No, the Metaverse is not the killer app for 5G

(This article was initially published on my LinkedIn Newsletter - click here to see the original, plus comment thread. And please subscribe!)

Let's stop the next cliche before it even starts.

Most knowledgeable people now roll their eyes in derision whenever they hear the words 5G and autonomous driving (or robotic surgery) mentioned in the same sentence. But the mobile industry's hypesters are always casting around for some new trope - and especially the mythical "killer app" that could help to justify the costs and complexity.

And as if on cue, the Metaverse - essentially a buzzword meaning a hybrid of AR/VR with the social web, collaboration and gaming - has captured the headlines.

The growing noise around Metaverse technologies - and especially Facebook's recent rebrand to Meta - is attracting a whole slew of bandwagon-jumpers. The cryptocurrency community has been the first to trumpet its assumed future role - perhaps unsurprisingly, since they tend to be even more fervent and boosterish than the mobile sector. But we're also seeing the online shopping, advertising and gaming worlds hail the 'Verse as the next big thing.

Next up - I can pretty much guarantee it - will be the 5G industry talking about millisecond latency and buying a "Metaverse network slice". We'll probably get the edge-computing crowd popping up shortly afterwards too. I've already seen a few posts hailing the Metaverse as the possible next big thing for MNOs (mobile network operators).

They're wrong.

The elephant in the room

If you've found this article without knowing my normal coverage themes, you might be surprised to read that the single biggest issue for connecting Metaverse devices and users will be real, physical walls.

If you go through Mark Zuckerberg's lengthy video intro to Meta and his view of future technologies, you'll notice that a high % of scenarios and use-cases are indoors. Gaming from your sofa. Virtual living rooms. Hybrid work environments blending WFH with in-person meetings, and so on.

This shouldn't be a huge surprise. The more immersive a technology is - and especially if it's VR rather than AR based - the more likely people will take part while seated, or at least not while walking around an outdoor environment with obstacles and dangers. Most gaming, and most business collaboration takes places indoors too.

And indoor environments tend to have particular ways that connectivity is delivered to devices. Generally, Wi-Fi tends to be used a lot, as the access points are themselves indoors, at the end of broadband connection or office local area network.

Basically, wireless signals at frequencies above 2-3GHz don't get inside buildings very well from outside, and the higher the performance, the worse that propagation tends to be. Put simply, 5G-connected headsets and other devices will generally not work reliably indoors, especially if they have to deliver consistent high data speeds and low latencies which need higher frequencies. We can also expect the massive push for Net Zero in coming years to mean ever-better insulated buildings, which will make matters even worse for wireless signals as a side-effect.

For sure, certain locations will have well-engineered indoor 5G systems that will work effectively - but software developers generally won't be able to assume this. Airports, big sports venues, shopping malls and some industrial sites like factories will be at the top of the list for these types of solutions. For those locations, 5G Metaverse connections may well be widely used and effective. However, those are the exceptions - and it will take many years to deploy new in-building systems, or upgrade existing infrastructure anyway.

In particular, most homes and offices will have patchy or sometimes no 5G coverage, especially in internal rooms, elevators or basements. (There might be a 5G signal or logo displayed on the device, but that doesn't mean that the famously-promised gigabit speeds or millisecond latencies will actually be deliverable).

In those locations, expect Metaverse devices to use Wi-Fi as a baseline - and increasingly the Wi-Fi 6/6E/7 generations with better capabilities than previous versions.

What the Meta video tells us

I'm aware that the Metaverse is more than just Facebook / Meta, but the 1h17 video from Zuck (link) is not a bad overview of what to expect in terms of experiences, devices and business models. Obviously there will be different views from Epic Games, Microsoft's various initiatives around Hololens and Mesh, plus whatever Apple is quietly cooking up, but this is a decent place to start.

The first thing to note is the various Horizon visions that Meta is pitching - Home, Worlds and Workrooms. These are (broadly) for close social interaction, gaming/larger-scale social and business collaboration - especially hybrid work.

Mostly, the demos and visions are expected to take place from the participant's home, office, school or similar venue. There's a couple of outdoor examples of enhanced sports, or outdoor art/advertising as well. Virtual desktops, avatars that mimic eye and facial movements and so on.

In terms of devices, there's a large emphasis on headsets (obviously the Oculus Quest, and also the new high-end Cambria device promised for 2022) as well as discussions of AR glasses, from the RayBan Stories recently launched, to a forthcoming project called Nazare.

The technology discussion is all around the functional elements, not the connectivity. Optics, sensors, batteries, displays, speakers, cameras and so on. There are developer tools for hand and voice interaction, and presence / placement of objects in the virtual realm. There's lots of discussion around creators, advertising and the ability to own (and interoperate) virtual avatars, costumes and furniture. There are also nods to privacy, as would be expected.

There's no mention of connectivity, apart from noting that Cambria will have radios of some sort. The section on the "Dozen major technological breakthroughs for next-gen metaverse" doesn't mention wireless, 5G or anything else.

It's worth noting that Oculus devices and the RayBan glasses today use Wi-Fi. We can also expect the gesture-control in future will likely lean on UWB sensors. Outside of Facebook / Meta essentially all of today's dedicated AR/VR headsets connect with Wi-Fi or a cable, to a local network or broadband line. (That might be 5G fixed-wireless to the building for a few % of homes, but that will still use Wi-Fi on the inside).

Where cellular 4G/5G takes a role in XR is where the device is tethered to a phone or modem, or is experienced actually on the smartphone itself - think Pokemon Go, or the IKEA app that lets you design a room with virtual furniture.

We can expect the same with the Metaverse. If you're using a smartphone to access it, then obviously 5G will play a role, just as it will for all mobile apps in 3-4 years time when penetration has increased.

Will Cambria and future iterations feature 5G built-in? Maybe but I doubt it, not least because of the extra cost and engineering involved, as well as multiple versions to support different regional frequency options. Would a future Apple AR/Metaverse headset feature cellular, like some versions of the Watch? Again, that's possible but I wouldn't bet on it.

In the second half of the decade, later versions of 5G (Release 17 & 18) will have useful new features like centimetre-accuracy positioning that could be useful for Metaverse purposes - but again, that's reliant on having decent coverage in the first place. There will likely be some useful aspects outdoors though - for instance accurate measurement of vehicles on roadways.

Facebook Connectivity becomes Meta too

One other thing I noticed is a reference on LinkedIn to Facebook's often-overlooked Connectivity division, which does all sorts of interesting programmes and initiatives like TIP (which does OpenRAN and other projects), Terragraph 60GHz mesh, Express Wi-Fi and the low-end Basics "FB-lite" platform for developing markets with limited network infrastructure.

Apparently it's now being renamed Meta Connectivity - partly I guess because of the reorganisation and rebranding of the group overall, but also as a longterm part of the Metaverse landscape.

To me, that also indicates that the Metaverse is going to use multiple wireless (and wired) technologies - which aligns with Zuckerberg's view that it's more of a reinvention of the Internet/Web overall, rather than a particular app or experience.

Bandwidth-heavy? Or perhaps not....

One other thing needs to be considered around the Metaverse and connectivity. The immediate assumption is that such a "rich" environment, either full-virtual or overlaid onto a view of the real world, will need lots of data - and therefore the types of bandwidths promised by 5G. If we all use Metaverse devices to project "virtual TV screens" onto virtual surfaces, it will use lots of capacity, supposedly.

But it strikes me that avatars (even photo-realistic ones) & 3D reconstructions of real-world scenes will likely need less bandwidth than actual video. Realtime rendering will likely be done on-device in most cases, just sending the motion/sensor data or metadata about objects over the network.

Clearly this will depend on the exact context and application, but if your PC or phone or headset has a model of your friend's virtual house, or your virtual conference room - and all the objects and people/avatars in it - then it doesn't actually need realtime 4K video feeds to show different views.

In addition, the integration of eye-tracking allows pre-emptive downloads or actions, so "pseudo-latency" can seem very low, irrespective of the network's actual performance. If the headset sees you looking at a football, it can start working on the trajectory of a kick 10's or even 100's of milliseconds before you move your virtual leg.

That said, the sensor data uplink & motion control downlink will need low latency, but I suspect that will be more about driving localised breakout and peering rather than genuine localised compute. If you're in a hybrid conference with distant colleagues, the main role for edge-computing is to offload your data to the nearest Internet exchange with as few hops as possible.

(Some of the outdoor scenes in the Meta video from Connect seem rather unrealistic. They show groups of people playing table tennis and a virtual basketball match with "friends on the other side of the world", which would involve some interesting issues with the speed of light and how that would impact latency.)

Conclusion

In a nutshell - no, the Metaverse isn't the killer app for 5G.

The timelines align between the two, so where 'Verse apps are used on smartphones they'll increasingly use 5G if it's available and the user is out-and-about. But that's correlation, not causation. Those smartphones will typically be connected via Wi-Fi when at home, school or work. I suspect the main impact on smartphones will be on the need for better 3D graphics capability and enhanced sensors and cameras, rather than the network side.

Will we see some headsets or glasses with built-in cellular radios, some with 5G support? Sure, there will certainly be a few emerging in coming years, especially for enterprise / private network use. I'd expect field-workers, military, or industrial employees to exploit various forms of AR and VR in demanding situations well-suited to cellular, although many will tether a headset or glasses to a separate modem / module to reduce weight.

Many devices will also include various other wireless technologies too - Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, maybe Thread/Matter, UWB and so on.

But if anything, I suspect that the Metaverse may turn out to be the killer app for WiFi7, especially for home and office usage. That doesn't mean that 5G won't benefit as well - but I don't see it as a central enabler, given the probable heavy indoor bias of the main applications. (I don't think that cryptocurrency or edge-computing are key enablers either, but those are debates for another day)

(This article was initially published on my LinkedIn Newsletter - click here to see the original, plus comment thread. And please subscribe!)

#Metaverse #Facebook #Meta #AugmentedReality #VirtualReality #5G #WiFi #MixedReality #Mobile #Wireless #Devices #Gaming #Collaboration #HybridWorking

Facebook Workplace: Just collaboration, or parking its tanks on UCaaS & cPaaS lawns?

Facebook has finally launched its enterprise collaboration offering, changing its name to Workplace, from the original beta-tested Facebook at Work (link). It certainly isn't a full UCaaS product - but it wouldn't surprise me if it heads (somewhat) in that direction over time, or adds in integration or PaaS capabilities that allow it to compete indirectly in future.

It's aggressively priced, and mostly targetted at the Slack-style market for timeline- and messaging-centric collaboration, also known as WCC (workstream collaboration & communication). It's got a free trial, it's free for educational users, and for businesses it costs just $1-3 per month depending on size of deployment. (For comparison, Facebook's global consumer ARPU is around 4, mainly from advertising, although this is much higher in North America - link).

Clearly, it's majoring on large similarity in user-experience to its social networking platform, which is familiar to a large % of humanity. Likes, reactions, groups and so on are all replicated.

It also has some communications capabilities already - FB's Live video-streaming service is built into the main Workplace service, while it has a separate "companion" app (Work Chat - link) for IM and voice/video. I strongly suspect it is based on WebRTC, as its consumer equivalent is one of the biggest users of the technology today. Work Chat also has file/image-sharing and (not all entirely professional) stickers, which are basically glorified emoji. 

Interestingly, the iOS appstore page for Chat - which says it's already at Version 48 - has a screenshot focusing on voice rather than video, although that may just be because it hasn't updated it yet (there's an old website link to At Work rather than Workplace too).

Some other things I've noticed:

• It references trial user companies (for internal deployment) include telcos Telenor and Telekom Austria
• Its partners / distributors include a division of Phillipines telco PLDT
• Unsurprisingly, there's a big pitch on security, privacy and data-ownership for companies that may be suspicious of FB's record.
• There's a big pitch for non-desk workers such as those in restaurants, on ships or industrial facilities (who are mostly likely to be mobile-first / mobile only, and which are often well outside the traditional UC/UCaaS universe). 
• It's apparently air-gapped from the consumer Facebook platform - although given WhatsApp's recent history, some may speculate how long that lasts.
• There's a way to create multi-company groups for federation, and presumably closed groups for suppliers/customers/partners.
• Various 3rd-party providers of identity for single sign-on support (including G Suite and MS Azure).

In common with Slack and some other UC and WCC-type offers, it suggests that use of messaging and workstreams may reduce the need for voice/video realtime communications as well as email. Its FAQ says that "Companies find that they can eliminate or drastically reduce their need for internal collaboration tools such as their intranet, telephony systems, video conferencing and distribution lists."

That is quite telling for me: "reduce their need" implies that Facebook doesn't immediately see its role as replacing old phone systems or UC (or UCaaS), or that it intends to jump into the conferencing space. Perhaps I'm inferring too much, but I suspect it means:

• Facebook isn't interested in becoming a business phone system or normal UCaaS platform, especially with PSTN interconnect. In any case, it is unclear that businesses would accept it any time soon - it's taking Microsoft a long time to move on from IM/UC to telephony.
• The apparent enthusiasm of various telco partners could just indicate prudent curiosity - or could indicate a future alignment with network-based telephony and numbering, especially given Facebook's love of phone number-based 2-factor authentication.
• Also at present, Workplace isn't being set up as a mechanism for B2C communications, as many thought it might. In many ways, that's more a role for consumer Facebook (& consumer FB identities) and perhaps WhatsApp for chatbots. Businesses have to pay for various services around their pages already.
• However, it would be very unsurprising if Workplace became more of an integration platform in future. I can easily imagine it - or partners - building ways to link it to other telephony, conferencing or CRM/call-centre systems or cloud providers. 
• Workplace could potentially become a hub for Slack-style "collaboration as a platform", also being done in various ways by Cisco Spark, Symphony, Broadsoft Tempo, Unify Circuit and many others.
• Given Facebook's enthusiasm for live video-streaming, video-calling and other communications abilities (especially in-app on mobile) it would not surprise me to see a cPaaS play or acquisition at some point. I suspect it wouldn't aim to compete with Twilio directly, or some other UC-style rivals such as Nexmo/Vonage, but either Cisco/Tropo or Tokbox could be closer to the firing line. (Actually, Tokbox would be an interesting M&A target, if Telefonica decides it can't leverage it more than it does today).
• I expect that a major push will be made later around "events" which seems to be mostly missing from the current release, and which is a huge draw on the consumer service. Renaming it to "meetings" or "appointments" would make a lot of sense, and absorb much more communications traffic in consequence.
• Facebook has perhaps the best way to categorising personal "context" of any company. Its status updates have a great set of tags of location, doing/feeling activities, tagged colleagues/friends and so forth. It has the potential to leverage this in Workplace to create a really interesting platform for Contextual Communications.

Overall, I think that Facebook Workplace looks like a much more subtle and oblique entry to enterprise communications than some people expected. It's not aiming to replace UC/UCaaS outright, but instead to gradually divert (steal?) a growing slice of the overall employee-to-employee (or cross-company) communications pie. This is very different to the way that the traditional enterprise comms companies like Cisco or Avaya or various cloud-based providers are going, where they typically aim to be at the centre of a firm's communications, radiating outward from phone or conferencing. Instead, Workplace seems to be a play for adjacency, siphoning off use from email and Slack and peripheral (often unloved) UC features, at a low price point.

If companies can get over their privacy-wariness from Facebook's consumer reputation, it has quite a lot of potential. I also suspect it could be seen as attractive as a channel play by some telcos' enterprise business units, especially where they have minimal mobile footprint today. It would probably sit alongside other UCaaS offers rather than replace them. Thus far, it's a bit unclear what Microsoft plans to do with LinkedIn, but that's also in the same universe.

But Workplace also represents a starting-point for some really interesting future cPaaS and integration plays. Facebook's familiar UI - and its vast realm of heritage and skill in design and UX - could be a gamechanger. It is rightly eschewing "boring old business phone systems" for now - but should be able to help create a variety of new voice and video experiences in subsequent enhancements, if it proves the basics, gains scale quickly, and mitigates residual concern about security and privacy.

If we call the message/timeline concept WCC, maybe this will end up being called wPaaS?

Mobile data zero-rating: adhering to letter of the law on Net Neutrality, or the spirit?

An increasing number of mobile networks are zero-rating specific data services to their customers, giving free access to certain applications or websites, rather than charging against the customer's allotted quota of data.

Some of the best-known examples are in the developing world, with Facebook, Google, Wikipedia and other services offered for free on numerous networks, either as a temporary promotion or ongoing plan. Other examples in Europe (eg DT & TeliaSonera) have bundled free data traffic with paid music or video content. This is starting to cause controversy, as some observers perceive it to be contrary to the principles of Net Neutrality on the basis of differential treatment or pricing of Internet traffic.

This matter has gained a lot of attention recently, with the Chilean regulator (one of the earliest to enact "hard" Neutrality laws) banning the practice. Several articles & certain of my analyst peers have opined that zero-rating might give Facebook & Co. an unfair grip over novice Internet users, who might be left unaware of the rest of the Internet, or at least dissuaded from exploring it at extra cost. In more mature markets, there is a fear that zero-rating certain popular services might give operators an excuse to reduce "open Internet" quotas and steer users to partners who offer revenue-shares, or perhaps direct "sponsored data" payments for traffic.

I am more sanguine about these threats. Although these practices seem to break the letter of (some interpretations) of Net Neutrality, I'm less convinced they break it in spirit, when the actual outcomes are examined. That said, I'd certainly agree that zero-rating bears close and ongoing scrutiny in case future risks emerge, but I'd say that some clear benefits suggest "ex-ante" laws are not needed in this instance, as opposed to some other manifestations of "non-neutrality".

In addition, historic practices of the mobile industry - which nobody has complained about in the past - seem to suggest that this might all be a storm in a teacup.

In my mind, there are three main classes of mobile data zero-rating:

• Zero-rating of paid Internet content/app, such as music or movie streaming
• Zero-rating of free Internet content/apps, which might be either
  - Commercial (search or maps or social networking) or
  - Non-commercial (eg health & education & government services)
• Zero-rating of non-Internet data, such as the telco's own in-house data services (MMS messaging for example, or new VoLTE phone services on 4G), or operational tasks such as handset software updates, customer-care functions and so on.

The first class - paid Internet apps - is largely irrelevant. For example, if a carrier sells Spotify as an add-on service, it can say "free data for Spotify use" (technically non-neutral), or equally easily, "buy Spotify & get 200MB a month extra data allowance as a bonus" (perfectly neutral). If the average usage is 200MB, it nets out, although some individual users might be worse/better off. Competitors are "disadvantaged" either way, because they didn't get a deal in place while Spotify did.

The third class ought to be non-controversial as well - mobile operators have long sold non-Internet data services in all manner of pricing configurations. MMS & SMS messages are priced per-message, irrespective of whether your photo compresses down to 1MB or 100kb. BlackBerry email services have traditionally been sold as per-month subscriptions, not volume-based. And your phone sends and receives a variety of zero-rated operational data just to function. If a service provider tried to charge for data used for an online help function, or to access its billing portal, it would get criticised by every consumer activist.

Sponsored data and zero rate charging - Non-neutral mobile broadband models from Dean Bubley

The complication emerging here is if one of these "own brand" services implicitly competes with Internet equivalents. Nowadays, MMS competes with all manner of photo-sharing apps, while a telco's own mobile TV implicitly competes with YouTube or Netflix or other commercial equivalents. Yet the original licences for 3G spectrum assumed that these were exactly the type of "multimedia" data services that operators would be selling. Open access to the public Internet only started taking off later, with the iPhone and USB modems, around 2006-7. Since then, the Internet tail has wagged the mobile data dog - but we shouldn't be surprised when "on-net" paid mobile data services appear again.

In any case, no such services have shown any sign of enough popularity to warrant telcos unilaterally reducing overall mobile data quotas, in the face of ever-fiercer competition. No MNO is going to do well selling "1GB open data + as much of our movie service as you want" vs. a rival selling 3GB of "anything" usage. There might be a Machiavellian wish for this to occur - and perhaps a few TV addicts who can live without flexibility - but given the tendency to just bundle useless and unwanted apps like RCS messaging in this category, we can probably relax about the hypothetical risks for now.

This leaves zero-rating of free Internet services as the main point of contention. And here, the real gripe seems to be with Facebook, Google, WeChat and similar large app providers, helping (mostly) developing-world operators with various types of free-access services. The perceived risk is that these companies become the "main destination" for low-end mobile Internet users, squeezing out startups or rivals. Alternatively, some wonder if they become "gateways", coordinating other apps inside their platforms and restricting access to others. Facebook's acquisitions of Onavo and Pryte suggest possible intentions.

What's in it for the telcos concerned? The pitch is that this gets non-data mobile users onto the first rung of Internet use with low friction, by offering something useful/popular for free. The hope is that they will then click "off-app" links, or start using other apps and websites that cost money to access. There are also rumours that some app providers are actually paying money ("sponsored data" rather than "zero rating") although others such as Wikipedia are very clear that they only deal on a zero-payment basis. There are also reports that some in-app payments (eg for games or stickers) are revenue-shared, even if the main app is free. Some of these deals are ongoing, while others are short-term promotions.

More hardcore neutrality advocates would prefer such operators to just give (say) a starter balance of 50MB free data for general use. And that is indeed a possible answer - although it is less clear that people would know what to use it for - or bother going through the pain of configuring their phones to explore.

Yet as before, there are some historical precedents here too. Many operators in developing countries have done special deals for Opera's Mini browser traffic, or sold SIM cards pre-configured for BlackBerry data. It is perhaps only because of Google and Facebook's scale, breadth and ambition that people seem to be objecting now. Both companies face cynicism over their public statements about "getting the whole world online" - is it pure philanthropy, or also self-interest?

Another wrinkle is also making zero-rating seem "acceptable". Some operators are giving free access to educational material, such as Econet in Zimbabwe. It isn't too hard to imagine a charity like the Gates Foundation offering free access to anti-malaria advice, either - or perhaps local authorities giving free access to jobs websites or agricultural market pricing services. Prohibiting zero-rating might discourage such initiatives.

On balance, the benefits seem to outweigh the risks, as long as appropriate scrutiny is applied. Many use-cases seem uncontroversial, while historical precedent makes it difficult to frame this as a new anti-competitive practice, too.

Overall, Disruptive Analysis expects zero-rating to become commonplace, especially in developing markets. It forecasts more than 1.5bn people to have access to zero-rated applications or content by 2019, one of the findings in its new report on "non-neutral" mobile data business models.

It is right that regulators and neutrality advocates should keep a close eye on zero-rating - but it should not be summarily prohibited without careful thought.