27oct2002: Day One of the new site.
Let's start with a rant: 3G hasn't got a hope in hell.
3G telephony is about to be reduced to a technological footnote
by the biggest end-run ever done in technology. To succeed,
wireless broadband needs federated anarchy, the same way the Internet grew
from a few geeks to a billion users in ten years. What
it doesn't need is top-down tech, a homogenous 'infrastructure'
bolted onto a million cellular towers, and billion-pound government bribes,
sorry, auction fees before you can start doing business. Which is basically
what the 3G rollout amounts to, and what another technology doesn't.
Of course, I'm talking WiFi. WiFi is simple.
Just a PC card and a hub glued to whatever connection you've paid for: the
office Ethernet, home DSL, even a dialup. Around each node is a 50m circle
within which you can log on. (You don't have to own the hub; someone else,
like Starbucks, can charge you for using theirs.) Unlike the lock-ins and
long contracts of today's mobile operators, WiFi hardware and software interoperates
by fundamental design, same way the Internet does. Easy. When
we get to the point - not too far away - where all those nodes overlap,
and the world's business cities are blanketed in wireless broadband, there's
a huge incentive for the hub owners to federate. People with laptops will
roam seamlessly across the cityscapes of Europe and North America, wireless
voice-over-Internet will make inroads, and everyone in 3G will start sending
out resumes. 3G's potential top-out of 2Mbps sounds impressive.
But it's useful for laptops, not phones, and only if it's everywhere, roams
seamlessly, and cheap as hell. After all, what do people
actually want to do with phones? Talk to people. Maybe some tools, address
book, calendar, reminders, but most of the tools people find useful aren't
high-bandwidth; the value returned for the cost of 3G - low battery life,
high cost-per-byte due to the capital equipment your phone bill is depreciating
on the back end - just won't add up. Even the rich (for a phone) experience
of Japan's i-mode is delivered with bandwidth of just 22Kbps. What
people need high bandwidth for is the stuff you do on laptops, not phones
- intense video, multiplayer games, collaborative work. Because the killer
app of wireless broadband is not picture messaging, not video conferencing,
not even the million-song jukebox the 3G guys are talking about but privately
can' t make work. The killer app of any network is
simply... the Internet itself. No one service delivered by
3G can compete with the thousands on the Net. No one website, no matter
how optimised, can complete with the web itself. No one's better than all
of them. And all of them is what WiFi delivers - and 3G never will.
Even if the technologies of 3G and WiFi were the same - they're
not - WiFi would still have the winning hand, because it's just a better
business model. Instead of each service on the network rolled out and available
to the whole network, WiFi makes it available in a small local radius and
lets it fan out to where the users want it based on demand - the same way
peering and caching work with the IP protocol itself. And the capital needed
upfront? Perhaps ultimately no less than the billions paid for 3G - but
those billions are spread among hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs,
smart hands-on people in a competitive market. The value
of the Internet stems from a million little hubs of content and creativity.
With 3G, there'll be so little left over when the media groups and network
owners have finished arguing over money that the 3G network will wither
on the vine: overcapitalised, underused, and technologically inferior.
I mean, the next generation of 802.11 runs at 54Mbps!
WiFi will simply be everywhere. In London today, I see the death
sentence of 3G written on a thousand warchalked
walls.
