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Friday, July 24, 2009
Thought Leaders
Fanny Mlinarsky, on shifts in the wireless world
By Rodney Brown
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Tell us about octoScope.
OctoScope is a technology consulting company. I started it by myself and it was just me at the beginning, in 2006 when I left Azimuth, a company I founded in 2002 and I was their CTO for 5 years. Azimuth builds wireless test equipment and so I had been working in the wireless space for the past eight or nine years.
I started doing basically CCTO (contract CTO) work for hire, focusing on the wireless technologies — wi-fi, WiMax LTE, UWD, Bluetooth. And as I gained clients and they needed help with design work, having been a VP of engineering in my past life, I brought on some design people. And I am fortunate to know some very talented design engineers. We started doing some contract design work. Now what we do is we actually have both the CTO skills and design skills. Your typical contract design house requires a very detailed specification on what the product needs to do. In contrast we can actually help our clients define the requirements of their wireless systems and components. So we are a very low-maintenance contract design house.
We work with half a dozen people, some full time, some contract employees. We can scale very quickly for a project because we all know other good engineers and technologists. So we are very well connected in the wireless space among the experts.
Will you eventually move from contract design to rolling out you own products?
Having been a product person my whole life, its a natural thing for me to think about, as I help companies and I see issues that need products. I have been in the test equipment space for most of my career. So I always think about testing, even though with my consulting practice we develop a lot of end products and some are test but not all. My thoughts are drifting to testing the new emerging smartphones, As you know there have been very dramatic changes in a very short period of time with the iPhone being introduced. So that’s very significant because it kind of starts with the applications, the mobile apps, but they drive all the layers of wireless communications, the wireless broadband infrastructure, because even today AT&T isn’t able to support users doing all they want to do with the iPhone — they have to restrain their use. That’s because the infrastructure’s not ready for it.
So there are two things that are happening. There are applications, but there are also smartphones with multiple radios that are coming on the market. About five years you had on the phone one radio - it was a GSM phone in Europe or a CDMA phone in the U.S. Then they stared coming out with GSM/CDMA duo-mode phones. But now, you have a have a dozen radios in the phone. You have GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, which is 3G, you may have HSPA for data which goes with WCDMA. But 4G is also on the horizon, you have LTE, Now you may have an MPEG decoder so you can watch video, or ATSC, the new digital video is in the air.
That puts a drain on your battery, and also the cost of the phone, the weight of the phone, but not just that, it’s a performance issue. Earlier when you had one radio, even that was very hard to test because of the mobility. Your mobile phone drives around in the car with you and you jump from base station to base station and each carrier has to think about roaming policies. How weak does a signal have to get before I let the phone roam to a competing network?
Now you not only have roaming but you have roaming from one network to another. And you may have applications that are time-critical like video teleconferencing, like accessing the web, like paying video, while you are switching towers. Mobile networks are pretty hard to test. There are a lot of things that have to work right. And battery is a very important consideration.
Things have gotten very complicated, very quickly for phones and subsequently for the networks that support these phones. And the testing industry has not kept up with it. There’s a lot to do to assure both battery performance and quality of service, and quality of user experience and that’s the area where we have an architecture that we are validating with target customers. It’s a natural for us to look in that space to develop products
What do you find of interest that is happening in your market?
How quickly will LTE get deployed? You have WiMax and LTE — competing technologies. WiMax has about a 3-4 year lead over LTE, but all the carriers have accepted LTE. And that’s our 4G. Basically WiMax works well but it has only been used in a fixed mode. In this country we have cable and DSL to bring broadband into our homes, but in other countries such as Russia and China and the Middle East, they don’t have cable and DSL, so they use WiMax. Its been deployed that way and it is a successful technology but it was designed also to be mobile — for handsets to do the handoffs and to support mobility in the physical layer. But the only carrier that has embraced WiMax is Sprint/Clearwire. and Clearwire has now separated from Sprint. So WiMax is expected to be a niche technology, but probably a big niche, a billion-dollar niche, and mostly fixed.
LTE is a very similar technology on the physical layer. But its been embraced by 3GPP, 3rd Generation Partnership Project — that’s the international organization thats making 3G standards and now they own LTE they rejected WiMax. LTE is the 4G standard as far as 3GPP is concerned. LTE is not quite here yet and how quickly will it get embraced. We have 3G, now industry has been taking about 3G for ten years but only now is it getting deployed with the iPhone forcing that requirement on AT&T, and now Verizon and everybody’s going to have 3G. How soon will we need LTE and 4G? That all depends on how quickly the applications take on and user demand has to be a business case.
What are you following for regulations?
The biggest thing that’s happening as far as regulations go is white spaces. When the FTC was considering the digital TV transition there were several channels that were freed up because digital TV is more efficient and takes up less frequency than analog TV. At the same time that this regulation was in the works companies like Google and Microsoft and Dell got together and started petitioning the FCC to have two-way wireless communication on the freed up channels, sort of like wi-fi on steroids. That’s what Google has in mind still, probably. That can operate in the spectrum, where there is low losses and greater range.
When we first launched analog TV the airwaves weren’t used very much and so we put each channel in its own 6MHz slot. Today when you see communications devices, they share space, there are hundreds of users sharing the same frequencies. The technology exists but FCC regulations haven’t kept pace with it. And so there is still old allocated channels for each broadcast station.
At the end of 2008 it has been a very fierce battle between broadcasters and the players that were trying to demonstrate that technology-wise this can be made to work.. Obviously it threatens not just the broadcasters but the traditional carriers, the AT&Ts and Verizons of the world, because have a very high-cost business model, they’ve paid billions of dollars for their spectrum. All of a sudden if people can have huge swaths of spectrum worth billions of dollars that they can use, it undermines the carriers business model. There is no communication standard yet (for white spaces) — IEEE is working on it. And there are a couple of places within IEEE that the standards are being developed. It is a huge, huge deal, because there is very limited spectrum available now for unlicensed communications and this will increase it tenfold or more. Where the TV broadcasting was you will see that you will often have hundreds of megahertz available in the prime spectrum available for communications. So this definitely is a very significant regulatory development.
I think its a couple of years away (before any real applications). Its in the initial phases of communications development, but it doesn’t mean that some enterprising company may not just jump in and do something that is not IEEE-standards but just complies with the FCC guidelines.
How do you see the economy right now and its affect on the industry?
I know a lot of my colleagues are getting laid off and startup companies, small companies have been affected, several of them in our area. We see a lot of startups shutting down. For octoScope we haven’t really seen a slowdown and we are able to work with people who would be occupied otherwise and now have access to some very smart people who have been affected, and this allows us to start something new.
When the economy is down, enterprising people jump in and take advantage of the lower rents and the talented people being available and willing to work for stock or whatever, and that’s the time to get started on a shoestring.
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