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Speculating On the Far Future of Cellphones
Trio writes "What will cellphones look like in in future? silicon.com explores five future characteristics that could shape tomorrow's phones — from a wearable prototype such as MIT's SixthSense device which projects mobile data into the user's world, to a mobile that mixes the real and the virtual by using holographic telepresence. So far, so futuristic, but one question remains: will there be enough spectrum to support all this wireless communication?"
Yeah, a real cellphone that let you dial a number and speak with someone. Not those with tons of addons that you forget you can dial number with !
Never mind that it isn't practical to walk around with a huge projector on your chest, it isn't fashionable. There is certainly utility to a good web-enabled phone with plenty of apps, but I think people get sold initially on the style of an iPhone specifically. If people adopt new technology and new features in their next phone, style has to help sell it.
Otherwise, I think we're hitting a breaking point. What more functionality do we really want from our phone? How much more can you accomplish on a small screen? How much more money are you willing to pay for the device and the data plan? If anything, the pendulum might swing backwards as competitors try to ape 80% of the iPhone's functionality at half the price.
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Given that the most-used features of cellphones are things other than talking on the phone (presumably included in the "Other 9%"), I predict that they will become like this Nintendo controller of the future.
In the U.S., we have the slow, bureaucratic and oligarchic FCC that limits technology from acquiring near limitless spectrum/bandwidth.
We're moving to a truly digital age, but still we have the FCC regulating that we should keep analog/digital spectrum separate for various "needs" such as TV, radio, ham, cordless phones, FRS, etc. It's ridiculous.
We have technology TODAY that allows for frequency hopping, for signal strength negotiation, for handling multiple devices on the same frequencies/channels, etc. Private industries can blossom to utilize the right frequency, the right transceiving power, the right tower hopping mechanisms, etc. But they can't get there because the FCC overregulates and strangulates the future.
On my 3G phone (I'm on AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint, shared via my lovely Cradlepoint router on-the-go even), I can watch TV on-demand. I can listen to music, on-demand. I can read my websites, send my emails, talk via Google voice/Gizmo5 VoIP, send SMS via Google Voice, etc. But there's a limited run of bandwidth.
I don't have a TV at home, so the TV spectrum is useless. I don't listen to radio in the car, so radio spectrum is useless. So much that we do today would be better suited to a HUGE amount of spectrum divvied up and utilized by every device that could hop frequencies as needed to find a clean channel, that could raise power needs when a tower is far but drop them significantly when towers are near.
The future is nearly endless bandwidth for endless users, but we're throttled because our lovely State decides it wants only the powerful to play ball, with the weak kept out of the game.
But what would happen if the FCC went away, and all of a sudden the power players who control TV, radio and other spectra would need to compete with the YouTube amateurs of the world? The powerful would fall. And the State can't let that happen.
IMO speculation about the future of technology is a waste of time. It always turns out very different from what was predicted, because some technologies that seem easy turn out to be (extreme) difficult, like flat TVs and nuclear fusion, and others turn out to much easier than expected. Besides the technical issues there are often changes in society that make the predictions about the future futile. Look at all the past predictions about the future back then, and what do you see? An extrapolation of the technology and mindset that was available at the time. So, predictions are fun, but please don't put any sort of value in them.
-- Cheers!
I can imagine a similar discussion in 1875: "What will telegraphs look like in the future?"
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I always figured that the future was in phone/PC convergence. Which is to say, rather than syncing your smartphone with your computer, your smartphone would BE your computer.
Coming in to your office, You'd pull your PC out of your pocket, sit it on your desk and plug in a monitor. It would connect to a wireless keyboard and mouse, and away you'd go.
WHen you left to go home or to a meeting, you'd unplug the monitor, stick it in your pocket and off you'd go. The only other thing is you'd pay a cloud service to do incremental backups over wireless or cell service.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
- AJ
I listen to the radio.
Why is it that because you don't listen to the radio, it is useless?
Radio is cool. It's completely free and I can find really good music on it. For free. No payments necessary to Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, or Sprint.
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Where you are with a small group of humans with no electronics you are talking directly to each other, looking them in the eye, or at their body language. Sometimes you touch too.
Now when you are in a public space like a coffee-house, walking the street, sitting on the train, etc. many people are communicating with those out of sight and completely ignoring those in sight. To me it feels like a zombie movie.
I'd like future phones to do two things: 1) Not let people mess with their phone at a movie theater. 2) Not let people use the phone while driving.
Really, it is hard for me to imagine that we won't eventually have direct neural interfaces. Why limit ourselves to the sensors and actuators evolution gave us?
First of all, to transmit on wide ranges of frequencies at high power costs a TON of money in electricity. I've researched what a radio station (5000 watts) alone has to pay for a slim band of frequency, and it's not trivial at all.
They transmit at such a high power so as to achieve good coverage over the entire city they're serving. If the signal only had to be heard over a radius of a few kilometres or less, such as with a cell tower, then the tramsit power could be reduced greatly. Although FM is not a particularly power-efficient or bandwidth-efficient modulation scheme (in fact, considering the large guard bands between FM radio channels, the overall bandwidth efficiency is pretty bad), but 5kW power consumption is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Heck, a typical air conditioning unit consumes about 1kW. I'm pretty sure some FM transmitters use up to 10s or 100s of kW, but that's still probably less than your average office building.
The reality is that in the biggest chaos, it isn't the strongest that survive, it's generally the weakest groups that make it. Look at hurricanes (VERY strong, but don't last) versus slightly windy weeks. It's not the strong that maintain for long.
The analogy flew over my head completely.
In the airwaves industry, we have so many proofs of things going right. I know people will cry foul if I say "What about WiFi?" but with WiFi, we have a VERY slim band of frequency that is working VERY well except in the most congested areas. What, in those areas, we had tripled the amount of frequency range? What if we quadrupled it? Again, it's the State's regulations, not WiFi, that breaks that most congested area.
Eh? The Wifi band (2.4 to ~2.5 GHz) is about 100 MHz in width. By no means is that "very slim" in any sense of the word. By comparison, the FM radio band (88 to 108 MHz) is only 20 MHz in width. Now it's kind of apples and oranges to be comparing a long-range broadcast voice service to a short-range broadband data service, but, by any objective measure, 100MHz is a big chunk of spectrum
All those people who have TV and radio now would still have it, but they'd get it on-demand, a la carte. Broad-casting is efficient only in spectrum, it is terribly inefficient in time scheduling. It's lost completely in terms of data analysis to see who is watching/listening to what and when (Nielsen is a failure, really). Since few people can truly watch TV, listen to the radio, talk on the phone, and browse the web at the same time efficiently, most of the spectrum in their given area set for a given service is WASTED. When you are watching TV in your living room, what is happening to all the AM and FM spectrum? Wasted. Cell phone channels? Wasted. It's endless to think of the spectrum being wasted in your given area right now with useless transmissions that are actually using energy to be transmitted to you and not received.
We won't need 50,000 watt radio stations anymore, when a 2 watt transmitter/receiver in your locale will cover so much more, so much more efficiently. And what if no one is using a given set of frequencies at a given time? We can throttle back the transmitter power -- saving energy, saving money.
I say bring on the anarchy, it'll REDUCE the chaos. Especially in terms of the airwaves.
You should probably confine your arguments to bandwidth efficient spectrum utilization because the "wasted power" is, again, a drop in the bucket. Not to rain on your parade of wireless utopia via shared spectrum anarchy, but it will be a huge technological challenge to equip all wireless devices with the ability to privately negotiate channel allocations with competing devices while ensuring fairness and reliability. For example, let's say demand for cellular channels ramps up around dinner time. The spectrum is already full though, so what do you do? Users of other services will have to be heavi
I can imagine a similar discussion in 1875: "What will telegraphs look like in the future?"
Actually, the view from 1875 was surprisingly clear. Because, by 1875, telegraphy was a mature technology.
It was generally recognized that a "printing telegraph" was desirable. But it was hard to do. The House Printing Telegraph dated from 1852. Early machines had trouble staying in sync. By 1875, though, there were reasonably good printing telegraphs and stock tickers, using a design by Phelps.
The sending and receiving gear then stagnated for decades. Progress was made in transmission, but the end node technology was relatively static for years. It wasn't until 1921, with the first Teletype machines that worked, that a new technology replaced the old one. The reason was manufacturing technology. The Phelps machines had a relatively low parts count. Teletypes had perhaps 5x as many parts. Until manufacturing techniques improved, page printers were just too much machinery to build and deploy in quantity.
Once Baudot-code teletypes, with associated paper tape punches and readers, were developed, the technology started to move forward again. Messages could at last be forwarded without manual retyping. Forwarding still required people tearing off sections of paper tape from punches and moving them to readers. It wasn't until 1948 that Western Union Plan 55-A produced a fully automatic message switch. (It was entirely electromechanical, with many paper tape readers and punches, and switchgear to interconnect them. Think Sendmail built from moving parts.)
Not until 1977 did Western Union finally get rid of the last of the paper-tape switching centers. By then, telegrams were in decline anyway.
IMHO, among the best post-cyberpunk style science fiction series to explore this, among other concepts, in recent years has been the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series. The "cyber brain" conversations combined with "external memory" (think of it like an off site storage, backup and messaging server for your mind) really takes man machine integration to its final logical conclusion: making or receiving voice and video communications remotely is as easy as initiating thoughts to do so. Although, I do think that the series is a bit too optimistic on how soon all of this will actually come about (i.e. by 2030).