Original Broadcast: Thursday, November, 11, 2004;
11 am-noon PT/2-3 pm ET
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The following summary is from the November 11, 2004, Net Seminar, the second in EE Times Cult of the Consumer Series entitled Wireless Standards: Opportunity or Obstacle brought to you by EE Times Freescale Semiconductor and CMP Media. Patrick Mannion, Section Editor, Corporate and DSP Technology for EE Times is the Moderator.
Discussing today's topic will be Ken Hansen, Technical Fellow and Director of Advanced Technology, Wireless and Mobile Systems Group of Freescale Semiconductor Inc.; Ben Manny, Director, Radio Communications Lab, Corporate Technology Group, Intel Corp., Andy Rappaport, Partner, August Capital and Sean Wargo, Director of Industry Analysis, Consumer Electronics Association. As we begin our presentation we will first hear from Sean Wargo, of the Consumer Electronics Association.
Sean: I will share a couple of slides about some of the research we have done on wireless technologies. In particular, CEA does a bunch of work on Internet wireless standards and other sorts of things. We also conduct consumer research to find out about consumer's uptake of technology and the problems they may be experiencing along the way. So the first slide that you are going to look at today is for satisfaction with aspects of wireless home networking. We are particularly interested in where are the pain points for the customer. As you can see most of the attributes of a wireless home network received fairly high marks in terms of satisfaction from the customer, ease of use is over 60% - 65% and many of the items here coming in above 50%, at the bottom end of this chart it is security coming in around 48%.
The next slide will really show you as well that in addition to being dissatisfied with the security or the perceived security, of their home network. We are also finding out there isn't widespread usage of any security methods so 45% of the people that we surveyed said there were using a password, 28% 128 bit encryption, but a fairly high percentage, 26% saying that it was protected, they were not sure how, or if you look towards the bottom, a combined 23% saying it's either protected from by some other method or none of the above. So we are clearly seeing a lack of wide spread usage of security even though consumers are not satisfied with that attribute.
So when we look also at why are people not owning some other things kind of jump to the top here in terms of their lack of ownership of the wireless network. Cost of course typically comes near the top, 82% of those surveyed saying that they do not have a wireless home network because of the cost. However quickly below that you see some other areas that we talk a lot about here at CEA which is really pointing towards a need for more education on the part of the consumer about what wireless networks can do, what they are, how they work, etc. so, 64% saying they don't know enough about wireless networking, 55% saying there are no compelling benefits, which really to me suggests that it is not sure what it is and what it can do for them.
One of the other areas that we looked at in this survey that we completed was the usage of hot spots, clearly wireless for the home is only one aspect of this emerging technology. Here again we see a similar type of pattern, which is really a need for education through the options, through the choices, etc. So, the reasons for not owning or not using a hot spot, was cost of course being number one, but in the number two and three spot, we had no compelling benefits, and don't know enough about it. So here again, its education, its showing them, talking about the standards, telling them what they do, clearly defining what the usages are for the consumer.
Moderator: Ken Hansen of Freescale, about the main topic is wireless security. How are we addressing that topic? We can't talk of wireless in any sense at all until we address the security issues.
Ken: Well, the point being made is that most people don't know whether they do have security or not and how to enable the security. Certainly what we would like to do is make security something that comes with the device that the user does not even need to know that its there or how to enable, it just is there, and if you move out of a home into taking a phone and using it in a variety of ways for payments and things like that, security will be a fundamental, built in attribute of the other device to make it secure so that you can prevent theft and things like that.
Andy: I think that security has been overrated and in fact as a factor that has been either driving or impeding the adoption of wireless networks. I think security is the function or a requirement of the application. It is not necessarily a requirement of the infrastructure. You know in the early days of the wireless LAN business, we kept hearing about how no one was going to adopt wireless LANs because the security problem had not been addressed, but yet what we found was that consumers who were not particularly security conscious because of the nature of their traffic, or their lack of need to protect public access to their last mile connection or whatever it is, adopted wireless simply because of the utility or the mobility associated with being wireless, and so I think that generalizing about security is dangerous because it takes security and the need for security and the nature of security out of the context of the application. I think we need to think about this for various kinds of applications, enterprise, wirelessness, media, transportability that kind of thing. What really is the role of security, what kind of security is really required, and how at the application level do we need to manage the security complements as well as the inter-relationship between security and users.
Ben: My comments are very similar to what you just heard. I think you really need to understand what consumer is worried about keeping secure. I think fundamentally the data that they have would be the biggest concern and the correspondence that they would be conducting over wireless link. There are some consumers that might be just concerned about someone coming in and using their wireless link in an unauthorized manner, although that might not be causing any harm or any compromise to their data security, if they had other provisions in place, firewalls and such. So going along with what Andy just said, I think you do need to focus on the particular need for security, how tight do you want to make the security, and you can do a lot of things in the link but not necessarily at the radio level to ensure the right level of security. If you burden the radio with too much security that impacts performance, and so I think you need to have a flexible architecture that allows the level of security required for the application. The other thing that I think is important here is to help especially the consumer with what level of security he does need. He might not be actually aware that there are some different levels needed and so I think there may be some more work that needs to be done in that space.
Moderator: Across the board is why security is it addressable across all the wireless technologies and is it an equal issue with them all, Ultra wide band, Wi-Max, wireless LAN and 3G?
Ken: Well, I think what you have just heard that it is application dependent, so it depends on the application being implemented with the particular technology. So if you look at UWB in a consumer electronics cable replacement situation, no you really don't need security there, but if you are going to download a media file or a movie or something from a server some place, then you will need certain security there to make sure that the provide person is charged for the download and the right person gets the bill for the services that they are providing. So it is not technology dependent, as it is a truly application dependent and inside I think of each of these technologies, you will find applications where you will want increased levels of security to where you need virtual no security.
Moderator: It seems like from what Sean is saying that I guess lack of knowledge of hot spots and how to use them and security are two issues. Are there any other issues that come to mind that consumers want from their wireless devices?
Andy: There are many things that come to mind, and one reason why I believe that investment in wireless, new wireless technologies is going to be fruitful for some time as it for the most part, wireless technologies don't solve consumer needs. We see increased wirelessness and increased utility associated with wirelessness, but we still see links that don't have sufficient bandwidth, links that don't have sufficient range and robustness, we still see the inabilities to apply certain applications wirelessly, we are not moving video wirelessly yet, we don't have a kind of regional transportability yet in any kind of cohesive way, we have indoor mobility or transportability with respective data. We don't have with respect to data what we have had for years now with respect to voice.
So I think that you know there, we can look at specific things with respect to the attributes of the links that we have in place. You know do we have appropriate security, are we finding and able to use hot spots but I think that misses the larger point which is that we have not yet figured out how to apply wirelessness to a much broader class of applications in a much wider range of places and I think that's where the opportunity lies.
Ben: Yeah, I would just build on what Andy said there. It needs to be more pervasive, to fully change lifestyles and how people use the technology. You got to look at the cell phones, it got to a certain point where there is enough coverage that people would buy cell phones and I think the same thing is applying here for data. In order to be completely dependent on a wireless link, you have to have a very good coverage and persistent coverage, and in some cases, you want to be able to do handoff between networks and I guess to a certain level of connectivity if you will, then people will start to change their lifestyles and use this technology more. We are kind of in this transition phase from wire to wireless in terms of how you connect your laptops, and I go to airports all the time and it is interesting more and more now and I am able to connect wirelessly but then you have the issue is do I have an account on that service provider and that becomes another problem that needs to be worked through so that you don't have to sign up for five or ten different services to have that kind of consistency and those problems are being worked. So there is combination of the technology being more deployed, business models that enable that to be deployed on a proper way, and then there is the accounting that needs to happen in a more universal way to make it lot easier to have that access.
Moderator: Sean from your point of view aside from the security and hot spot knowledge, do end users want to really know more about wireless standards or do they even care.
Sean: I think they do, but I think what it comes down to the further consumer is really making the choice easy. So the more acronyms they have to wade through I think the more they get glazed over and perhaps avoid purchase. So certainly the security is part of it too, unfortunately for all of us in the wireless industry, it has been much hyped in the media and so now it's top of mind as a concern for the consumer. So whenever you are talking of wireless link, you are automatically making the customer ask the question "Am I safe at doing so?" Even if we know from the technology side and the application side that the security may not need to be as robust for that application, they want to be sure that they are not exposing themselves to risk of an attack or lost information or whatever. But clearly the demand is there, we are seeing it across a lot of product categories, including in the home where consumers are really wanting an untethered link to their information. That really cuts across a lot of the research we do, particularly when you are looking at things like distributed audio and video. So I think the demand is clearly there. I think we just have some more sales to do to them and education and some product planning to really make these easy to adopt, easy to understand, easy to integrate.
Moderator: We know it is pretty hard to get one device that will communicate to all wireless networks but is it possible to have one device that will communicate across multiple networks at one time? And how will we get ubiquitous wireless coverage from a single device?
Ken: For ubiquitous wireless coverage, technically will never have it if you consider remote portions of the world, but practically we are close to having it today in many ways. Sure we need more local area networks built out than what we have, and we need the ability to move between one mode to the other mode better than we have today. We need standards that will address that with it say a common signaling protocol that will allow us to shift from one mode to the other mode, but when you look at just plain old voice with what is happening with wireless LAN and there are phones coming out now today they have GSM with wireless LAN operating in VoIP that allow you to move from the outside to deep inside a building and maintain your phone call. That technology is in its early phases. It will advance and there will be more local area networks rolled out to where you will be able to cover most of every place that you would go with a phone call. There will be the other areas that will develop a little bit slower which are the higher rate services like video which is probably the next killer app beyond voice.
If you look at kind of the history of the US, it used to be everyone would sit around in their home listening to the radio until TV came along and that moved people from voice communications against the visual communications. Similar thing is going to happen I think in the phone space where video will come to the phone and that requires higher data rate services than we basically have today in order for that to be come ubiquitous, but when it comes to voice we are pretty close to having that kind of capability today. There are short falls you can't even hold the phone call the entire length of your drive in many cases, that could be covered by networks as well getting together, to cover where one network covers the particular geography better than the other one does to hand over, if there was simply a way of providing a common signaling layer between the networks and the rest of the value chain was put in place, so the right person got the money for the service provided.
Andy: So I have what I think is a slightly different point of view and I don't think that it is necessarily desirable that we think in terms of a single device accessing any network, and there are lots of reasons for that I think the functionality of any single device will be scoped to some set of things that is appropriate to the nature of that device, and the kind of people who carry it around and I think that certain networks need to be optimized or at least developed in the context of applications and services that may not be appropriate to every kind of device. So I think that even though we are going to find devices that are increasingly multi mode, multi network, for example I'm a big believer that pretty soon we will all carry cell phones that are also
Wi-Fi enabled, not necessarily because we are going to be using Wi-Fi delivery data services on those phones we might, but because Wi-Fis are more cost effective way to achieve in building penetration than 3G or any other wider area type of approach. So those kinds of things will happen, but I do believe that the emergence of new kinds of networks and networks that are optimized towards emerging kinds of application services and devices will happen faster than the existing devices will start to adopt increasing numbers of network access capabilities.
Ben: Most of the interest that we have with wireless or with portable devices, and so of course there is fixed devices that have wireless capability, for example in a home where you might want to avoid having to install a cable, but the big role I believe is in the mobile devices and these devices, I believe there is fundamentally two types of links that need to be maintained and possibly at the same time; one is what I call a cluster connect, a kind of a short range wireless PAN connect and those may with Bluetooth will know that is an example of that kind of connection. Or even if you have a cell phone, you might want a little ear piece to avoid having use you hand to hold your cell phone up, so that there is a cluster connect capping and at the same time that cell phone is connected to a network so you have this what I would call a community connection in addition to the cluster connection.
You look at a laptop for example, if its in an office setting, the community that is connected to is probably your local intranet inside the company, but then that community is also bridged to the outside broader community. So usually you will need just that one link. I cannot imagine a laptop for example, needing to have both a wireless LAN connection, if it is available to a hot spot, at the same time at that location having a wide area connection. It is already connected to the community. We don't right now have I think enough options on the cluster connect. There is some emerging need for really high data rate connections on the cluster connect, and there are some new technologies around the corner, ultra wide band being one of the them, that could provide the data rates to enable this high speed file transfers that are becoming more and more important, as people have these devices that require and have a large storage capacity when you want to fill them up quickly.
Moderator: What's your take on Ultra wide band?
Ben: Well I think that is a very good technology for short range, high data rate connections and it is an interesting experiment in a number of ways. We haven't talked about regulatory space. I think that is a key factor in how all this plays out, but the SEC was very innovative a couple of years back when they finally passed their rules that allow sharing with really low data rate, low power devices, spectrum that other services are using and of course there is a lot of debate but we've played with the technology enough to know that for the ranges that are of interest here which is now three feet to six feet, that with radios that only go that far, you are not going to cause much interference with other devices, and even if you are with these mobile devices, you can move away, just like cell phones today get into fading mode or something like that you move physically three feet or so and you are out of that mode. So I believe that once you start to see these devices deployed, it will be a technology that will take off very quickly because of the pent demand to have a high speed wireless short range link, and the wide version of the USB2 was a factor of more than 10X the USB1 data rate and its really taken off for applications like hard drive backup and you can do that with you know being in a wireless manner be even more convenient.
Moderator: On the issue of international regulations, it seems that Europe is getting less and less enthusiastic for want of better word about ultra wide band. What is your take on the international regulatory?
Ben: Clearly the people who are very vocal about their opinions, are people who have a lot at stake here, the existing spectrum holders. It was very interesting that there is not an official release by the European/UK OfComm rule making, but they commissioned a report done by a consulting agency. It was an interesting report, to analyze whether the existence of UWB will be a net positive or net negative financial gain, and they concluded that UWB would be actually a very significant net positive gain as a technology, so that kind of reassures us that there is a good need for this service and it can coexist with existing services without causing them financial impact.
Andy: So first of all on the regulatory question, I remember when 80211a was not going to ever be legal in Europe and hyper LAN was going to be the technology because of interference issues and the five gigahertz band and of course 80211a is now quite popular and there were some few accommodations that needed to be made, but ultimately the power of the market place overwhelmed the power of lets say, entrenched interests or regulators. I'm a big believer that that always happens. With UWB in general, my own view about UWB is that we don't yet know the applications to which UWB will be applied and you know it's possible that UWB will be applied in some of the matters that we just heard but is possible that it won't.
I don't really spend a lot of time wondering or worrying about that because my own view of UWB and the reason why I have been interested in the technology and I have recently invested in the technology, is that it represents further liberalization spectrum, and I think that in general if we think about what's happening technologically with wireless, we have reached a point where on the Moore's Law curve where the processing power that we can bring to bear on any particular link trumps the interference characteristics of using an unlicensed link, and what we are going to find over time is that increasingly the value of experimentation in unlicensed spectrum will turn out to be much greater than the value of protection and interference predictability in licensed spectrum, and the ability to run 1000s of experiments or tens or thousands of experiments to determine what ultimately will be useful, is much greater than the ability of a few spectrum owners to build a particular infrastructure with a particular idea that may or may not turn out to be technically or economically particularly interesting.
So what UWB represents, at least in the United States, is the largest liberalization of spectrum ever, we're attracted to the fact that it can potentially carry a very high band signals, just because of the amount of contiguous spectrum that has been liberalized, albeit at a low power levels, but I think this really is now a set of experiments to determine when one has that kind of spectrum, what can one do with that, and what can one do with it, especially when one can predict at least to a certain degree, the amount of additional processing gain we will be able to bring to bear as a result of Moore's Law. So I'm certainly willing and I put my money where my mouth is to bet on the ultimate emergence of UWB type radios as very important going forward but I am not willing to put a stake in the ground yet and say we know exactly what the applications are going to be.
Moderator: Is your point that the use of unlicensed bands is more interesting than licensed bands and that is the way it should go?
Andy: Absolutely without question. In fact I think we are going to find out over something that may happen over a 50 year period, but we are going to find the collapse of economic value associated with licensed spectrum and the dramatic increase of the shifting of that value into applications done using unlicensed spectrum. So I just used the example by the way of cell phones that will achieve their in building coverage through Wi-Fi, which will continue to use unlicensed spectrum and what we will see as a result of that as a shift,at least in proportion, if not in actual talk minutes, of cellular telephony away from licensed spectrum and to unlicensed spectrum, and I think we will see that type of shift occur with respect to every kind of traffic that is now carried through every piece of spectrum.
Moderator: So should the cell phone operators look out?
Andy: I think that cell phone operators absolutely should look out. I think that the asset that they have was their spectrum. I think the asset that they have now is their customer base and their network infrastructure. I think that cell phone providers who don't address the increasing importance of unlicensed spectrum and different kinds of networks built on that spectrum do so at their peril.
Moderator: Your take on Ultra wide band, Ken?
Ken: Freescale for sure is a big believer in UWB. We believe in the short range applications similar to what Ben was mentioning; we will be the first ones to deploy that in consumer electronics devices, to eliminate the cable. I mean who wants to run cable from their display down to their media player or media center, or even between their stereo equipment? It will quickly evolve into that kind of equipment, and then find its way into other devices like phones and so forth, file transfers for portable hard disk drive, data transfers, things like that. There is no doubt that is going to be a big technology that is just starting to develop and you should see some products next year coming via Freescale that's out there in the hands of some important customers today.
Just to jump on the licensed and unlicensed stuff a little bit, the problem with unlicensed spectrum is interference, and interference is really important when it comes to voice communications or streaming video communications. Voice being latency dependent and packet delivery dependent, if you have ever listened to voice being played over IP, there is some garbling every once in a while because the packets simply don't get delivered in time. You can't allow that time slippage at all, in case of voice or in the case of streaming video. Streaming video can tolerate the initial latency problem, but the packet delivery becomes very important. So I think that while I have mentioned there is phones now coming out with wireless LAN and utilizing voice over IP, if there is one potential problem for that technology, it is the fact that soon an unlicensed band where it is subject to some interference and its vulnerable to other technologies like potentially Wi-Max or something like that that will be in a licensed band where the interference is controlled coming on and displacing it. Wireless LAN will clearly have a lot of momentum behind it, well before Wi-Max ever shows up which is the counter argument, and as Andy is saying, there will be continued improvements in signal processing, but if you look at today's technology, there are problems still need to be solved before that communication level is what you are used to with a regular phone.
Andy: I think that with all due respect, I think voice will be one of the easiest applications to carry an unlicensed band, and the reason for that is that I think at a technical level what we just heard is absolutely true however, consumers are actually conditioned to pretty lousy wireless voice performance, I mean we all have wireless cordless phones that operate in unlicensed spectrum and they work okay sometimes and not okay other times and they are subject to interference and range restrictions, but the convenience of them overwhelms the voice quality issues. The second thing is, that none of our cell phones work particularly well, I mean, you know that the irony here is that when we are well within range, and we are on a well performing network, and we are using a well performed device, we are going to achieve extremely high voice quality on our cell phones, but in practice when we are driving around and we are inside buildings and we are on real networks at rush hour and those kinds of things, we get pretty lousy of voice quality, but we put up with it and we put up with it because of the convenience of portability is fine. And so I think what we are going to find is that there are going to be applications for wireless voice over unlicensed spectrum where convenience, low power, reach, all of those kinds of things trump the voice quality question and there are a lot of things happening with noise resilient Code X and frequency multichannel kinds of schemes and bursting kinds of schemes and things like that that will use the increasing amount of bandwidth that is available in unlicensed wireless connections to approximate a reasonably good narrow band voice connection.
Ben: Well I don't directly disagree with what Andy is saying, I believe that if there is a cell phone service today, that guaranteed wire line quality, people would pay more for it. I think this question of unlicensed and licensed, has lot of parallels to the way the highway system has built out over time. If you look at the early highways most of them are toll roads because it took money to build the highways, and communities got together and they have a lot of public roads and you did not have to pay a fee then to drive on these roads, and you know how the highway system has evolved since then, and what we are seeing now are communities and enterprising groups that are actually building highways again, and charging people because of the jam that you have only on the unlicensed highways. So people are willing to pay extra tolls to have less interference driving to work, and I think you will see the same thing about the spectrum, and I completely agree with Andy though that the availability of unlicensed spectrum is a huge motivator for innovation, and if you don't have that motivation, you just don't have advanced technology as fast as we are seeing the things like Wi-Fi. But I think there is going to continue to be a need for both types of spectrum, dependent upon the service quality that consumers are going to want to have, and they might even want to have the option to switch between service qualities. I want this call to be a wire line quality call, and am willing to pay a surcharge for it, and they then use spectrum or toll road in the car analogy, to get from point A to point B, because they have to have a really solid reliable connection.
Sean any input here?
Sean: It is an interesting concept, and I have to echo somewhat the last speaker was talking about which is that it really does come down to a pricing issue for the customers. We'ree certainly were well aware of what is going on with audio being traded online these days and the movement to a paid for service, and certainly I think there is a lot of analogies there too where. yes there are customers out there who are much more willing to pay in order to have a guarantee of a certain quality, a certain content, a certain breadth of content, etc. There are also the very value conscious customers out there. So it really does argue for a tier of servicing, whether they're either within plan or across plans. So I think that makes a lot of sense over time. So we will start to see more of those tiers and customers perhaps making the choice, yes I want this call to be higher quality, or you know what it does not matter to me as much I am more on the go, I am more of a data user and so more of a Wi-Fi type of connection would make sense for that customer. So the tiering makes lot of sense to me.
Thank you for attending today's Net seminar, "Wireless Standards: Opportunities or Obstacles," brought to you by EE Times, Freescale Semiconductor, and CMP Media. This net seminar is copyright 2004 by CMP Media. The presentation materials are owned by or copyright if that is the case by EE Times and Freescale Semiconductor who are solely responsible for its content and the individual speakers are solely responsible for their content and their opinions. On behalf of our guests, Ken Hansen of Freescale Semiconductor, Ben Manny of Intel Corp., Andy Rappaport of August Capital, and Sean Wargo, Director of Industry Analysis and Consumer Electronics Association and our Stanford based production team. I'm Patrick Mannion of EE Times. Thanks for your time and have a great day.
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Moderated by:
Patrick Mannion
Section Editor, Wireless/DSP technology,
EE Times
Panelist:
Ken Hansen
Senior Technical Fellow and Director of Advanced Technology,
Wireless and Mobile Systems Group, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.
Panelist:
Ben Manny
Director Radio Communications Lab, Corporate Technology Group, Intel Corporation
Panelist:
Andy Rappaport
Partner, August Capital
Panelist:
Sean Wargo
Director of Industry Analysis, Consumer Electronics Association
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