All That’s Tech Glitter Isn’t Gold

Like most years past, we’re entering 2021 with a healthy population of exaggerations regarding tech issues.  Since, as I’ve said many times, “news” means “novelty” not “truth”, I guess that’s inevitable.  The problem is that 2021 is going to be a pivotal year for tech overall.  We’re recovering from a pandemic-generated economic slump, we’re facing major shifts in work behavior that have grown out of work-from-home, and many vendors and users have told me they had major tech plans on hold until things stabilized.  There’s a lot of things coming to roost, in short, and we need to face them squarely.

One of the biggest areas at risk to over-hype is 5G.  Mobile infrastructure upgrades to support 5G are one of the few budgeted areas in the service provider space, which means vendors are descending on it like vultures in the Masai Mara descend on a kill.  We’ve tied so many things to 5G that it’s creaking under the load.

One major problem is that users are themselves expecting a radical change in their mobile experience with 5G, and both operators and vendors tell me privately that the average smartphone user will likely have to look at the display that tells them what service they’re using to even know they have 5G.  The fact is that 4G is fast enough to distribute streaming experiences to the limit of devices and eyesight.  Yes, you could download faster, but most users have little need to download a lot of stuff.

5G is essential for mobile operators, since it provides for higher subscriber density and per-cell bandwidth, but that makes a story that’s too dull for the average reader, so we’re jazzing it up with implications that the 5G deployments will revolutionize smartphone use.  The primary motivation for operators is that without 5G handsets there’s no value to the service at all, and many smartphone users would have to replace their handsets.

But what happens when users get the handsets, and the service?  What happens with users’ attitudes toward 5G when the truth comes out, as we know it will?  The PR cycle for any new technology shifts quickly from presenting it as the last savior of civilization to the seed of its imminent downfall, and we’re getting close to the flex point, since people are finding out that what they expected isn’t going to happen.  It will make it harder to promote something, even something that could be revolutionary, later.

That potentially revolutionary thing may already be here.  Operators facing 5G’s moment of truth are also facing the truth that the place where 5G is most likely to impact user experience is in the area of fixed broadband.  The hybridization of 5G mm-wave technology with fiber to the node (FTTN) creates a pathway to residential and small-business-site broadband that could revolutionize the cost side for areas where demand density is average or below.  It’s hard to get detailed numbers, but my model says that only about 25% of the US population could be served by FTTH, while over 80% could get 50 Mbps or better using 5G mm-wave.

It’s interesting that in the US, Verizon has been promoting 5G mm-wave more than AT&T, when Verizon needs it less for residential broadband because of its higher demand density.  But maybe that’s the reason; if there’s going to be a large-scale 5G mm-wave deployment for residential broadband, it would create the potential for a large population of cell sites that could also serve smartphones.  This could allow a smart operator to deal with mobile users in high-density areas using the same technology that’s providing home and small-site access.  That could be a big cost savings, and also the basis for a broad-scale modernization of network infrastructure.

Which brings up our second point.  If you read the tech rags, you’d come away with the impression that there are at least half-a-dozen technologies that would single-handedly reverse the problem network operators have with profit-per-bit squeeze.  There are indeed that many profit-sustaining technologies; the fallacy is that any of them would fix the problem by itself.  We’ve created a massive information and content ecosystem that provides us with almost all communications and entertainment.  Its sheer financial inertia is dazzling, and it’s supported by people whose jobs depend on specialized roles in supporting that current ecosystem.  It’s not going to change because somebody waves a little technology magic-wand at it.  We need a massive shift.

Massive shifts are highly unpopular with the people who fund technology news and events, the vendors.  We have as much invested in service provider, content provider, cloud provider, and end-user infrastructure and practices, dependent on the current technology model, as the global GDP of 50 years ago.  Imagine a salesperson with a quarterly quota facing that sunk cost as a barrier to a new technology.  They’d do one sales call and start looking for another job.  Instead, we pretend that we can stick another band-aid on the creaking model, because we can sell that notion.

It’s not working.  We’re adding layers of technology, layers of capital cost, and layers of operations complexity.  We’re creating an ecosystem so complicated that we can’t possibly secure it, because it has too big and fuzzy an attack surface.  Just when we think we’ve gotten a handle on things, we find that there’s a whole new approach to attack that turns our own remedies into vulnerabilities, which is what Solar Winds did.

The vulnerability of networks to malware introduced as a trusted component of infrastructure was raised at least as far back as 2013, because I raised it within the context of NFV.  As far as I know, as of today, it’s not been resolved there, nor has the problem of “creeping insecurity” created by introduced malware been fully addressed in the cloud.  Could the reason be that there’s no quick fix, nothing easy to sell that promises to make you immune?

So, did the operators mess us up with their hype, or the vendors?  Did publications and analysts feed us garbage and delude us?  Yeah, perhaps, but we have to understand that hype is a buyer-driven process.  Nobody tells an unattractive, unpopular, lie, because there’s no value to it.  We have created our own problem by being willing consumers of what we find interesting, exciting, and easy.  We could change this industry, all of tech, in a heartbeat if we simply accepted reality and dealt with it.

I almost got out of the tech business 20 years ago, during the peak of the tech bubble.  I’d get four or five calls a week from startups wanting “consulting”, but really meaning “promotion”, on a concept that had zero chance of meeting its stated goals.  I’ve always refused to work with companies whose story couldn’t pass muster with me, and so I was turning almost everything away.  I stuck it out, and there was a market crash that eventually weeded out the total nonsense, and things got a bit better.

We may be backsliding now.  Do we need that tech bubble, the hype bubble, to happen again?  I hope not, because while sand castles are really attractive, it’s probably not wise to plan to live in one.  I’m still applying my standards for working with companies, saying that I will never say what I don’t believe, and never work with someone who I don’t think is delivering any tangible value proposition.  I’m still getting pushback, pressure to just sell a vendor’s story as the truth when it isn’t.

Let me gently suggest that you have to apply a similar standard if we’re going to change things.  Next time you pass over an article that describes the complexity of this or that new concept, in favor of reading something on self-driving bicycles or AI doorknobs, remember that you’re contributing the pushback against reality.  The tech world isn’t easy for me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not responsible for doing my best.  So are we all.  That’s the best lesson we could learn in the new year.