One of the things I learned in the past was that “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions were worlds apart. Another thing I learned was that “pent-up demand” reflects in how realization of opportunity bunches up until released. It’s pretty clear that 5G supporters haven’t learned that lesson, as an article in Light Reading reflects.
A “necessary” condition for something to occur is a condition that must be satisfied, but which by itself does not guarantee the thing will happen. A “sufficient” condition can be a sole driver. One of the big problems that 5G has faced (and that frankly in this age of over-hype, practically all technologies face) is that 5G is not a sufficient condition for what we’d like it to do.
Do you need 5G for mobile broadband? Clearly not; we have mobile broadband today without it. But there’s another side to this particular truth, which is that even if you couldn’t do something without 5G, having 5G doesn’t guarantee it would get done. The best example of that is virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR).
You can make a decent case that the bandwidth requirements for many VR/AR applications could not be satisfied for any reasonable number of users without 5G. It’s not just a matter of per-user bandwidth; you would need fairly high bandwidth density per cell, which is really where 5G could shine. But suppose we got 5G. Does that automatically mean that we’d have augmented reality? Clearly not. It would be a “necessary” condition, but not “sufficient”.
There are two barriers to achieving the things that 5G might be “necessary” for. One is the availability of a marketable application that provides the experience. The other is the cost of the capacity needed to fulfill it. The latter is a primary impediment for many things that 5G “could do”, so let’s deal with it first.
How much would operators charge for 5G service? The answer, at least in an enduring-market sense, is “nothing more unless there’s significant willingness to pay.” If you can play your video now, and can still play it with 5G service, you’re gold, and anyone who says otherwise is dreaming. That means that it’s going to be difficult to get operators to offer a lot more per-user bandwidth, because they’d have to charge for it. What does the user get for the money? All the wonderful 5G applications (like VR/AR) that everyone built and had ready to go, just hoping that 5G would come along and the users would buy it. In other words, probably nothing. That’s the other side of our pair of points.
Suppose we were to postulate what kinds of mobile broadband applications would use a lot of bandwidth, the one thing that we could say 5G could theoretically provide that 4G doesn’t. VR/AR is about the only thing that comes to mind, since video is already available and there are few other high-bandwidth applications that anyone really seems to be thinking about. Let’s look at VR/AR. There are surely VR/AR applications in gaming and entertainment, and we do have some examples of these, but these applications are far more likely to be run in the home or an area where WiFi is available. Gaming does appear to be a convincing opportunity, but how much of it would be WiFi? Most, I suspect.
It’s hard to see how a lot of really hot uniquely 5G apps could come along absent any way to run them until you had 5G service widely available. It’s the classic “first-phone” problem; nobody buys the first phone because there’s nobody they can call. That means the applications and the service would have to stumble forward in jerks, hoping something created a justification. That’s unrealistic, so what we can really expect is that 5G will roll out largely as an evolution to 4G aimed at improving overall cell capacity not individual user speed. When that happens, and when user speed could be upped if there was a demonstrable market, we could see different services and not just different cells.
Time now to talk about my second life-lesson, the fact that a pent-up market creates clumping where the constraint is found. Let’s suppose that there are super applications of VR/AR out there that could easily consume 5G-scale bandwidth. Doesn’t that make it likely that there are super applications of VR/AR out there that would still work, at least in a limited sense, on 4G? We should have many such apps already, if they were convincingly valuable, and they should be clustered at the high end of current 4G network performance. If that were true, nobody would doubt the need for and value of 5G, and we’d be in a real race instead of a hype contest.
The most credible and potentially ubiquitous VR/AR application that would require cellular broadband is the familiar AR one where a user with special glasses sees the names of places and potentially even people, messages from them, etc. laid on top of the real visual field. This application has to keep the augmentation in phase with the real world while the user is likely moving, and so it’s performance-critical. The thing is, that’s also possible today with 4G. Perhaps the application wouldn’t perform as well as it might with more bandwidth, but we could surely offer it.
This kind of AR application, as opposed to VR gaming, is critical for mobile 5G because it’s credibly a mobile application. Gaming is something likely to be done in a fixed location, and while it’s possible that the location wouldn’t have WiFi, it’s not probable given the drive to deploy WiFi in almost all public facilities. Further, if operators wanted to charge for 5G bandwidth based on gaming use, they first miss a lot of the population and second would (by the added cost) put pressure on public locations where gamers congregated to offer WiFi. If there’s a mobile application to drive 5G, then, it’s augmented reality.
That means that what we’re seeing now with 5G mobile, which is the classic “Field of Dreams” model of a new service where operators “build it” and hope “they will come”, is the wrong approach. What should be happening is that the stakeholders who want mobile 5G, like operators, handset vendors, and 5G network equipment vendors, should band together and foster applications for AR. A solid AR app, in itself, could go a long way toward justifying 5G.
An AR application architecture could be the home run. AR is an obvious example of what I’ve called “contextual” services, meaning that the service is more valuable the more it knows about what a user is trying to do. In our example of the labels on the user’s visual field, you can see it would be easy to get the visual field so cluttered with labels that nobody could see where they were going. On the other hand, if the application knew you were trying to find a specific product, kind of restaurant, or friend in a crowd, the labels could be made manageable.
Even cellular IoT, another application that’s getting all the hype and none of the attention to reality, could be promoted by contextual services. Where you are in relationship to other stuff is the essence of context. Even Cisco said that in one of their recent blogs. However, IoT-related location services are not a compelling application for mobile services, because we don’t have many of them now. Yes, 5G is needed to fulfill the needs of a vast cellular-based IoT community, but we could get that started with 4G and we’re really not seeing that.
My suggestion is that everybody stop hyping 5G and start supporting it. The way to do that is to frame an AR architecture, a contextual architecture. Let’s set up a body, maybe an open-source project or maybe an industry group, and attack the real problem. Like most technologies, 5G doesn’t need promotion, it needs justification.