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June 08, 2004
More Spectrum, But For What?
There is a crying need for reallocating spectrum from broadcast to two-way communication, and in general introducing a more rational and economically efficient spectrum management scheme. But how will this newly freed-up spectrum be used? We hear about all the innovative new services that will be created. But the main use of the additional spectrum will be--voice! (For quite a few years, anyway.)
Yes, the boring old voice. That is still what people (referring to the general population, not necessarily to the digirati who read this posting) value the most. In the U.S., at least 70 percent of telecommunications revenues come from voice services (including cellular). The Internet has seen explosive growth over the last decade. But during that same period, wireless voice has seen far greater growth, in both number of users and revenues. There are well over a billion cellular subscribers today.
Voice is and will continue to be important not just because it is the traditional telecom cash cow. Voice is an extremely important human method of communication. We all know that "one picture is worth a thousand words." But that is not quite right. In my lectures, I often ask the audience what their reaction would have been if, shortly before the lecture, they were told that there would be no slides or other graphics aids available, due to some technical or safety problems. How many would decide not to attend? Usually just a handful raise their hands. I then ask, suppose instead they were told ahead of time that for some strange reason, slides, flip charts, and so on would be available, but neither I nor they could say a word. How many would still come? Usually just a handful, and sometimes not a single hand goes up. Voice is still the main method for human communication (and the failures of Picturephone and various
later video telephony experiments just serve to emphasize this point). So "one picture is worth a thousand words" is not quite right. Instead, what is correct is that, as was said by Harold M. Stark in 1970,
One picture is worth a thousand words, provided one uses another thousand words to justify the picture.
The primacy of voice should not be a cause for dismay. Even for those who are interested in more innovative services, promoting more wireless voice usage should be seen as a positive goal. It will bring in more revenues to the wireless industry. It will also make it clear to the general population just how important radio communication is. And it will stimulate wired broadband. As voice continues to migrate to wireless (at this point only around 25 percent of voice usage goes over wireless links), wireline providers, both traditional telcos
and cable TV companies, are likely to try exploiting their main advantage, namely greater bandwidth. The end result is likely to be much faster development and deployment of innovative new services, both wireless and wireline.
Posted by Andrew Odlyzko at June 8, 2004 10:20 AM
As usual Andrew makes exactly the right point.
as an aside
I think we need to have more creative work on making wireless (and if that means voice, so be it) really wireless. Spectrum policy needs to address schemes for doing radio well - we need to figure out how to treat radio as having a topology different from a fixed wired network. It is really important not to preclude what comes after TCP/IP...
Posted by: steve crandall at June 8, 2004 03:04 PM