At the recent Cambridge Wireless conference at the Emirates Stadium, the best and brightest of the wireless and mobile world spoke and occasionally sparred over the future of mobile and the IoT.
CBR was there to round up some of their thoughts.
1. David Wood, Principal, Delta Wisdom
Wood argues that it’s too early to give up on smart glasses.
"You may say this is crazy, there’s no way a billion people in the world are going to wear these devices, and I agree with you in a sense. [The existing smart-glasses] are v1 and v2 and there are going to be many much better, much more useful devices in the next five to ten years.
"If you’re still laughing, still sceptical, I remind you of people’s reactions to the first mobile phones – these big bricks; it was very hard to imagine a billion people would be carrying around these big bricks. [Ori Inbar, founder of augmentedreality.org] claims it is inevitable because it is so useful to have a screen up here in front of your eyes the whole time."
2. Tim Whitley, Managing Director of Research & Innovation at BT
Whitley explains how networks will deal with the coming surge in demand:
"We’re facing massive growth. Innovation will be the means by which we respond to that growth in data. Increasing amounts of offload: we’re already seeing the use of LTE within wi-fi bands. A variety of other forms of convergence between the world of wi-fi and the world of traditional cellular mobile technologies. Femtocells will be another example of that sort of early offloading.
"Using better technologies…we’re actually nutting the way through to what 5G is and what science can give us over the next four or five years. More spectrum is another obvious way of dealing with the growth, and of course innovation and topology of the network. The model where we had 18000 or so macro basestations in a country the size of the UK will change. We will move to many more hundreds of thousands of base stations, be they small cells, big cells or femtocells.
3. Jeffrey Ju, SVP and General Manager of Wireless Communication at MediaTek
Ju suggests that there are three main innovations that the smartphone will see in the next few years. The first is a reduction in the power consumption, with MediaTek’s tri-cluster technology distributing functions to different cores to optimise usage. Ju also predicted major advances in the cameras of phones, such as real-time visual processing technology to optimise photography.
Finally, he highlighted Media-Tek’s CrossMount software, which allows users to connect their phones to carry out multiple functions. This might include multiple cameras in the same venue being synced to provide a panoramic view of the same event. He suggested this was another step towards the IoT.
4. Tim Rundle, Design Director – Product Design, Conran and Partners
Rundle believes that consumers are going to be able to demand more from technology.
"The coming iPhone is being heralded as one of the more exciting updates of this product yet. Why? Because of the technology they’ve already rolled out in the Apple Watch and their most recent MacBook laptop. It’s called Force Touch; not a few more pixels, not a faster processor, but a feature that inherently changes the way that we interact with our smartphones, the way that we tell the device what we want it to do.
"It’s an example of the way the developments in hardware technology have reached a maturity that they’re going to allow human behaviour and actions to influence the way that technology develops rather than vice versa. It allows you to input another level of information simply by squeezing the touch-screen, which is a natural and primitive human interaction rather than some awkward interaction that we’ve adopted from technology like double-tap or press and hold."
5. Tony Milbourn, VP Strategy of u-blox, and Howard Benn, Head of Standards and Industrial Affairs at Samsung Electronics Research Institute
Milbourn and Benn debated whether 5G would really be as necessary and paradigm-shifting as many expect. According to Milbourn:
"We have benefited hugely from standards. 2G built a momentum big enough to justify significant R&D, which in turn drove down costs to make the market big enough for more R&D, and so on. But the standards-making machine has now moved to a point where it is defining things beyond the needs of the consumer.
"Essentially it is like washing machines; there is a rapid growth in the supply of washing machines before everybody has one, but once people can wash their clothes easily it becomes a replacement market, where the differentiation is the colour of the knobs.
"Consumer cellular is at this point. The area for investment is coverage, not yet another standard that sucks capital out of operators and delivers something that consumers don’t need."
Howard Benn, however, argued:
"We are communicating very differently now, from voice and text to photos and video – driven by internet players and the move to mobile apps. It is clear is that data volumes will continue to grow and 5G offers the capacity and flexibility to handle a few bits to control a thermostat to the high bandwidth need for a full QoS video session.
"It will also offer a flexible air interface and network splicing. In short, we need 5G because history tells us that we can’t predict what services will be popular from 2020 to 2030 so we need a super-efficient and super-flexible system to cover all bases."
