I walked around at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week, and I talked with several developers of artificial intelligence (AI) video services, games, AR glasses, haptic feedback apps, sound identification apps and many others. The number of young people working on new ideas is simply staggering and their variety of ideas is mind-boggling.
Some of these new apps send A LOT of data to the cloud: one smartphone application uses two cameras on the iPhone simultaneously, with two 1440p HD video streams at 60 frames per second. The two video streams are combined in the cloud for rich 3D video effects. Today, the app is used for non-realtime processing of video…but of course there will be pressure to adapt this technique for Microsoft Teams or Zoom. It would definitely up my game if I had this kind of production-quality video for my customer meetings.
The engineer I spoke with said that they don’t have any preferences for network connections. His app will upload over 4G or 5G if the speed is "good enough." That’s scary, as these files can be huge.
Word of warning
So, I have a word of warning this month: The mobile operators are at the mercy of these 22-year-old whiz kids. The minute that somebody creates a video app that combines two videos, or analyzes a video stream in a useful way, or uses a video stream in a game — the mobile network could be buried in traffic.
In fact, the mobile industry could commit suicide unintentionally, if we build a network with 5 ms latency, edge computing and AI servers everywhere, and we offer it to the OTT community for any app they like. The whiz kids will quickly figure out that the 5 ms network is better than the 20-30 ms cable broadband/Wi-Fi network and they’ll start directing the smartphone to prefer 5G.
If we haven’t set up premium pricing plans before that happens, our industry could be buried in a mountain of uplink data demand without any new revenue to pay for it.
Consider this: Gaming, VR, and streaming services use Wi-Fi and fixed broadband connections today. Mobile devices are offloading their traffic onto Wi-Fi and wired broadband at least 70% of the time…and some apps are used almost exclusively on Wi-Fi. That allows the CSPs to charge a premium for mobile data…at a consumer level, they charge 20x more for mobile data compared with fixed broadband data.
So, if the mobile industry moves ahead with investing in edge data centers everywhere (or even GPUs everywhere), we would create a ‘tipping point’ that incentivizes the app developers to steer the “offload” traffic back onto the mobile network. We could drown in the flood of OTT application data that suddenly appears on the mobile network.
I don’t have the answers here. But I encourage the operators to consider this: before you build a better pipe, figure out what will happen to traffic that is adjacent to your network, such as offloaded data. Can you live with sudden 3x growth in your traffic?
Can you charge 3x or 4x higher prices for that 5 ms network? Be selective. Offer the premium latency only to diamond-level customers. The mobile industry has talked for a long time about edge computing and low-latency connections. SoftBank is testing GPUs for the edge, for access to new AI applications. These are grand ideas but be careful what you wish for.
Joe Madden is principal analyst at Mobile Experts, a network of market and technology experts that analyze wireless markets.
Op-eds from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff are opinion pieces that do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.