is a is a specific instrument
that you tune to one of those frequencies and pick
that one up. Absolutely. So, if you ever enter an
area where two different competing radio stations have the same
(07:56):
or very similar frequencies, you might get that interference from
get that static kind of overlap. Yeah, you get you
can hear two things going on at once and it
sounds like you know that you really need to change
the station. Or perhaps you might hear secret messages only
you can decipher, and that gets scary. So on the
FM side, same sort of thing. From eight point eight
mega hurts to ten point eight mega hurts. That's where
(08:18):
you get the FM stations two and eight. Uh, that's
they correspond again to that range of frequencies. So that's
just in you know, broadcast radio here in the United States,
radio waves encompass a much broader spectrum even than that.
And this is this is where we're looking at using
(08:39):
electromagnetic radiation to carry data. And the problem is is
that not all wavelengths are ideal for carrying lots of data.
Some some are great at carrying small amounts of data.
But in order to carry a lot of data, you
need a lot of time. So we're really talking about
throughput here, you know, because the speed is still the
speed of light, right, It's gonna it's going to carry
(09:01):
a single bit of information the same speed, no matter
what the frequency of the wavelength is. But the amount
of information how many times can it send a signal
in that in that span of time, right, or or
how many bits can it carry along in that span
of time? All right, So the higher frequency the wavelength,
the more information it can carry. Generally speaking, generally speaking,
(09:24):
it gets a little complicated because it also depends upon
the implementation a little complicated. We're talking about wireless here.
This is really difficult stuff. Yeah, we're actually not going
Engineers who design this are crazy smart people. Yeah, we're
not going to go too deeply into the physics and
technology because to do so would require a suite of episodes.
I mean, these, what we're talking about right here, would
(09:45):
constitute an entire semester's worth of courses on the in
the university level. Yeah, we're simplifying, Yeah, we are. We are,
for the purposes of this discussion, simplifying so that we
can talk about what the problem is. But in order
to talk about the problem, we have to lay the ground. Okay,
so who decides who gets to use what parts of
the radio spectrum? Right? You can't have two different radio
(10:08):
stations in the same place broadcasting at the same frequency.
I imagine that applies to all different kinds of radio transmission.
A cell phone tower, if you're whatever you are that
needs to be sending data back and forth, you've got
to know who can use what frequency, Yes, because otherwise
you do have this interference problem, and you have to
avoid those interference problems as as best as you possibly can,
(10:32):
so uh it depends upon where you live. But in general,
most places in the world your local, as in your
national government. When I say local, I mean nationally. Yeah,
nationally local, because not everyone listening to the show. Everyone
listening to the show is from the United States. So
but generally speaking, the government decides which parts of the
(10:55):
spectrum go to which applications. So, for example, in the
United States, there are large, large UH bands frequencies that
are dedicated to things like military use, and no one
else is allowed to touch that, even if the military
is not making full use of it. It is reserved
for military use. And then there may be narrow bands
(11:17):
that are that are reserved for specific cell phone carriers,
so no other cell phone carrier can use that specific
band of frequencies. They might operate in a similar band
of frequencies, but they won't have overlapping ones necessarily. So
this gets really really complicated. You have to be able
to legislate this and say this goes to you, this
(11:37):
goes to you, this goes to you, and you you're
limited by this, and it's of course only gotten more
complicated in the past couple of decades as cell phone
use has zapped crazy out of the stratosphere. Well, yeah,
things like smartphones have put such a huge load on
the cellular networks because with smartphones, you're not just using
those radio signals to carry your voice. You're trying to
(12:00):
download pictures of cat videos and cat videos and and
get Axl Rose on your phone and yeah, singing to
your cat. Everything is cat relating face time with Axl
Rose and his cat. Yeah, exactly. We have to keep
the cats in this or else they will overthrow us. Well,
at any rate, Like you were saying, Lauren, the cell
(12:22):
phone use has definitely complicated matters. And then on top
of that, we have all the different wireless technologies they
debuted over the years, everything from WiFi to Zigby to Bluetooth. Uh.
These are different protocols that use wireless communication, usually in
the two point four or two point five giga hurts range.
A few of them are in the five giga hurts
(12:43):
range um, and that complicates matters more. Now we've got
some big, big issues here, like the idea of the capacity,
like what is the capacity for wireless communication. It's actually
really complicated to answer because if we were to say,
all right, this one frequency band within this one geographic
(13:05):
region can carry x amount of data and no more.
That's not entirely accurate. One thing that is helping is
that we have devices that have really good error checking algorithms,
and those error checking algorithms what they do is they're
able to help separate the signal from the noise. So
the noise would be all the different UH transmissions that
(13:26):
don't have anything to do with what you are actively
trying to do. It's a fine frequency tuner basically, right.
And on top of that, the actual infrastructure, the the
the things that receive messages and route information have a
limitation on how many connections they can actively handle at
a given time. That's largely based upon the state of
(13:46):
the art of the technology at the time, as well
as the density of those things within whatever geographic region
you're talking about. Yeah, it's due to our capacity to
program um a device to handle a certain number of
incoming connections. Has it? You know, computers get confused when
you have too many things trying to go on at once. Yeah,
if you if you think of it in the old
wired terms, that makes it a lot easier. Right. Let's
(14:08):
let's talk about like if you had an old router
that was not a WiFi router. It was just it
was a router that hooked up to your modem and
it allows you to physically plug Ethernet cables into that router.
I used to have. Yeah, they looked like a big
one looked like a harmonica. Yeah, it really did. Just
wanted to see if I could play a tune on it.
But yeah, well you can download tunes using them. But
(14:30):
because it's got all those parts, and it has a
finite number of parts, right, and once you reach that
finite number, you ain't plugging anything else into that router.
That's it. You would have to unplug something else before
you can plug a new thing in. And it had
a very easy to understand physical limitation of how many
devices could plug into that router. Well, when you get
(14:51):
to WiFi, uh, those those connections become invisible if you're
not hard wiring stuff to your router. I still hardwire
a lot stuff to matter what, because I like to
game and like to watch things on gaming consoles. But
at any rate, you have more connections than what you
can see, right, And so the thing is that the
limitation is still there. These devices have a capacity that
(15:14):
they can't really go beyond If they try to, then
they're shuffling, They're they're juggling all of these different tasks
and trying to respond to them as quickly as possible,
which slows everything else down. If you have ever been
in a high density area during a big event when
people are using their phones a lot, like a concert
or dragon con ce s something like that, then you've
(15:39):
had the experience of your phone not making a connection.
You might not even be able to make a phone
call in extreme circumstances, and that's really when the network
is starting to get overwhelmed. It's it's getting more requests
from devices than it can actually process simultaneously, and that's
where we start to see the real spectrum crunch. It's
(16:01):
not just the physical limitation of the spectrum, although that's
a part of it too, It's also a physical limitation
of the actual hardware that we're making. So the question
is what happens when you hit that And the answer
is that scenario I was talking about where suddenly everything
is slow or you can't make a connection in the
first place, which is a really frustrating I mean, I'm
(16:22):
sure you guys have had that example, right where you've
got it says you've got full bars on your phone,
but you can't call failed here. I often get that
in this building where we work. Yeah, so that may
just be a structural interference. I don't know, it could be,
but it's also something that if you go to one
of these big events, you'll see you'll have full bars
(16:45):
and you think, I've got complete four G service here,
I can't wait to download my schedule for the day
so I know where I need to go next, And
then you just get that little circular waiting you know,
icon and nothing ever happens. And it's because again, the
whole network has been jammed up by the way. Quick
word of advice to people who are attending something like that,
(17:05):
you can always try to switch to two gene networks
because often those are underused compared to the faster ones.
It doesn't always work, but sometimes it does. It's been
a lifesaver for me. Hit ces nice. Yeah, I mean
it takes it takes longer to get data than it
would on an unencumbered three G or four G network,
but it works so so it does have its advantages. Um. So, yeah,
(17:29):
this this ended up being real issues also in places
like London during the two thousand twelve Olympics, and this
was where we started to see it as a real,
like citywide issue, not just something that's located to sports
arena like that. Yeah, well, because I mean the city
of London was basically already at its capacity for for
(17:49):
cellular use at the time before millions of people are
I don't know how many, like like a whole bunch
of people came into the city, right and and not
just people, but like all the different news outlets that
are using all that data to wirelessly send stuff back
and forth between journalists. I mean, it was just an
incredible demand on the system. And so what London ended
up having to do what the UK did was for
(18:11):
a temporary basis, they ended up reallocating some bandwidth that
normally would be reserved for the military to go to
this wireless communication use for the general public and for
really for for media outlets in particular, to alleviate some
of that demand. So it spreads the demand out a
bit more and makes it a little more manageable. But
(18:32):
it's not something that they could necessarily do perpetually unless
they were too uh to look at the full spectrum
and say, which parts of these are of the spectrum
are really necessary for what they're doing right now, and
which ones can we repurpose so that we can uh
stave off the spectrum crunch. Keep in mind, if we
(18:53):
keep building more and more Internet connected devices, specifically cellular
connected devices. This, even if we alleviate it by adding
in more more spectrum, we're still we're still heading toward
that problem. We're just heading towards it. You know, the
problem is a little further out than it was before. Well,
and also it's not necessarily easy to just, for example,
(19:15):
build a whole bunch more cellular towers, right. Yeah, so
you guys know the whole nimby not in my backyard thing, right,
I mean that this applies to all sorts of things, right,
anything that, uh, that you think will end up affecting
the property value of your home or a quality of
life issue. Uh. It's one of those things that people
(19:35):
react very strongly too. So the idea of erecting more
cell towers is not really that attractive to a lot
of people. It's something that could potentially help alleviate the
problem a little bit. The idea being that with cell phones,
you have these cell sites that represent a certain geographic
area of service. You could divide those cells into smaller
(19:57):
units so that they're servicing smaller areas. That means you're
gonna have more handshakes between towers whenever you have people
moving through the area. But it also means that you've
spread out the service capacity and you've increased it as
a result. But because it's so hard, both financially and
politically to get these things built, it's not really seen
(20:22):
as an attractive solution to spectrum crunch. And also again,
it's one of the things that you can only keep
doing for so long before you have reached you know,
like I can't move because all the cell phone towers right,
I'm wearing one as a hat. My environment is responding
to me in real time, but I can't go anywhere.
So I guess it's a good thing that it gets
(20:43):
to be all things to me all the time. I
haven't seen a person in years. Yeah, So we are
talking about an issue that tends to be regional, not global.
So this is something that tends to affect densely populated
areas that have a high population of people with connected devices,
specifically cellularly connected devices and so that's really where we
(21:08):
would expect to see this, and it tends to be
um something that that has peaks and valleys as well, right,
because there are times of the day when there aren't
as many people on the network, and on those times
things might seem perfectly fine, but at peak performance it
may suddenly seem like you can't get a call out
at all, and in moments of extreme circumstances like what
(21:31):
we saw post nine eleven, where you had a lot
of people trying to use the network in order to
check on one another understandably, so then it's going to
overload the system to the point where it doesn't work
at all. So it is regional, not necessarily global. But
that doesn't mean that we shouldn't work on some sort
of solution just because it's not going to affect the
(21:53):
entire world simultaneously, at least not until we get to
a point where the Internet of Things is ubiquity across
the entire globe, we still need to worry about it.
So if we can't just build more cell towers and
divide up those cell sites, then what can we do.
One of the things is that reallocation. So you guys,
remember a few years ago when the United States made
(22:15):
that switch from analog TV to digital TV, and anyone
who was getting their television service over the air, uh,
and they were relying on old antenna had to get
a new converter box so that it could convert digital
signals to analog signals so they could watch it on
their television. You remember those all right. So, once we
(22:36):
made that switch, and it was painful, I mean, it
was kind of it was more painful than I anticipated.
I thought a lot of people had already upgraded, but
there was a large significant portion of the population that
was still on analog systems. I mean, it is an
investment to upgrade your your hardware like that. A lot
of the same There was overlap with the group of
(22:56):
people who sends a lot of email forwards, so there
were a lot of forwarded emails about this product. Yeah.
So so well, when that happened, when they switched from
analog to digital, it did mean that that entire spectrum
of the that entire section of the radio spectrum I
should say, became available because now it wasn't used for
(23:19):
analog transmission. That had ended. And once that ended, then
the government said, what can we do with this, and
the FCC said, we're gonna auction it off. We're going
to auction off bands of frequencies to anyone who is
ready to bid. Yeah, this was the story. There were
so many stories that came out of this, including Google
(23:39):
getting involved. Google made some bids, and the real reason
Google was bidding, at least the story anyway, was that
they weren't interested. The company wasn't interested in getting portions
of the spectrum. They were interested in driving the price
up to the point where a specific requirement would kick
in that would require net neutrality rules to apply. So
(24:00):
it wasn't so much that we want this, we just
it was more like, we want to make sure whoever
gets this has to play by the rules we want
to play by m hard. That's kind of wonderful. I
mean it as as a fan of net neutrality. Yeah,
that's a perfectly I was okay, I'm okay with certain
enormous corporations having to spend more money to get what
(24:20):
they want, and I'm okay with them having to follow
certain rules of net neutrality in order to do it.
I'm biased, I had met it, but yeah, that was
There were all these companies like Verizon, A, T and T, etcetera,
and pretty much any of the big wireless carriers. So
I'm sure everyone was interested. Yeah, they wanted to be
able to get at this extra spectrum because that way
they have the padding to expand once they start to
(24:44):
hit capacity on their own. And it might mean having
to upgrade existing cell phone towers to have new antennas
for these for these particular spectrum, for these particular frequency bands,
I should say, or just using existing hardware that they've
then have, you know, signed over to them. And keep
in mind, all of this is based on licenses. They're
(25:06):
they're they're not owning any physical property. They own a
license to a specific range of frequencies. So it's it's
it's gets a little uh whibbli wabbli tammy, Why me sure? Sure?
But okay, this is all a hypothetical instance, right, I mean,
we haven't reached capacity anywhere. What what happens when we do,
or if we do, well, what happens is if we
(25:28):
hit capacity, we are no longer able to make calls
or get dad. I mean it would be no more
cat videos, no more cat videos, and well at least
not on a mobile device. That's using a cellular network.
It would it would probably be things that would hit
specific carriers and specific regions at different times. So you
might suddenly get a story about how the carrier you
(25:49):
are on in the city you live in has become unreliable,
so suddenly everyone switches to a new carrier, and that
carrier ends up becoming unreliable because all that that weight
has just shifted to them, a sort of rolling blackouts
and in areas with with energy problem. Yeah, yeah, that's
not a bad example. That's a really good way of
putting it. So it's not it's it's something that would
(26:11):
be really bad for consumers and it would ultimately be
bad for companies because the consumer backlash would be incredible.
So we want to avoid this as best we can.
Um but there are there's some people who suggest that
maybe we're doing it already, that maybe this spectrum crunch
is already being put off quite a bit. And the
(26:32):
reasons for that are varied. One of them is that, uh,
if you have a handheld device that works on the
cellular networks but also is WiFi capable, a lot of
people have enabled the WiFi so that they're on WiFi
more frequently than they would be just on cellular. It's
it's a way of one avoiding getting too many data costs, right,
(26:53):
You're not gonna end up going over a data cap
that way, um, and it also means that you don't
encounter those problems that the cell at work itself gets
really busy. Right now. WiFi still uses of course wireless
radio to communicate, but it distributes the problem. Yeah, they
they access small unlicensed bits of bandwidth. I believe it's
(27:13):
also the it also is Yeah, you're connecting to a
local router, and so yeah, and I don't have to
worry about if there's space to connect to the cell tower,
right if if the local router, as long as the
local router isn't handling more requests than it has capacity for,
then you should be pretty much all right. That router
may not be uh running on the latest WiFi protocols,
(27:37):
which means that it could be slower than what you're
you are used to, but it means that it will
at least get your request through. So, especially if it's
something like voice, which tends to be pretty low on
the data chain, you don't have to worry some Also,
voice on cellular networks tends to be prioritized. It takes
the least amount of data for besides like a text message, uh,
(27:58):
for the kinds of things you see a smartphone used
as um and so it tends to be prioritized over
like the data intensive stuff like trying to get your
cat videos. So if you're trying to make a phone call,
it's more likely to go through then you're trying to
watch a video on on a system that's near capacity. Okay,
and I have some statistics on the amount of of
Wi Fi versus cellular use that's going on, and it's
(28:21):
pretty significant. This is according to a paper that was
published by the New America Foundation in October. And and
the paper I know you'll appreciate this was called Solving
the Spectrum Crunch Unlicensed Spectrum on a high fiber diet fiber.
See what they did there. I like to have a
regular service, but okay, So this paper said that more
(28:44):
than thirty of smartphone data and more than iPad data
is going out over WiFi and therefore eventually landline networks
rather sometimes called wire line. By the way, if you're
ever reading industry stuff, sometimes that entire network will be
called wire line and um rather than cellular networks. Yeah,
and that that that's the sort of thing I'm talking
(29:05):
about where this reliance upon WiFi has removed some of
that burden that cellular networks were under. In fact, it's
it's got some people like there are some researchers at
the University of Southern California who have said that the
the conversation around the spectrum crunch has been largely the
role of um or inside the realm of hyper bowl
(29:27):
or hyperbole. Yeah, so we are going to the hyperbowl.
I still love l Yes, that will always be with
me because I love it so much that it's it's yeah,
hyperbole is is certainly what the University of Southern California
researchers would say was the tone of the conversation, saying that, uh,
(29:49):
you know, these these networks have are these carriers have
a vested interest in getting hold of the spectrum. Uh
for multiple reasons. One, it gives them that padding to
it prevents other competitors getting at that spectrum, so they
are actively able to uh to to counteract competition before
it even happens. UM. But that that ultimately it may
(30:11):
not be as bad as what they had been saying
because of WiFi helping take some of this burden exactly,
I was going to say, It seems to me a
kind of crucial question whether the Internet of Things will
present a big problem for the spectrum crunch really seems
to depend on what percentage of these devices and the
Internet of Things connect through cellular well. It also depends
(30:32):
on how many routers do you have to handle all
of those Like, if if I have a dozen connected
devices in my home, my router might be fine. If
I have five dozen connected devices in my home, my
router might be overwhelmed, which means that I need to
have some other, better router that can handle more connections,
which may mean that I need to have a better
(30:54):
uh Internet connection to the backbone, you know, from the
last mile all the way over to the Internet backbone.
It all depends on how these devices are communicating with
each other and if they have to connect to a
larger network. If they do, then you still have some
other issues to work out. The cellular one is the
easiest one to look at because it was the one
that was closest to capacity. So and and it is
(31:16):
true that the more wireless devices you get in a
in an area, the more likelihood you have of things
like interference coming in UM and generally speaking, it's not
a huge problem. But then we don't we don't live
in that future where everything is connected yet, and we're
kind of moving towards it pretty quickly. Yeah. So if
we get to a point where we suddenly realize, oh,
(31:37):
this internet of things has multiple issues, the interference issue,
the communications issue. Uh, and now I've got all these
things that in theory could react in real time, but
in reality or having all these communication errors. So my
coffee never starts brewing when I'm on my way home,
or my toaster oven has decided that it's no longer
listening to me. But but lots of companies want me
(31:59):
to have my double test. Yeah, so what are some
of the solutions that they're working on. Well, frequency sharing
is a big one. I mean, we we talked about
the the reallocation, We talked about dividing up cell uh
service so that you can add in more towers or
you're adding more capacity in your routers, whatever that may be.
But frequency sharing is a big one. This is the
(32:20):
design of technology that can use different frequencies and if
it's senses that there's a lot of congestion on one band,
it can switch to another band, and thus you have
kind of a dynamic system so that you don't run
into these truly congested situations that we're talking about where
it's like a real time traffic management system for wireless data.
(32:41):
So that's one thing, and that's really promising. There are
already some examples of that technology out there. Um, there's
also the idea of installing more fiber and high capacity
wire networks in high traffic areas. So this is kind
of like the Google fiber approach, this idea of getting
more capacity that way. Um, it's a it's a big deal. Yeah. Yeah.
(33:02):
And by by doing that, you know, by improving that
overall system, you would be encouraging more users to make
use of those WiFi networks and you know, take more
of the drag off of their cellular systems. Right. And
and also with that added capacity, then when you have
those more advanced routers that can handle more connections, you
already have the conduit going to it that can handle
(33:24):
the extra traffic. Yeah. Yeah, that thoroughfare. That report from
the New America Foundation, by the way, also suggested that
only some of mobile device use occurs outside of WiFi
or at the very least WiFi capable areas, So so yeah,
that could be a huge hand off. Yeah, okay, So
what's this I hear about the open garden approach? I
love this. So we've talked a lot about the Internet,
(33:48):
but the Internet of Things may not need necessarily to
tap into our existing Internet. The Internet is a network
of networks. That's what it refers to the Internet. So
that network of networks are all these different networks that
can communicate with one another. The idea of the open
garden is an ad hoc network not necessarily connected to
(34:12):
the Internet. It could be self contained, it could be
enormous and self contained. So here's an example. Let's say
all three of us have a device that allows us
to communicate with one another, and we're in the same
general area, so they are able to send signals to
each other directly through a radio frequency. And I sent
(34:32):
a message out to the two of you saying something
like Okay, I'll meet you guys in the studio in
fifteen minutes, and you both get it because we're all
in range. Everything's fine. That doesn't ever touch the Internet.
So anything that's going on in the Internet, whether it's
congested or not, does not affect that particular message. Now,
imagine that we have a we're we're all in the
(34:52):
same building, but we're on different floors. The building's got
like five people in it, and we're all on these
devices and I and we're out of range of my
phone would reach maybe or my device would reach your devices.
So if I were to try and just send a
message and that was in a vacuum, it wouldn't get
to you. But if like Kristen Conger and Ben Boland
and Scott Benjamin are all in the same building and
(35:14):
they're closer to you, and also you know, they're at
a point between you and us, Yeah, and they all
have the same sort of device, it all becomes an
ad hoc network and a message I passed through to
the network will continue through their devices, eventually getting to
you guys. It's kind of like a ham radio operator
using someone else as a repeater, kind of. Yeah. So
imagine that now you're talking about an Internet of things
(35:36):
where all these different devices can be part of this
ad hoc network, dropping in or out as necessary, and
being able to relay this information without ever touching the
Internet at all. So it's just a network that's existing
on its own that is similar to but separate from
the Internet that we all know and love. So that's
(35:57):
an approach that would allow the Internet of Things who
continuously grow to a point where as long as there
wasn't like crazy interference going on from the potentially millions
or billions of devices that would be dropping in and
out of this. Uh, it could help solve some of
that congestion issue as well. So that's really exciting. And uh, yeah,
the Open Garden is actually a particular project that is
(36:20):
looking into this and using this kind of approach to
try and create these ad hoc networks. So I'll have
to keep an eye on it. But um, I think
that's a really cool idea. Yeah. So anyway, the spectrum
crunch may or may not really be the the cellular
apocalypse that we've been warned. I know that this was
a big deal in the news over the last three
(36:41):
or four years, particularly like I remember first seeing a
lot of stuff about it back in two thousand eleven.
But because of the shift in the use of WiFi,
it really does seem like, at least in the very
short term, it's not as huge an issue, and we
do have top people working on this problem. There's going
to be a global UH conference about wireless communication in
(37:06):
two thousand and fifteen where some of these issues are
going to be talked about by various world leaders and
UH to steal a word from the UK journalists boffins
to discuss the issue, Joe does not approve of the
term Boffin's. Uh, that seems like a word that should
describe some Antarctic bird. So so the boffin is cousin
(37:28):
to the puffin. Yes, okay, that's fair alright, So anyway
that wraps up this discussion. I actually, I actually don't
care for the term boffins because I think that it
downplays the the importance of scientists and researchers by making
it a little too cartoonish. But I still can't help
myself at poke fun at everybody at any rate. If
(37:48):
you want me to poke fun at you, or more importantly,
you have a topic about the future you would love
us to talk about, get in touch with us. You
can send us a message on Facebook by searching for
w thinking. We have fu Thinking as our handle both
at Twitter and Google Plus. We look forward to hearing
from you, and you'll hear from us again really soon.
(38:14):
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
I'll visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota.
Let's Go Places,
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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