Tech Brew Ride Home - What IS 5G Anyway, With Ericsson's Peter Linder

Episode Date: February 9, 2019

I’ve told you plenty that this year, one of the big narratives, one of THE big stories... will be 5G. But what exactly IS 5G? Well, I spoke to Peter Linder, the head of 5G marketing, and evangelist at Ericsson. Here are all the answers to your questions, to prepare us for Mobile World Congress, which is coming later this month, and where all of this 5G stuff might finally begin to happen. For real. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to a bonus weekend episode of the tech meme ride home. I'm Brian McCullough. I've told you plenty of times that this year, one of the big narratives, one of the big stories will be 5G. But what exactly is 5G? Why do so many people think it's going to be so important? And when will it actually enter our lives? Well, I spoke to Peter Linder, the head of 5G marketing and evangelism at Erickson. Here are all of the answers. to your questions about 5G to prepare us for the Mobile World Congress, which is coming up later this month and where all of this 5G stuff

is probably finally going to begin to happen. But first, okay, Erickson's Peter Linder tells us everything you wanted to know about 5G, but we're afraid to ask. So I've been talking last couple months about how one of the biggest stories this year for tech will be 5G finally coming into our lives. And we've been talking about how the rollout will probably begin in earnest at Mobile World Congress later this month.

Can you give us just a little bit of maybe a preview? What should we expect from MWC? Are we going to finally get a look at the first 5G phones, I guess? Yeah, I think we can expect that. I think what you can describe where we are right now with the market on 5G, we're a little bit like the first semester when we went to college. So everybody's in, everybody's exciting, and we started to figure out what the first steps are. We saw some of the networks go live late last year,

and I think this year is very much about building the networks and connecting them to exciting devices. So that's where I think a lot of the conversations will be in Barcelona. So let me... Let me, let's do a little bit of a history lesson. We had 2G, we had 3G and then 4G. So tell me what the steps were, you know, like 2G was all the way back in just voice and even SMS and stuff. So give me a history lesson of how we've evolved to where we are now and then where 5G is taking us.

So I think that you've written a book about how the Internet happened. This is very much about how mobility happened. So 1G was very much when the phone was in the trunk, it was very much voice focused. And the systems we had in different parts of the world was very different, almost country by country. And it was predominantly business people that were using it, connecting to the rest of us. Then as we moved into 2G, I would say the big things was the phone got into your pocket. It started to become affordable for everybody, so it was not only business people. and text came around text or SMS.

Then when we moved to 3G, I think we had a lot of expectations when 3G started. We talked about the mobile internet, even though there was very teeny tiny screens on the phones. And we talked about video telephony. It didn't really come out that way. So it became a lot of feature phones and all kinds of new capabilities built in. And we started to use data. And we started to also use data cards. So I think it was a little bit, that came quite far down the road and we started to see smartphones being introduced.

And then the big thing with 4G has been very, like, very much down the same avenue. Smartphones at one end, data connectivity and buckets are unlimited in the middle, and then cloud-based applications centers at the other end. And we now got to the point where essentially have penetrated a significant portion of the population. So then how is 5G different? I mean, we all have been, I think we all know that we're going to get faster speeds, but what even technically is different about 5G from 4G? There's a few things that I think what's different if you look at the drivers

is very much that with 5G we have not only consumers, we have consumers businesses or cities in the driving seat for what we're going to use it for. So it's not only a consumer-driven play. Regarding what's different in the network, you can break down the differences in a few key components. Today you have a tower out there, radio tower, which is like very high masts, which providing this cellular connectivity for 4G, 5G, part of that functionality moves closer to the users in terms of smaller cells into sitting poles in the neighborhood, and parts of the radio functionality is moving up in the network,

is typically the basement functionality where we're aggregating things together. And that kind of separation then creates a new segment of transport between those two locations, which we talk about as front wall. So that's very much what's going on at the radio end. Then at the core end, what is sitting at the other end, which is connecting out with the internet, that has been centralized to typically fairly few locations in a country like the United States. As we now talk about 5G, we talk about lower latency, and we talk about mobile, edge computing or distributed clouds. So this functionality will partly be distributed closer and closer to the users to drive for the performance targets that we have. And to be clear, when you say lower latency, you're saying that my phone, I should no longer have any lag. If I want something from my phone, it should almost be instantaneous like I'm using a local computing device.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's correct. So it's being pushed out closer so that the lag is going. is going away and for some applications which are lag critical, those will be enabled for it to happen. But you can also see it as opening up for new things. Today, everything is on the device, computing as well as power and storage.

Part of that can move now into the distributed cloud, because assuming that you have a low latency connection to it, so the devices can become leaner, get longer battery life and changes, a little bit on that paradigm. And that I think is the more strategic implication of the low latency networks. And is 5G more expensive or even technically more difficult to roll out than 4G or even 3G was?

I think it's going to be rolled out. I think it's not so much more expensive. Typically each of these generation had been associated with the larger investment cycle in the beginning for coverage, and then we have been reaping the benefits of it with capabilities for faster, speed with software down the road. What I think is different this time around is all previous generation has been built as an overlay network, meaning that when you had 2G, you'd build a whole

new 3G network on top of it with different types of nodes and functionality. Same happen with 4G. Now we get to 5G. It's going to be more integrated and tied together. So it's no longer building on the blocks of the past, like this is a full move into the future. Well, I would say you're leveraging more of the things in the past. When we had 3G and when you introduced 4G, all elements had new names, and you essentially built a 4G network without any connection to the 3G network on top of it. As we move to 5G, the paradox here is like when we moved to 5G is both an evolution and a revolution at the same time. It's a revolution in the sense that the capabilities go up significantly.

It's an evolution in the steps that we are introducing 5G as evolution steps for the different. domains that the networks are consisting of. All right, let's get to the good stuff. Wow me with some of the amazing things we can expect from a 5G future. Let's start with the consumer side. You know, like if what am I looking forward to five years from now when 5G hopefully is ubiquitous where I live? I think that you are the things that you live, I think you can experience a few things.

It's easy to talk about what it does in terms of speed. And so what I think, it's easy to see where will it be different than where it is today. I think if you go to a sports venue that 5G will be different in the sense that you will have more capacity upstream. So you can live stream even when there's a lot of people. You can also, when you're at home, you can stream video at higher quality to your devices because there's more capacity in the 5G network than we have with 4G. And I think we're going to see more streaming gaming over a 5G network. that hasn't really been a significant factor.

And actually, sorry to interrupt, but I've been talking about that on the show a lot recently, about everyone in the gaming industry wanting to move to streaming gaming. So is that because we potentially have greater bandwidth, and you're talking about the lower latency and things like that, then even I could get in my wired existing Internet service-providing paradigm? I think that you're not necessarily getting lower, but I think it's getting close enough, so it's starting to become a different. So if we go back 20 years when gamers were having ISDN, even though DSL was available,

after a while DSL got so close, it was worthwhile of moving out of it. And I think what we're seeing now with 5G, the potential is there to drive 5G to a technology that behaves like a wire, even though it's wireless. Okay, I interrupt you. Continue telling me about the amazing things we can look forward to. Yeah, so I think that these things, we were into gaming. we covered some of the aspects there. The other thing I think will be with a low latency thing. I think we will, the lower latency open up for new applications where things are

talking to each other without, that is hard to realize today. I would imagine that one of the biggest things is when our cars are driving and support making sure that cars don't collide with each other. It's perhaps the cheapest way to build traffic capacity in urban areas. the problem in I have in Dallas is not the four lanes on the highway is like they're down to two when they're wrecks during rush hours.

So with 5G and the low latency, cars can start communicating to each other. So actually perhaps preventing these kind of things, not necessarily driving the car for me, but making sure that I take better decision, helping me and taking better decisions so I don't run into someone. So it's almost like the internet of things

that we've been thinking about in the home, like 5G will allow us to be the internet of like the whole outside. side in real life world all over. Exactly. I think you're on to that and connecting things. Another thing I think is very cool thing about five years. You can start replacing wires.

I saw some statistics for a Super Bowl over the weekend here. There was 4,000 miles of wire. That's roughly 90 yards for every spectator in the stadium. And close to 2,000 Wi-Fi access points. If we can start reducing those numbers for the amount of we need to put in and reducing the amount of radius, even for high performance. That does think is something that will be very exciting to see. Well, and then, so I've been asking you about consumer stuff initially, but we're almost getting

into this. There maybe is even more of a revolution potential on the industrial side or on the non-consumer side. Yeah, I think we've seen that we, there's a. And we started to see the discussions for around four years ago when companies started to approach us and say, what's the next big thing after four? What is this five thing going to look like and how can we leverage it? So you're starting to see there's a big momentum in a number of different industries as they approach and going through their digital transformation.

They're interested in seeing, well, how can we leverage future connectivity? And is it something that will open up for new doors beyond what we've seen? So a lot of businesses in a variety of sectors are looking at 5G as something to trigger what they can do. So we're talking about things like in manufacturing environments, in safety and things like that. Like what are, give me some of the wow factors or potential that that 5G would allow in those areas. Yeah, I think the wow factors there is, for example, in a manufacturing sector, that's the manufacturing plant today is typically we connect the key. things with wires, but most of the other things are unconnected.

In a wireless manufacturing scenario, you can, A, you can get rid of a lot of wires so that your production line becomes more flexible. You can start of connecting other things that you haven't connected before. We are connecting screwdrivers to see that you apply the right amount of torque whenever you connect something to a circuit board. And so that is important. because that otherwise you're you those those screwdrives you send them in for for maintenance repair more frequent than they really need it and you don't

really are able to track if if you're attaching the board with with right torque so there's a number of these different things that if you go into it you can find small things here that you haven't really thought about for example we've been involved in one case where for yet engine turbine blades when you're milling those ones takes around 24 hours and the yield is roughly 75%. So Monday through Wednesday, you get out of blade Thursdays. It doesn't come out.

And the cost of that scrap cost for something that you've been milling on close for 24 hours, is very, very high. So if we could go in and those kind of processes and notify exactly when there's even a tiny vibration, take corrective actions immediately. So that's where the one milliseat, latest it comes into taking those ultra-fast decisions,

So a whole big block of material don't need to be wasted. One more thing that I've been reading about is 5G has been engineered to also be more reliable, right, and to survive, you know, act of God situations and for mission critical infrastructure type things. Is that also something that's built into what 5G can do as well? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that some of the core. Warnerstones are available, reliability, and security. We're trying to keep that on a very high level.

So, for example, we've done some of the pilots in mines, where you have self-driving trucks. Then you can have those trucks operated by people sitting in a room, almost like playing video games and remotely operate. So it's remotely operated right now. Sometime in the future it might be self-driving. But by remotely operating equipment in harsh conditions, that require that is up and running the whole time.

And that can fairly easy be achieved with a network that's covering where the mine is and whatever we need to do to make it a little bit more reliable than in the past. Well, and also things like doing remote surgeries and things like that, that's part of this as well. Yeah, I think remote surgery has often been used as an example to showcase. It's perhaps easy for people to understand what the low latency, and that if you're a doctor that you're, well, if you move by hand at one end, you'll be moving at the other end at the same time, otherwise become complicated.

Those showcases perhaps demonstrate what can be done with the technology over time, but as perhaps more classes in your fourth year of your college education rather than the first and second semester in the first year. So finally, the roadmap, you know, As we said at the beginning, I believe that we'll be seeing some 5G phones announced later this month, and hopefully we would be able to start purchasing those this year. But in terms of, you know, the ubiquity of what 4G achieved, you know, as you said, that it's rolling out in a major way this year. Are we five years out from 5G being as ubiquitous as what we expect 4G to be right now?

At least in, I'm sorry, at least in North America. No, I think we've expected to go a little bit faster than the 4G happened. When 4G happened, it was 33 months between the first launch of the 4G networks and the first iPhone. We see that the windows here for terminals are pulled in quite a bit compared to 4G. And we expect that the 5G penetration here in North America will exceed 50% by 2024. So just a couple years. Yeah. Yeah. So it's no expect from it happened quite quick. And the reason for that is very much that the pace of the market is more rapid right now. And when you talked about 4G, then you can as an operator or device manufacturer. You could choose a strategy, which was a fast follower. Right now, everybody's more trying to move for, go for first mover advantages as you learned so much by being in the market. Thank you.