IEEE Future Directions
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The tail wags the dog
Terminals are already a crucial factor in wireless economy. Their volume sustains investment in their evolution that progresses like a clockwork. Basically, every year we have a significant improvement in terms of processing and storage capability, every 3 to 4 years a significant improvement in transmission capability. For the last 25 years cell phones have been the “terminals” in the wireless economy. Today they are still dominating, by far, the wireless economy, however we can predict that the rise of IoT and vehicular terminals will start to have some impact on the wireless economy in the next decade, in synch with the roll out of 5G.
Equally important, cell phones and smartphones have a short lifetime, currently estimated in 4.7 years. However, the substitution time is often shorter than 2 years (in 2016 the average in US was 22.7 months, in Europe 21.6 months and in China 20.2 months, 15 months in South Korea). This means that in 2 years over 50% of the smartphone users will have a new up to date phone creating a receptive market for new services.
In the case of IoT the lifetime is often quite longer but here we will see a growth in application areas that will lead to the roll out of tens of millions of specific IoT in a relatively short time, taking advantage of currently available comm technology and creating a market for exploiting it. Evolution is likely to be significant in terms of low power usage; this will extend the application fields and push volumes up. Part of the 5G communication protocols will be tailored to low transmission power, hence it will support the deployment of certain types of IoT.
Vehicular communication is tied to the replacement cycle of vehicles that is in the order of 10 years with part of the users regularly changing their cars every 5 years. V2V (vehicular to vehicular) communications will be embedded in the car, hence the same lifetime of the car, whilst people on-car communications will most likely continue to piggy back on the passengers and driver own cell phones, so it will follow their evolution pace.
This is unlikely to change with the roll out of 5G, much more likely the opposite: availability of 5G terminals will steer the deployment of 5G: the tail wags the dog.
Smartphones penetration will continue and will probably reach full maturation in many markets in synch with the roll out of 5G. The storage capacity of smartphones will continue to increase making 1TB a common capacity in the next decade.
This huge capacity will move data to the edges, inside the terminals, just in case. Already today majority of users opts for navigation maps to reside in the terminal to avoid network cost when using them.
Let’s do a few calculations on the back of the napkin: let’s assume that on average out of that 1TB of storage only 70% is used and that a 10% could be “released” for community use. In a city with 100,000 people with a penetration of 50% smartphone that would mean 5PB of storage available. If you are at a concert you may have just around you over 200 TB of storage. Same order of magnitude for storage availability in a mall.
In a stadium as well as within a mall your terminal will act as a network node in a mesh network with basically no need to connect to the wireless networks operated by a “classical” Operator.
We are seeing new chips with energy demand of 2 even 3 orders of magnitude lower than the ones we have today in our phones. This means that in addition to data also applications and services can migrate in the Cloud at the edges, or as it is often called in the “Fog”.
Clearly, this evolution will displace the current business models creating opportunities to small players (fragmentation) and consolidation for authentication (and related “customer care” support services, including access negotiation fees) in the hand of a few global players that do not need a telecom infrastructure to deliver it (think of Skype). Today’s Telecom Operators will need to fight for their market place without the possibility to leverage on their network (and the CAPEX invested in the network).
