The 5G Opportunity

When leaders and politicians misunderstand business development and the innovation process it’s easy for them to screw up trade and interfere with business development.

Imagine yourself, a century ago, a major carriage maker entertaining a politician and telling him cars will be bad for the city (right for the wrong reasons). Then, the politician decides to ban cars from the city, or the country. As a result no infrastructure or innovation to support the increasingly efficient automobile is developed. After a few years the cities and countries who have supported the automobile have the infrastructure, support, and a massive competitive lead. In addition they would have dramatically stimulated their economies by creating jobs for people to build roads, garages, gas stations, and trained mechanics to learn and progressively innovate.

Picture the same with a more relevant lantern oil company executive protesting electricity being installed and delivered.

In 2001 JAPAN introduced 3G. AT&T, Verizon, bell and Rogers licensed it shortly after and hired people to install towers switches, chips and to enable Apple to develop the iPhone, it resulted in hundreds of billions of GDP in North America.

Today Huawei is the leader in 5G - a technology that will transform both communications and commerce in ways yet to imagine.  Politicians don't seem to understand what it is, how it will be implemented or the limited role of Huawei.

In the year 2000, picture what you and others were doing on the subway. The concept that everyone would be staring down at their phones was unimaginable. That was just 7 years before the first iPhone was launched.

In 1999 Time Warner the biggest cable company was rolling out Road Runner. A DSL type service for home internet. They had 200,000 customers nationwide and hoped to grow it within a couple of years to 2 million. This was a service that often took several minutes to download a single webpage. (For reference a decade later in 2009 a 20 Mbps speed was fast and it took almost 15 minutes to access a Netflix movie on a high speed connection at home). 

In 2000, at our software development company we restricted developers to only working on available technologies, not future ones.

Our clients also demanded that what we developed for them matched what their customers had available.

Today our developers are restricted to creating technology and content for North American customers they can access now. We do not have the resources to build technology (though I have frequently made that mistake before), for some future technology that may be available.

When politicians decide to ban 5G from outsiders, they will destroy job growth at companies like AT&T and others who will not be installing 5G antennas and supporting technology until they are actually available on their network.

Not only this, but the impact and consequences are potentially far greater.

We used the Auto and electric examples above for perspective, apply it here, spectrum possibly 100 X faster bandwidth affects jobs for everyone who works in Hollywood and everyone in every version if Silicon Valley and all of us who consume and use the products and content.

Picture, a senior Intel or some other multi millionaire American LTE chip executive trying to secure or land more LTE business in the face of the impending 5G delivery from someone else.

Another thought to consider: say this multi millionaire tech executive is entertaining a senior politician (or just paying a lobbyist) and explains to the politician how 5G from outsiders is a threat. Keep in mind the tech executive can make up virtually any story and it will not be decipherable by the politician or the public, and certainly not by the news broadcasters. Where do you imagine are the business executive’s motivations?

In 2014 there were about 15 million app developers in the world compared to one to two million only 7 years earlier.

Roughly 30 percent of the developers are in Asia, 30 in North America, and 30 in Europe, with the remaining balance elsewhere. These app and software developers who support and enable the them, who will create tens of millions of jobs to support their function and utilization. They cannot develop it if it is not available here.

This articulation of app development is of course only a snapshot of what 3G and 4G enabled along with a faster broadband.

5G is up to 100 times faster than 4G.

The rest of the world is installing 5G and along with it the creativity and possibilities that come with it not to mention the millions of jobs many likely and possible in industries we can not imagine.

It isn’t only companies, but entire industries that will be created in countries launching 5G. This in turn, will create a mammoth competitive advantage for those companies.

How do technicians who advance their skills installing new networks in the USA feel about the threat of lost jobs as networks delay as they wait for new technology? “A widely cited 2016 report by consulting firm Accenture estimates that the construction and maintenance of 5G networks in the US could result in 3 million jobs and a $500 billion boost to GDP. But would all those jobs end up overseas if China is the first country with a nationwide 5G network?”

The wait for local companies to build 5G could take years. 1G was introduced in 1979, 2G in 1991, 3G in 1998, 4G in 2008. It may take years for North American companies to launch an equivalent of 5G.

Companies cannot afford to pay for innovation in a technology that is not available. You cannot conduct user testing or experiential design on something you cannot properly experience in everyday life. You cannot get a stable hand to imagine being a mechanic.

Many software developers failed to evolve with the mobile era.

The politicians should learn that people like, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg, Sergy & Larry at Google and Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan appear to be both better equipped and more interested in actually protecting their data and their customers than the government.

If someone cannot easily explain how a packet travels across the net I am not particularly interested in their opinion on risks.

Explaining how data requests leave your phone or computer, connect to POPs and then content, are examined for verification, and are then retrieved it is a pretty rudimentary process with massive controls imposed along the trail by each participant in the journey and an entire sub industry employed just to employ security on these journeys.

Too many of our tech titans are too busy bathing in their billions to be concerned with the future of their companies - like many companies of the past who sat marveling at their own glory. Examples include the founders of Netscape who wandered off with their money and their company died, other companies, including Compaq, Alta Vista, Yahoo, AOL suffered similar fates. The future belongs to future technologies, not dinosaurs clinging to the past

The pace of change will never be as slow as it is right now. Lets hope Justin Trudeau doesn't get snowed by Mike Pence on how 5G works. Lets get moving 50 to 100 times faster.