It’s already getting hard to find positive things being said about 5G, and candidly most of the negativity is well-deserved. Hype doesn’t conquer all; although it does produce more interesting stories, reality eventually impinges. At any rate, Light Reading offered another round in the 5G downside fight, with the story on how the shine is wearing off private 5G. Again being candid, I have to wonder if there was ever any real shine at all.
This particular story seemed to stem from the comments that Verizon made during its January earnings call, where the CFO admitted that “A couple of areas where we are behind versus our expectation [are] the mobile edge compute and 5G private networks”. I don’t think Verizon was alone in not seeing private 5G meet expectations, but (returning to candor) I wonder how many of those who expressed lofty private 5G hopes had their fingers crossed behind their backs.
Back in 2021, which happens to be the year when Verizon executives were claiming a TAM of between $7 billion and $8 billion for private 5G, enterprises were telling me that they didn’t see any more value in that technology than they’d seen in private LTE. The article quotes AT&T as pointing out the fact that private LTE was similarly hyped and similarly disappointed. In fact, more enterprises said that advances in WiFi made private 5G less useful than said it was useful at all. Still, operators, mobile network vendors, and even cloud providers were eager to jump on the technology as a promising revenue source for themselves, and a heady benefit set for enterprise users. Why?
I can’t get on-the-record comments from vendors on things like private 5G, and few comments even off-the-record. However, I did get the sense that a lot of vendors and providers who had been seeing 5G as creating new revenue opportunities were engaged in the common practice of dodging negative proofs. You see a given technology as a way to get positive media coverage, and you dive into it. Maybe some believe it, but probably most in their hearts have doubts. Then, as the proof that the positive views were unjustified, you jump to a related area that’s not yet disproved.
OK, you all know how I feel about this sort of hype, but there is perhaps a question to explore in this flood of exaggeration and disappointment. How many is the “some” who actually believe this stuff? Is there self-delusion going on here, or is there simply manipulation? It turns out that there are both.
Over the last decade, I asked marketing professionals whether they could be more effective pushing something they believed in versus something they doubted. The numbers varied a bit, but generally about three times as many said they were better at marketing things they believed. Most who told me that said that when they believed something they were “more convincing”, and those who could say why that was suggested that people were willing to get more aggressive pushing something they thought was true, because proof to the contrary wouldn’t blow back on them.
The same group of professionals also admitted (by about the same margin) that people who at least appeared to believe strongly in some new technology were more likely to get meaningful roles in marketing it. That suggests that the ability to appear to love something gets you promoted if that something becomes a focus. That combines with the other factors to create organizations who are likely to be cheerleaders for things, whether they really believe them or not. Given that hype gets you editorial mentions and potential sales engagement, that’s probably enough to promote some hype-targeted campaigns, even products.
In the case of 5G, though, the big reason for dodging negative proofs seems to be that everyone really did believe 5G was a revolution. Why not? It had such broad support. Yes, the media led the cheers, but operators, vendors, analyst firms, and pretty much everyone else validated 5G. It was budgeted after all, at a time when having specific funds available meant a lot. How could something budgeted fail? It couldn’t, and it didn’t, of course. It was just that the model of “success” wasn’t exactly what was expected. 5G turned out to have very little user-visible value beyond LTE. When operators started to pull back on 5G spending, vendors started to look to non-operator buyers to justify what they’d already done, and private 5G got its start.
What, exactly, is private 5G supposed to do? Clearly an enterprise couldn’t deploy a private 5G network as an alternative to public mobile services. Clearly, within a facility, it’s very difficult to see why private 5G would offer much versus WiFi, which is far less costly and more versatile. OK, maybe a campus location could use private 5G where WiFi roaming might be complicated, but wouldn’t that same location do better with public mobile services, including 5G? And after years of standards work, we still don’t have any decisive features to justify private 5G. In fact, it’s hard to find features to differentiate public-network 5G services.
The root problem here wasn’t 5G, or mobile networks, or standards processes, though. It was bottom-up or supply-side thinking. The Field of Dreams mindset leads you to the promised land if “they” actually “come”. If that happy result isn’t a pure accident, if “planning for serendipity” isn’t a great idea, then you have to assume that the question of who will come and why has been asked before the field has been sown. You also have to assume that the value proposition becomes clear before you start expecting a lot of traffic.
This may explain why ETSI just announced the adoption of “Software Development Groups” or SDGs. These, the organization says, will “accelerate the standardization process, providing faster feedback loops and improving the quality of standards.” I think that there’s little question that SDGs could translate standards into something actually available faster than just writing specifications would do, but that doesn’t resolve the private 5G problem or other problems of the same type.
Suppose 5G had advanced at a breathtaking pace instead of a glacial one? Would that have meant that real applications that could benefit from 5G, raise operator revenues, add business benefits, would have emerged faster? Why? Just having an SDG to build code doesn’t mean that the basic mission would somehow change, it could just mean that the failings of the process might be recognized sooner. When we had ample numbers of providers of private 5G technology, did users suddenly jump on it? Nope, so why would they have done so had software been available three or four years earlier?
If you’re asking the wrong question, no amount of efficiency in getting your response is going to overcome the fact that it was the wrong question. You can still plant hopeful corn rather than asking what would motivate people to travel to your field. Software design can start wrong and stay wrong, just as easily as formal standards can.
ETSI’s SDGs can “improve the quality of standards” only by making standards into something that responds to market needs and opportunities. If you subordinate SDGs to standards processes, that’s not going to happen. ETSI has to accept that the problem with standards is the way they’re conceptualized, that needs and opportunities have to be identified first, validated, and only then addressed with standards and software. That this would mean a likely difficult transition from supply-side thinking is obvious, and that the transition could have been made a decade or more ago and was not is also obvious. That demonstrates that issuing a press release isn’t likely to create the transition now. ETSI has to make explicit changes to align initiatives with realistic opportunities. If they do, they might be able to save 6G.