Wi-Fi

PHILADELPHIA–It was a full-on Wi-Fi binge at the Philly Tech It Out program here on 8/21, with one common refrain: When it comes to Wi-Fi, we’re still in the very, very early stages.

“We know it’s new and nifty, and know it adds value, but where it’s going to go is anybody’s bet,” said morning keynoter Ken Falkenstein, VP/Wireless Technology for Comcast. He added, for the benefit of the appreciable student presence: “You will have a marvelous career trying to get rid of the wires.”

Other highlights of the “Wi-Fi Everywhere” day, put on by the Philadelphia chapter of Women In Cable & Telecommunications:

Greyhound’s decision on its 100^th anniversary to put Wi-Fi spigots throughout its short-term rides reversed what had been the company’s smallest earner — and they can thank the millennial generation for it. “They gave us something we think we should have,” said Blaire Ballin, a senior at Ramapo College and Comcast summer intern.

Speaking of millennials: They’re a demanding bunch. Earlier this summer, she accidentally over-ran her data plan. Yes, she could’ve paid for more. But then again: “I have a hard time understanding that I have to pay for anything. Luxuries should just be there.”

(Just to bring your eyebrows back down: This same young woman also led a project that enabled a community of Guatemalan women to sell their woven goods over Wi-Fi.)

Sexy Wi-Fi numbers: Comcast expects to light up 8 million Wi-Fi “homespots” by year-end, calling the decision to install boxes comprised of both cable modem and Wi-Fi radio “the hockey stick moment.”

Time Warner Cable’s Wi-Fi footprint supports 17 million sessions per month; about a fifth of them come in from roaming partners, like Boingo. (Last summer, Time Warner was the first U.S. operator to partner with Boingo on Wi-Fi roaming — industrially known as HotSpot 2.0, with a consumer brand of Passpoint.)

The city’s regional rail line supports about 270,000 Wi-Fi sessions per month, with a load of 2.5 Terabytes of data transfer, said Bill Zebrowski, Senior Director of Information Technology for SEPTA, who quipped: “That’s a lot of Walking Dead.”

At the 2014 World Cup, in Brazil, 30% of the people sitting in the 241,033-seat Maracana Stadium got a connectivity fix over Wi-Fi, moving 5.6 terabytes of data over 217 access points, noted executives from Ruckuss Wireless.

Crazy stuff that’s coming: Wi-Fi that recharges your batteries. (What!?) Well, sort of. It’s called “wireless backscatter,” and is in the academic stages now as a way to make battery-less the sensors of the Internet of Things.

In closing: Focusing on one tech subject for an entire day takes guts! It worked. Kudos, WICT Philadelphia, for an outstanding event.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

Dead reckoning. Unless you’re a pilot, you probably haven’t heard the term in a while.  Refresher: It’s a navigational term, used to establish where you are, and where you’re going, using the last known (“deduced,” which is the “ded” of “dead reckoning”) information about your location.

Charles Lindbergh dead reckoned his way over the Atlantic to Paris, in 1927, using its basic formula  — distance equals speed, multiplied by time.

And now, it gains a new, kind of odd, prefix: Pedestrian dead reckoning. It’s a way of using Wi-Fi and the sensor-enabled stuff in our gadgets to find other stuff, indoors — like how your Garmin used to navigate you to physical addresses, outdoors. (Before your phone’s map app did.)

In short, pedestrian dead reckoning — abbreviated “PDR” — is a little bit GPS (global positioning system), a little bit Wi-Fi, a little bit accelerometer, and a little bit magnetometer. (No country. No rock-n-roll.)

Refresher: GPS works over satellite, with predictable results once you drive into the parking garage. Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi. Accelerometers measure, well, acceleration. They’re what’s inside your FitBit, Fuelband, or other digital pedometer. Magnetometers inform your phone’s compass app.

Put it all together, with an app on top, and suddenly Costco could offer a “mobile butler,” that senses when you’ve entered the store, and when you’ve stayed still for a time. It could ask: Can I help you find something? Paper towels? Follow me — I’ll show you the way. Then your sensor-equipped gadget (meaning your phone) and app shows you the way.

That’s but one example in what has to be dozens of use cases that blend Wi-Fi, pedometer and compass. Pedestrian Dead Reckoning: It’s coming, and it’ll either save us time, or drive us nuts. Maybe both!

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

Say you’re mingling in a room full of people, enjoying a tasty beverage. It’s a polite room of people who listen, responding during pauses. (So you’re in Canada!)

Out of nowhere, a mass of large, loud people enters the room, shouting instructions to each other. It’s like they’re oblivious to anyone who isn’t them.

In wireless protocols, the Canadians are WiFi. The Large Louds are LTE.

Here’s what happens next: The Canadians still want to converse. Their only option? Talk louder. The volume in the room goes up, and up, and up. The loud people keep piling in the door, with no signs of leaving. Suddenly, it’s not such a good time anymore.

This is one way to think about a red-hot topic touching WiFi people, known as LTE-U. The “LTE” stands for Long Term Evolution, a term mobile carriers use for fast, wireless broadband. The “U” stands for “unlicensed.”

Consider: About 200 MHz of spectrum exists for WiFi transmissions, including the extra 100 MHz the FCC granted in March, in the 5 GHz band. Right now, that spectral slice is carrying 50 to 60 percent of the Internet’s traffic.

Mobile carriers, by contrast, maneuver their traffic over some 600 MHz of spectrum — licensed spectrum, meaning they paid for it. (Dearly.) Some two to three percent of the Internet’s traffic moves within it.

So, right off the bat, WiFi is moving 30x the load, in one-third the space. Which brings us to how WiFi works, and the fact that just because its spectral zone is unlicensed, doesn’t mean it’s unregulated.

WiFi is built for spectrum sharing. It waits to talk, and it adjusts its transmit power as part of a design goal that purposefully wants to be a good neighbor, all the time — partly because of regulations that govern things like transmit power and sharing.

LTE is different. For starters, it uses “tunneling protocols.” That means that when a device connects, a secret tunnel is instantly established between it, and the carrier’s LTE network. Each data packet is both encrypted and encapsulated; the only visible parts are the packet’s source (who am I?) and destination (where am I going?)

Meanwhile, the LTE “control plane” — the servers and software that handling signaling and routing — is ceaselessly talking, back and forth, making sure everything’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

Here’s the concern: That LTE traffic will deliberately dump into the unlicensed territories, offloading giant blobs of traffic that can’t see or hear what’s already there. Such as anything moving over WiFi.

Is this a real problem? Not yet. Could it be? Definitely. (O, Canada! We stand on guard for thee.)

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

Usually, the International CES serves up at least a few new buzzwords – last year, Samsung coined the “phablet,” to describe a device that’s half phone, half tablet. The “superphone” entered the tech lexicon, briefly, but never really stuck. Apparently it’s better to be “smart” than “super.”

This year, only one new term popped out of CES — but there’s plenty venturing out from the world of Wi-Fi. This week’s translation is a round-up of weird, overworked, and new tech lingo.

The new one from CES: “Ten-finger touch,” to describe large-scale tablets upon which you can use all 10 digits. (Not sure what happens if an 11^th finger ventures onto the screen.)

At CES, “ten finger touch” talk involved tablets the size of a coffee table.

The latest in overworked lingo: “Curation.” This one seems to show up as a classier twist on “aggregation.” Think of it in terms of news websites (industrial and mainstream), which populate themselves with summaries of stories researched and written by other news sites — often without attribution.

We used to call this plagiarism. Now, it’s “curated content.”

The new WiFi lingo: “SON,” which has nothing to do with male offspring (although it’s pronounced as such), and everything to do with “self organizing networks.” (Some also call them “self-optimizing networks.”)

Here’s why at some point we’ll need SONs: Because WiFi spectrum is largely unlicensed, meaning unmanaged, and more and more of our dumb stuff will want to jump onto it, to get smart.

SON is part of  “the Internet of Things,” which affixes sensors to our stuff, thus making it “smart.” At CES, the “Internet of Things”  showed up big time at the Zigbee Alliance, which serves the industry segment making low-power, low-cost radios (“the Clapper” is an early example; most of today’s home security systems use Zigbee.)

One Zigbee participant (and heavily Kickstarter-funded) outfit, “Smart Things,” characterized today’s times as the third phase of the Internet. Phase one was knowledge/search. Phase two was social. Now, we’re entering the physical Internet, which controls our formerly dumb stuff.

But back to “SON,” a cousin of machine-to-machine (“M2M”) computing and near field communications (“NFC”). It exists to coordinate between multiple radios, so that, say, your Skype call doesn’t get stepped on by your smart house. Because it turns out that Zigbee-based gear, WiFi, and lots of other stuff runs in the 2.4 GHz range. SON keeps WiFi’s many occupants clear of each other.

For me, any mention of “self organizing” is alluring. Like maybe a physical Internet with sensors to self-organize closets and junk drawers. That’d be good.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

Sometimes it’s worth it to stay until the bitter end. In this case, for a “What is Wi-Fi?” workshop, which ended at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon in a week that contained two back-to-back conventions – first CTAM Summit, then the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo.

Wi-Fi matters to cable providers for two reasons: One, as a way to make existing broadband customers more “sticky” by offering easy access to signal when on the go – doctor’s office, sporting event, train station. Two, for the potential revenues associated with helping other carriers (think mobile operators) to offload the huge volumes of data clogging their pipes.

This week’s translation attempts to condense that hour-and-a-half workshop, led by Jerry Patton, product manager / wireless network for Arris, and Daniel Howard, CTO of the SCTE. Here goes.

So: What’s new in Wi-Fi? “802.11 ac,” the latest shoptalk darling of Wi-Fi. In its sexier marketing finery, 802.11 ac goes by “Gigabit Wi-Fi.” So, theoretically, that means 1,000 Megabits per second. (What!) Compared to the fastest advertised broadband speed – 300 Mbps – that’s pretty zippy.

But hold on. Before going any further with Wi-Fi speeds, know that almost every number you hear is smaller or slower than it really is. There’s a physical rate, and then there’s an actual rate.

The physical rate is the “if all things are perfect” speed. In wireless (especially outdoors), things are never perfect.  Wireless access points are constantly besieged with noise. Impulse noise, ingress noise, spurious noise.

Actual throughput rates are typically 30-40% slower than what an access point may be capable of (physical rate), in perfect conditions. The rest is the overhead of re-sending whatever it is that got squelched by noise.

Here’s what to know about 802.11 ac: It works (only) in the 5 GHz band, which means that any “clients” (phones, tablets, laptops) equipped 2.4 GHz radios won’t work. (So far, only the Apple iPhone5 is plumbed with 802.11ac, but it’s early yet.)

Gigabit Wi-Fi gets to those willy-nilly speeds using a feature familiar to cable modem operations: Channel bonding, of up to 8 channels. In reality, it’s unlikely that eight clean, contiguous channels exist. Plus, recall that speed is a function of modulation, which almost always includes a tradeoff between speed and sturdiness.

So, watch for 802.11ac as more of an in-the-house thing (and when you replace your Wi-Fi router, make sure that it’s IPv6) than an outdoors thing.

Bonus round Wi-Fi shop talk: “Beam-forming.” It’s a way to bulge a Wi-Fi signal out toward the devices it serves, rather than shooting out signal omni-directionally.  The work of it can happen on chip, or in an antenna; best to ask. Also good to ask: How many streams it takes. Because every stream that’s beam-formed can’t be used for anything else.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

by Leslie Ellis // August 27 2012

Last week’s email included one from a friend who lives on the periphery of cable technology: “I was asked recently if I’d seen cable MSOs developing any new businesses, aside from home security, Skype and business services. I couldn’t think of any others – do you know of new technical products that are in early development stage?”

Where to start? Wireless seems a good place. Ever since mobile became mobile, the world has wondered about cable’s wireless play

Wall Street wants it, but only if it doesn’t cost a fortune to build. Consumers want it, if it means taking your broadband with you, sans the $50/mo. fees charged by mobile carriers for a dongle that works half the time. Operators want it, as a way to keep customers “sticky” to them in a hyper-competitive marketplace.

Step one was the Clearwire consortium, which continues to trundle along. The bigger action, though, is in mobile Wi-Fi hotspots. East Coasters already know about this, given the cableWiFi happenings along the mid-Atlantic corridor. Cox is now on-board, so it’s a footprint that will widen.

Also of interest: Secondary SSIDs (service set identifiers) inside wireless routers, inside homes. I’m in Comcast territory, in Denver. I visit you, in another part of the country, also served by Comcast. On firing up the laptop, I’m automatically connected to your Wi-Fi feed, drawing bandwidth from a secondary SSID provisioned inside your router – but my usage counts against my account, not yours. Ultimately very handy for when high-bandwidth relatives are in town.

This hasn’t happened yet, but it’s an example of “early development stage” launches.

Then there’s the whole consumer device scene, and the APIs (application program interfaces) operators can and will use to extend their “service icons” into connected screens. Different devices contain different native abilities – witness the Cox demonstration of video navigation on a Sony PS3, which lets viewers control video playback with the joystick, frame by frame.

It’s hard to predict where and how this will go, but, it’s going. We’ve already seen our phones and tablets become the remote control for the TV. Those apps will evolve, such that you’re using the touch pad to swipe-navigate the TV screen – this is already happening in the UK, with Sky TV’s iPad app. Or using hand gestures, a la Microsoft Xbox Kinect. Or with your voice.

So, Ms. J, there’s your answer. Happy to report that we’re just warming up here. Three years ago, I’d still be staring at your mail.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

by Leslie Ellis // July 09 2012

More than a decade ago, an MSO exec halted a staff meeting to make this exasperated observation: “Tools, tools, tools – can we just have one meeting where I’m not being asked for more tools? How many tools do we really need?”

At the time, Comcast was AT&T Broadband, and the tool in question related to the monitoring of an “open access” (remember that?) trial.

But the question – how many tools do we really need? – is decidedly evergreen.

The latest case in point is the home network, itself an extension of the HFC plant, with gadgets and screens that live better with signal. And they’re all cross-linked.

Today’s home networks make mixed use of MoCA (Multimedia Over Coax Alliance), Ethernet, and Wi-Fi to move stuff around. On top of that, there’s DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance),  poised to let us share component resources – tuners, hard drives – amongst screens. And that’s just the IP (Internet Protocol) side of the equation.

Here’s how one engine-room guy put it, over a fish taco last week: “So in the home you have a QAM set-top that’s pulling video into the home network. And an advanced wireless gateway, handling data and voice. And lets throw in an IP set-top.

“The IP set-top gets video from the QAM box, but it gets its user interface through the data side.

“A customer calls: Something’s wrong with my set-top. We say, is it a video problem, or a data problem?” (At which point he made the “d’oh!” face.)

Which brings us back to tools. And silos of people — video people, data people, voice people.

One answer getting a lot of play in tech circles is TR-069, where the “TR” stands for “Technical Report.” It’s an outgrowth of what’s now called the Broadband Forum (formerly the DSL Forum; DSL is a telco thing, which might explain why cable’s coming around to it only now.)

TR-69 is sort of like an IP-based SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), in that it provides ways to move data back and forth, for purposes of troubleshooting, say, a home network. Or, as the Broadband Forum itself puts it: “The TR-069 standard was developed for automatic configuration of modems, routers, gateways, set-top boxes and VoIP phones.”

Great, right? Yes, if you’re ok with devils and details. While TR-69 can fetch data from different networked devices –assuming they’re plumbed with the right client profile – it lacks the job-specific tools to make diagnostic sense of that data.

What tools are needed? One for bridging into workforce management. One for customer care reps. Engineering tools, to see what’s going on. And some kind of blended video/data tool, because how things work for QAM-based video are vastly different than how they work on IP-based video.

So. How many tools? I’d go with “lots.” (And good luck with that.)

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.