Author: Peter Linder

I am is a 5G evangelist and Head of 5G Marketing for Ericsson in North America. My mission is to turn your mobile grey zones into black and white insights, to help you make an impact when driving 5G in your company. I share experiences gained at the intersection of tech and digital marketing.

Coverage, Capacity & Capabilities Change City Climate

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52. Coverage Capacity and Capabilities change City Climate - 1610 edited

The evolution of networks will play a central role in the development of urban society. A network that delivers from A to Z on expectations with regards to coverage, capacity and capabilities is vital for turning urban populations into ‘cityzens’ of the Networked Society. I would argue that the urban network is the single most important piece of infrastructure needed for economic growth in a city. This is the first in a series of posts that will touch upon the following subjects introduced here.

Work & play
Lifestyles are transforming for locals and for tourists. Going forward, how do we thrill those visiting our cities, when location-based services and LTE are all widely available? How do we meet up with acquaintances in a city where fewer and fewer people plan social meetings in advance? The question is perhaps, what is required to power-up performance in public places in the city?

Similarly, urban business life and the service sector are in the beginning of a major innovation cycle. What role will networked collaboration play in re-inventing the service sector? How can the sales process in a city be revamped to support the evolution of small shops and food outlets? What will a modern restaurant look like if you spice up life beyond salt, pepper and free Wi-Fi? Will we work from office or home or will we see work developing around where we are?

Transportation & health
With cities becoming larger and larger, the focus is being placed on efficient transportation. How will air travel evolve and what about the door-to-door experience? How will parking and power infrastructures evolve to support a future centered on electric vehicles?

Finally, a major burden will be to take care of entire populations and secure their health. How can proactive activity-monitoring secure a more physically active population in the city? And how can we leverage the network to improve the situation for urban homeless people?

This subset of opportunities for cities in the Networked Society will be explored over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Coverage Challenges Completely Changed

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App coverage -1610 Edited

Measuring coverage in mobile networks used to be easy when the bars on the screen told the full story. As the breadth of applications grows quickly, so does the need for new coverage measurements. Going forward operators need to be prepared that end-users will expect coverage for all their applications.

As a starting point for how to measure coverage per application, you can measure the coverage for three performance tiers, e.g. 100kbps, 1Mbps and 10Mbps. These tiers can be used to approximate the coverage for voice, data and video-centric applications. The evolution of mobile-data performance requirements are driven by the new needs from IP-based voice and video applications. According to the most recent Ericsson Mobility Report, the North American coverage for the three tier examples above are: 95%, 78% and 31% respectively.

End-user’s expectations for IP-based voice quality are defined by the mobile voice services we have today. Circuit-switched mobile voice services are known to be universally available and support uninterrupted calls with very high availability. These factors together with the new High-Definition voice capabilities have set the bar for IP-based communication services. The large-scale introduction of VoLTE is driving performance reviews and upgrades for the lower coverage tiers. In addition to voice communication, the application coverage for streaming music services is important to support.

The very high screen resolutions for smartphones and tablets make them prime targets for innovative video consumption services. Video coverage is defined by the higher performance tier and a quickly growing factor for redefining the most demanding coverage bar. Streaming video services can be buffered at both ends but require close to real-time performance when used.

In the past, we have assumed that a lot of the video consumption will be offloaded to Wi-Fi but the ultra-mobile use of smartphones and tablets means that video demand is highly realistic in areas outside hotspots as well.

Here are my predictions for the ‘App Coverage’ evolution:

– IP-based voice and video will set the performance bar for new coverage expectations on mobile data services.
– End-user demand for universal app coverage will require a more refined approach for measuring coverage.
– The current performance measures for mobile data, e.g. response times and download times, will be accompanied by already established quality of experience (QoE) measures for voice and video.

Perhaps the vertical coverage bars we grew up with will soon be complemented with horizontal app-coverage bars on our screens.

Time To Turn To Third Trajectory

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49. Time To Turn To Third Trajectory - 1610 edited

The communications world has been based on two major business models – the voice model and the internet model. We are about to enter the third major business model era, and the change might be bigger than most players in the market expect.

The voice business model is based on minutes, and initially on a differentiation on location, in other words, local, national and international. The basic model is applied across both fixed and mobile voice. The voice business model did not support internet. It started to collapse for dial up data in the late 1990s, and a new model emerged with the large-scale introduction of DSL and cable.

 

The internet business model is based on mix of “all you can eat,” and the peak-rate-speeds and monthly-data-bucket alternative. The model was pioneered for residential internet and later adopted for mobile broadband. Users are used to a mix of freemium applications for the data paradigm. Business internet/intranet services have evolved from their FR/ATM/leased-line legacy. The internet model does not support the growing video/cloud services in the marketplace, where consumer value is not correlated with bits and bytes.

The video/cloud business model for the Networked Society is yet to be defined and a lot if innovation can be expected. Here are some important boundaries for this model:

* New traffic patterns from video- and cloud-based applications are defining the demands on next-generation communications infrastructure.

* New service paradigms enabled with software-Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities introduced in service-provider networks and tightly coupled to cloud data centers.

* Consumerization of business services and a migration to an increasingly mobile workforce.

* A new balance for end-to-end services, with connectivity providers and application providers needs to coexist and support each other.

 

My predictions about the creation of the Networked Society business model supporting a video/cloud-centric world is:

* A value based business model, diverting from the proven voice and internet models, where time/bits and volumes are key.

* It will be shaped from 2013 to 2015 in a few leading markets, for mass market adoption from 2016.

* It will be the business foundation for accelerating SDN/NFV introduction across fixed and mobile networks.

* It will contribute to major traffic shifts across LAN, metro and core networks.

This blog-post was originally posted September 20, 2013 on Ericsson’s Networked Society blog as: “The Third trajectory a new business model era for the Networked Society”.

 

Interactive Ideas inspire Innovations

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©Peter Linder 2013 – All rights reserved
©Peter Linder 2013 – All rights reserved

It is 20 years since the birth of video on demand (VoD). Time Warner was pushing the envelope in Orlando, US, over cable networks. BT in the UK made Colchester the VoD capital of Europe. All this was driven by the vision that interactivity would change our approach to video/TV consumption. Ericsson’s first major broadband push was around Residential Interactive Broadband Services. What can we learn from the first 20 years of interactive/on-demand video, and why will the next five years in the Networked Society be very different?

In the initial VoD era, later labeled iTV, it was all about turning the video rental market into a networked revenue stream. Before it even started in volumes, internet access became the market maker for DSL and cable. Switched Video Broadcast was introduced as an innovation for delivery of broadcast services across copper-based networks. Finally, VoD and broadcast TV became part of a triple play bundle before the market took off.

Access to attractive content offerings has always been a key issue for on-demand video, to a point where the original services’ VoD offerings could be referred to as “very-old demand.” The worlds of the operators, content owners and consumer electronics manufacturers collided at the triple-play intersection, and a dual vision emerged for managed IPTV services in coexistence with over-the-top video. This pioneering work has resulted in the big boom for the sales of smart TVs or internet TVs during the last three years.

The missing links in the large-scale adoption of interactive/on-demand video are now clearly visible. Interactivity/on-demand and personalization goes hand in hand. Interactivity is not a family experience. Interactivity is not only about video consumption. It is about taking national advertising through local to personal ads as an instrumental part of the business model transformation. Users have historically considered the internet and voice as commodities and paid a premium for mobile and video. The center of gravity for interactivity will be where mobile and video meets. The big question is how quickly will we move toward such a “video-all-demand” world?

Here are my predictions for the future of interactive video:

* Any video offered on-demand has a higher value than linear video. This applies to users as well as advertisers. With live sports being the big exception.
* Personalization of video is here to stay. We have quickly moved from one TV per family toward two to three screens per individual.
* The interactivity has become multifaceted and involves complex relations between multiple screens across ecosystem borders.
* With powerful networks and high-resolution screens in a variety of sizes, two of the main innovation risks are eliminated. Now we can focus on the on multiscreen interactivity and the business model transformation for user fees and advertising revenues.
* The initial vision will be realized. It just took us 25 years to get there, with the next 5 years being the most interesting part of the journey.

Daily Device Dependency Drive Digital Detox Demand

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©Peter Linder 2013 – All rights reserved
© Peter Linder 2013 – All rights reserved

Are you among the users dependent on four or five networked devices on a daily basis? These devices provide endless opportunities and can also create addictive behaviors. Nevertheless, some of us might benefit from a bit of “digital detox” during our vacation as we recharge for the fall.

A survival question for application developers is to offer their applications on a variety of platforms, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, PCs and TVs. It is also about the seamless transition between them and to allow for dual-screen use cases. This creates an application availability opportunity for users to take advantage of or to use excessively.

Many users have adopted a multiscreen and multi-social media lifestyle without putting boundaries for when their URL life should stand back for their IRL experiences. Both business communications and excessive social media use could become a stress factor to wind down from during the vacation.

The digital detox industry is growing quickly and offers everything from initial seminars to advanced programs. All with the purpose of finding your own well-being during a period without or with reduced device access. It is not about dropping the devices but finding the right balance between your networked and your physical/mental life. Both are an essential part of life in the Networked Society in the same way as a great meal requires both food and drinks in order to be well-balanced.

My suggestions for vacations this summer:

– Reflect on your personal usage patterns and decide which screen and app combination makes you relax and enjoy life, without causing stress.
– If you are a heavy user of both business communication and social media, consider dropping one of them during your vacation this year.
– Elaborate with shifting content consumption patterns to a new media/device combination allowing you to free up time. For example, stop reading full books and shift to audio summaries of the same book.
– Determine which stimuli reactions, for example, responding, pinning, liking, re-tweeting you see as adding value to your important life accomplishments.

How “able” will the connected world become?

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Earlier this summer I attended the D11 conference where one of the key trends addressed was “able devices”. A range of new computing applications are emerging in the form of ‘wearables’, ‘driveables’, ‘flyables’ and ‘scannables’. All are part of the Networked Society evolution towards a more connected world.

 

Networked Glasses were introduced earlier this year while augmented reality applications are already entering the mass market. Disney is launching a networked wristband at their theme parks allowing families to pre-book their favorite rides and cut waiting times. Many of us are already using pulse-meters to monitor the impact of our exercise. The era of ‘wearables’ is just beginning.

 

Networked cars and associated accessories fall into the ‘driveables’ category. Navigators are becoming connected in real-time with media content being delivered over the air to their vehicles. Soon electric-powered vehicles will keep track on where and when to charge next.

 

Remotely controlled drones are entering the surveillance market and more devices can be expected to move into the air as part of their typical usage pattern. QR Codes are becoming an integrated part of a networked life including clothes with QR codes connected to washing instructions. Product information is now commonly accessed through QR codes rather than the product packaging.

 

A common factor in the “able computing” trend is the smartphone which acts as an intermediate device for connecting able devices. Here Wi-Fi/Bluetooth provides the personal/local connectivity while smartphones enable access to apps and connectivity to the cloud.

 

My predictions for the future are:

  • Able devices are in their infancy and will grow rapidly in coming decade
  • Able devices will grow up in an eco-system where apps and mobile connectivity to the cloud are fundamental enablers
  • The smartphone will play a key role as a control/relay device supporting able devices