Why 5G and IoT are still hot technologies | Ep. 37
Amazon has opened up its sidewalk platform to outside developers which could have long-term effects on 5G rollouts and other Internet of Things Technologies we're going to discuss those impacts next up on today in Tech [Music] hi everyone welcome back to today Tech I'm Keith Shaw joining me in studio is our old friend of the show Jack gold he's the president and principal analyst of Jay Gold Associates hello Jack Keith good to be here welcome back you know I say old friend I'm not saying that you're old I'm just saying like you know we've been friends for a while so it's okay or you can say I'm old uh so you had uh some analysis recently uh on your in your technology insights newsletter uh talking about sort of the Amazon sidewalk opening itself up to external developers can you just for for people that might not understand what Amazon sidewalk is because I had to sort of going back and research it just explain what what sidewalk is sure so and that's a great place to start right because people don't really know it it's it's not a it's not really public right even though you may have one um they snuck it in under under the table so what what sidewalk is is a uh basically a network that's installed in many Amazon devices or newer and MSN devices like Echo uh like the cameras right the ring cameras and what it is is it's a chip that uh talks um Bluetooth low energy Bluetooth yep okay for battery savings right it also talks Laura which is a Wan low speed uh when technology that's been around for quite a while it hasn't really branched out a lot but it's it's around and they'll also do like FSK 900 megahertz which is stuff that's been around probably for 20 years yeah so what happens is if you buy an echo or at least a newer generation Echo it comes these chips come inside you know the echo connects up to your Wi-Fi connection or direct to an ethernet connection however you might do it and that's how they get out the internet the um the Bluetooth then whatever connects up to that Bluetooth or lower connection then we'll go out over your internet so it comes uh turned on by default now as a user as the owner you can turn it off if you want but most people probably don't even know it's there right and so what happens is as as devices go by it doesn't have to be real close but you know Bluetooth is what 30 meters or so goes by your uh your Echo let's say it can talk to the Echo and send out data over your Echo to Amazon right or anywhere else on the internet and so what sidewalk basically is doing what it what what Amazon wants to do a sidewalk is say hey look we have this huge Network there's I don't know what the number is millions of echo devices out there lots of ring devices out there they claim ninety percent of the US population coverage I don't know but yeah that number seems awfully high but now I'm thinking is this is this beneficial more for kind of urban areas and and things where you have more coverage because you know again the neighborhood that I live in then you know there's six houses right right and and you know in theory if all six houses had it so you should have complete coverage if one has it then you've got to be sort of near that house and so that's the issue right it this is a high density Network in certain places okay and other places you know if you're in a rural area you know with your six houses yeah you're not gonna get connectivity but what's nice about the technology in theory is that there are a lot of applications where I don't need real-time connectivity and and um in fact by the way the downside of sidewalk is if you need real-time connectivity it doesn't work right okay so you can't like stream a movie that that needs or more important yeah well you can't anyway because it's a very low data technology yeah but I'm thinking you know emergency fire alarm or if you've got a wrist bracelets on and you're having a heart attack and you need to get to somebody now okay and you're not in in range you know if you were walking you'd get to range eventually so half an hour later doesn't do you much good because you're lying on the sidewalk dead right right and that's that's the fundamental issue with sidewalk is it's not which is okay for a lot of things I mean if it's if it's a meter if you're you know doing water meter reading you know if I if I transmit it once a month you know a couple of kilobytes worth of data it doesn't matter if I do it now or an hour from now probably not right so who does Amazon think is the sort of the beneficiary of this from from because from a homeowner's perspective if I've got this system it feels like Amazon's just borrowing my bandwidth from these devices or from my Broadband ethernet uh to use my FiOS connection so my fiber optic line or my DSL or whatever my my you know connection is borrowing that for other people and I don't like that like I you know and of course so I as soon as I read all this I checked and my ring camera is old so it doesn't it doesn't have it and I haven't checked my echo yet but I'm pretty sure my echo is sold as well so it's you know I haven't upgraded in a while so I'm probably not opted in on any of these anyway um so it's opt-in by default it's opt-in by default you have to opt out of it right yes yeah yes I don't know it so from a homeowner perspective it was like well I'm not getting anything in return unless I go out and maybe buy some of these other devices and from from the website that that Amazon has the the their basic big selling point was if you have a pet and it gets lost then all right so now let's say my dog gets out of the house and I've got a little pet tracker on on the dog the dog can go and the dog is now down the street that in theory that could then access That Sidewalk Network and tell me where the dog is right in theory but the problem is it well it it may tell you with the dog it's not as big a deal it'll tell you within some area yeah right it's not it's not GPS it's not GPS but okay so it'll say it's at your neighbor's house and you'll know where your neighbor is perhaps or something like that along those lines if you really need deterministic GPS type of location it's not going to do that for you right it'll be a wide area but it but you're right you're basically offering free service to whoever won just by your house right and how many people are really going to want to do that ultimately especially since it's only low energy and it's not it's not high bandwidth not high bandwidth so what what is this why they've opened it up to the external developers because they want to find they want to they don't have any ideas and they need they need other people to maybe think of some ideas for them on how to use this well it's not just them I mean you know they're already ideas air tags for instance it's that kind of of Technology right it's the same air tag air tags don't use sidewalk today they use Bluetooth and connectivity across the board to other things but but it's that basic kind of of technology that they're opening up where Amazon the play for Amazon here is twofold number one is they have something called iot core which is their infrastructure of how you build iot applications and these you know these smart devices are basically iot devices and the second piece is if you're successful and in your I don't know you know Keith's dog tracking service and you've got a million subscribers that's gotta be on a cloud somewhere and they want it to be on AWS yeah okay and you're not charging for the connectivity but you are charging for the app right so I'm still paying you you know whatever five bucks a month I don't know what the number would be yeah and part of that's going to Amazon so if you've got if you could get you know 100 million devices um and and you know 1000 apps now you're talking some real money it still feels like though that they need a better use case for sort of convincing people to either buy these devices I mean I guess the you know the watch example that you you or at least the example of the health device so that if you're walking around maybe you'll be saved because this watch that's detecting that I'm having a heart attack does connect to a sidewalk Network or let's let's look at a real case uh but what would most of those be using GPS anyway or some of these these other networks or the network on your phone like my 5G on this phone is is faster than a sidewalk absolutely and if it's personal on you uh it's probably going to link to your phone it makes much more sense but but let's look at a real use case so there's a real problem today in many places where Amazon drops off a package and you never get it because somebody comes up and picks it up off your porch Porsche pirate right right what if you could build a low enough cost tracker and it'd have to be real low cost but but let's assume you know you could build a dollar tracker um that could talk to the sidewalk Network I dropped uh I'm an Amazon Amazon guy okay yeah yep I dropped a package on your porch you know it's there right I mean he sends you email anyway but you know what's there but what if somebody picks it up right you can in theory track to where it ends up right and and catch those folks so so you've eliminated a uh a path for them to get away with it right in essence okay but it would have to be really low cost or or groceries right um I ordered groceries from local stock Stop and Shop here right and and they're going to deliver them I don't know when it's going to get there uh if there's a little tracker on the side of the package as they're driving down the street I can see where they are um I can then know when it gets dropped on my porch I know what's in it you know or there's a temperature Monitor and there's a you know something Frozen inside and I want to make sure that it doesn't defrost those are the kinds of applications you know tracker tracker kinds of applications make a whole lot of sense wasn't RFID supposed to sort of do all that too and it just hasn't been deployed enough or it's too expensive well the problem with RFID is you need a reader okay and and and so I don't have a reader and and with RFID you have to be within close proximity like okay inches all right so it it is deployed it's very cheap yeah but because there are no readers it's not going to be able to send me messages down the street and certainly Amazon with all of the package deliveries it does has a vested interest in maybe trying to access the network that way yes but but again it's they have a network in place they want to fill it yeah from Amazon's perspective that's what I take away okay from the consumer perspective there are some advantages because it really lowers the cost so for instance if you have a Tracker that and you're not carrying your phone and it has a 5V 5G chip in it you've got to have a subscription to 5G yeah so there's a cost involved okay it may not be huge especially as 5G goes to things like Network slicings where the instead of giving you the full bandwidth they give you a you know a small chunk of the bandwidth and can charge you a lot less but even there the problem is with 5G is that um the modem the the RF radio unit and whatever the tracker is takes a pretty significant amount of power and battery life is in a watch it's a day maybe where these guys um you know low power Bluetooth you could you could have a Year's worth of of data especially because there's very little bandwidth going out anyway right um and and that's another advantage of this kind of Technology okay now in your your analysis that you wrote about about sort of Amazon opening this up to sidewalk or everything opening up sidewalks and outside developers it does have an effect on on sort of 5G and some of this network slicing can you expand on that like sure you know what what were 5G carriers hoping to accomplish with network slicing so what they wanted to do was maybe explain Network slicing yeah sure so all right so let's start with slices so let's say I've got um a 5D signal coming into my home or or work or wherever it is right it has very wide bandwidth I mean it can have in some cases a gigabyte worth of bandwidth and the and the um the carriers if if I want all that bandwidth the carriers are going to charge me you know whatever the monthly charges 50 bucks a month or 100 bucks a month or whatever yeah or more yeah now if I've got let's use my water meter example if I got a water meter it's sending maybe a kilobyte worth of data once a month yeah I'm not going to charge I'm not going to pay 50 bucks a month for a 5G modem on that thing ain't gonna happen because because if I'm the Water Authority there goes my profit yeah and and I as a user I'm not going to reimburse them 50 a month for their signal so what the the newer generations of 5G technology allow is to slice up the network and say take I'll use an easier example let's say it's 100 megabytes worth of data what if it instead of 100 I give you 100 megabytes worth of data I give 100 people one megabyte worth of data bandwidth okay and then charge them accordingly right so if I divide that fifty dollars by a hundred what's that 50 Cent 50 cents yeah that's that's the model that they want to go after and it's a great model for iot and it works really well because 5G infrastructure not yet but will be everywhere and so I don't everywhere is a relative term most everywhere and I can have a Tracker or I can have a temperature monitor on a on a train refrigerated car or whatever I want to have it and it'll just connect upper 5G whenever I needed to yep yep there are also consumer devices that can do the same thing again the health monitor what if you don't have your phone or you don't want to have your phone on with you or you're running down the street or whatever there's a whole bunch of stuff that we could think about that that would be along those lines on 5G the nice thing about 5G is you got connectivity pretty much everywhere with with the Amazon stuff you got connectivity when you're near somebody's home with the device right installed the good news is it's free that you're not paying that 50 50 cents or 100 a dollar a month yeah yeah um for most users it's probably not a big deal but there are business models where that's just prohibitive right right and there and and so that's where we're going with this it's it's not that 5G goes away yes that it's a new business model that's cheaper right okay and so it's potentially beneficial for people that don't want to pay that 5G and again like is Network slicing is that the big appeal of 5G anyway or is it still the the high bandwidth the in the edge scenarios and you know those types of it's all about this yeah this is a feature a nice feature that you can use but it's not the primary feature it it's it's what's going to enable a lot more iot types of devices smart devices because it's low band with low cost yeah and and a lot of iot devices so you know it's a traffic signal you want to you maybe want to be able to change the the uh how long the red light stays on versus green light versus by traffic or whatever right and you want to send it a signal it's not a lot of data but you're not going to spend 50 a month to do that yeah and so it's those kinds of models that that the slicing really was all about it also works really well in a private setting so if I've got 5G installed in a factory floor you know I can slice it up into in into segments and and send it to different places you know the slicing thing this is this is a little off topic but the networking slicing concept it always confuses me a little bit because you know you picture like a pizza pie or some big circle and you're slicing it up and then and then handing out but then it always feels like like I always get confused that with beam forming which is sort of directing your signal through a specific thing so when you talk about like I've got a water sensor I'm thinking well they're going to just point that and give that a little bit of bandwidth but they're not I mean it's still a wide signal you're only getting that that small amount of bandwidth they're basically taking a signal and saying okay you know if if I'll use an example if if the signal is 10 seconds long you get one second of that 10 seconds okay and then then they go into the next person so it's it's segmenting the signal so you get part of it yeah whereas the beam forming is I got a flashlight and pointing it at your at your face right if you go that way then it doesn't then you don't see the light yeah right so how is the 5G rollout been like the past couple of years I mean we've been talking about this 5G stuff for a while and um I you know I I equate it since since most of the the cool parts of the technology have no real impact on an average consumer like this is really aimed at factories industrial settings and sort of that edge AI autonomous vehicles robots like that's a that seems to be what 5G is appealing because again 4G LTE for the average cell phone user was was good enough and so the extra bandwidth doesn't matter and because it's also a smaller uh cell right so you have to build more uh well so you're looking at me like okay well I'm just not realizing the benefits of 5j no so so they're you no you're taking it from from a personal perspective okay as opposed to Verizon 18tmo okay well yeah for them well so there's there's a few different things now there there are real advantages but let me start with the carrier side right the advantage of the carrier side is that they have a lot more capacity with 5G than they had with 4G okay and and that means that they can handle a lot more signals a lot more technology a lot more phones but also a lot of other stuff cars are coming and yeah you know the traffic lights whatever it's going to be and that's important because uh quality of you know you pick up your phone no one calls people anymore probably but if you send a text or you want to stream video you want it now and you want it in good quality so capacity is a big deal especially you know if you walk down in in Boston yeah or in New York or Chicago or LA or wherever uh capacity is a real problem the constraints so that's one piece of it the second piece of it is that uh it also and by the way let me back up a little bit 5G as it's been rolled out to date for most places not everywhere was built on top of the 4G infrastructure right so what that means is that you're you're basically hobbled by what 4G gives you and then you put this you know nice wrapper around at 5G we're now getting to the point where most of the the carriers are rolling out Standalone 5G which is true 5G core Network so you know the core of the network is is based on 5G stuff not 4G stuff yeah that's what brings on slicing and all the other kinds of technologies that we're talking about and aren't there three bands within sort of the 5G there's low band mid band and and high band and high band is called something else too right yeah so the the the question becomes lovan would give you the the wide coverage area and that's what one of the vendors is doing but then other vendors are doing that mid band stuff and then the super high Edge AI you know you need all of this this computational power at the factory is is the upper frequency or the high band so so the problem is frequency what's available for frequencies right and yeah in in this country the FCC determines that yeah and they determine that by territory it's not even across the country for general purpose stuff so they've repurposed a lot of the low band uh technology which we had we've had for years to now be uh available for 5G then there's a mid-tier c-band that they they um they use uh they actually captured some some um frequency spectrum from satellite Communications and and that doesn't so the lower the the frequency the better the range right right the better not only the range but the penetration so we can get into this building as opposed to c-band not so much and then you go to the really high millimeter wave stuff that's what it was millimeters which has tons of capacity because you have lots and lots and lots and lots of spectrum so you can send a lot of signal but it doesn't penetrate buildings it may not penetrate metal so it's for short haul but High freak High data rates kind of stuff right and and it also that for high density so it'll work in Manhattan it won't work out here and you know need them perhaps because the buildings are too far apart yeah yeah but but then also if you then connect you know you connect an edge computer right near that signal then you can start doing all the processing on the edge computer and you don't have to go over to the cloud to do a lot of this AI stuff that and that's going to happen anyway we're already seeing some of that happen so yeah so the the ultimately what what's going to this will be out a few years right but ultimately what's going to happen is you'll see cell towers that have cell equipment traditional radio equipment yeah but as they move to more and more you know Common off-the-shelf kinds of equipment they'll also have computers in there that'll actually run applications locally on the cell tower that's your Edge right and so you will get instant availability and then the cell towers are all connected or should all be connected up by you know high speed fiber to the core Network somewhere right right and so the local processing will take place at the south side or near the South side right and not have to go off to the cloud to be processed and then all sent back right it it gives you a lot more processing power locally but also does things like alleviate the need to actually send all that data to the cloud right and that saves money for the big you know especially a lot of the AI stuff has so much data that has to get sent right yeah and and if if I'm processing tens of thousands of things at the cloud as opposed to having tens of thousands of Edge Computers processing one or two things at a time yeah you know it the the the time from when I send the data to what I get a response back is you know 100th of of what it would be otherwise all right so so my my experience that I was talking about with sort of the uh you know the I'm the average user and I I hear marketing about 5G in terms of speeds and feeds and I don't care about that what would a better message be this capacity like okay you're you know if you're in if you're in a busy area you're no longer gonna get I don't want to say busy signals because again you don't probably use it as your phone but um you know lag or you know how come you you're not seeing sort of messaging around that is it just easier for the the pr marketing people go oh speed speeds ah fast fast because no they tried it for a while and it didn't work they tried the capacity yeah for a while yeah okay they they did there were there was a lot of talk early on for consumers about capacity because of that there'd be less lag and all that kind of stuff and consumers said okay I don't care yeah like just as a you know every day I want to drive in here you know I've got the radio on and there's this there's this Comcast ad that annoys the heck out of me only one well luckily I have Verizon FiOS and so their ads are not as annoying but so they've got it's it's for their home internet and this this ad is like it's for 10g and it's like you don't need 10g in your house you don't need it you don't need it but like everyone this this marketing is like oh well you've got multiple devices connecting it's like it can handle it like the existing Broadband can handle most of the stuff but they're trying to like and I feel like they're trying to trick consumers who don't care you know we might not understand it they don't know maybe they've got some some some bandwidth issues within their house but you know the lag the lag is not going to be it's not I don't know it's just it's just how many streams of 4K video you're going to have coming into your home yeah it's the bottom line I mean I've got three kids and I've and they're all watching different things at every time but I've got the lowest connection Broadband ever and no one's ever complained to me I know I I the same issue yeah actually the commercial that bothers me even more is the one where they go against the Teemo uh fixed wireless access on the couch yeah or you know the people are walking the women are walking by the house and then they want them to turn off their phones it's it's so silly all right but we won't get it we won't get into the commercial well again because we understand the technology and maybe maybe you know the average viewer doesn't but that's the issue right so Keith if you really look at the commercials you know the geared I hate to say this but they're geared towards five-year-olds right I mean the message really isn't about you know getting into any depth it's it's sound bites right it's what can I put in front of you that's aha that's that's what I want to buy right right right all right so let's switch gears into my sort of my last sort of kind of common questions things with is the Internet of Things still a big deal and it sounds like it is it sounds like iot I mean that was the you know that was the acronym that everybody was using it was like iot iot there's gonna be 25 billion devices connected to the internet and um is that still gaining momentum or has it slowed down in recent months and years it's still it's gaining a lot it's it's to most people it's kind of invisible uh but but let's take an example we were talking earlier uh before we we came on live about digital twins yep right digital twins uh let me explain digital twins digital twins is basically take a physical something whatever that is it's it's this building it's the human body we were talking about earlier right it's a factory setting and building a exact model digitally of that environment and that's your digital twin now if I put enough sensors into the physical right I can be continuously Gathering data about the physical that I can then feed into my digital twin right and then I can use that digital twin to predict what's going to happen you know is a machine going to go down is there going to be a traffic accident if it's out on the highway right um is it uh you know in the human body am I gonna God forbid have a heart attack or something right right or you know you're a diabetic and my blood sugar is gone and and and that digital twin is going is becoming a really really big issue especially when you tie it to AI kinds of environments so iot is is real it's growing dramatically it's people aren't making such a big deal of it anymore because um you know it's it's just kind of invisible it how does it affect to you you know what's iot to you right but what if here's another example that we see all all over the place now um food production and farming people are putting sensors into field so they know when to water specific areas yep when to put uh insect aside or wherever they're going to put fertilizer down in for different plants and they do it on a not not over there you know a thousand acres they do it on a 100 square feet basis and then they run it into essentially a digital twin AI kind of technology that says oh that corn stock over there in the corners having problems go take care of it right right you you increase your yield dramatically you lower your cost because now you know you're using less water you're using less fertilizer you have great impact on the environment because again there's less stuff draining off and so that's really kind of where iot is morphed into it's really more about smart sensors and and digital Twins and the ability to predict what's going to happen to prevent you know whatever you're trying to prevent yeah do they do are there any obstacles on the hardware side where you know either is it is it more about battery life and making sure that you have a long enough power because like you know maybe initial deployments the batteries were running out and then it became useless or they had to plug them in yeah um or speeds of the chips I mean those are still probably pretty good right yeah it's not or is it are they still expensive not expensive All the Above So Okay in fact getting back to the sidewalk this sidewalk discussion that's really what it was about was having a cheaper chip because if I take a 5G modem and put it into a a chip right it needs a lot of power 5G is just it just takes a lot of power as opposed to Bluetooth I mean Bluetooth headphones how long ago they last 20 30 40 hours right and they're they're on continuously in a sensor that's sending data once an hour that's going to last years as opposed to having it a 5G modem where there's a lot of interaction going on the networks are just very very different and so power is a huge huge issue the longevity of the battery is a huge issue cost is also a huge issue I'm not going to deploy ten thousand ten thousand dollar chips yeah I'm going to deploy ten thousand one thousand dollars right right so so anything I can do to lower cost um get more battery life by the way it makes it smaller okay cheaper to build yeah and I can charge you less because it's not costing me a lot of money all of that is going it enhances the ability for this to to Blossom and one sorry but one real quickie yeah this also ties directly into the edge because what I want is the Computing to take place at the edge for privacy concerns for one thing and also I want instant um I was going to say instant gratification that's not quite right but but you know instant Return of the data so I know what to so I can act quickly right so it all it all gets tied together yeah well like another example of the edge of of why Edge is beneficial too is if you add a so say we're in a building here we've got a bunch of video cameras and we're you know monitoring for any Intruders and things like that instead of sending that live stream right over the cloud it's more like you just process the change right or and then send that alert so that it's you're not you're not spending all that money into the feed and then having someone looking looking at it so so I walk into the I walk into your camera and the camera says okay here's this guy that walked in I'm going to send it to the cloud the Cloud's going to look me up and and after they looked at you know 4 000 different people they're gonna say aha that's Jack then they're going to send data back and say do you want to let Jack in now this is what 10 seconds 15 seconds 20 seconds later in the meantime I've broken it right right you know it's the issue right it's it's a it's a time thing right whereas if you're processing locally locally and you know it's Jack you can let me in with or not let me in in half a second and if I'm a bad guy you know you just send out a signal to the cops and they're here in no time hopefully all right so getting back to the sort of the sidewalk discussion do you think this we're just gonna sort of Go full circle here uh is this something that that maybe technology enthusiasts should just be aware of or was it just hey this was just a piece of news and and like Does this does it have legs so to speak in terms of things to to monitor so for from a personal perspective no okay other than maybe you want to turn it off if you've got an echo device maybe yeah I don't I don't want people bar it is such little it's not even a lot of bands it's not it's more about the principle right exactly exactly I I'm subsidizing you basically and not just you but everybody in the neighborhood yeah give it give me a discount on my delivery and I'll do it right but but the real issue is that this does open up a different channel for um people companies who want to build especially consumer oriented low-cost things and it gives them a way to get the data out of those low-cost things without spending a lot of right and not affecting the battery life as we talked about earlier that's really kind of what what this is about from a consumer you you and I consumer perspective knowing about it is fine but it's not going to make any difference all right if the average person who goes into a let's say a Best Buy or a Walmart or Target and buys a smart device isn't going to know what technology it's it's sending the data across and isn't going to care it's going to care about the price and how well it works right right all right jack always good to see us still still enthusiastic about technology no no you turned into a pessimist no no I'm kidding I I am I am joking well I I am worried that uh you know with all the political stuff going on in the world that uh we we could be in for some trouble in the technology space but that's a whole difference yeah yeah let's not get into that all that stuff let's just let's try to say I'm not talking about local I'm talking about you know geopolitical all right all right yeah we won't go there all right good to see you Jack thank you Keith all right so that's all the time we've got for today's show uh please subscribe to our Channel like the video add some comments below join us every week for new episodes of today in Tech I'm Keith Shaw thanks for watching [Music]
2023-04-18 01:21
