Open innovation needs a boost
I love open and permissionless innovation, so it was a love fest for me to talk about blockchain and WiFi at Wi-Fi Now World Congress last week. And earlier this week, I was attending an on-site workshop for Telecom Infra Project’s (TIP) Edge Computing group hosted on Facebook campus. I have been following WiFi and TIP since the very beginning, and strongly felt that these open innovations need a serious boost.
Muni WiFi 2.0?
I was on a panel discussing Blockchain and the potential disruption to WiFi. I shared a short story about the first wave of Muni Wi-Fi during 2005–2007, where municipalities and utility companies tried to set up city wide Wi-Fi network to compete with the ISPs. That’s also the time when Jan Burglund and I started our WiMetro venture, where NKN’s founder Yanbo Li was our tech lead. The Muni WiFi 1.0 movement slowly fizzled out due to a few reasons: technology was not mature yet; municipality funding did not materialize; lawsuits from existing ISPs.
Now it seems we have another wave of Muni WiFi 2.0 bubbling up, because the technology is much better now, the devices are ubiquitous, and we might have mobile advertisement revenue. But will these be enough?
Wi-Fi access is tough business: small businesses put up Wi-Fi access point, but the money from subscription or usage based charges, plus advertisement revenue, cannot easily pay back the capital investment and ongoing running costs. On the other hand, if we can incentivize small business with tokens for sharing the network and mining, these tokens can become significant income for these small businesses. That much faster return on investment, will enable them to expand their WiFi coverage, upgrade their WiFi equipment, and attract more new businesses to deploy infrastructure,
People have asked me why bother with WiFi at all, since Cellular technologies like 3G, 4G and upcoming 5G are making steady albeit slower progress as well. Cellular and WiFi are like siblings, they fight a lot, and keep each other honest. At the end, consumers win. It is the open and permissionless innovation of WiFi, that prevents us from living in 56kbps “Wireless broadband ISDN” today. And the amazing technology advances in WiFi will lead the industry in real world deployment at totally affordable price. And we hope blockchain and tokenized WiFi connectivity will make the new wave of Muni WiFi 2.0 more successful.
Open source Telco hardware and software
Most of the telco hardware and software are standard based (3GPP for 3G/4G/5G, IEEE/WFA for WiFi), thus it seems sensible to build most of these technologies by open source. Facebook definitely saw it that way, when it started the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) in 2016 after its success in building Open Compute Project (OCP).
TIP has published several open source hardware and software designs for 3G & 4G LTE small cells, optical switch, mmWave backhaul, and edge computing. These initiatives will significantly lower the cost of building telecom infra equipment, and speed up the innovation on these open platforms.
However when I was at the TIP Edge Computing workshop hosted by Facebook, I can feel many participant’s impatience at the slow pace that the Telco industry are adopting the open source technology already developed by organizations like TIP. Even with the significantly lowered cost of open source software and hardware, the traditional subscription revenue stream is still too small and too slow to recoup the capital investment. In addition, the existing telecom network is not efficiently utilized due to the imbalance between demand and supply. An open and trusted protocol is required to mediate among different networks and service providers.
When I talked briefly about what we intend to do with blockchain technology, there are immediate interest in exploring it further for Internet of Things (IoT), dApp support at the edge instead of core cloud, and decentralized Software Defined Network (SDN) that can optimize according to real-time traffic and pricing information across network borders.
We envision tokenized connectivity protocols and economy can give the TIP innovators a further boost in faster and wider adoption. And it is up to the entire Telco industry to convert these interesting ideas into real world use cases, lab demos, field trials and eventual commercial deployment.
Separating hype and disruption
There might be some misconception about blockchain and tokenized economy, both in mass media and general public. But the enthusiasm or even hype about virtual tokens can bring in much needed funding to support open innovation. An analogy is that the gold rush helped building the great city of San Francisco, while the American railroad speculation helped building the Stanford University (founder Leland Stanford made lots of money from railroads).
At the same time an idealist and pragmatist, I believe what we set out to do with blockchain for the telco industry will have profound impact. But we have to stay true to the course and wade through the hype and irrational exuberance to make concrete progress towards rebuilding both the technology and business model, one block at a time.
