Stupidity, they say, is doing the same thing multiple times and expecting a different result. I think many accept the fact that an example of this is the 5G/6G discussions. How much of what people are staying is the use case for 6G was already claimed as a use case for 5G, one that didn’t pan out? We also have the example of public/private 5G, and of 5G as an alternative to WiFi. Good luck with those as a big opportunity driver! But are these all that “same thing”? If we’re seeing really different, multiple, failures here then we have a problem of application scope. If we’re seeing a different wrapper on one thing that gives an impression of multiplicity, we have a problem facing reality. Which is it? I contend it’s the latter, and it may be hiding a more important truth.
For four decades, I’ve been involved in the evolution of network services and network infrastructure, going back to the days of ISDN (gasp, remember that?). In every case, we had suggested use cases and in the great majority of them, those use cases did nothing to actually drive technology success. Was there a common factor? Yes, and we can see it in the name—“Use” case.
I can use a shovel to drive a nail or to open a bottle, but if I start with the nail or the bottle and run out to buy a tool to accomplish my task, do I look for a shovel? Not unless I’m truly delusional. Someone selling shovels would be perhaps even more delusional to believe that promoting it for driving nails and opening bottles is a winning strategy. Network technology is transformational if it unlocks a lot of new business cases, which means two things. First, there has to be a set of business cases whose network needs are not being met currently. Second, the new technology has to meet those needs, meaning it has to offer the capabilities needed at a price point that gets CFO approval for the projects. It has to justify.
One telco planner made this comment to me last month. “You know what the big problem with 5G was? That we had 4G. The big problem with 6G? That we have 5G. What’s the problem with private 5G? WiFi. We have generations of technology but not generations of technology value.” Put in this light, we can see why 5G laptops or private 5G have not shaken the market. Truth be told, satellite broadband has been more impactful than either of these in terms of applications, opportunity realization, and that should be telling us something.
I’m sitting at my computer as I write this. That’s also what I’m doing when I get information on enterprise technology plans, at least most of the time. Sometimes I’m sitting on my deck with a more portable system, or my phone in a pinch, or maybe I’m traveling to some interesting place with the same tools. But wherever I go, I can almost assume that I have adequate broadband connectivity. I have an empowered appliance set that I’ve built my work around and that appliance set lets me do my work almost anywhere. You’re probably working the same way, and you’re probably reading this blog at your own desk, your own empowered appliance.
This week, my mailbox fell victim to the heat and rainfall in the US northeast, and the post rotted out so it fell down. As I was working to fix it, a guy in a yellow vest came along and walked down my driveway, explaining he was there to read the gas meter. He did that, and entered the reading in a hand-held gadget that, as it happened, was one of those empowered appliances. Not a computer or smartphone, but something that was linked to cellular service (4G, as it turns out). This experience raised a couple of questions in my mind.
First, why was the gas company sending someone out to read the meter and enter the reading? Why not have the meter just send the reading along? Second, what would the gas company (or any utility) do in areas where there was no available wireless service? Those questions sure seem to point to some opportunities that could be addressed. What are the answers?
In the first case, the answer is simple. The gas meter doesn’t have the capability to send a reading out. Neither did my first water meter, but the water company changed out a unit and remote automatic reading was supported. It was easy to do that because of the way the water meter was designed, but not so for the gas meter, and changing out every gas meter just wasn’t practical, and in any event the cost of having every meter equipped with a 4G service subscription is way more than the cost of having a worker carry a gadget with 4G capability up to every home.
In the second case, the answer can be inferred from the first case, and I actually worked on an application like this in the past. A handheld device could be used to record the readings, and dumped into a network at a convenient central point.
My yellow-vested friend may not seem like much of a transformational target, but consider this. Only 60% of our workforce in the US, and in other major market areas, are regularly in a nice location with good broadband access like my office, and probably yours. Of this group, a quarter are at least sometimes away from that location, meaning mobile, some of the time. The remaining 40% of workers are simply not empowered. What might it be worth to get them empowered?
We could today, by giving them a 5G smartphone or laptop, you say, or maybe a satellite broadband service contract in rural areas. Why don’t we? A big part of it is cost; subscription to such a service isn’t cheap, and the monthly connection cost would have to be paid out of the benefits to empowering each worker. What things like 5G laptops focus on is a little tweaking of “edge empowerment” of workers we’ve already empowered at their desks. A use, but not a justification. My meter-reader isn’t going to carry a laptop around, and doesn’t need to be viewing 4K TV while working. He needs simple telemetry capability at low cost, and that’s what we should be looking at doing.
But there’s another issue, perhaps more significant. We don’t know what the empowerment of these 40% of workers would look like. If you look at the evolution of IT, it started with transaction processing. We realized in the 1950s that we could get a lot of benefit from computer-processing the business records generated daily by companies. We started by punching paperwork onto punched cards, then graduated to online transaction processing. All of this was done in office locations, and when PCs came along we put them in offices to help workers there improve their use of business records, and also to enhance how they communicated, generated reports, etc. But this was the 60% that were regularly in offices. We didn’t consider the rest, and we still haven’t. We’re only now coming to terms with the needs of the 40% who are doing their jobs out in the real world. We need to understand the real world, meaning applying IoT, and we need to understand workers’ roles in it, to be effective. Some of the digital twin discussions that are now coming out are early attempts to do that, and so we have to be ready with connection solutions to deliver what we learn.
We don’t need an evolutionary strategy to address the empowerment of the 60% who we’ve already empowered. All of IT as we see it is built on the productivity gains of just a bit less than two-thirds of the workforce. What kind of business cases could we make for new network technology if we could get the rest? That’s the question that network people need to be considering if they want to drive a revolution, and that’s what some compelling justification cases could be built on.
If you’re quarterback of a football team, and you’re third and ten on the fifty yard line with a minute left to play, what do you do? Do you try for a yard because it’s a gain, but a gain that does you no good, or do you try a long pass for a touchdown? We can’t create transformational benefits by tweaking empowerment for that 60%, we need to think bigger.
