There is a long tradition, across many cultures, of making
New Year’s Resolutions: Babylonians made promises to their gods at the start of
each year that they would return borrowed objects and pay their debts. The
Romans began each year by making promises to the god Janus, for whom the month
of January is named [1]. The New Year is an opportunity to try something new,
or to make efforts to do something better than before.
2016 saw some important achievements in the evolution of the
5G standard and its underlying technologies, as the industry’s network
equipment suppliers teamed with operators to compete for leadership in expected
5G metrics such as data throughput, latency, etc. We applaud these achievements
and we are excited about the applications that might be enabled by these
technologies. It would be tempting to frame our New Year’s resolutions in terms
of what we might do with 5G in 2017.
However, the technology elite runs the risk of missing the
lesson that the political elite learned across the world in 2016; we cannot
afford to be deaf to the needs of people who are being left behind. The
problems that we are seeking to address with 5G are the problems of the world’s
digital ‘haves’. The world’s digital ‘have nots’ are still constrained by what
can be offered over low-speed mobile services or copper-based broadband. This
chart from Akamai’s State of the Internet Report for Q3 2016, measuring
percentage of connections exceeding 4 Mbps, helps us to visualize the problem:
[Downloaded from:
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For reference, the 4 Mbps was adopted as the minimum
threshold for broadband in the National Broadband Plan published by the FCC in
2010 – and since updated to 25 Mbps! In the regions in red in particular, data
demand outstrips the capacity of the infrastructure - in rural and in urban
areas alike. This represents forgone opportunity in the economic, cultural and
entertainment spheres – opportunity that we take for granted in areas with more
developed infrastructure.
For cities, we now have a scalable solution in the form of
low-cost, low-power micro base stations and metro Wi-Fi access points, powered
by solar panel / battery units and connected into dense networks using
millimeter wave links. Lattice, through our SiBEAM technology group, provides
key components of the latter. These can be installed on street lights, bus
stops and traffic lights, or as Nokia demonstrated recently, dropped onto
roof-tops by drones.
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So, if we have the tools at our disposal to address a
pressing issue today, maybe our New Year’s Resolution for 2017 should be to put
those tools in the hands of those who could most benefit – the digital ‘have
nots’ – and work towards making the map less red and more green.
