The rush to cash in ... who wins, who loses
Interest is acute at all major telecom equipment manufacturers, from Ericsson to Motorola, and champions include every telecom company that thinks it may have guessed wrong in the GSM, TDMA, CDMA wars. BellSouth, for example, is slipping into a GSM ghetto, but it dreams of deploying smart radios that can play any popular standard and allow it to filch (i.e., service) CDMA customers. Also a TDMA orphan, AT&T could buy cheap, all-purpose base stations that allow it to sell any favored brand of service. Ericsson is using the technology to create indoor GSM base stations that can fit in a closet, and if worst comes to worst (as it will), Ericsson will also offer CDMA, perhaps initially as an overlay for data.
By drastically enhancing efficiency in the use of spectrum, broadband digital radios will lend new force to the industry's move up the frequency ladder toward bandwidth abundance. They enable the seamless convergence of the cellular band not only with the PCS band but also with an array of other applications such as the low-powered ISM (industrial, scientific, and medical) bands at 900 megahertz used by Baran's Metricom startup, the 24-gigahertz band of Associated Communications, the 28-gigahertz band of Local Multipoint Distribution Service (LMDS) used by CellularVision for wireless cable, and the 38-gigahertz band of WinStar. This up-spectrum bias assures the continued success of companies pressing the frontiers of microwave integrated circuits, low-noise amplifiers, power amplifiers, and other devices that function in the gigahertz.
Going over the cliff of costs, the industry can introduce radically new products. We have just undergone the epoch of the personal computer, climaxing in 1996 with PCs outselling TVs in units for the first time. We are now entering a new era when a new form of PC will be dominant. It may not do Windows, but it will do doors. Tetherlessly transcending most of the limitations of the current PC era, the most common PC will be a digital cellular phone.
It will be a dataphone, as faithful readers of these pages will know. It will be as portable as your watch and as personal as your wallet. It will recognize speech and convert it to text. It will plug into a slot in your car and help you navigate streets. It will consult electronic yellow pages and give directions to the nearest gas station, restaurant, police headquarters, or hotel. It will collect your news and your mail and, if you wish, it will read them to you. It will conduct transactions and load credit into a credit chip on a smart card, which can be used like cash. It can pay your taxes, or help you avoid them, or soothe you with soft music as you do your calculus homework. It will take digital pictures and project them onto a wall or screen, or dispatch them to any other dataphone or computer. It will have an Internet address and a Java run-time engine that allows it to execute any applet or program written in that increasingly universal language. Or it will dock in a more powerful machine to perform more demanding functions. It will link to any compatible display, monitor, keyboard, storage device, or other peripheral through infrared pulses or radio frequencies.
And, oh yes, it will unlock your front door or car door, open your garage door, or even play Jim Morrison songs, if you are old enough to care for those swinging Doors of the 1960s (amazingly enough, my teenage daughters do).
Sorry, though, Nokia, your model 9000, which comes closest today to this new machine, will not cut it, at least in the United States, because it is based on Europe's increasingly obsolescent GSM standard. Also offering the right form factor but the wrong access standard is the IBM- BellSouth Simon, which is based on the U.S. analog cellular system (AMPS) or CDPD (cellular digital packet data). The most common PC will not be a GSM or CDPD device, because it will soon need to provide bandwidth on demand while draining the lowest possible power, whenever it is not plugged in. Thus the first PC of the new paradigm will probably have to be CDMA, built from the bottom up to provide bandwidth on demand, according to TCP/IP Internet standards, at a handful of milliwatts of communications power.
Among the companies soon to supply such machines, resembling the popular U.S. Robotics Pilot, are Sony, Qualcomm, Lucky-Goldstar, and Samsung. In cooperation with Alcatel, the European giant, which has just announced a CDMA program, Qualcomm base stations will soon contain a GSM link that can allow such CDMA dataphones to tie seamlessly to GSM systems in Europe. This will permit European carriers to use CDMA to expand capacity without jeopardizing their GSM customers.
Inspiring the Baran vision of wireless is the spectronic paradigm, in which most of the industry, from personal computers to cellular phones, moves on into the microwaves and is discussed more in terms of megahertz and gigahertz than in the usual metrics of mips and bits. The spectronic paradigm tends to favor the manufacturers of gallium arsenide, indium phosphide, and silicon germanium devices. Even as Philips and other firms push silicon bipolar chips toward microwave frequencies, the industry will move to higher domains of spectrum where gallium arsenide and indium phosphide tend to prevail. For the power amplifiers needed in every cell phone, gallium arsenide is superior to all the silicon variants. Pushed by the advance of the spectronics paradigm, the current ride of Vitesse, Anadigics, TriQuint, and other gallium arsenide innovators is likely to continue.
The major long-term winner is silicon germanium. Pioneered by IBM fellow Bernard Meyerson and tested and sampled by Analog Devices, silicon germanium combines much of the manufacturability of silicon with the high-frequency operation of gallium arsenide. IBM has recently contracted with Hughes's communications division to develop silicon germanium microwave devices.
As the technology advances, the broadband radios will be ideal to offer video teleconferencing, World Wide Web, and other image-rich wireless content, including CDMA bandwidth on demand. Data, not voice, will be the critical application. As people brandish their dataphones around the globe, linking to convenient displays through IR connectors, users can break out into a tetherless telecosm where they can work or play, study or pray, anywhere they go.
A major supplier of wireless in Third World countries may be NextWave, the aggressive CDMA vendor for PCS, now preparing an IPO. As a "carrier's carrier" providing only infrastructure and network services and leaving the sales and marketing to the locals, NextWave will join its complementary sister company in space, Globalstar, at the heart of a CDMA fabric of culture-independent worldwide communications. Watch Motorola's obsolescent Iridium, with its exclusive spectrum requirements and its effort to bypass all local infrastructure, sink like a stone.
The new paradigm of wireless joins Baran's two key inspirations-Internet and smart radio-to burst the chains of geography. People who want leading-edge computers and communications can get them wherever they may live. Using Globalstar, Teledesic, and other low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite systems that will be available as the smart radios roll out, students in the Third World can study or work in the First World. Teachers and entrepreneurs in the First World can serve and employ people around the globe. Imagined gaps between the information rich and poor will collapse in an infoscape equally accessible to all.
Baran has not spent his life in speculation or prophecy. Living at the heart of Silicon Valley in a walled and radiantly flowered community a few minutes down Middlefield Road from Netscape, Baran sits at the epicenter of a series of entrepreneurial creations. His home-office PCs and Power Macs are linked to the Internet through the Palo Alto Cable Co-op by cable modems from Com21, which he founded and now chairs. To run multimedia programming down twisted-pair wires, the regional Bell operating companies now propose to use discrete multitone technology (DMT), the basic technology conceived by Baran for Telebit and now the leading digital subscriber loop (DSL) method, taken up and perfected by Amati Communications, just down the road in San Jose. StrataCom, recently purchased by Cisco for $4 billion, began as a leveraged buyout spinoff from Baran's Packet Technologies.
Metricom, a Baran company with investments from Bill Gates, among others, offers wireless Internet services through Baran's neighborhood and at campuses across the country. Baran's company, Equatorial Communications, introduced spread spectrum commercially as a way of delivering information from satellites below the noise floor required by the FCC. Spread spectrum is now, in the form of the CDMA of Qualcomm and Globalstar, the world's fastest- growing communications technology. And it is the basis for the flourishing, unlicensed wireless systems, such as Metricom, operating at less than one watt of transmit power in the ISM (industrial, scientific, medical) bands.
Collectively, the visionary concepts of this once-myopic and still-modest engineer offer the foundation of an effort to reinvent the Internet in an increasingly wireless form and reshape the communications policies of the nation and the world.
http://www.gildertech.com/public/telecosm_series/inventing.html link now dead)
The following article, INVENTING THE INTERNET AGAIN, was first published in Forbes, June 2, 1997. It is a portion of George Gilder's book, Telecosm, which waspublished in 1997 by Simon & Schuster, as a sequel to Microcosm, published in 1989 and Life After Television published by Norton in 1992. Reposted by permission.