City good, Suburb bad
In the UK certainly, it is the case that the mobile operators focus their efforts most on providing blanket coverage in the cities and large population centres. It’s obvious; the more customers per square mile you have, the better profit/investment ratio you get.
For those living outside the big population centres it can be frustrating to watch television adverts for a particular operator’s “fantastic” new 4G service, then glance at their smartphone and see a miserly two bars of 2G indicated.
Public Wi-Fi
The situation could change in the coming years and the reason is Wi-Fi.
Provision of public Wi-Fi services in towns and cities is improving rapidly. So is interoperability between providers. Many towns are already trialling universal free Wi-Fi coverage. In other words, we are following an evolution that will, in the short to medium term, see everyone who lives in these population centres gaining continuous cheap access to Wi-Fi. A supporting activity in this evolution is the trend by broadband providers to supply routers to their customers which offer a public access point as well as providing the customer with their private service.
This represents a tipping point.
If you have Wi-Fi, you don’t need 3G or 4G at all. You can make calls using VOIP services, of which there are many. Chat-app messaging has already overtaken SMS in a recent survey, so the cellular services will become redundant. To use the industry terms, ‘Offload’ will turn into ‘Unload’.
The mobile operators are doubtless aware of this and are making plans. They have to face up to the fact that the areas where they have focused their best cellular services up until now, that have received the most investment (per square mile), are going to become the areas where no-one needs their service at all.
4G in the suburbs
This may lead to an interesting reversal. Wi-Fi in the cities, 4G in the suburbs. It makes sense and everyone will benefit.
Some operators, such as O2, are already getting a foothold in the public Wi-Fi market. We can expect others to follow. They will need to transform their business model if they are to survive in the world of city-wide Wi-Fi. In many ways it will be a lot simpler, with the separation between voice, text and data disappearing to be replaced by universal data provision. In other words, the mobile market will assume a similar business model to that employed by broadband internet providers.
The fact that many mobile operators are already getting involved in broadband services is a clear sign that they understand the implications of this upcoming reversal .
Separation of Service and Platform
We are also likely to see another division take place; between the service providers, who charge users for access, and the platform providers, who maintain the network and sell bandwidth wholesale to the service providers. This will create a healthy competitive market and overall we will see our costs per megabyte head downwards. In the UK, this separation has already happened with broadband, gas, electricity, water, sewage and rail to name a few, so it’s well tested model.
Technology convergence
All of this is part of wider, longer term evolution. We are at the beginning of a technology convergence between Wi-Fi and cellular.
Initially, this will take the form of service provider convergence. As you move around, your smartphone will automatically switch between Wi-Fi and 4G as appropriate, all with the same provider. This is practically upon us already. The Wi-Fi alliance have backed certification of converged service devices.
In the longer term, we will see a single mobile internet technology emerge; combining the merits of both approaches. It will allow for intranet (home, business) and internet (public, wide area) implementations, scaling seamlessly between high node density in a small area to low node density in a large area.
What about Bluetooth?
There is an irony in all this. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are sibling technologies. I might go as far as to say non-identical twins. Many commentators and industry insiders have anticipated a full convergence between the two technologies for some time. It appears superficially to make sense. Yet they serve a very different purpose, particularly in the context of the evolutions I’ve talked about above.
I suspect the opposite will happen; a divergence.
Bluetooth will become the basis for more advanced and comprehensive personal device connectivity technologies. Think of it like this. Each person is a node in the internet; whether they are making use of a broadband, Wi-Fi or 3G/4G connection. Around each person is an array of devices they use; headsets, sat-navs, car infotainment systems and so on. Conceptually, all those devices belong to the same node; the user. They are a part of it.
This is great, as it focuses the architecture of communication systems on the person, not the device.
Therefore, we have communication between users (extra-node) and intra-connection within a node (intra-node), for the user’s devices. Wi-Fi and 4G are going to follow a convergence on the extra-node path. Bluetooth and it’s descendants will follow the intra-node path.
As you walk around today, think of yourself as that node; a single point of contact in an ever-expanding network. It’s a spooky feeling.
