Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Thought-leading wireless industry analysis
This post originally appeared on June 5 on my LinkedIn feed, which is now my main platform for both short posts and longer-form articles. It can be found here, along with the comment stream. Please follow / connect to me on LinkedIn, to receive regular updates (about 1-3 / week)
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I'm publishing a full
report & recommendations on Enterprise & Private 5G, especially
aimed at policymakers and regulators.
It explains the complex
dynamics linking Enterprises, MNOs and Governments – explaining the
motivations of each around connectivity, 5G deployment choices, IoT and
the broader impacts and trade-offs around the economy and productivity.
This
is not a simple calculus – MNOs want to exploit 5G opportunities for
verticals, but businesses have their own priorities and preferences.
Governments want to satisfy both groups – and also act as both major
network users themselves and “suppliers” of spectrum.
A
supporting cast of cloud players, network vendors, other classes of
service providers and other stakeholders have important roles as well.
This
report is a “Director’s Cut” extended version of a paper originally
commissioned for internal use by Microsoft, now made available for
general distribution.
(To download on LinkedIn, display in full screen & select download PDF)
Copied from my LinkedIn. Please click here for the download page & comments
I'm publishing my full
report & recommendations on telecoms supplier diversification,
especially for 5G, but more broadly for "advanced connectivity" overall.
This follows my "10 Principles" article from 2 months ago.
It
covers both near-term RAN diversification and a long-term roadmap for a
better telecoms/networking landscape towards 2030, with 6G and other
connectivity enabling "biodiversity" rather than monoculture.
Although it has been triggered by UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)
work via its Diversification Task Force - and will be submitted
directly to it - it is applicable more broadly to global policymakers
considering 5G, private networks, Open RAN, Wi-Fi, spectrum and vendor
policy issues.
My view is that Open RAN is important, but
overhyped (like 5G itself). Much of the value from 5G is in settings
where there is already good vendor choice (eg indoors, or for private
cellular).
Governments should focus more on context for deployment, ownership models and substitutive options like WiFi6. All bring extra supply options.
In short - *Demand* diversification catalyses *Supply* diversification.
(To download from LinkedIn, display in full screen & select download PDF)
Both organisations have previously published terrible studies by consultants, riddled with flawed assumptions and dodgy multiplier "fiddle factors". I’ve loudly criticised Axon and Coleago reports related to the (un)#fairshare and #6GHz #spectrum debates respectively.
So I started the ADL report with trepidation, not helped by a strange typo / editing error in the first paragraph.
But actually, the report is pretty good, and I broadly agree with both methodology and conclusions, albeit with one major caveat.
It estimates usage of home and mobile broadband on the basis of hours-per-day of active use of heavy applications such as video streaming, gaming and possible metaverse-type experiences.
I’ve used GB-per-hour myself, to model passenger data-traffic demand on trains. It makes more sense than the usual Gbps, as most applications are “bursty”. It also fits the typical heuristics of human behaviour. How many seconds a day do you spend on social media?
The central prediction of 20% growth in fixed traffic and 25% for mobile usage seems reasonable. I could argue for 25/20 rather than 20/25, but it's fine as a rough estimate.
Importantly these rates for the next few years are well within the bounds of both fixed broadband (moving to #FTTP) and mobile (on #5G) without incremental investments in extra capacity, beyond the main "generational" shift & CAPEX. And that is driven by government policy and competition, not traffic load and congestion. The report convincingly shows that nobody really needs/values more than 100Mbps for current apps, so #gigabit networks have plenty of headroom.
My main criticism is there is no analysis of mobile device traffic carried over fixed networks and #WiFi. Smartphones used at home for video, gaming or social media will be c80% on Wi-Fi, and indoor usage is c80% of the total.
The report also talks about AI pre-emptively downloading content for “infinite scrolling”, but doesn't suggest it could be smart enough to do so mostly over cheap / low-energy fixed connections. (IMO, by 2030, governments may *mandate* cellular offload via neutral-host or Wi-Fi for indoor use).
I agree with the report's assertions that VR is in an indoor/fixed application, that most #IoT traffic is a rounding-error and that #Web3 is probably irrelevant. The #metaverse scenarios seem mostly plausible.
One area I think ADL underestimates is fixed broadband for video streaming. While Netflix and YouTube are “active” viewing, historically, many people just leave broadcast TV switched on, even if nobody is in the room except the cat.
If TV really goes online-only, then that becomes a genuine “waste” of capacity, unless you can advertise to pets.
Overall - really quite good analysis, which (ironically, given the sponsors) fatally undermines the #InternetTrafficTax rhetoric.