MWC: Everything is Mobile Now

Every year, Mobile World Congress (MWC) takes place in Barcelona, Spain. Historically, if you wander around the show floor, the biggest booths are the network equipment vendors, followed by the handset vendors. Of course, the network operators are here too. There are two other notable groups of booths. First, the suppliers into the industry, with everything from specialized antennas to offload digital signal processors. You also might have heard of a company called Cadence? They have a line of Tensilica processors that are widely used in mobile handsets.

Normally I would report from Barcelona as the event unfolds, but with both DVCon and the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference happening at the same time, Cadence announced some new products so those slots on my calendar got preempted. For more details, see Xcelium: Parallel Simulation for the Next Decade, Protium: Next Generation FPGA Prototyping, and Litho Physical Analyzer PLUS.

Mobile is very important to the semiconductor industry (and its supporting ecosystem of tools and IP, which obviously includes Cadence). It is the biggest consumer of silicon by a long way. it drives new process nodes, new packaging technology, and new tool capabilities since it is first to need everything. So watching what is going on in mobile is very important.

I have attended several of the keynote sessions, enough that some major themes have started to emerge. But I'll talk about those in tomorrow's post.

Sustainable Development Goals

Another keynote was on Achieving Sustainable Development Goals through Mobile. The UN sustainable development goals are the mark II version of the millennium development goals (MDG). The MDG were an attempt to turn vague platitudes into something more focused and measurable. Presented were eight goals:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Global partnership for development

To me, the first 6 are reasonably measurable, the last two are feel-good goals (I'm not really sure what the 8th one even really means). The goals were set in 2000 with the target being to achieve them by 2015. They indeed served to focus a lot of efforts and a lot of progress was made in those 15 years. So the UN decided to do it again, but instead of the goals being created by a tiny team, this time it was created by a huge committee with the result that the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are anything but focused. There are 169 targets. As is always the case, when everything is a top priority, nothing is—so I doubt that they will have the same positive catalyzing effect that the original MDG had.

I am somewhat dubious about the whole aid "industry" as a good way to improve anything much. It seems to be more focused on making the donors feel good. Britain, for example, has a commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid. If that is your only target, then it is easy to meet, mostly because there is no requirement that the aid does anything positive. Since so much aid goes to corrupt countries, there is way too much truth in the aphorism that foreign aid is "taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries." Another example is that the US gives more fertilizer to Liberia than the entire Liberian education budget, so probably not the highest priority. Of course, they don't manufacture the fertilizer in Liberia, or even Africa, it comes from the US, since a large part of foreign aid is actually subsidizing donor country businesses. Any local manufacturer of fertilizer would go bankrupt anyway since they would be competing with free.

Mobile has actually made an enormous difference to the lives of people in Africa, in particular, by doing business as usual. It means a lot for a fisherman to negotiate over a mobile phone with several potential buyers, rather than showing up in one port and being stuck with whatever deal is offered. But it is not just using the phone as a communication device. M-pesa has revolutionized banking in Kenya, Tanzania and some other countries by making mobile payments work in countries without banks (outside of major cities).

The sister of a friend of mine was a senior finance person in Nokia, back in their heyday when they shipped a million phones a day, many of them to poor nations. She was having a midlife crisis and talking about resigning and joining an NGO so she could feel she was doing good in the world. I encouraged her to stay, pointing out that Nokia was doing more good in poor countries by doing business there, than Oxfam or other industrial scale NGOs who had no measurable effect on anything much, beyond being able to show that them money was spent (along with a lot that Oxfam used to pay their huge staff).

So I was feeling guilty this morning, sitting in an auditorium of several thousand people, at a conference with 100,000 attendees, listening to how 50c per day would make a big difference to hunger. There are 20 times as many cell phones as children that are hungry...I wrote it down the other way around in my notes, but that can't be true since there are more phones than people in the world, and there has been major progress in reducing hunger (see MDG #1).

The CEO of NEC presented about how they are...something or other that makes NEC feel look and feel good. Mostly to do with agriculture. I didn't manage to determine if NEC is doing charitable work, or is doing good by doing business as usual in the countries they were discussing. If it is the second, it is much more likely to make a difference in the long run.

Strive Masiyawa

Strive is the founder of Econet Wireless, who are doing a lot of work on building Africa's digital economy. His name sounds Japanese to me, but as you can see by the picture here where he is meeting another famous black guy, he is not. In fact, he said during his talk that he is from Zimbabwe, although he left years ago (who wouldn't get out of such a mismanaged country as quickly as possible?). Like Nokia that I mentioned earlier, he is in business for business's sake, not for charity's sake.

One fact he opened with is that Africa is full of millennials. 60% of the population is below 30, the average age is 19.

He pointed out that GSM (what we now call 2G but didn't then) brought into Africa highest level of investment ever, bigger even than oil and gas. Global players came in and made the investment to build the industry. But now, a lot of big players beginning to exit space mainly due to regulation. African governments have seen mobile as a golden goose and wanted more and more eggs until the business doesn't make economic sense. Since 5G will require an enormous investment, the countries need to ensure that the continent remains attractive from an investment perspective. Or it simply won't happen.

Formula E

Every event these days seems to be about autonomous driving, and MWC is not an exception. Alejandro Agag, the CEO of Formula E, told the story of creating it. Four years ago he and some others had the idea to create a global racing championship for electric cars. But when he started, there were no cars, no sponsors, no teams, and no cities signed up. Everyone told him he would fail. But Formula E is part of the technology revolution that is going on in the automobile industry. The idea is to make society better, accepting as a reality that most people will only buy electric cars when they are cheaper and better than internal combustion. So Formula E serves to both drive the technology in an unforgiving environment, and also allow manufacturers to showcase their technology. Every season (now on 3^rd) they add 2 laps more to the tracks with the same battery. The current iteration uses 2 cars per driver, with one used for the first half of the race, and then in a pit change swapping to the second car. By season 5 they will use just a single car.

He then introduced Denis Sverdlov and Daniel Simon of Roborace. They are taking formula E to the next level, creating races for driverless electric cars. Again, part of the reason is spectacle, and part is to drive the technology hard. Autonomous vehicles could have an impact of $3.5T on the global economy through fewer accidents, higher productivity (you can work instead of driving), and more efficient ways of driving. Clearly the future is driverless, the only question is when. Roborace is an open platform, the hardware is the same, each team produces their own software (which runs on the NVIDIA Drive platform). Daniel Simon is the designer of the car, which I have to admit looks very attractive. They had one there for us to look at (but not touch). It has all gone very fast. The concept was announced in December 2015, by March 2016 they had the first design, the first driverless lap took place at Donington Park (in England). The cars currently achieve lap times much slower than the best human drivers, so there is lots of room for improvement.

Netflix

Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, closed out the first day of MWC. Francine Stock of the BBC interviewed him. She started by congratulating him on Netflix winning their first Oscar for White Helmets. She also congratulated him for being in almost every country now, famously excluding the country with the biggest population in the world, China.

Reed gave a bit of background on how Netflix got started. A standard part of any introduction to networking course, that I've used myself in my university lecturing days, is to have the class work out the bandwidth of a truck full of the medium of the day (magnetic tape, CDs, DVDs, thumb drives) driving down the highway. It turns out to be incredibly high, much higher than any wide area network until recently. Reed realized that DVDs in the mail, at about 600GB each, is a high bandwidth network (10s of megabytes per second). Eventually, the internet would overtake the postal system, but it took until 2010 for that to happen. At that point, streaming started to become increasingly attractive.

Netflix now releases globally, in the sense that a release is available in all countries at the same time. This is very different from the old process where something might appear first in a theater, then pay per view, then broadcast TV, then on DVD etc. These so-called "windows" are a thing of the past.

Binge watching is a symptom of being able to watch anything whenever you want, rather than having episodes dripped out one per week. Reed pointed out that we are getting back to how books work. You can read anytime you want, as many chapters as you want. In the future, not even the far future, all TV will be watched on the internet. Networks all over the world are bringing all their content online like HBO and others already have.

Netflix has around 100M members around the world, about half in the US, half overseas (well, I guess I should say outside the US since I'm in Spain right now). One effect is that a local film-maker in, say, Spain can get global reach.

Cable companies have been worried about Netflix, that it will lead to a lot of cord-cutting (people canceling their cable subscription and living with an internet subscription and Netflix etc). They just put Netflix on the latest Comcast boxes with great success. To a Comcast subscriber, it is another channel with really great content. It is about story telling more than technology. Netflix invests a lot in technology with the aim to make it invisible. Better codecs lead to less "buffering" hiccups; ideally, they will become a thing of the past like the sound of a 56kb dialup modem. This also reduces the bandwidth requirements and thus means that a lower data cap (so less money) is needed for a given quality and consumption pattern.

There is a lot of competition for streaming: YouTube, Amazon, BBC, and more coming. Reed is confident that they will stay out ahead and be a leader. "We need to keep out in front so we don't get run over."