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Hoov's Musings (volume 3, number 8) |
Retirement
Is In Sight
(If You Squint Hard Enough)
Mark Hoover,
President, Acuitive, Inc.
I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, which (at the
time) was a Dupont town, about twenty minutes south of the southern
parts of Philadelphia, which in effect makes Wilmington a big
Philadelphia suburb.
As with many kids, during the spring and summer I
lived and breathed baseball, both playing and following the pros.
Nearly every night, I can remember going to sleep with the
Phillies games on the radio. The voices of Richie Ashburn, Harry Kallas, By Saam, and the
other Phillies announcers of that era are ingrained in those deeps
parts of my memory that haven’t gotten obliterated due to aging
and beer drinking. Not
just their voices are ingrained, but the whole auditory experience
of listening to the games using a small transistor radio receiving
AM signals. Which means
I can’t conceive of hearing Richie Ashburn without interruptions
due to static and signal fades, all of which seemed occur just as
the three-and-two pitch was released.
The limits of that generation of broadcast
technology hit home to me even more when I moved to Indiana to go to
college – where no Phillies baseball was available at all except
when they played against the Chicago Cubs.
Ironically, after years and years of bad teams and last place
finishes, the Phillies finally started to get good right when I went
to college. They were actually in pennant races.
They were playing games that mattered (to them, not just
their opponent) after the All-Star break.
And I missed almost all of it.
I would have loved to be able to receive the Phillies radio
broadcasts, even from remote foreign places like Indiana or southern
Germany, where I happened to be when they played in the 1983 World
Series.
As I look back on it, I (and thousands of others)
have spent most of our technical careers developing technologies
that should allow me to eventually listen to or watch Phillies
broadcasts no matter where I am in the world.
I’ve recently decided that when that milestone is achieved,
I can retire a satisfied man. The
list of technologies that look like they are going to contribute to
this goal includes RF components, optical subsystems, packet
switching and LAN technologies, all of the innovations that have
helped create the Internet, and various IP QoS, caching, and
multicast-related innovations.
So, with all this technology in use or in the
pipeline, where do we stand?
In one very important way, things have improved for
me considerably. I can
listen to every Phillies game at my California home via Internet
broadcasts, available from a variety of different web sites.
At home, using my DSL link, when I am the only one in the
house “working,” the quality is good.
The broadcasts are free and yet I don’t have to listen to
any commercials. That’s consumer nirvana as far as I am concerned.
And I can run the signal through my audio receiver to use
wireless headphones, which gives me the ability to listen while
outside cutting the lawn or walking my baby daughter around.
So are we done?
Can I retire now?
Not quite. I’m
still missing an essential component of the solution – mobility.
The DSL link into my home, combined with my wireless
headphones requires that I stay within 100 feet or so of my home
computer. I can’t
listen to the Phillies when I travel, because audio over dial-up
connections is horrible. I
can’t listen to them from my car while sitting for hours in
Silicon Valley traffic. I
can’t listen to them while driving a tractor on my cousin’s
farm. And I can’t
listen to them while hiking (and scanning for snakes) in Montana.
So I feel a bit more connected. But in some ways less connected than I was 30 years ago as a
kid.
I do believe, however, that such mobility is
coming. The Internet
will remain the origin sources of the broadcasts.
It’s a matter of adding mobile access to the Internet, with
the bandwidth and jitter required for audio broadcasting.
Some technologies exist for packet delivery to
mobile devices today. But
many of them just drive packets through the circuit switched
channels available in the existing cellular voice systems.
This provides enough bandwidth for some messaging services,
but not enough for real-time audio.
You
have probably been hearing awhile about some new wireless
technologies to enable higher performance and standards-based
delivery of packets in and out of mobile devices.
You may have heard about General Packet Radio Services (GPRS)
and 3G, for instance. These
emerging technologies define methods for overlaying packet-switched
services onto cellular systems, co-residing with traditional
circuit-switched voice. In
other words, some of the available cellular spectrum is allocated to
voice uses, and some of it is allocated to packet services.
Multiple users can share the spectrum allocated to packet
services. Thus the
efficiencies of packet multiplexing are achieved with-in this
portion of the spectrum. Subscribers to packet services can roam and can enjoy “always-on”
connectivity, ala DSL and cable modems.
But do these new technologies
help me listen to the Phillies as I travel in my car? In the case of GPRS, not likely. The nice thing about GPRS is that it overlays existing
GSM cellular radio systems. That
reduces the amount of infrastructure components that need to be
upgraded or introduced into existing systems.
The downside of this migration advantage is that the
bandwidth made available for packet services will be fairly modest.
GPRS will be very popular and a big step forward (compared to
circuit switched data services) for delay-insensitive bursty
applications like messaging (e-mails, stock quotes, textural paging,
etc.). But GPRS will
not provide good support for continuous feed applications like
audio. Partly because of the bandwidth audio requires, but more so
because listening to audio broadcasts requires a user to “lock
up” bandwidth for an extended period of time which undercuts the
packet multiplexing advantage of GPRS over circuit switched
techniques.
Another issue for the Phillies
and me is that GPRS requires GSM as an underlying wireless cellular
technology, and GMS is widely deployed as a cellular technology in
Europe and the Far East, but very little in the U.S.
In the U.S., the cellular systems in place use mostly various
forms of TDMA and CDMA.
Nirvana is more likely associated
with the deployment of 3G and a set of associated overlay functions
called UMTS, which are intended to (a) provide higher bandwidth
solutions, and (b) overlay any modern type of cellular system so
that the same handset could be used anywhere in the world, resulting
in global roaming.
Because 3G/UMTS promises such
tremendous values – global roaming, LAN-type speed connections for
mobile laptops, and (most importantly), car radios that would allow
one to tune into Internet broadcasts of Phillies games – it has
been receiving a huge amount of attention from both the press and
the large Telco equipment vendors.
However, the promise will take awhile to get
delivered. There are a
few little issues that need to get resolved, like (a) bidding for
spectrum across the world has been like trying to buy a house in
Silicon Valley – it’s a market out of control and the prices are
going higher and higher, (b) implementing 3G/UMTS requires upgrades
and wholesale changes to almost every cellular infrastructure system
element in place today, (c) handsets that talk 3G don’t exist, and
(d) many believe the technology simply won’t work or deliver as
promised due to issues with interference that are being ignored by
bureaucratic standards committees.
I don’t have enough subject matter expertise to
comment on the last item in the above list, but I know that the sum
of the first three means that we won’t see this technology in any
widespread sense of the word for many more years.
It may even be that incremental innovation around GPRS, which
should start to get deployed widely in the 2nd half of
next year, will keep pushing the need for 3G out into the future.
Kind of like innovations to IPv4 keep pushing out the need
for IPv6.
But all this will take awhile to play out.
So I am estimating it will be 5-6 years before I’ll be able
to listen to Phillies games on my in-dash Internet radio in my car.
But at least I can see it coming and I can see the light at
the end of the tunnel. At
that point, I’ll be able to retire from the technology-oriented
life and turn my energies to something more important – like maybe
helping the Phillies get their act together and create a team worth
listening to.
(volume
3,
number 8)
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