Nationalizing the imaginary 5G Network?

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Bob Frankston <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
Date: Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 3:17 PM
Subject: Nationalizing the imaginary 5G Network?
To: David J. J Farber <Dave () farber net>


To put it bluntly the proposal cited in Axios story on “Trump team
considers nationalizing 5G network <https://goo.gl/XuXv1y>” doesn’t make
sense on a number of levels. The real danger comes if this indeed
represents the NSC’s failure to understand Internet style connectivity. The
proposal may just be the work of an NSC staffer who accepted all the 5G
hype as if it were real.  (This story
<https://www.recode.net/2018/1/29/16945452/donald-trump-5g-wireless-network-national-security-council-memo>
from Recode says just that).

I credit the Axios article for having some skepticism. For example, it asks
what protecting a network or, more to the point, only the mobile network,
has to do with the “AI algorithm battles”. And hardening the network rather
than making it more resilient only makes it brittle.

In fact, the whole idea of nationalizing the network presumes there is a
well-defined network rather than today’s generic connectivity that isn’t
confined to the telecommunications infrastructure. But then this is only
about 5G and not even the bulk of the infrastructure which is wired. The
threats are to applications and services that are at the end points and
devices rather than inside a network.

If we really want to compete with China, we must learn from what they got
right – assuring coverage everywhere. And we can do better by adopting an
Internet native approach rather than yet another telecommunications network.

The real value of this story may be in forcing us to think about the
contradictions in the 5G story which is framed in terms of legacy telecom
vs. the more generic connectivity of the Internet. The idea of having a
common infrastructure is very good.

The main Axios article and the related story “How 5G works
<https://goo.gl/etkdq6>” are useful in understanding the fallacies in the
5G hype including, but not limited to …

   - The article cites the need for many additional transmitters [sic –
   transceivers] because the signals are easily blocked. That means there will
   be a lot of dead spots – which doesn’t jibe with the idea that this is
   vital ubiquitous high-speed connectivity.  And the telecom business model
   means that users extending the coverage are stealing Internet.
   - 5G is supposed to provide guarantees of low latency. That was the
   argument for the SS7 network reserving capacity for each connection because
   it was deemed absolutely necessary for voice. VoIP put a lie to that
   premise. And reserving capacity has side effects like creating scarcity by
   taking capacity off the table and creating the concept of a busy signal
   rather than graceful fallback. If you depend on the network for low latency
   your application is brittle and not safe for the very applications that
   require guarantees.
   - 5G is supposed to be necessary for self-driving (autonomous) cars. But
   that doesn’t make sense since they have to be autonomous! And we can’t
   guarantee coverage anyway. At CES there were attempts to show the power of
   constantly streaming video from cars, but the story fell apart as soon as
   you asked why. At least the article acknowledges that most IoT doesn’t
   generate much traffic, so it doesn’t need 5G at all.

The other example cited is VR which doesn’t make sense. High performance
local links make sense but extending that experience across the world won’t
work the same way and there is not a scintilla of evidence that there is
any demand. Citing such examples contribute to my feeling that this was not
a serious proposal but rather an attempt to take 5G as the answer and then
find a problem that required it.

Networking is something we do with infrastructure rather than depending
upon having a physical network which can be nationalized. Instead, as with
highways we build the common infrastructure by interconnecting local
systems and complement it with regional and national connectivity. This is
possible because we don’t rely on a provider who owns the entire
intelligent network, so it can make promises by allocating channels.
Instead we use the intelligence in our devices to assemble a whole out of
the parts.

With the Internet approach we can mix and match technologies. Choosing a
high-performance radio for a particular link should be an engineering
choice. The idea that we need to deploy an entirely new technology
everywhere along with a new business model harks back to the days when we
had to replace the entire broadcast ecosystem just to add a new format like
HDTV.

Perhaps 5G mania will force us to come to terms with the new landscape of
best efforts connectivity and move beyond building a different intelligent
network for each application.

(This is also available online as https://rmf.vc/Nationalizing5G)

Bob Frankston

http://Frankston.com

@BobFrankston



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