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

New: Future of Video & RTC Workshop Series, starting May 19th

 "Why do people make phone calls?"

... the opening question at my old Future of Voice workshops. 

 It stumped many attendees and also many of my telco consulting clients during private engagements.

Most just looked blank, or perhaps suggested "to speak to people?". To be fair, the answer isn't obvious. Which is rather odd, given the need or desire for phone calls is the basis for the entire industry.

Few people think broadly about "purpose" of communications. What is the participant trying to achieve? How does the service or application help them do that? How can it be improved? What are the real sources of value?

In reality, there are 100s of uses for phone calls: To get information. Catch up with a friend. Buy something. Complain. Get help. All deserve a different, optimised experience. Yet a phone call is basically a one-size-fits-all, common denominator product. 

Telco's don't do "voice". They just do "telephony" - a single 140-year old, clunky, unnatural, heavily-regulated voice applications

Instead, they should have considered the 1000s of types of voice communication that are NOT phone calls. Audio chat, push-to-talk, karaoke, voice assistants and so on. All designed for particular purposes, with user-interaction models and technology stacks. Some dependent on the network, some on apps, some on devices, some in learned human behaviour.

The same is happening now for video. It's more than just video conferencing.

It's training, collaboration, security, education, medicine, machine vision, infra-red, social broadcast or 1000s of other uses, applications & business models.

There are platforms, enablers & APIs. Developer tools & design & test capabilities. WebRTC is important but not alone.

If telcos, service-providers, cloud/platform players, developers, enterprises and investors really want to understand the value and timelines for future communications - they need to ask the real questions. Not get blinded by ancient standards, or regulatory mandates to measure things in "minutes".

RTC (realtime communications) is getting more complicated, diverse - and has huge opportunities, as well as risks to incumbent providers of old/poor products. We all know which are the good/bad WFH conferencing products, or messaging services these days. 

What does the future bring? New models for UCaaS & cPaaS? Innovative video services for the smart home? New audio drop-in chat apps? AR/VR conferencing? What are the impacts of 5G, edge-computing and AI?

So I'm announcing: 

A new 3-part / 2-timezone "Future of Video & RTC" workshop series with WebRTC maven Tsahi Levent-Levi from May 19th. Early-bird rates end soon.

 

Sign up here.

 

Predictions for the next decade: looking out to 2030 for telecoms, wireless & adjacent technologies

It's tempting to emulate every other analyst & commentator and write a list of 2020 predictions of success and failure. In fact, I got part-way into a set of bulletpoints about what’s overhyped and underhyped. 

But to be honest, if you read my articles and tweets, you probably know what I think about 2020 already. Private cellular networks will be important (4G, initially). 5G fixed wireless is interesting and will grow the FWA market - but won't replace fibre. 5G is Just Another G and is overhyped, especially until the new core matures. RCS is still a worthless zombie, eating brains. But I don't need to repeat all this in detail, just because I'm a bit more sharp-worded than most observers. It wouldn't tell you much new.

But seeing as I spend a fair amount of time advising clients about the longer-term future, 5-10 years out or even further, I thought I'd set my sights higher. I use the term "telco-futurism" to look at the impacts of technology and broader society on telecoms, and vice versa.

So, at the start of the 2020s, what about the next decade? Assuming I haven't retired to my palatial Mars-orbiting private Moon in 10 years' time, what do I think I'll be writing, podcasting (or neural-transmitting) about in 2030?

So, let's have a few shots at this more-distant target...

• 6G: In 2030, the first 6G networks are already gaining traction in the marketplace. The first users are still fixed connections to homes, and personal devices that look a bit similar to phones and wearables, but with a variety of new display and UI technologies, including contact lenses and advanced audio/haptic interfaces. 6G represents the maturing of various 5G concepts (such as the new core), plus greater intelligence to allow efficient operation. 
• Details, details: Much of the 2020s will have been spent dealing with numerous "back-office" problems that have stopped many early 5G visions becoming real. Network-slicing will have thrown up huge operationalisation and security issues. Dealing with QoS/slice roaming or handoff, at borders between networks (outdoor / indoor / private / neutral / international) will be hugely complex. Edge computing scenarios will turn out to need local peering or interconnection points. All of these will have huge extra complexities with billing, pricing and monitoring. mmWave planning and design tools will need to have matured, as well as the processes for installation and operation.Training and skills for all of this will have been time-consuming and expensive - we'll need hundreds of thousands of experts - often multi-domain experts. By the time all these issues get properly fixed, 6G radios and vendors will exploit them, rather than the "legacy 5G" infrastructure. See this post for my discussion about the telecom industry's problems with accurate timelines.
• Device-Network cooperation: By 2030, mobile ecosystems and control software will break today's silos between radio network, devices and applications much more effectively. Sensors in users' devices, cell-towers and elsewhere will be linked to AI which works out how, why and where people or IoT objects need connectivity and how best to deliver it. Recognise a moving truck with machine-vision, and bounce signals off it opportunistically. Work out that someone is approaching the front of a building, and pre-emptively look for Wi-Fi, or negotiate with the in-building neutral host on a marketplace before they enter the door. Spot behavioural patterns such as driving the same route to work, and optimise connectivity accordingly. Recognise a low battery, and tweak the "best-connected" algorithm for power efficiency, and downrate apps' energy demand.Integrate with crowd-flow patterns or weather forecasts. There will be thousands of ways to improve operations if networks stop just thinking of a "terminal" as just an endpoint, and look for external sources of operational data - that's a 20th Century approach. Expect Google's work on its Fi MVNO & Android/Pixel phones, and similar efforts by Samsung and maybe Apple, Qualcomm and ARM, to have driven much of this cross-domain evolution.
• Energy-aware networks: Far more energy-awareness will be designed into all aspects of the network, cloud and device/app ecosystem. I'm not predicting some sort of monolithic and integrated cascading-payments system linked into CO2-taxes, but I expect "energy budget" to be linked much more closely to costs (including externalities) in different areas. How best to optimise wired/wireless data for power demand, where best to charge devices, "scavenging" for power and so on. Maybe even "nudge" people to lower-energy applications or consumption behaviours by including "power-shaming" indicators. If 3GPP and governments get their act together, as well as vendors & CSPs, overall 6G energy use will be a higher priority design-goal than throughput speed and latency.
• Wi-Fi: We'll probably be on Wi-Fi 9 by 2030. It will continue to dominate connectivity inside buildings, especially homes and business premises with FTTX broadband (i.e. most of them in developed markets). It will continue to be used for primary connectivity on high-throughput / low-margin / low-mobility devices like TVs and display screens, PC-type devices, AR/VR headsets and so on. It will be bonded together with 5G/6G and other technologies with ever-better multi-path mechanisms, including ad-hoc device meshes. Ease of use will have improved, with the success of approaches like OpenRoaming. Fairly little public Wi-Fi will be delivered by "service providers" as we think of them today.  We'll probably still have to suffer the "6G will kill Wi-Fi" pundit-pieces and hype, though.
• Spectrum: The spectrum world changes slowly at a global level, thanks to the glacial 4-year cycle of ITU WRCs. By 2030 we will have had 2023 and 2027 conferences, which will probably harmonise more spectrum for 5G/6G, satellites & high-altitude platforms (HAPS) and Wi-Fi type unlicensed use. The more interesting developments will occur at national / regional levels, below the ITU's role, in how these bands actually get released / authorised - and especially whether that's for localised or shared usage suitable for private networks and other innovators. By 2030 we should have been through 2+ cycles of US CBRS and UK/Germany/Japan/France style local licensing experiments, allocation methods, databases and sensing systems. I think we'll be closer to some of the "spectrum-as-a-service" models and marketplaces I've been discussing over the last 24 months, with more fluid resale and temporary usage permits. International allocations will still differ though. We will also see whether other options, such as "national licenses with lots of extra conditions" (eg MVNO access, rural coverage, sharing, power use etc) has helped maintain today's style of MNOs, despite the grumbling. We will also see much more opportunism and flexibility in band support in silicon/devices, and more sophisticated approaches to in-band sharing between different technologies. I'm less certain whether we will have progressed much with commercialisation of mmWave bands 20-100GHz, especially for mobile and indoor use. It's possible and we'll certainly see lots of R&D, but the practicalities may prove insuperable for wide usage.
• Private/neutral cellular: Today, there's around 1000 MNOs globally (public and private). By 2030, I'd expect there to be between 100,000 and a million networks, probably with various new types of service provider, aggregation hubs and consortia. These will span industrial, city, office, rural, utility, "public venue" and many other domains. It will be increasingly hard to distinguish private from public, eg with MNOs' campus networks with private cores and hybrid public/private spectrum. We might even get another zero, if the goals of making private 4G/5G as easy and cheap to build as Wi-Fi prove feasible, although I have doubts. Most of these networks will be user-specific, but a decent fraction will be multi-tenant, either offering wholesale access or roaming to "legacy MNOs" as neutral hosts, or with some sort of landlord model such as a property company running a network with each occupied floor or building on campus as a "semi-private" network. Some such networks will look like micro-telcos (eg an airport providing access to caterers & airlines) and will need billing, management & security tools - and perhaps new forms of regulation. This massive new domain will help catalyse various shifts in the vendor community as well - especially cloud-native core and BSS/OSS, and probably various forms of open RAN, and also "neutral edge".
• Security & privacy: I'm not a security expert, so I hesitate to imagine the risks and responses 10 years out. Both good and bad guys will be armed to the teeth with AI. We'll see networks attacked physically as well as logically. We'll see sophisticated thefts of credentials and what we quaintly term "secrets" today. There will be cameras and mics everywhere. Quantum threats may compromise encryption - and other quantum tools may enhance it, as well as provide new forms of identity and authentication. We will need to be wary of threats within core networks, especially where orchestration and oversight is automated. I think we will be wise to avoid "monocultures" of technologies at various levels of the network - we need to trade off efficiency and scale vs. resilience.
• Satellite / HAPS: We'll definitely have more satellite constellations by 2030, including some huge ones from SpaceX or others. I have my doubts that they will be "game-changers" in terms of our overall broadband use, except in rural/remote areas. They won't have the capacity of terrestrial networks, and signals will struggle with indoor penetration and uplink from anything battery-powered. Vehicles, planes, boats and remote IoT will be much better-connected, though. Space junk & cascading-collision scenarios like the movie Gravity will be a worry, though. I'm not sure about drones and balloons as HAPS for mass-market use, although I suspect they'll have some cool applications we don't know today.
• Cloud & edge: Let's get one thing clear - the bulk of the world's computing cycles & data storage will continue to occur in massive datacentres (perhaps heading towards a terawatt of aggregate power by 2030) and on devices themselves, or nearby gateways. But there will be a thriving mid-market of different sorts of "edge" as I've covered in many posts and presentations recently. This will partly be about low-latency, but not as much as most people think. It will be more about saving mass data-transport costs, protecting "data sovereignty" and perhaps optimising energy consumption. A certain amount will be inside telcos' networks, but without localised peering / aggregation this will be fairly niche, or else it will be wholesaled out to the big cloud players. There will be a lot of value in the overall orchestration of compute tasks for applications between multiple locations in the ecosystem, from chip-level to hyperscale and back again. The fundamental physical quantum of much edge compute will be mundane: a 40ft shipping container, plonked down near sources of power and fibre.
• Multi-network: We should expect all connectivity to be "software-defined" and "multi-network". Devices will have lots of radios, connecting simultaneously, with different paths and providers (and multiple eSIM / other identities). Buildings will have mutliple fibres, wireless connections and management tools. Device-to-device connections and relaying will be prevalent. IoT will use a selection of LPWAN technologies as well as Wi-Fi, cellular and short-range connections. Satellite and maybe LiFi (light-based) connections will play new roles. Arbitrage, bonding, load-balancing will occur at multiple levels from silicon to OS to gateway to mid-network. Very few things will be locked to a single network or provider - unless it has unique value such as managed security or power consumption.
• Voice & messaging: Telephony will be 150yo in 2026. By 2030 we'll still be making some retro-style "phone calls" although it will seem even more clunky, interruptive, unnatural and primitive than today. (It won't stop the cellular industry spending billions upgrading to Vo6G though). SMS won't have disappeared, either. But most consumers will communicate through a broad variety of voice and video interaction models, in-app, group-based, mediated by an array of assistants, and veracity-checked to avoid "fake voice" and man-in-the-middle attacks of ever increasing subtlety. Another 10 years of evolution beyond emojis, stories, filters and live broadcasts will allow communication which is expressive, emotion-first, and perhaps even richer and more nuanced than in-person body language. I'm not sure about AR/VR comms, although it will still be more important than RCS which will no doubt be celebrating its 23rd year of irrelevance, hype and refusal to die.
• Enterprise comms:  UCaaS, cPaaS and related collaboration tools will progress steadily, if unspectacularly - although with ever more cloud focus. There will be more video, more AI-enriched experiences for knowledge management, translation, whispered coaching and search. There will be attempts to reduce travel to meetings and events as carbon taxes bite, although few will come close to the in-person experience or effectiveness. We'll still have some legacy phone calls and numbers (as with consumer communications) although these will be progressively pushed to the margins of B2B and E2E interactions. Ever more communications will take place "contextually" - within apps, natively supported in IoT devices, or with AI-based assistants. Contact centres and customer interactions will be battlegrounds for bots and assistants on both sides. ("Alexa, renegotiate my subscription for a better price - you have permission to emulate my voice"). Security and verification will be highly prized - just because something is heard doesn't mean it will match what was originally spoken
• Network ownership models: Some networks of today will still look mostly like "telcos" in 2030,  but as I wrote in this post the first industry to be transformed by 5G will be the telecom industry itself. We'll see many new stakeholders, some of which look like SPs, some which are private network operators, and many new forms of aggregator, virtual operator, wholesale or neutral mobile/fibre provider. I'm not expecting a major shift back to nationalised or government-run networks, but I think regulations will favour more sharing of assets where it makes sense. Individual industries will take control of their own connectivity and communications, perhaps using standardised 5G, or mild variations of it. There will be major telcos of today still around - but most will not be providing "slices" to companies and offering deep cross-vertical managed services. There will be M&A which means that we'll have a much more heterogeneous telco/CSP market by 2030 than today's 800 identikit national MNOs. Fixed and fibre providers will be diverse as well - especially with the addition of cloud, utility and muncipal providers. I think the towerco / property-telco model will be important as asset owners / builders as well.

I realise that I could go on at length about many other topics here - autonomous and connected vehicles, the future of cities and socio-political spheres, shifts in entertainment models, the second wave of blockchain/ledgers, the role of human enhancement & biotech, new sources of energy and environmental technology, new forms of regulation and so forth. But this list is already long enough, I think. Various of these topics will also appear in podcasts - which I'm intending to ramp up in 2020. At the moment I'm on SoundCloud (link) but watch out here or on Twitter for announcements of other platforms.

If this has piqued your interest, please comment on my blog or LinkedIn article. This is a vision for 2030, which I hope is self-consistent and reasonable - but it is not the only plausible future scenario.

If you're interested in running a private workshop to discuss, debate and strategise around any of these topics, please get in touch via private message, or information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com. I work with numerous operators, vendors, regulators, industry bodies and investors to imagine the future of networks and other advanced technologies - and steer the path of evolution.

Happy New Year! (and New Decade)

Sources of value in voice: Asking the right questions

In the last few weeks I've been doing a lot of work on voice communications (and messaging / video / context):

• I attended Enterprise Connect in Orlando discussing collaboration, UCaaS, cPaaS, WebRTC and related themes
• I spoke at a private workshop, for a Tier-1 operator group's communications-service internal experts team
• I've helped a client advise a strategy around the new European eCall in-vehicle emergency-call standard
• I've been writing a report on VoLTE adoption and impact, for my Future of the Network research stream published by STL Partners / Telco 2.0 (Subscribe! Link here)

A common, over-arching, theme is starting to form for me. The future sources of value in voice are all about SPs / vendors asking the right questions when they design new services and solutions.

Historically, most value in voice communications has come from telephony (Sidenote: voice is 1000 applications/functions. Phone calls are merely one of these). And in particular, the revenue has stemmed from answering the following:

• Who is calling?
• Where are they?
• Who is being called?
• Where are they?
• How long did they speak for?
• Plus (sometimes):
• When did they call?
• What networks were they on?
• Was the call high-quality? (drops, glitches etc)
• Is it an emergency?

This pretty much covers most permutations for ordinary phone calls: on-net/off-net, roaming, international and long-distance, fixed-to-mobile and so forth. 

Clearly, the answers to these questions are worth a lot of money: many billions of dollars. But equally clearly, they don't seem to be enough to protect the industry from competition and substitution from other voice-comms providers, or alternative ways of conducting conversations and transactions. As a result, voice telephony services are (mostly) being bundled as flat-rate offers into data-led bundles for consumers, or perhaps per-month/per-seat fees for unified comms (or SIP trunks) for business. 

In other words, current voice revenues are being delivered based on answering fewer questions than in the past. Unsurprisingly, this is not helping to defend the voice business.

The current "mainstream" telecoms industry seems to be focused only on adding a few more questions to the voice roster:

• Is it VoIP / VoLTE / VoWiFi? (Answer = sometimes, but "so what" for the customer?)
• Can we use it to drag through RCS? (Answer = No)
• How can we reduce the costs of implementation? (Answer = maybe NFV/cloud)
• Are there special versions for emergencies? (Answer = yes, eg MCPTT and eCall)
• Is there a role for CSPs in business UCaaS? (Answer = yes, but it's hard to differentiate against Microsoft, Cisco, RingCentral, Vonage and 100 others)
• What do we do about Amazon Echo? (Answer = "Errrrmmmm... chatbots?")

Given the huge expense and complexity involved in implementing IMS for VoLTE, many mobile operators have very little "bandwidth" left to think about genuine voice innovation, especially given wider emphasis on NFV. What limited resources are left may get squandered on RCS or "video-calling". 

Fixed and cable operators are in a slightly better position - they have long had hybrid business models partnering with PBX/UC vendors for businesses and can monetise various solutions, especially where they bundle with enterprise connectivity. For fixed home telephony, most operators have long viewed basic calls as a commodity, and are either protected by regulators via line-rental and emergency-call requirements, or can outsource provision to third parties.

In my view, there are many other questions that can be asked and answered - and that is where the value lies for the future of voice communications. None are easy to achieve, but then they wouldn't be valuable if they were:

• Why is the call occurring? (To buy something, ask a question, catch up with a friend, arrange a meeting or 100 other underlying purposes)
• Where is the call being made and received (physically)? For instance indoors, in a noisy bar, on a beach with crashing waves, in a car, in a location with eavesdroppers?
• Is the communication embedded in an app, website or business process? 
• Is the call part of an ongoing (multi-occasion) conversation or relationship?
• Is a "call" the right format, with interruptive ringing and no pre-announcement? Is a push-to-talk, one-way, "whisper mode", broadcast, team or other form more appropriate?
• Are both/all parties human, or is a machine involved as well?
• What device(s) are being used? (eg headset, car, wearable, TV, Echo, whiteboard?)
• Who gets to record the call, and own/delete/transcribe the recording?
• Are the call records secure, and can they be tampered with?
• What's the most effective style of the call? (Business-like, genial, brusque, get-to-the-point-quickly etc)
• What languages and accents are being spoken? Can these be adjusted for better understanding? What about background noise - is that helpful or hindering?
• Can the call add/drop other parties? Are these pre-arranged, or can they be suggested by the system in context?
• Are the participants displaying emotion? (Happiness, anger, eagerness, impatience, boredom etc) . How can this be measured, and if necessary, managed?
• Is there a role for ultrasound and/or data-over-sound signalling before or during the call?
• How can the call be better scheduled / postponed / rescheduled?
• Is a normal phone number the best "identifier"? What about a different number, or a social / enterprise / gaming / secure identity?
• Are there multiple networks involved/available for connection, or just one? What happens when there are multiple choices of access or transit providers? What happens where the last 10m is over WiFi or Bluetooth beyond the SP's visibility?
• Is encryption needed? Whose?
• What solutions are needed to meet the needs of specific vertical-markets or other user groups? (Banking, healthcare, hospitality, gaming etc)
• What are the desired/undesired psychological effects of the communications event? How can the user interface and experience by improved?
• Did the call meet the underlying objectives of all parties? How could a similar call be improved the next time?
• How do we track, monetise and bill any of this?

In my view it is these - and many other - questions that determines the real value of voice communications. Codec choice and network QoS are certainly useful, as is (sometimes) interoperability. Network coverage is clearly paramount for mobile communications. But these should not be put on a pedestal, above all the other ways in which value can be derived from something seemingly simple - people speaking to each other.

I'm seeing various answers to some of these questions - for example, contact-centre solutions seem to be most advanced on some of the emotional analysis, language-detection and other aspects. There are some interesting human-driven psychology considerations being built into new codec designs like EVS (eg uncomfortable silences between words). MVNOs and cPaaS players are doing cool things to "program" telephony for different applications and devices. The notion of "hypervoice" was a good start, but hasn't had the traction it deserved (link). Machine-learning is being applied to help answer some of these questions - most obviously with Alexa/Siri/Assistant voice products, but also behind the scenes in some UC and contact-centre applications.

But we still lack any consistent recognition that voice is "more than calls". 99% of effort still seems to go on "person A calls person B for X minutes". Very little is being done around intention and purpose - ask a CSP "Why do people make phone calls?" and most can't give a list of the top-10 uses for a "minute". Most people still use "voice" and "telephony" synonymously - a sure-fire indicator they don't understand the depth of possibility here. And we still get hung up on replacing voice with video (they have a Venn overlap, but most uses are still voice-centric or video-centric).

Until both the telco and traditional enterprise solutions marketplaces expand their views of voice (and entrench that vision among employees, vendors and partners), we should continue to expect Internet- and IoT-based innovators to accelerate past the humble, 140yr-old phone call. Start asking the right questions, and look for ways to provide answers.

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?