Hedge 298: The 6G Hype Begins

Join us as we gather around the hedge, where we dig into technology, business, and culture

with the finest minds in computer networking.

Well, Audrey, nice to see you.

Audrey says, hello, I can't bring myself to do a high-pitched feminine voice.

And hello, Tom.

Hi, Russ.

Second time for the day.

Yep.

Yeah, here we are.

Two recordings in one day.

I don't know.

And now we are joined by Doug Dawson, who if you've never read his blog, Pots and Pants,

you ought to be reading his blog.

I'm just gonna say that up front.

I read his blog regularly.

You see me cross-post his stuff on Rule 11.

And I don't know.

He's just a great source of information.

He's been in the industry for as long as I have, which I'm, you know, he's got more white in his beard than I do.

So there you go.

So how are you, Doug?

You're in Nashville, right?

I'm doing well.

Yes.

I live in Asheville, North Carolina.

So we've been here for eight, nine years now.

So, yep.

Okay.

Cool.

Old telco head.

Old telco head.

He used to own telephone companies.

I mean, I was telco head as they come.

Yes.

So I actually started out when telephone companies use stepper's mechanical switches.

Strogrins, right?

Strogrins, yes.

Oh, yes.

So here's the thing, right?

When I was in the Air Force, the United States military is notorious for having all this advanced technology.

Well, there's another entire site to that.

When something's installed, it's never removed.

Right.

So, for instance, I worked on the Navy's network for a while on Fleetnet.

And they were like, oh, yeah, we still have Bay routers.

I'm like, Bay has been out of business for five years.

Yeah, we don't care.

We still use them.

They're still there.

So at McGuire Airport Space, we had Strogr.

We had a 12,000-line Strogr frame.

I was telco head.

It was so old.

And those things land forever.

They did.

They were broke, they didn't.

Yeah.

That was insane.

So anyway, all right.

So we are talking about, we're going to start with 5G height, because that's the right place to start, right?

Yeah.

So I talked to us about the transition from 4G to 5G.

And what that was all about, and how like, we ended up with 4.5G, basically, because 5G never really…

We never really worked.

So I talked to us about that a little bit.

So this takes you back now about 10, 12 years.

So about 10, 12 years ago, you couldn't go to anywhere

in the industry and not hear about the 5G

war or the 5G fight with China, right?

So we were at a race with China for 5G.

And they never did explain why that mattered that we won.

But it was very, very important that we were at race.

And what that was, it turns out that after it was all

sudden done, that was a strategy that the three big carriers

adopt it.

Because that was their way to get the public behind giving

them more spectrum for 5G.

And they needed it.

4G was in trouble.

4G networks were bogging down.

They were really not in good shape.

People were literally getting black calls.

I'm certain times of the day, it was just getting terrible.

But rather than just go and make the go in and say,

we need more spectrum, they created this crisis, which

was a completely fake crisis.

Because there never was a race with China.

Because in there's no race, we'll get to the 6G race today.

There's no race today.

Because there's only really three major vendors

of this equipment.

And they all do the same thing.

Whatever the Chinese company does, the European companies

do the same thing.

The technology doesn't get very far ahead in either place.

And the whole world gets it.

Everybody can buy it.

So there's no such thing as a race.

But we had this tremendous race.

I mean, it got so crazy, you probably remember this,

because you're one of the companies.

I mean, the White House had serious conversations

about buying Nokia or Ericsson.

Because that way, the United States

went on a 5G company.

I mean, they talked about buying lock stock in parallel

and buying the company to make an American company.

And they were serious about it.

They actually investigated it until everyone laughed them

to death.

But that's how crazy this hype was.

And you just couldn't go to an industry forum.

That's all anybody wanted to talk about.

How are we doing with this 5G race?

Well, part of the race was they made these incredible claims

about what 5G would do.

And even today, I think we were just

talking before this show.

We're only at today at 4 1 1-1-1 1-1-1.

We never really made it the full 5G.

And so a lot of the things that they promised us

during that time period still have never come.

But we actually overperformed on some of it.

For regular cellular spectrum, they

told us that we would get the networks up to 100

or maybe even a little bit more megabits per second.

Well, they've outperformed that one by a mountain.

I just did anything to just up to create it.

My spectrum and this town from the stuff

they just bought from Echo Star.

And I went from 115 megabits down to 381 megabits

down in three days.

It's like, well, because I've been

watching to see when they were going to do the upgrade.

All of a sudden, they never promised

that much bandwidth on those spectrum bands.

But they did claim up to 10 gig speeds

on no matter what their wave spectrum.

They're like, yeah, and if you remember,

if you watched sports 10, 11 years ago,

every single sports event had ads from Verizon

where they held up a cell phone and it showed one gigabit

speeds on the cell phone.

You have to remember those a few sports fans.

Can you hear me now?

Yeah, I can.

Yeah, remember that?

And those were millimeter and they were real networks.

They're still there today.

But I think I read that those networks

carry about a half a percent of all of Verizon's traffic.

But they are still there in downtowns of Denver

and places like that, still have these little networks.

But it turns out that that's a really crappy spectrum

for day-to-day use of cell phones.

So it's just bombed.

It doesn't go through anything.

It doesn't bounce around things very well.

So that just turned out to be a giant bus.

So we didn't get our gigabit speeds,

but we did get way, way faster.

So they've actually outperformed on one of the key things.

But everything else they've fallen down on,

remember they were going to use network slicing

to really stretch the spectrum.

That was their actually biggest thing

that they said we were going to do.

They were going to go, if you only want to do a little thing,

we're going to give you a 15th of a channel

so that you just get a amount of spectrum that you need

and if you want to do something really big,

we want to get you on and off the network quickly.

We're going to combine all sorts of different frequencies

and we're even going to go grab stuff

from another self-tower next door.

And we're going to give you this giant pipe.

So instead of being on for 10 seconds,

you're going to be on for a third of a second.

That's going to keep our self-sights free.

Well, they never did any of that.

And that was their number one claim

of how they were going to do this.

They also talked about Russ's favorite beam forming.

Beam forming.

They were going to take the self-tower that looks all directions

and they were going to beam right at you

at somehow if you're walking or moving in a car or whatever

and they were going to make sure that you got your spectrum

by beam forming so that it didn't get strayed.

That way they could do 20 different beams

using the same spectrum at the same time.

Well, they never made that work either.

And then they were also going to, yeah.

None of those things ever happened.

None of them.

They've happened.

There's a little tiny bit of spectrum slicing

that's been introduced here and there and not very much,

but a little bit.

They've played around with beam forming

but nothing that ever worked.

And I don't think they've ever played around

with combining signals from multiple self-towers.

I don't remember seeing anybody trying that one.

The other thing they promised was,

we were going to do small cells everywhere.

In their cells, everywhere.

We were going to have millions and millions and millions.

That way, that would protect the cell network

because everybody would be using the cell tower

that's a block and a half from their house instead.

The big ones are going to be obsolete.

They weren't even going to need the big ones anymore

because there was going to be one in your neighborhood.

So when they brought the backbone to that one,

then you would have all the spectrum

you would ever need, right?

Well, they didn't even build a 50th of what they promised

because the economics caught up to them

and they went, boy, these things are expensive

and that's an awful lot of backbone.

So they just never got them.

I bought a femtor cell.

I had a femtor cell in my house

because I couldn't get near a tower.

And like, so yeah, I had a femtor cell

but I paid for it, I did, you didn't.

Yes, but these were going to be pole mounted,

small cell sites that could handle a thousand customers

and they were going to be literally everywhere.

So that just very quietly went away.

I think today, last time I saw,

I think there's 400,000 small cells

but that's a very deceptive number

because 75 to 80% of those cells

are on top of buildings and they beam down

inside of office buildings and malls.

So they call those small cells, they're not.

They're bunch of night repeaters,

is what they are, right?

So I remember this, I was at the time

I was working for an eyeball network

that owned a ton of fiber

and just as it was sort of the crest of this hype wave

and I just remember the meetings

and people were talking about

we are sitting on a gold mine, we are going to be rich,

we are going to, you know, and none of it.

None of it.

Well, no, companies like American Tower

went out and they gobbled up all these resources

to support the small cells.

They actually went out and built a bunch of them.

They grabbed backbone fiber routes

through all these cities

because they were going to make a fortune

on selling the back hall to Verizon, AT&T.

Boy, that was a busted business plan.

So everyone who bet on that one lost their shirt.

So, you know, it just never happened.

You know, they also promised really super low latency

like four mega seconds.

Bill seconds, if you remember that,

they never got anywhere close to that number.

And that one is one of my favorites

because one of the biggest things

that they touted at 5G would do

is it would be faster than fiber from a latency perspective

which will allow you to really do real-time stock trading.

It's like, I do pretty real-time stock trading on fiber.

Or gaming.

Or gaming, or gaming.

Or gaming, I guess.

Or gaming.

Oh, yeah.

Everyone was going to game on their cell phone

because that's going to be the absolute fastest connection.

Of course, we also needed the one gig connections

for that to work, which didn't come.

So that went from a part.

And then, finally, I think, yeah, go ahead.

Sorry, the other hype piece that I remember over and over

was remote surgery.

I don't know why that stuck with that.

Oh, yeah.

But we're going to be able to operate on people

across the world because of this.

And there's no doctor in his right mind

in whatever do that because of the insurance problems.

You know, it's like, wait, if broadband goes out

in the middle of this operation, the patient dies

and I get my S.

So it's like, I don't think we're going to want to do that.

You know, the final really big claim they had was,

they can connect an immense number of people

to a cell site at the same time.

Remember that?

I mean, they were just going to be able to, I don't know,

40,000, 50,000 people to a cell site.

And that's way beyond what, and they didn't really,

they increased that one, maybe 30, 40%.

They're bigger now, but they're not massively bigger now.

So all those things that they promised to do just

didn't come to pass.

Now, at the same time, what really came into play

was not their hype because the other hype they had

was economic hype.

How are they going to pay for all this stuff?

Now, this didn't get spouted in public, but it got,

but this is what they told investors.

If he went to all the quarterly announcements for them.

So here's what they said they were going to do with 5G.

You know, they first they said businesses

are going to adopt private 5G networks like crazy.

And that's going to surpass residential revenues.

So all these businesses were going to do all their own employees

and customers were going to get on private networks.

They were going to put 5G and factories.

5G was just going to rule the business world.

And that didn't even come in.

They didn't accomplish 100th of that claim.

Yeah, there was, there were big things about how

we'll never need either.

In fact, there are a lot of factories that were built

that never were wired for cat 5 or cat 6.

Because they knew this was coming.

Yeah, that's right.

5G is coming.

Yeah, OK.

Now, this was such a rare thing that I think it was about two

years.

John Deere rewired about eight or 10 of their factories

in Illinois for 5G.

And also with Wi-Fi at the same time.

And they did get rid of a lot of the wiring.

And that was such big news because at the time when

that was announced, I looked it up.

And there was maybe 10 factories in the world who had done that.

So instead of, instead of being a massive business.

And they did it all themselves.

Like they didn't even use the big carriers

to do what I found really amusing.

So, but that was supposed to be larger than customer

subscription revenue.

The next thing they said was, they're

going to pay for all this because first off,

they were going to do IoT, you know, internet of things.

Oh, my goodness.

You're going to have 5G and your washing machine

and your refrigerator.

Every car was going to have a monthly $10 or 5G subscription.

I mean, they were going to make so much money off of recurring

subscriptions.

And so that was really what they were counting on.

And it turns out that Wi-Fi won that war 100%.

I mean, nobody has a subscription for those kind of things.

I mean, even cars, you know, I have two cars that

communicate with my house when you pull on the driveway.

The first day we bought them, we gave them

the Wi-Fi password, it dumps whatever they dump and it's done.

They don't need 5G to do that.

But everybody was going to have these subscriptions.

They also thought everybody would pay extra for the speeds.

It turned out nobody was willing to pay extra for the speeds.

And they're still not willing to date a extra for the speeds.

I'm very impressed to get 381 megabits on my phone.

Would I pay extra for that?

No.

I don't really.

I'm impressed at it's that fast.

I don't care that it's that fast.

You know, so there was just nothing there.

Finally, they were going to, they were absolutely positive

that they were going to be killer apps of some sort.

That 5G was going to be so unique.

And they talked about the AR glasses, you know,

the Google Glass and all those crazy glasses people were.

They talked about virtual reality and none

of those things ever came to pass.

And if they did, they were going to work on Wi-Fi and not 5G.

And so, you know, so almost everything they promised

about 5G failed.

Really, the only thing that they did right

was they got regular old day-to-day speeds up a lot faster.

But even there, the American vendors, the American carriers,

only allocate six or seven percent of their total speed

upload, they put all their speed on download

because they're having this marketing battle

about who has the fastest networks today, right?

So they, all the rest of the world puts two

and three times more of their bandwidth upload.

So you still can't use your cell phone for any

of those advanced apps that require two-way communications

because you don't have very much upload on yourself.

I mean, I have 381 down, I have 11 up.

It's like, that's ridiculous.

That's 3% of the bandwidth allocation is going up, right?

So, you know, that, it tests consistently

at that very small level.

So, you know, they just, they over-promised massively

under-perform, except for regular day-to-day speeds.

Everything else, they promised, never came to pass.

Or it came to pass in such a diminished nature

that it didn't make any marketing difference.

And boy, did the heads roll.

I mean, a couple years into 5G, all the execs

in that part of those companies were all gone

because they, you know, their business plans just died.

And so, you know, there was a real clean out

of the executives at the cell companies

from, through and promised all the stuff

that they were going to be performing on.

So, and finally, what they, they finally found their use

for 5G, which is FWA wireless home internet.

That was 12 years ago.

There was not even one mention of that.

I looked and all of the press, nobody ever said,

let's use 5G spectrum to do home internet.

Nobody made that claim.

Nobody thought that was a good idea.

It's still not a good idea.

We're using these very valuable mid-range spectrum bands

for people's home broadband.

When most of the places they're competing,

there's a wired, there's wired alternative,

which is so much more efficient

than using spectrum to do that.

Are they adequate?

Do they work? Yes.

People can get one, 200 megabits

and they're not a bad product.

Their, their sellers point is that they're cheap.

They're, you know, you get them as cheap as $30 a month.

So, but, but they're just sucking up all the spectrum.

And that leads to the, that leads to the 6G hype.

Well, before you go there, even, the other thing is that

when they did, even when you do FWA,

a one thing that no one counted on was LEO.

And that is actually a result of beamforming, right?

That's actually because somebody got beamforming to work.

It just wasn't the cell people.

So yeah, so, you know, before when you had GeoSync,

the satellite was so high and the delay was so long

and the jitter was so bad, you just really,

like, don't even bother with this stuff, right?

For anything, for anything near real time, at all.

But now with LEO, it's not that much worse

than your local cell phone tower.

And so it's kind of eating the FWA space as well.

Well, and look out 10 years from now,

it's going to kill the FWA space

because they're going to blow them away at speed.

Yeah, the next generation of satellites

is going to be way more powerful.

And so they're not going to be delivering 90 megabits anymore.

They're going to be delivering 500, 600 gigabit.

And when they get laser working in space,

oh, it's even going to be better for the lay in jitter

than what we have in there.

Yeah, so they're going to get their jitter

and latency way down on the satellites

and they're going to get their speeds way up.

And now, as long as there's no competition for that,

if they keep charging 120 dollars a month,

that's their weakness.

But they're going to bring those prices down

when they really wanted to rule the world

because they're going to be able to do it.

And they don't charge 120 in Africa today.

They selectively price by the company.

We pay the full price here.

Yeah, yeah.

So anyway, so keep going to 60.

I just wanted to point out that that was yet another factor

in the FWA stuff.

So now we're back to the same spot.

So now, you know, we're five years into 5G.

These cycles are about 10 years

to go from one generation to the next.

So five years from now, we should start seeing

the very first of the 6G stuff, right?

Now we're starting to see the hype.

In fact, the White House put out a document two weeks ago

that said we have a 6G war with China.

They actually used race.

They said we're at a 6G race with China.

It's like, wait a minute.

This looks really familiar.

And they didn't explain why, but we are in one.

I have no idea why.

Because we have, overall, this country now

has way better broadband than we did 10, 12 years ago.

Everyone's got every, I don't care what you're on.

What was your, I'm on cable company.

I think at 10 years ago, my speeds were either 30

or 60 megabits.

And now I have a gigabit on my cable company.

I mean, we've all gotten these giant increases

in capability just over a 10 years span.

I don't know why all of a sudden we have this crisis

where we need 6G, but we've started the hype.

Now, again, this hype is coming for the exact same reason.

They want more frequency.

But now they don't want it for 6G.

They want it for FWA.

They want to go get another 10, 20, 30 million customers

on this very lucrative new product that they have.

And they need a lot of spectrum to do that, which

has nothing to do with the normal uses of a wireless network.

But that's what this is all about.

The funny thing about it is they already won.

The FCC already set up side 800 megahertz of mid-range spectrum

that has to go to auction.

And they're going to have to go robbing very useful bands

that other people already have.

They're going to have to dip into the Wi-Fi.

They're going to have to dip into CBRS just to come up

with 800.

And these are all bad.

That they're going to take some of these things away.

A few of the ones are going to take away not so bad.

I mean, there's two different bands assigned

to self-driving cars, a failure.

We go ahead and get rid of those.

I don't know who watches the thing.

We might get a whole bunch of angry emails from folks

who think that's still useful, but because I run into them

once in a while.

They're going to like, no, we're going to make that work.

No, we're not because there's four or five other technologies

that cars can talk to each other with don't require

spectrums.

Yes.

And exactly.

Even if they do, they're still LEO.

Even if they do, they're still Wi-Fi is so blanketed

in urban areas that we don't really

need a set of side spectrum to do it.

So you're saying they're giving away 800,

what did you say, 800 K, or 800 K?

They hit our mega-moves spectrum.

And so they're putting it up for auction,

but the cell companies are going to win it all.

It's going to only go to cell companies,

because no one else can beat them at an auction.

And so it's being taken from CBMRA, you said, right?

Well, it's going to be taken between about 900 megahertz

and about maybe six and a half gigahertz.

And that sweet range, which is worse cellular,

is really good.

And that range of spectrum, the FCC,

has to come up with 800 megahertz of bandwidth

to put up for auction.

It's already used for something else to do.

I was going to say that's going to actually be hard,

because that is very hard.

Yeah.

That's where everything is.

Yeah, most radar systems are at 1.0 gigahertz.

Exactly.

2 gig microwave systems are right in that range.

Like, everything is in there.

And at the same time, we're trying to use those spectrums

for more satellite stuff.

They're talking about rating stuff for weather satellites.

Like, no, do not rate a pan with these for weather satellites.

I don't know what this government has against weather satellites,

but they seem to not like them.

I know it's like, no, we've got to like weather satellites.

I'd also like the radar at my local airport to work,

I think.

I do too.

Very much so.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

They're going to have a really hard time finding that,

because there's none of this that's not used.

I say that again, I laughed about the one band for cars,

because it's really not in use.

So it's like, yeah, but that's only a one tiny little slice

of that.

I think that's like 60 or 80 megahertz.

So there are some stuff that they can grab.

They're going to kick the military off of a bunch of it.

I don't know that I want the military to get kicked off

with this stuff either.

It's like, we kind of like them to have stuff that works for them,

too.

Right.

Are they going to impact amateur radio?

Because I would think they would.

That's a bit high-frequency for amateur radio.

Yeah, no, that's mostly below that.

But who knows?

Because they're going to move all these people somewhere else.

That's your thing.

Where are they going to move those other people?

I.

You know, it's my borrowing that they're,

and this was Congress now.

This wasn't the FCC.

I'm not a giant fan of a lot of the things the FCC does,

but they've always been pretty decent with spectrum allocation.

They listen to both sides, and they act as a neutral arbiter,

and they've mostly decided.

Most of their decisions have been good.

They've always had a little bit of a bias

about spectrum sharing versus operating licenses,

and little licenses and big licenses.

But they kind of got the bands right.

They really did over the years.

They have not done a terrible job of it.

And what we do isn't sort of in sync with the rest of the world,

which is kind of important that the gear you buy

from other countries will work here,

because we don't really manufacture any of it.

So it was nice.

So much tuning you could do on a transmitter Friday.

Well, now we're going to rearrange all of our stuff.

So this doesn't make any sense.

But that order came down in the big, beautiful bill.

And it's very obvious that AT&T and those guys

got that language inserted at the last minute.

That was a bill that the people vote on it

said they hadn't read it.

I mean, they couldn't have.

It was this thick, and it all got forced out at the end.

So they got this thing in there, so they won that battle.

But yet they're still lobbying.

It's like, well, you're already won.

Why are you still lobbying?

They're still lobbying, because I guess they

want even more spectrum, I guess I don't know.

But we still have this 6G race.

So it's more of the same.

So we have this hype starting.

It's five years ahead of the possible first introduction

of a 6G technology, which is on its face

a very funny thing to say, because their first introductions

that they will call 6G are going to be

to try to finish off some of the stuff from 5G

that they never got around to.

But how much of this, too, is just straight marketing, right?

What's all marketing?

Yeah, I need to sell new phones.

Like, you know, everybody has phones,

and the rate at which they're selling them is slowing down.

And for instance, the other day, I just bought a new laptop.

Well, a new tablet or whatever.

And you can get it with a 5G subscription,

but it's $500 extra plus the subscription.

Like, why would I ever do that?

Why would I spend?

I have Wi-Fi.

Why am I doing this to myself?

I mean, where would you have to live

that that would sound like a good idea?

Yeah.

I mean, I guess you have to travel.

Yeah, well, that's, you know,

what are you going to travel with your tower?

I mean, the answer is, yeah.

But I mean, are you putting it in the back of your SUV

and taking it places every week?

Just seems crazy.

Yeah, I mean, if you work at home,

and you absolutely are shut down for making money

when your broadband's down, it's not bad to have a backup.

But I have a backup for that.

It's called this.

Yeah.

I mean, I know.

We had Hurricane Elaine.

I worked on my cell phone for four weeks

before the cell towers came back here.

It worked just fine.

I mean, before the broad, my charter came back.

These guys were back up and running in four days,

when you look at what happened to the towers,

this was an amazing job they did.

Now, they didn't get all of them up,

but they got the ones up that served where I live.

Some of them took on a lot of months to fix,

but because some places, the roads were gone.

It's kind of hard to fix the cell tower

when the road is gone.

But the point is, you don't need a computer with that

because you always have this.

You always have your cell phone with you.

If that $500 and that subscription work

so did your cell phone.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, it's a need we don't have.

Now, here's the funny thing about all this,

because you mentioned satellites.

Nobody has been willing and survey after survey,

marketing survey after marketing survey.

Nobody's willing to pay extra for the speed,

the latency, none of those things.

No, 64% of US households said they would pay extra

to get satellite or satellite texting.

Now, they won't really, once they find out what it cost

and how crappy it is.

But the point is, everybody runs into places every month

where their cell phone doesn't work.

If you go anywhere except your house, there's dead spots, right?

And we're a generation where you can't wait three minutes.

So I need to have that satellite, right?

They don't realize it won't work in your car.

It doesn't work when you're at a house.

It's like you're gonna have to go out in the backyard

to snow to get your text off, but so be it.

So it won't really be 60%.

But that's the first thing we've seen in a 10 years

where a whole lot of people said they're willing to pay for it.

That has way more promise than all the stuff

they've done with the 5G

because nobody's paid anything extra for 5G.

Nobody.

They never got anybody to give them extra money every month

because the 5G networks are better.

So that's where their business plan really fell down.

And in fact, cell prices have dropped about 30%.

I was just saying, yeah, people are paying less.

A lot, quite a bit less.

So they've gone the wrong direction instead of up.

No, if they would have gotten every car

to give them a $10 a month subscription, man,

that was a gold mine, but they didn't, right?

The satellite guys, we're gonna do a $3, $4, $5 a month subscription

to be able to text the satellites.

And you're gonna use 20 or 30 cents worth.

It's almost all profit.

They're gonna clean up on that product.

Wow.

And young people will all buy it.

You watch, young people will all do the $5 add on.

Care and take it.

So, you know, and that money doesn't go to the carriers.

That money goes to the satellite guys.

Again, satellite, after all these years,

satellites gonna be the one who found a way

to make money off of this idea.

So I think that's hilarious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And because of a technology

that sell people couldn't get working, honestly.

That's what even makes it funnier.

It's like you tried to do beamforming, you failed.

The satellite people succeeded.

Well, it's a different environment, right?

It's much easier to beam form an Earthbound antenna

to reach a satellite that's moving in the sky

than it is to try to beam form off the cell phone tower

to a cell device that's driving down the highways

60 miles an hour.

Like those are completely different classes of problems.

Well, they are, but the satellite would sounds complex to me.

Plus, they don't really beam form to you.

They kind of beam form to hold pretty large neighborhoods.

Yeah, yeah, they do.

So they have to kind of hit your area.

But you know, majority of cell phone users

are sitting still in one place.

They're not moving.

So it's like, okay, so you can't beam form the cars.

Why aren't you beam form into me?

Yeah, yeah.

Right, so I like, you know, I've been sitting here

in my desk now for three hours.

Beam form to me, you know where I'm at?

So the fact that they can't make that work

is they can't make that work.

And the cell tower hasn't moved now in 40 years.

I'm pretty sure they know where that is.

Yeah, it's a little bit bad.

And it's not like any of that's new technology.

I mean, seriously, beam form has been around.

I mean, when I was in the year.

Well, it's been around 30 years at least.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's probably longer.

That's 30 years ago, I remember it's a,

I'm sure it's older than that, yeah.

Well, in radio systems, you go back to the,

you go back to the year in 2029 and those types of systems

for doing airfield, right?

And all the ILS systems are using beam forming

back in the 60s.

Right, yeah, you're right.

So that's way back, yeah.

Way back.

So that's crazy.

So now 5G has a bunch of new claims.

First off, this one kills me.

They're talking about day to day guaranteeing day to day

speeds of at least 100 megabits.

It's like, wait a minute.

We've already beaten the hell out of that number.

But that's what's in the specification.

Believe it or not, that's what's in the 60s specification.

Now, they're also talking about going back

to the very high frequencies.

Now they're talking about not one gigabit, two gigabits.

They're talking about speeds between 50 and 100 gigabits.

There's not enough spectrum in the world to do.

They're going to have to join together like all the spectrum

there is to give you 100 gigabit connection.

And then the back hall network would be incredible if I had.

Well, yes, yes, but there's not enough spectrum bands

to tie together to do that.

They've just did some recent tests

where they were doing 5 gigabit connections on wireless.

And they had to tie together like seven different bands

of spectrum.

In fact, as most people don't own that many different bands

of spectrum, even the carriers.

It's like, were you going to find the spectrum to do that with?

And on top of that, what do we need it for?

We've had point-to-point microwaves for a long time.

Yeah.

That can do that much bandwidth.

And if one of them's not enough, put up three of them.

This is not hard technology to do.

This is crazy.

And now we have LiDAR and all sorts of other things

that look to have a whole lot of promise to do it

without all this crazy wireless stuff.

So that's their first big claim is we're going to get way faster.

But again, they're going back to these super high frequencies,

which are just not real world-friendly.

They don't like rain.

They don't like fog.

They don't even like when the wind blows and there's dust

in the air.

And the high frequencies are just very,

and they're real world pain-and-ass touchy.

They're just not great things to use in the real world, right?

So but they're making these claims.

They're never going to do it.

They'll do it as a test every once in a while

to kind of look what we did here in the lab, right?

So they're talking about, they're back to this idea of small cells.

They said, they're going to reduce the cost so much

that they're going to cover the entire world with 6G.

Everybody's going to have it.

So somehow they're going to get it to the royal areas now.

That one is beyond me, but that's literally

part of the hype now that they're sell it it on.

And it's like, so are you going to build more royal cell towers?

Because there's no one who lives there

like there hasn't been for the last 50 years.

If you couldn't justify a 3G or 4G tower,

how are you going to justify a 6G tower, right?

So that one I don't get at all, but that's

a big part of their claim is it's going to be so low cost

that it's going to do it.

We're now talking, you're going to love this number.

The specs as latency between 0.1 and 1 milliseconds.

It's not even possible on fiber.

No, it's really not about the best you can do as 3.

So that's not at all probably.

You can't clock a packet onto a circuit in 0.1 milliseconds.

No, you can't get it out of the chip onto the thing.

No, so that's crazy.

But that's what it says.

If you go read the 6G specs, these are really fun reading.

They're also, again, talking massive numbers of devices

again, which is they never did the first time.

So that's a 5G claim coming back around again.

And they're now claiming IoT again,

because they're going to use those massive number

of connections to do smart city, smart cars,

environmental marketing, agricultural sensors,

like, wait, those were all 5G claims.

It's like, but they're back in there again.

So they're trying that one again.

Nobody wanted it the first time.

The problem you have with all those things

is it's not affordable.

The actual agricultural sensor to get a SIM card,

and it is way too expensive, and it uses enough power

that it's really hard to keep the darn thing lit.

So you don't want to have to put up an expensive solar power.

You want the real little cheap, tiny solar thing.

So that means you need a very low.

You need something to just blips out data now.

And so cellular is not the right technology for that.

So this is crazy.

But that's all back in there again.

So we're going to do all that again.

And now we're going to go one better,

because now we are going to have way better advanced stuff.

Not the 3D glasses.

We're going to have holograms everywhere,

and just all this crazy advanced stuff,

because 6G has so much bandwidth

that they're going to support every possible advanced technology

you could ever dream of.

Again, going, but I have fiber.

Isn't that good enough to do that?

It's like, but who needs this, right?

They did not.

No.

Good news, Tom, is they did not mention remote operations.

It's just time.

But did they do the internet of smells?

I don't know.

Yeah.

Actually, I think they did.

They call that haptic sensing, right?

I think that's the term for it.

So haptic sensing is in one of those.

I believe that's what that term means.

So they are talking the internet of smells.

Yes.

No, no, thanks.

Yeah, I pretty much make all the smells I ever need, I think.

I do not want to be watching a movie

and have the smells of Vignorean London coming out of the street.

Or even the steam locomotive driving by smell.

I don't really need to smell that.

I can imagine it without the paint going to be in there.

You know, I'm certainly not watching the nature channel, that's for sure.

So, Eddie, we're back to this.

It's honestly, it's the same old list.

And somehow they got, it's going to be massively more energy efficient

and massively cheaper.

And they don't talk about how they're going to do that.

I don't know what makes any new technology cheaper than the old one.

It's hard to picture that these new site or technologies

will be cheaper for 6G than the RF or 5G, right?

Yeah, if you're going up frequency range,

it actually takes a lot more power into 5 whatever gig range

than it does to push something at like, you know, whatever.

But no, this stuff is mostly going to concentrate on from 6 to about 20.

So, this is a lot of this stuff is going to be 12 and 16 gigahertz.

That's what they're talking about using for this stuff.

So, that makes no sense.

No, it doesn't.

For those listening who don't know this, the general rule of thumb is,

is you lose essentially a logarith, it's a logarithic scale,

you lose half your power every wavelength.

And every time you go up frequency, your wavelength gets increasingly shorter.

So, like, if I'm sending something at 10 meters,

I don't even know what frequency that is,

a 10 or 40 meter wavelength, like, I push 100 watts behind it,

and I'm still at a watt, you know, like, way out there,

in distance, if I'm pushing it at 6 gigahertz or 12 gigahertz,

oh my gosh, like, you lose all the power in a city block.

Yeah, exactly.

It's literally that short of a distance.

They found that those can you hear me Verizon things,

they had to put a cell site every 1,000 feet to make those work,

which means they only were carrying 500 feet.

So, you had to be within 500 feet of a cell site.

Yeah, that's crazy.

That's really close.

Yeah, it really is.

Wow, so, yeah.

So, I don't know.

I think I felt like we've kind of beat this one today.

Yeah, that's pretty much everything there is to say about it.

But we're right, but it just, it's filler like deja vu,

because all of this has been talked about before.

But in this country, 10 or 12 years is forever going,

everybody forgot, so it's fresh again, etc.

Except for the people like us that were annoyed the first time,

it's new.

Wow.

So, any other questions, Tom, before we drop off?

No, no.

Okay, good.

Anything you want to say, Doug, before we wrap up and...

No, I appreciate let me talk about this,

because this has been bugging me for a year.

This is one of those topics that just annoy the hell to me,

because, you know, the accelerator of business

has come down to marketing based on price.

Plain and simple, there's too much supply for the demand,

and it's nothing more than price horrors and packaging horrors.

To talk about the need for these new technologies makes no sense,

because they're not going to make it any better.

Yeah.

I don't really care of 6G.

I already increased from 100 to 300 megabits,

and I don't care if they now increase it to 3G.

I don't need it anymore than I needed it at 100 megabits,

so I don't understand what this is all about,

and I don't get it.

Yeah.

And it worked, tech guys, it's like,

if we don't like it, who the hell is going to like that?

Yeah, exactly.

All right, well, Doug, where can people find you

and get in touch if they want to or follow your work?

Yeah, the easiest way to find me is on pots and pans by CCG.

My email address is on there, so I'm easy to find.

My company is CCG consulting, so if you need engineering

or business market plans, look me up,

so that's what we do for a living, so.

But I think I'm in my 13th or 14th year

of writing a blog every day, so it's about topics,

I've probably written about 5G at least a dozen times

over the years, once a year at least, so.

Yeah.

Well, we'll get you back on.

I mean, this is a fun conversation.

We'll get you back on.

This was a fun conversation, thank you.

And Tom, say your word, go ahead.

LinkedIn.

So, okay.

So, that's Tom, Tom's entire social media

spiel, if you're interested, is the word, LinkedIn.

All right, I'm Russ White.

If I'm here at the hedge rule 11.tech on LinkedIn,

occasionally on X, whatever, whatever.

I'm actually pretty easy to find.

We know we live in an attention driven economy,

so your attention is what we value here,

and we thank you for listening all the way

to the bitter end of this episode of the hedge,

and we will catch you next time.

All right, so, that's it for today.

See you next time.

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