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