Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) News

Apple Search (Apple Found) - Quite Plausible

One of my must-reads is I, Cringely. I've been a fan even before he "Cringley'd" me in 2002. Many Cringley posts are provocative and throught provoking, but he had a doozy yesterday - Avram Miller says Steve Jobs has one more Apple intro. 

Then I read Miller's post - How Apple crushed Google in the fall of 2015 from my book "the Future History of Technology".

As I was sipping my coffee this morning and my wife Tina was rushing to leave to catch her bus, I persuaded her (just barely) to listen to me read her part of Miller's article, and then went on to explain why I thought Miller's idea was so plausible. She fixed me in a steely gaze and said "I look forward to reading your article on your blog." So, here goes. Thanks, Honey.

My first observation is another one of those things that you either get about Apple, or don't - Apple's customers just want stuff to work. They're willing to pay Apple's prices to get a product with a low hassle factor - that works reliably, repeatedly, and when it breaks, you can get help quickly and efficiently. You just have to go to the average Apple store to see just how profound this effect is - the average Apple store is packed with people. Most are buying things, but the ones that aren't buying are getting help with their existing Apple product.

So, Miller's right that there's an existing base of Apple users ready to try a search capablity that doesn't spam them like Google and Bing and Yahoo! are doing.

My second observation is the mystery of Apple building enormous data centers (and according to "CHRISGRAY", a commenter on Miller's post, buying existing data centers). Most observers on Apple's data center activity have simply asked "why so big"? You don't need that much data center to do what Apple's currently doing, even projecting forward to Apple doing something like buying Netflix (total speculation on my part) or maintaining each user's music and video collections totally in iCloud. Siri apparently isn't that compute-intensive (or, per my experiences with it overall, not compute-intensive enough). So, adding on a search capability to what Apple is already doing begins to make sense of what Apple could do with so much datacenter capability.

My third observation is a leap that as far as I am aware, unique to me. This is total speculation. The biggest factor in data centers is watts per "compute function" - how much electrical power does it take to accomplish a calculation... a search? If you look at the rack of an average data center, you'd see something that's vaguely recognizable as the successor to a desktop PC. It'll have big Intel processors that are air-cooled or even water-cooled.  It will have sticks of RAM, sticks of cache memory, and lots of disks, usually spinning, but more and more, solid state. Conceptually, it's a PC.

But Apple thinks differently. Unlike Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple builds things. They're used to... comfortable... building things. Apple likes building things, and they're good at it. Apple has even built servers. So, what if... in their data centers, Apple is building their own servers around the 64-bit A7 processor that they use in their current leading-edge products? Two things immediately come to mind from that possibility. The first is the compute-density would be astonishing - they'd be able to do astonishing amounts of computation. The second is that Apple is seriously motivated to make the watts per "compute function" very high, because Apple is committed to powering their data centers from renewable energy sources like solar. So, for Apple, every watt that's spent spinning a fan or pump to cool a processor is a lot of money (more renewable energy required).

So, imagine a huge data center, populated floor to ceiling with very, very dense racks of processor boards populated with cool-running A7 processors. I've been told that some of these data centers aren't even accessible by humans any more - when they (rarely) need to be serviced, they have to be disassembled to provide enough room for a human to get to it.

I can't really imagine the applications that are possible with a huge data processing capability like that. The possibilities not only boggle my imagination... let alone what I know. But Apple has an incredible number of smart people dedicated to making my experience as an Apple customer as good as possible, and I'm guessing they have some ideas on what to do with all that compute capability.

Including Search. I'll certainly use Apple Found, if it comes to pass.

The obligatory BWIA tie-in? None, really, except that if Search could get as good as Arthur C. Clarke imagines the "Minisec" to be, all the data would be kept in the cloud, not on the device, because you'd want it all to be easily searchable. In that future, we're going to need a lot of Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

 

By Steve Stroh

 

 

Two Great Articles

I wish I had written both of these articles - they're extremely well written, and they'll give you a perspecitve on wireless that you won't get from any of the conventional sources.

I recommend them highly, and I think they're both exactly correct in their assertions.

Harold Feld - My Insanely Long Field Guide To LightSquared v. the GPS Guys. 

Matt Larsen - Rural Broadband, Picture Essay. 

 

Thanks Guys - you've inspired me to get back on the wagon in the saddle.

 

Steve Stroh

 

Comment On David Isenberg's Beyond White Spaces Article

David Isenberg (who's a must read for me) has posted a thought-provoking article titled Beyond White Spaces.

What... (regregrettably) most people miss in the discussion about license-exempt use of Television Broadcast Spectrum White Spaces are a number of points that, if taken into consideration, considerably alter the overall discussion and potential for license-exempt use of White Spaces.

One fundamental point that's universally overlooked in the White Spaces discussions is that the original rules that are put into place are subject to change as technology makes new things possible, usage patterns change, economic value changes. So, the admittedly puny capabilities of this first generation of license-exempt White Spaces devices that are envisioned is just a timid first step. In time, there will be bolder steps. One example is the FCC's Part 15.247 rules for license-exempt communications operation in the "junk bands" of 902-928 MHz, 2.40-2.485 MHz, and 5.2/5.4/5.5 GHz have evolved continuously... and in some cases radically, from their first iteration. The changes came about because of improved technology, fears that were later proven to be unfounded, requests from industry and user groups, etc. Having been on the inside of some of those changes, I've been pleasantly surprised to learn that the FCC's rules are not rigid and unchangeable... and if you know what to look for... sometimes amazingly prescient and flexible.

Another fundamental point is that it's obvious to those that have looked seriously at the trends is that there will be yet another round of reduction of the spectrum currently allocated to over-the-air television broadcasting. We'll have another chance at crafting a new generation of devices and systems that operate in this spectrum.

Third, White Spaces is intended... and will have its greatest impact by far, in rural areas. High-powered, High Profile White Spaces systems operating under "non-exclusive licensed lite" rules rather than full license-exempt rules is a real game changer in Broadband Internet Access for rural areas. It's not a panacea - it will remain expensive to build towers, buy radios, and put together high-quality systems. There's still the backhaul problem (as in, not much, and pretty expensive in rural areas). But dollar-for-dollar, hertz-for-hertz, systems operating in White Space spectrum, at reasonably high power (tens of watts should work fine) will provide far better coverage and penetration than available such systems to date. Everyone would love to have fiber-to-the-premises, but that's tough to do other than with outright government-scale grants, in areas that have only a few "premises" within a 100 square mile area.

One thing Isenberg doesn't quite get right is that for White Spaces to succeed, especially in rural areas, it doesn't have to be an "Ethernet" or "Wi-Fi" scale of success. The numbers can be small (on a mass-market scale) but still large enough to attract vendors who can make quality systems that are affordable enough. Alvarion was able to do this using wholly-proprietary technology, and there's sufficient momentum in White Space that a dominant standard will emerge from the three competing contenders (one based on 802.11/Wi-Fi, one based on 802.16/a/WiMAX, and the other is a gestating new IEEE standard - 802.22).

But Isenberg hits it out of the park when he suggests that we need a comprehensive plan that doesn't address "slivers" of spectrum. The trouble is that when it comes time to convening groups to hammer out such plans, they end up populated with spectrum and technology partisans, and the resulting compromises necessary to reach any kind of conclusion end up so vague, gradual, and non-distruptive that not implementing them is actually more productive. What's really needed is a group that can truly look at the "big picture" of spectrum, technology, emerging trends, best practices, etc. without the partisan baggage that anyone beholden to "those that fund them" inevitably bring. We've done this before with, for example, National Science Foundation (NSF) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grants that span multiple years and allow truly deep and independent research and conclusions. There are technology, operational and business models, and systems models that have never been tried, or tried on a small scale, that could be woven into a plan that could really work. I, for one, am available.