30% of Americans can’t go one hour without Wi-Fi

Some surprising results from a Broadcom survey of 900 Americans:

• 30% cannot go one full hour without a Wi-Fi connection
• 60% cannot go one full day without Wi-Fi access before seeking a connection

I was trying to think of the last time I went a full day without checking my email – if you don’t count 26 hours of internet-free travel from San Francisco to Singapore two years ago, I believe it was in 2006 when I went to the Mayan Pyramids in Guatemala and there was no power for roughly 20 hours per day. My obsession with connectivity might be a little sad, but at least I know I’m not alone!

What you have to keep in mind here is that people are used to an always-on internet connection, whether that’s over Wi-Fi or cellular data networks. This is where 5G WiFi comes in: not only does it increase the capacity of existing Wi-Fi networks to support the exponential growth of smartphones, but it also allows cellular carriers to seamlessly offload customers from their limited spectrum to the vast expanses of the 5 GHz band.

With total wireless cellular penetration exceeding 100% in the United States, it won’t be that long before 100% of Americans will be unable to go a full day without Wi-Fi access.

Need More Spectrum

Wireless spectrum is like freeways: the more you build, the more traffic you get. There was certainly a time when the 110 freeway through downtown Los Angeles was synonymous with smooth sailing at 55 miles per hour, but for decades, the world’s highest-capacity freeway network has filled every additional lane that got built with twice as much traffic as before.

I noticed this tweet from Stephen Lawson a couple of days ago that suggests cellular operators are running up against the same problem:

#Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead sticks to theme in #ctia2012 keynote, decrying spectrum shortage.

— Stephen Lawson (@sdlawsonmedia) May 8, 2012

Stephen has a number of other comments from his trip to CTIA, including what might seem like a surprising statistic: wireless subscriptions have achieved 105% penetration in the United States. Surprising when I think back to my summer job with a CDMA operator in 1998 where everyone wondered if cell phones would ever achieve 30% market penetration; unsurprising given that today I have three wireless subscriptions.

With so many wireless devices in service, it’s definitely no surprise that we’re running out of spectrum, especially as more and more of these mobile devices are used for high-bandwidth video applications. And while allocating a significant amount of additional spectrum could solve the problem in the short-term, that’s not a simple solution – roughly 1 GHz of total cellular bandwidth has been set aside worldwide, but in any given country, it is shared with dozens of other wireless applications, including television, radio, satellites and navigation. (This 2003 chart of United States frequency allocations is very instructive!) The pace of clearing spectrum to open up new cellular bands is very slow because it often requires completely changing existing technology in a band – think about how long it took to switch to digital television, which created the already at-capacity 700 MHz LTE bands.

Fortunately, 5G WiFi presents a solution to this problem. The 5 GHz band, where 5G WiFi operates, offers another 1 GHz of spectrum that can potentially be used to offload high-bandwidth cellular usage to Wi-Fi. Much of this band is already open for Wi-Fi use in the United States and other countries, and the remainder may be licensed in the near future. The even better news is that the capacity of the 5 GHz band is even greater than a similar amount of cellular spectrum: there are significantly fewer users in this band than there are in cellular bands, and the reduced range of Wi-Fi relative to cellular (several hundred meters vs several kilometers) allows even more users to share the spectrum. While it’s difficult for cellular spectrum allocations to keep up with the growth in a carrier’s customers, for example, 5G WiFi presents an opportunity to quickly build 10 times as many freeways, so to speak. Even Los Angeles would have smooth traffic with that kind of increase in capacity.

Well, this is exciting…

The first 5G WiFi product has been announced: the NETGEAR R6300 will ship with Broadcom’s 3×3 802.11ac/5G WiFi chip next month at a low, low price of about $200.

If you were so inclined to try out 5G WiFi, you could buy two units and use them for bridging – essentially, you could use the second unit to extend the range over which you could achieve the highest data synchronization rates.  Normally, your 11n throughput would be reduced because the bridge needs to maintain two links (one to your PC; one to the router.) But with the two routers completing transactions more quickly using 802.11ac, there would be more time left over for the bridge to connect to your PC using 802.11n. Or if you wanted to be the first person on your block to demonstrate 5G WiFi’s maximum speeds, you could go back to what I did in the dawn of Wi-Fi and plug an ethernet cable directly into the bridge router and use it as a very large external wireless card on your PC.

In the near-term, there will be many more 5G WiFi devices on the market, ranging from smartphones to tablets to 5G-enabled laptops and television sets.  You’ll be able to do data synchronization at up to 1300 Mbps, which would be a huge improvement relative to today’s automatic wireless backup devices – mine averages about 40 Mbps, and when I transfer data between legacy 802.11g devices through the router, it didn’t even hit 3 Mbps.  When I want to copy a video onto my current phone, it can take hours; 5G WiFi will reduce this to a matter of minutes.

You’ll also see a significant improvement in your media streaming experience.  Not only will you be able to transfer video from media devices to your PC or phone more quickly, but you’ll see much better performance when you’re actually sharing that video onto an HDTV.  Broadcom’s 5G WiFi chipsets have numerous features that not only extend the range of the highest Wi-Fi data rates, but also reduce the impact of signal fading, which eliminates the periodic video skipping and loss of fidelity that I’ve become so used to when watching TV over the internet.

As with most new technologies, it’s difficult to predict how people will use 5G WiFi once it’s in the marketplace. But as the guy who didn’t see the point of Wi-Fi in the first place, I’m expecting to find out about a whole bunch of different use cases that I never expected.

Times I Wished I had 5G WiFi and 4G LTE

I don’t usually work in a coffee shop – I don’t like not being able to charge my laptop, and my “home office” is the living room couch, with multiple computers strewn in front of me while I watch sports on TV – but on a recent nice and sunny day, I was convinced to go to one. Unfortunately, technical difficulties abounded. I waited in line, bought a drink and asked for the Wi-Fi password. I spent a few minutes trying to log in to various access points with no success – it turned out that my (brand new) machine could not see the coffee shop’s router.

Luckily, all was not lost. I fired up “Mobile Hotspot” on my LTE phone and, in less than a minute, connected my laptop to the internet using the phone’s software-based “Soft AP.”  The only downside? My phone only lets me run “Mobile Hotspot” on Channel 6 in the noisy 2.4 GHz band – I’m sure that’s to prevent some crazy harmonic of the LTE phone transmitter from interacting with the Wi-Fi chip in the phone, but it was certainly inconvenient where I was sitting because there were at least a half-dozen access points set to Channel 6. In fact, I’m pretty sure Channel 6 is the most commonly-used Wi-Fi channel in the United States. So my data rates were in the range of 10 Megabits per second – probably better than I would have had if I had been able to connect to the coffee shop Wi-Fi, but not that great.

You probably know where I’m going: this is one of those times I wish I had 5G WiFi to go with my 4G LTE phone. When I use the internet directly on my phone, I’ve been able to get upwards of 25 Mbps in some places using first-generation LTE. If I had 5G WiFi, I’d have a lot more bandwidth to work with and fewer interferers, so I could get my full LTE data rate on my PC. And future LTE networks will likely offer significantly higher data rates, way more than I got at home with DSL and more than I can get with a cable modem. (I’ll never be able to get fiber to my house, so those are my choices.) In fact, with LTE routers becoming more common, they might become an alternative to cable modems – they take a matter of minutes to set up rather than having to wait for days or weeks for someone to come to your house to install the system!

Times I Wished I had 5G WiFi: Part II

As I mentioned in my last post, despite being immersed in technology all day long, I’m actually a bit of a Luddite. Case in point: I needed to transfer 3 GB of data between two of the (seven) computers in my house.

For data transfers like this, I could use a USB flash drive, but I’m always lending them out or losing them, so I couldn’t find any. So I moved on to the next option: an external USB hard drive that I use to backup my data.  It’s fairly slow, so it might have taken half an hour to copy from the first PC to it, and then another half hour to copy to the second machine from the drive. That’s the best case. The much worse case is what actually happened: the source machine is old and some of its USB ports don’t work. When I plugged the drive in, the PC couldn’t recognize the hard drive partition where I could store the data.

So then I had a brilliant idea: transfer over Wi-Fi. All it took to get started was me figuring out how to share a folder on the destination machine. The new machine supports peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, but the old one doesn’t seem to, so the data transfer had to go through my 802.11g router (I told you I was a Luddite.) After just four hours, the transfer was complete, for an average data rate of…less than 3 Mbps.

That’s just sad. My PCs were both close to the router, so that wouldn’t have slowed them down. But with two machines not optimized for data transfer and five other devices (plus the microwave oven) competing for the same channel on my router, the results were awful.

Here’s where I wish I had 5G WiFi. Not only would the data transfer have been faster – both because it would be peer-to-peer and a higher data rate – but it would have been more obvious how to do it. What do I mean? You often can’t tell what the value of a particular technology is before it’s launched – ten years ago, I didn’t even see the point of Wi-Fi. I mean, who needs Wi-Fi when you can just pull hundreds of feet of cable through your walls and ceiling and connect your desktop into an ethernet wall socket? So once you have 5G WiFi-enabled machines, your operating system will support wireless data transfer in a much more obvious way than it does today. And I think that’s true of many 5G WiFi features – we can’t imagine them yet, but once the technology is available, people will figure out all kinds of new and interesting things to do with it.

Times I Wished I had 5G WiFi: Part I

This might seem implausible, but I think I’m a Luddite technologist – I have six computers, three personal audio players, two tablets, a supposedly wireless printer and an HDTV with more inputs than I could ever use…And yet I am an incredibly slow adopter of technology. Here’s a great example – a few years ago, I bought my mom a Slingplayer so that she could watch her TV when she was traveling. I didn’t have cable TV myself, but I put together a system she could use when she was visiting:

In case that’s not clear, my PC connects to the Slingplayer and streams video to my TV using a VGA-to-composite converter (which is sadly SD on my HDTV.) For all of the inputs on my HDTV, I didn’t have any that had the same sync rates as the PC I was using to generate video, and the PC was so old that I couldn’t successfully add an HDMI card to it. Of course, the system now needed a remote control, a role that was ably-filled by a wireless keyboard and mouse. As you may well imagine, everyone other than me found this system incredibly confusing and I basically had to come into the living room anytime anyone wanted to change the channel.  I finally gave in and got cable last year, and I now have a fairly standard setup with a set-top box connected to my TV, but no capability to stream video from my PC to the TV.

Here’s where I wish I had 5G WiFi. With 802.11ac expected to ship in the next generation of HDTVs, wireless routers and smartphones, my TV will have an interface that will allow me to access content from the outside world, whether my router is connected to the internet via a cable modem, fiber optic cable or even 4G LTE. (This nicely eliminates the PC from my setup.) And with seamless integration of 5G WiFi into all of these devices, my smartphone will also serve as a remote control – an obvious application, but not one that’s done poorly at the moment – or as a game controller. (Now my wireless keyboard and mouse are eliminated.)

Those are the simple and obvious applications – 5G WiFi eliminates the most-complicated parts of my Rube Goldberg A/V setup. But it also enables Wi-Fi Display from my smartphone – I can stream a movie or a video game from my phone directly to my TV. 5G WiFi has three times the throughput of my 802.11n wireless router, so I can stream high-quality video and do something else simultaneously with my phone – use the internet, stream audio, you name it.

As I mentioned in my last piece, I like to try to come up with technology that my mom would find useful. Not only would my mom find the 5G WiFi TV, smartphone remote and 5G WiFi Display really cool, she’d be really excited that it got rid of all of the clutter (keyboard, mouse, extra computer) that I had in my living room.

The Future of 5G WiFi and Smartphones

Like Vijay mentioned in his inaugural post, I also think about technology a lot from the perspective of what my mom would find useful and interesting. When I was an IC designer, the work I did was so microscopic and so far from the end product that it was difficult to explain it to someone who wasn’t in the same field as me. Most people who asked me what I did had their eyes glaze over almost as soon as I started to answer, but now that I’m focused on technology strategy, I can see their eyes light up instead.

So here’s what I told my mom the last time we talked about what I do at work: two years ago, you would call me up to ask me to look something up on the internet for you because you didn’t have a smart phone. Today, you wonder how you survived so many years with your old flip phone. Two years from now, your phone will do so many new things that you’ll wonder how you survived with your first smart phone for so long.

Here are all the things you want your phone to do today (and more) that it will do very soon:

• You’ll have 5G WiFi, which will give you 300+ Mbps throughput for all kinds of applications ranging from streaming TV to fast wireless data transfer to and from your computer
• With 4G LTE cellular data networks, you’ll get significantly higher internet throughput with your phone than you get with your home cable modem today
• With 5G WiFi and Wi-Fi Direct and you’ll be able to use LTE to connect your laptop directly to the internet through your phone when you’re at a hotel or a friend’s house
• Your GPS will be much better at finding your location, especially when you’re indoors
• You’ll have an FM radio that’s so good you can even use it at the gym where all the concrete blocks cellular signals
• You’ll have a mobile credit card payment system integrated into your phone and you’ll be able to pay for things just by tapping your phone on a point of sale terminal in the checkout line in a store
• You won’t have to remember to plug your phone in when you get home – its battery life will be so much better that it won’t die if you go a day without charging!
• And you’ll have a whole bunch of other devices around the house that will play well with your phone. The possibilities are endless: you’ll be able to download and stream a movie to your TV, print wirelessly, turn the house lights on and off remotely, water the garden, check and set the thermostat when you’re not home, get an email when the washing machine and the dryer are done, and when you’re at the supermarket, you’ll even be able to use your fridge’s camera to look inside and see if you’re out of milk!

Needless to say, my mom was impressed and she can’t wait to have a phone that does all of these things. In the coming weeks, I’ll discuss some of the ways that 5G WiFi combines with many of the other wireless technologies coming to the marketplace to enable features I wouldn’t have imagined back when I was texting on my flip phone.