"G" forces shake comms industry as it evolves toward the cloud

It has been half a century since Martin Cooper stood on 6th Avenue in Manhattan shouting into something that looked like a giant prosthetic foot.

Since then, his invention has changed the world, though not always for the better. Misunderstandings, compounded by misleading marketing claims, have been something of a trademark of the mobile industry over the course of its 50-year history. The ensuing miasma has led up to the biggest mobile industry misunderstanding of all when it comes to the latest 5G mobile standard, and its role in cloud infrastructure — a misreading that is proving hugely expensive for some of the world’s largest telcos.

How did we get to this point? To find out, let’s take a quick tour of the history of the mobile industry until now.

1G – Genesis! 

Martin Cooper may have had the first just-about-mobile phone, but his device didn’t use a cellular network.

The first mobile cell phones turned up six years later, when NTT deployed the very first 1G network in Tokyo.

Japan’s history making 1G network was restricted to use with automobiles, prompting confusion amongst Japanese consumers who thought that a “car phone” was literally a car that was also ... a phone?

Two years after Tokyo got its car phones, Norway and Sweden introduced 1G networks and used them to call each other from the car to laugh about how terrible the U.S. was at mobile technology.

Denmark and Finland launched their mobile networks the following year, before 1G spread to Saudi Arabia and Russia. The standard took off in quick succession in the mighty Baltic nations of Estonia and Lithuania before sweeping through Thailand, South Korea, Singapore and the U.A.E., among several other places. [Ed. Note: Still no U.S.!]

The U.S. didn’t get its own commercial cellular network until the end of 1983! That was also the year that Motorola introduced the first commercially available hand-held mobile phone, invented by our old friend, Martin Cooper [Ed. Note: U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!].

In 1982, the GSM (Groupe Speciale Mobile) was created, an organization that subsequently become the standards authority/autocracy defining all later “G” standards.

[Ed. Note: It would be another 16 years before the GSM added an A to its name to signify that it had found its true calling: manufacturing massive piles of “not-for-profit” and “We’re barely breaking even!” money at its Barcelona money-printing-factory-cum-tradeshow.]

2G gets going

It was almost a decade later before Finland launched the world’s first 2G network in 1991.

The following year data service was added to the 2G mobile standard, via the Short Message Service (SMS), presaging the advent of texting, emojis and, at some point in the not-too-distant-future, the end of global civilization as we know it.  

The first SMS was sent by engineer Neil Papworth on December 3, 1992. The message read "Merry Christmas" which was both totally uncool and also considered to be super weird by the recipient, as they’d only just celebrated Thanksgiving.   

Well, 2G swept through the world like a giant sweepy thing — except for the U.S., which was still sulking from having been late for the whole 1G revolution, and so it decided to use its own completely different standards (CDMA).

3G – The golden age 

3G arrived in 2003. All in all, a lot happened during the exciting reigns of both 2G and 3G. This was the Ma Belle Epoque of mobile technology, if you will, when it transformed the world without making it a significantly worse place to live in. It included Nokia’s introduction of its 3210 handset in 1999, and the 1100 in 2003 — the bestest-selling handset, ever.

Nokia’s mobile phones were so excellent, so incredibly mobile-phone-like, that they almost destroyed the company that sold them. For Nokia, it turned out that ultimate reliability made for a terrible business model. The problem was that once you bought a Nokia phone you had absolutely no reason to get rid of it. It was effectively a mobile technology tattoo; something to be eventually pried from your cold dead hands as the funeral home staff popped you into the incinerator.

Among other attributes, Nokia’s phones were incredibly tough.

How tough? In 2003 Britain’s Metropolitan Police considered using the casing material from the 1100 to up-armor the Prime Minister’s jag, before remembering that it contained Tony Blair at the time (it unlocked the doors and drove into Croydon instead).

The iPhone cometh shortly followed by … social media

Enter: The Apple iPhone, in 2007.

Sure, the iPhone did lots of clever things that mobile phones hadn’t done before that but, honestly, given Moore’s Law (RIP Gordon Moore), it was only a matter of time before lots of phone-makers did the same thing (i.e. Nokia, Samsung and Huawei).

However, the arrival of the iPhone coincided with a bunch of entitled passive-aggressive accountants (AKA “venture capitalists”) in Silicon Valley deciding that the world needed scalable computer systems that enabled people to be even more spiteful and unpleasant to each other than they had been before, but ubiquitously, on a truly global basis, and with the benefit of complete anonymity.

And so was born the era of social media. With some notable exceptions, for a while social media stayed relatively under control. That would change with the arrival of ...

4G!

Until 4G rolled up in 2009, users had been restricted to a paltry 3 Mbps (Pffft!) on their mobile networks which acted like a cement block and slowed down access to all the wonders afforded by social media.

4G introduced packets (TCP/IP) to the digital cellular realm and 4G LTE was the first all-IP "G" standard that ultimately brought data to the fore. Adding data to the mix allowed applications to become predominant in the smartphone world, however 4G phones fell back to 3G for voice calls for the longest time.

4G, with its top speed of 150 Mbps took the brakes off. The interpolation of iPhone with social media and fire-hose data rates exerted an almost irresistible force on vast swathes of the planet, as a new wave of social media networks — Tencent, TikTok, Tumblr, etc. — rose like a flock of cursed phoenixes.

The mobile operators loved 4G because its increased data rates, combined with surging demand for those speeds from consumers, increased ARPU and keeping the shareholders happy and the executive bonuses coming. 

5G fail 

Given their reputation for sticking with what works, and not investing in R&D to develop exciting new ideas, it wasn’t all that surprising that when 5G appeared on the horizon, mobile operators thought it would allow them to pull the same trick again. More speed, they thought, would drive more spending by consumers, resulting in financial nirvana.

Growth, they thought, was assured. 

The expectation was grounded in familiarity. They understood how consumers used mobile networks back to front. Snake, the iconic game, might have gone the way of the 3210, but throughout the history of the G standards a surprisingly large number of consumer applications have maintained a grip on their popularity. (Consider that even after four decades, mobile networks are still the most popular way for drug dealers to sell their cocaine to financial traders who wish to purchase that cocaine).  

Except, this time, the formula didn’t work. [Ed. Note: Oh snap!] 

Consumers, it turned out, didn’t crave the 5G wave in the same way that they had 4G.

Unlike its antecedent, 5G didn’t feel like a big change, because it didn’t enable them to participate full bore in a brand-new paradigm of social media addiction. Sure, it was faster, but most consumers didn’t really notice that much of a difference. They weren’t giddy about 5G and that lack of excitement translated into an unwillingness to pay more for it. Oops.

Mobile operators were unhappy. Some even started to wonder if 5G wasn’t just a cunning plot co-created by the GSMA and equipment vendors to get them to throw out their perfectly good 4G infrastructure and replace it with the pricey new 5G equipment — a giant cheesy con, in other words, rather like the cost of booth space at the GSMA show in Barcelona. 

Others pondered whether they could get away with just – hmmm, I don’t know – using some duct tape to attach the new 5G last mile to an old 4G LTE core?

The truth was that like a student who doesn’t properly read the exam question or a Roomba owner who doesn’t open the owner’s manual, the mobile carriers had made A. Very. Big. Mistake.  

5G Future 

It turns out that buried within the 100,000+ patents that comprise the 5G standard, there are vast swathes of capabilities — like indoor transmission and network slicing — designed to drive revenues not from consumers, but from enterprise businesses, as well as within vertical industries like transportation, energy and manufacturing.

Plus, 5G is cloud-native, which means that all those new money-making apps can run across and within the new cloud ecosystem (public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud) which has taken over the world.

So, the world suddenly has a high-speed mobile network fit for cloud-based business-class mission-critical applications. And of course, 5G is an edge network — the part of the network that cloud operators are rubbish at.

In other words, we now have all the ingredients we need to potentially build a profitable peaceable kingdom of what had once been entirely incompatible service operator business models (mobile telco, and public cloud).

It’s all terribly exciting, and definitely justifies me putting on my “Founder-of-a-Website” hat again.  

P.S. If you’re wondering what 6G will bring, here’s a sneak peek. 👉