A rant about 5G myths - chasing unicorns​

Exasperated rant & myth-busting time.

I actually got asked by a non-tech journalist recently "will 5G change our lives?"

Quick answer: No. Emphatically No.

#5G is Just Another G. It's not a unicorn

Yes, 5G is an important upgrade. But it's also *massively* overhyped by the mobile industry, by technology vendors, by some in government, and by many business and technology journalists.

- There is no "race to 5G". That's meaningless geopolitical waffle. Network operators are commercial organisations and will deploy networks when they see a viable market, or get cajoled into it by the terms & timing of spectrum licenses.

- Current 5G is like 4G, but faster & with extra capacity. Useful, but not world-changing.

- Future 5G will mean better industrial systems and certain other cool (but niche) use-cases.

- Most 5G networks will be very patchy, without ubiquitous coverage, except for very rudimentary performance. That means 5G-only applications will be rare - developers will have to assume 4G fallback (& WiFi) are common, and that dead-spots still exist.

- Lots of things get called 5G, but actually aren't 5G. It's become a sort of meaningless buzzword for "cool new wireless stuff", often by people who couldn't describe the difference between 5G, 4G or a pigeon carrying a message.

- Anyone who talks about 5G being essential for autonomous cars or remote surgery is clueless. 5G might get used in connected vehicles (self-driving or otherwise) if it's available and cheap, but it won't be essential - not least as it won't work everywhere (see above).

- Yes, there will be a bit more fixed wireless FWA broadband with 5G. But no, it's not replacing fibre or cable for normal users, especially in competitive urban markets. It'll help take FWA from 5% to 10-12% of global home broadband lines.

- The fact the 5G core is "a cloud-native service based architecture" doesn't make it world-changing. It's like raving about a software-defined heating element for your toaster. Fantastic for internal flexibility. But we expect that of anything new, really. It doesn't magically turn a mobile network into a "platform". Nor does it mean it's not Just Another G.

- No, enterprises are not going to "buy a network slice". The amount of #SliceWash I'm hearing is astonishing. It's a way to create some rudimentary virtualised sub-networks in 5G, but it's not a magic configurator for 100s or 1000s of fine-grained, dynamically-adjusted different permutations all coexisting in harmony. The delusional vision is very far removed from the mundane reality.

- The more interesting stuff in 5G happens in Phase 2/3, when 3GPP Release 16 & then Release 17 are complete, commercialised & common. R16 has just been finalised. From 2023-4 onward we should expect some more massmarket cool stuff, especially for industrial use. Assuming the economy recovers by then, that is.

- Ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) sounds great, but it's unclear there's a business case except at very localised levels, mostly for private networks. Actually, UR and LL are two separate things anyway. MNOs aren't going to be able sell reliability unless they also take legal *liability* if things go wrong. If the robot's network goes down and it injures a worker, is the telco CEO going to take the rap in court?

- Getting high-performance 5G working indoors will be very hard, need dedicated systems, and will take lots of time, money and trained engineers. It'll be a decade or longer before it's very common in public buildings - especially if it has to support mmWave and URLLC. Most things like AR/VR will just use Wi-Fi. Enterprises may deploy 5G in factories or airport hangars or mines - but will engineer it very carefully, examine the ROI - and possibly work with a specialist provider rather than a telco.

- #mmWave 5G is even more overhyped than most aspects. Yes, there's tons of spectrum and in certain circumstances it'll have huge speed and capacity. But it's go short range and needs line-of-sight. Outdoor-to-indoor coverage will be near zero. Having your back to a cell-site won't help. It will struggle to go through double-glazed windows, the shell of a car or train, and maybe even your bag or pocket. Extenders & repeaters will help, but it's going to be exceptionally patchy (and need tons of fibre everywhere for backhaul).

- 5G + #edgecomputing is a not going to be a big deal. If low-latency connections were that important, we'd have had localised *fixed* edge computing a decade ago, as most important enterprise sites connect with fibre. There's almost no FEC, so MEC seems implausible except for niches. And even there, not much will happen until there's edge federation & interconnect in place. Also, most smartphone-type devices will connect to someone else's WiFi between 50-80% of the time, and may have a VPN which means the network "egress" is a long way from the obvious geographically-proximal edge.

- Yes, enterprise is more important in 5G. But only for certain uses. A lot can be done with 4G. "Verticals" is a meaningless term; think about applications.

- No, it won't displace Wi-Fi. Obviously. I've been through this multiple times.

- No, all laptops won't have 5G. (As with 3G and 4G. Same arguments).

- No, 5G won't singlehandedly contribute $trillions to GDP. It's a less-important innovation area than many other things, such as AI, biotech, cloud, solar and probably quantum computing and nuclear fusion. So unless you think all of those will generate 10's or 100's of $trillions, you've got the zeros wrong.

- No, 5G won't fry your brain, or kill birds, or give you a virus. Conspiracy theorists are as bad as the hypesters. 5G is neither Devil nor Deity. It's just an important, but ultimately rather boring, upgrade.

There's probably a ton more 5G fallacies I've forgotten, and I might edit this with a few extra ones if they occur to me. Feel free to post comments here, although the majority of debate is on my LinkedIn version of this post (here). This is also the inaugural post for a new LinkedIn newsletter, Most of my stuff is not quite this snarky, but it depends on my mood. I'm @disruptivedean on Twitter so follow me there too.

If you like my work, and either need a (more sober) business advisory session or workshop, let me know. I'm also a frequent speaker, panellist and moderator for real and virtual events.

Just remember: #5GJAG. Just Another G.

Blockchain and the Telecoms Industry: Thoughts from TMForum Live

I’ve just returned from TMForum’s annual conference in Nice. Blockchain / distributed-ledger technologies (and even more so AI, which I’ll cover in another post) figured quite highly.

(I'm expecting this post to be read by some non-telecom people, so a bit of background is likely to be useful here)
 

TMForum Live is an event traditionally aimed at the IT-facing parts of the telecoms industry. This is usually called BSS and OSS in the vernacular – business and operations support systems, such as billing, ordering, customer service, network & fault management etc. TMF was originally the “telemanagement forum”. The event talks about top-level industry themes (5G is a hot topic, as is IoT) but couches them in terms of “monetisation” and “operationalisation”. It’s necessary back-office stuff, but sometimes a bit dry.

So for outsiders – such as blockchain specialists - looking at the telecom industry, the BSS/OSS sphere is a pretty impenetrable forest of acronyms, legacy software, IT frameworks and solutions to deal with telcos’ sprawling operational and customer-facing needs. It also showcases “catalysts” – joint R&D projects run by consortia of companies, highlighting future possibilities – which are a bit more accessible, with dozens of workgroups exhibiting demos and results of their work.

In recent years, two major trends have led to the event’s character changing significantly:

• A blurring of the boundaries between IT systems and the telcos’ networks, as virtualisation (NFV – network function virtualisation & SDN – software defined networking) takes hold
• An increased focus on IT systems to support new customer-facing services, or adjacent areas that telcos hope to find new roles in servicing, such as IoT platforms, content, banking and smart cities. (Yes, the dreaded word “digital” makes frequent appearances)

More mundanely, the event has looked at ways to enhance the bread-and-butter costs and effectiveness of BSS and OSS solutions. Terms such as “customer experience management” and “service assurance” are everywhere, with user-centric improvements to mobile self-care apps, contact centre automation tools, chatbots, better ways to monitor network coverage and so on.

This year, quite a few conference sessions and exhibiting vendors mentioned Blockchain. It definitely wasn’t as high-profile as AI and machine-learning, but it provoked a lot of curiosity. A year ago, few attendees would have heard of it, much less thought it relevant to telecoms. Now, there is an internal working group, a panel session linking Blockchain & IoT, at least one Catalyst project, and a significant number of TMForum’s members who are taking an interest. I spoke at a smaller event TMForum ran in Portugal a few months ago, outlining my thoughts about applications, and had a significant amount of interest.

The main use-cases being discussed for telecoms blockchain included:

• Device identity & authentication, especially in IoT. There was a Catalyst exhibited (link) which used a Microsoft blockchain to create unique identities for medical sensors (wearable patches), via an Ericsson IoT platform, and also involving AT&T and others. This was also used for data time-stamping and asset management.
  
• Smart contracts, both as a possible new "Contract-as-a-service" play for enterprise-facing telcos, but also as a way to offer and manage SLAs (service level agreements) for CSPs' own network services.
• Mobile banking and micropayments, including for IoT-type use cases such as smart electricity grids. Again, blockchains might be used by telcos to either build complete "vertical" services for end-user, or as Enabler-as-a-Service wholesale/API plays for domain specialists.

I also had private discussions with vendors in Nice that covered a lot of other possible use-cases, including ones around NFV monetisation, fraud prevention, wholesale reconciliation and data-integrity protection. Another one that I've talked about before is use of distributed databases for new shared-spectrum usage and localised private radio networks - and that was independently mentioned by a speaker at another recent conference, the Wireless Broadband Alliance's congress in London.

All of these areas, and others, will be discussed at the Telecoms Blockchain & AI workshop I'm running on May 31st in London. There are still some spaces available - you can sign up here (link) or email me at information AT disruptive-analysis dot com.

My general sense is that development of blockchain applications in telecoms is taking a rather different evolution path to AI. There are some big “framework” plays around telecoms AI, including massive shared “data lakes” relating to customer data, network status and other variables. These can help drive more-reliable operations, better planning and happier customers who are prepared to spend more. Conversely, interest in blockchain and distributed ledgers is (for now) much more dispersed. Individual projects and functions are looking at these as solutions for “point problems” – cheaper registries and databases, ways to secure identity, whether smart contracts could help create enforceable SLAs and so forth.

As such, it’s harder to see telcos developing a centralised, coherent “blockchain strategy” – it’s probably going to be used tactically in very isolated niches, for the next 1-2 years at least. There will be a lot of pilots and prototypes – and each domain will also have a wide range of alternative options to consider. We might see more strategic use in IoT in future, as that seems to be a focus of quite a lot of work. This fragmentation of effort also means that multiple vendors, integrators and blockchain platforms (private, but also potentially public blockchains) are likely to be relevant. As yet, there is no real centralisation of effort for telecom blockchains in the same way there is for banking and healthcare. That may be a next step, beyond the TMForum's own working group.

I'm interested in others' views about this - and it's something that the May 31st public workshop (the first I'm running) should shed further light on. (Workshop details here).