Internet DNA Podcast
Why do we need faster than superfast broadband? Is 5G going to change our lives? Will the countryside ever really catch up? Possibly not but throw in some charging rhinos and candy floss trees and we have plenty to talk about.
Transcription
(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)
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Hello, welcome to this week's episode, of Internet DNA with me, Abby and me. Dan said slowly and thoughtfully this week we're going to be discussing 5g or fifth generation mobile networks and to see really whether it's going to change our lives, whether this super fast information highway that we've been promised for so many years is perhaps arriving or whether it's another web two point naught flash in the pan. Each time we get an increase in bandwidth, it opens up new technologies. Technologies are bandwidth high, so 4g opened up video for us. Well, I think we should start with what all the G's are. So GE means generation and one G was basically making phone calls on a mobile network. DG was being able to do text messages. Three G was accessing the internet fluid. 4g was accessing the internet 10 times faster. Yes. And that opened up media for us because at first I iPhones came out, they didn't have three G, so it wasn't that you couldn't do it, it was just, it was tiresomely slow. Well, 5g is suggesting that it's going to be at a hundred times faster than 4g. Yeah, which will give us some bandwidth. So instead of downloading a movie in 10 minutes, you're downloading it in 10 seconds. It sounds to me actually like the [inaudible] thing is going to be good for us gamers and they're going to be really happy or anybody who has wired network because it removes any requirement to have routers and you've got that kind of bandwidth coming through your phone. Suddenly you don't need an internet provider. If you've got unlimited data, you just set your phone up as a hotspot. It does opens up a lot of possibilities which are all to do with bandwidth and you know, if we look into the future, six G, H G 10 G 24 G, what's really interesting is what do those capabilities, what does that bandwidths start to open up as a technology available to you anywhere. So at the moment you want really high bandwidth applications. You're kind of forced to sit on a computer or a wide network or a very high speed wireless network in order to do those things. The cost of data through our phone is extortionate. If you tried to run your house off a five G network, I did try it on 4g for a month and I was stolen with the 250 pound bill. So let's say you find out that during a month you use 20 gigs of data and buy yourself a 25 gig data plan or an unlimited data plan. Obviously the danger with five G is that now you're accepting data so much faster. You're going to be using more. The faster the internet goes, the more bandwidth we soak up. Now we don't have to think about do we want to download a movie that's going to take all night to downloads because it takes five minutes and we just download it. The actual size of the movie hasn't changed. Our perception of that as a thing has changed because now it's a five minute thing. It's almost inconsequential. It's five G will get cheaper. I mean, obviously it's the bright new shiny child on the block right now. I think you have to be careful before your whole house to a mobile network, but you're right. Maybe that will change, but as well, I don't think we were going to be wanting to download things so much as it's streaming. That's so important. Our lives are now dependent on Netflix streaming movies and it seems that the movies or videos are counting for more and more of the data that we're using. Of the downloads, the internet traffic, I think it's grown to 80% of internet traffic is movies and so we do need faster, more immediate video. I mean it's mostly cats falling off sofas. It's not movies necessarily. It's video of some form or other because my children don't watch TV or on the TV, they're watching Netflix, Amazon prime you to vivo, tick tock, whatever the hell it is that they're on and it's all video and if you think about applications, like for example, Instagram was used to just be images. Almost every post now is video and that's because people have the bandwidth to watch it. Five years ago you couldn't have done that because no one would have ever sat there, waited for that video to download because it would've taken them an hour. That's why we're much more used to searching and learning through written documents. Whereas now younger generations are much more attuned to searching and learning through video because it's available to them and therefore why wouldn't they? But it might be worth explaining a little bit about what five G is and therefore how it's really going to work for us because the excitement is these millimeter waves, isn't it? These really short waves because low bland with give you long waves, which are helpful, you know, several miles and then you get mid bandwidth, which are shorter ways and then you get these really short waves, which are really, really powerful, but they don't go very far and they don't go through buildings or trees or buses or anything. So it's how that's going to be used. If you're in a city with lots of masks, great. There's going to be lots of places that it can get you. But out in the countryside, I think we might have a few too many trees and perhaps we're rather a long way away to be able to even benefit from that. I mean, you're talking to a person here who doesn't have super fast bore about it. In fact, my broadband speed is two megabytes. To be fair, no one cares about [inaudible]. No, no. I mean, okay, but when I say people don't care, like one of the problems of this hundred percent coverage is to drag a fiber cable across the Highlands of Scotland to some Croft, 18 miles from anywhere else. You're never going to make your money back. And also that person that's bought that Croft in the middle of the Highlands kind of knew when they bought it that the internet was going to be sketchy. No, I don't think that's an argument at all. I'd think why shouldn't I have as good broad brand just because I'm living in the middle of the nowhere. I didn't find my house going. I'm in a mobile phone, black spot. I can't even use my phone. If you were somebody who had said, right, I'm going run an internet business. One of the key things that I hear, one of the key things I need is internet. It doesn't mean that's it. So maybe when making house choices don't find the Gatehouse in the middle of a word miles from anywhere. Yeah. That's kind of what I'm saying. If you were only buying a house for it's internet, I would have suggested that your location was not the best. I know all these trees again or play havoc with five G, but what they'll probably do here, we have a thing called County broadband and they go to all the churches and they say, we'll stick an antenna on the top of your big, tall steeple and then you will get a percentage of everybody who signs up to this service. So it's good for the church because they get an income because they've got a tall building in the middle of a village. Sorry. Yeah, we have. That doesn't work too many trees don't live in the middle of a word. There are certain people in my family, you have to tick certain boxes that a different bunkers for my box is hence ending up the middle of the woods. Yes, let's get away from me. And the fact that I've managed five G every month, why not get 5g? But what you will start to get is unsaturated 4g. I don't even have phone coverage. Oh yes. Well see this man in the Croft in the middle of the Highlands, you see there's a woman in a wood in the middle of Sephora. Exactly. Yeah. My default internet is 80 megs a second. That's the normal standard size. Okay, but here's something else. Now, when I was reading about five years this wonderful thing they called beam forming, which means with these millimeter waves you can directly shoot at whoever it is in shootout with your beam. And that's meant to make it even better. And actually that was terrifying. The fact that I don't get any of this, does it mean that I'm going to live longer cause I am not frying my brain as much with all these microwaves? Is that not going to be a problem? There's really no scientific study that has ever shown that anything to do with mobile waves has ever done anything to anyone. But that's like saying he never harmed anyone because the people that took the, he haven't got old enough for it to affect them yet. The people that have the phones attached to them the whole time, haven't got old enough for it to have affected them yet. Well, I will run with that, that that may possibly be a problem. You can live longer. Go for your life with your team, make broadband. It's going to feel like you're living longer. So well, videos, we were talking about what she getting high speed slows bleed where the sort of glitches and pauses, obviously five G will be rolled out from high population areas where it makes a lot of economic sense and it will slowly get pushed out to the less economically making sense. And then finally the idea would be that you will start to get even to the places that don't make any economic sense because they're then subsidized by the places that were economically viable. That's better and better. Now I'm a drain on society in that perspective. Perhaps moment. No, because you have to have a telephone so you're still using your copper line that you had to have anyway. You're not Drayton yet. I probably was when they had to put the telephone up here. Oh, we don't have NS water or mains gas. Okay, I'm going to take this on to something else. Why do we need it anyway? I get that we need to watch a movie without it stopping and glitching like it does me. But why do we need bandwidth? Why do we do bandwidth? I understand an attractor if you're using the internet to help equally cover and not covering the places that doesn't need fertilizer across a field. You're getting the data that you need and sending it back. But then that falls apart when you get to the core of your field that there's no connectivity. So that doesn't really work. I understand in finance where you'd be like me sort of pressing a button and waiting a few seconds, but why as a human being, do I need to be watching things on high-speed? Do I need the movie to start in North point naught, naught, naught, one of a second as opposed to just one second. Well, just cause it's what you've come to expect. There's a difference here between do you need as in will you die without it? No, you'll live longer. But the other side of that is do you really want to go back to an internet on 14.4 K modems? Was the internet better then? No, it was dreadful. You need more bandwidth. You're already, in fact, I've spent most of this podcast complaining that you don't have enough bandwidth. I know, but I'm saying that I went to get to 40 capability. Perhaps I'm talking about, yes, I want to be remembered a few blocks now I don't. I'm not greedy. No, but that's because you've never experienced that. Once you get to where normal people are or people in high bandwidth areas are, then you'll start being annoyed by the fact that it does take five seconds for a video to start and the fact that when your son is sitting downloading something on one thing, it's affecting your internet somewhere else. What you really want if you imagine it in the future, is you want infinite where you are literally connected in real time to everything. Now you're getting into Saifai living in VR. Yeah, proper VR experiences. You want to be able to walk down a street that looks like something out of your dreamland, where trees are colored pink and made of candy floss with infinite bandwidth, you can do that. You could augment the reality in real time with anything you wanted. So I'm not saying that we need it, but I'm saying I'm coming around to it now. Candy first trees. I could go and paint the woods around. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Your children could paint words and you could go and explore their painting and then change to someone else's painting. How does someone else wants it? Well, you know, so no, it wouldn't be using glasses or by this state would we have chips and I had to do this. It could be glasses, might be contact lenses. You might have them inbuilt direct into your cornea that we don't know and maybe that's would be a choice. Someone will choose to be augmented biologically. Some people have no, I'm not that keen on that. I'll rather up where I've had contact lenses or hair glasses. Okay. Sometimes I want to be able to lift the glasses up and see what's actually going on. It's a bit like living Charlie and the chocolate factory. Yeah. So you can have it where all cars look like charging rhinos. But I don't know why. Oh, I do stuff at the cars looking like charging rhinos. So let's say in London you've got at least charging rhinos on their 5g and they're driverless and they drive down to see me or they don't. They charge down to see me and they're turned down my lane and the internet drops off. What do they do? Do they like drive into a field? Did they stop the calls? A pilot? Well, they're not. They're driverless cars. So how do they keep driving if they're not connected to them? Because they are Reticuli. They could have already downloaded what they're doing. So the thing about driverless cars is that they are also self aware of that surrounding. So even without the internet, they can tell there's a wall that out there that they need sat and have to know where the roads are. But once they've downloaded that map, let's say I'm traveling from here to yours before we start, cause I know when we go to Robbie's there's no internet. Well I'm going to do is I'm going to download the maps. I'm going to recall the last time I went to Abby's to remember what all the features were from out of the camera the last time I went. And then all I really need to do is be able to scan for non normal things like other rhinos charging down the road. So then the only needs to be aware of its immediate environment. A bit like you if you said right, I'm going to walk to your village. Your brain already has a map in its head of how to get there. Oh mine doesn't. But most people's do. Yeah, it has a good idea, but it's too busy painting the trees, candy floss bank to be worrying about where the village was when it lasts. But it already has some vague idea that when I walk out the front door, I'm going to turn right or left or whichever way it UTA, and then I'm going to walk up this bit and then there'll be another road and I sort of follow that road for a while and it's sort of twists and turns and then there's a church on the left and then there's a T junction. You've got a vague idea, you may not be able to map it out millimeter by millimeter, but your brain already maps the world and all you're doing car is to say, look, when you don't have the internet to update you every damn second. Just remember what you did last time and scan for differences. Okay, that's all right. I'll take the rhinos. They can come. Hold on a moment. We're talking about five G here, but it could be fixed super fast. Ball bat, there's the same thing and actually we already have the speeds that we're talking about in 5g in the fixed fiber optic. Yeah, pretty much. So why do we need it? Mobile. Your phone has limited storage so anything you save on your phone could be saved on the cloud and you just pick it up as you need it. Why save anything to your phone, any music to your phone, you just save it to the cloud and you listen to your music. It's got fast enough bandwidth just to pick a cup directly streaming it or files you want to pick that video file up that you don't want to keep on your phone cause it's a huge video file of you and your kids. Tobogganing in Azerbaijan. Yeah. Is that immediately, so it's that whole thing of offloading storage into cloud systems plus any kind of really high bandwidth processing that you need to do. We've just talked about one driving this cars, whether they need to be feeding back all the time, picking up what's the traffic, what's going on, is there being an accident here? What's the, you know what the root times that's changed the route. All of that information they need to update. Plus they also need to update scenarios back to them. Motherload to say when I drove down this road, actually there's a tree that thicks out. You actually have to go around it so that in the future those cars have all got that idea. That's what's there. So it's really about offloading data from whichever device you're wrong because if you're going to move into a world where that level of bandwidth is so high that it doesn't need to be on your phone anymore, it can be anywhere. Then you start to allow the phone to do things that it can't do at the moment cause it purely doesn't have the processing power. Everybody ends up being a dumb terminal so your phone doesn't have to be very bright at all. All it has to do is talk to something that is very bright. Yeah. You don't need any of the memory is super fast broadband bit fixed or mobile. Is it because businesses need it or is it because people need it? Individuals need it. There's three things at the moment, which is people need more bandwidth. Even I hear with 80 megs, which let's face it, five years ago, 10 years ago, just seemed like a dream 80 banks. He's joking still. I remember. Yeah, I remember when two mics seemed incredibly fast. Yeah. Like just wow how FOSS is this, but our lives fill those spaces so we add more stuff that needs more bandwidth, requires faster loading of stuff. So I think there's that just the natural and we get lazy. We don't have to unfill we can only feel, we never have to clear out. Do you remember when you only allowed 10 text messages on your phone so you could only keep your best 10 you had to clear the others out. Yeah. Your best 10 [inaudible] 10 was most people's choice. But anyway, yeah, well I had my latest three and then about my best seven. Yeah. So there's that. B businesses are requiring applications to transfer more and more data near instantaneously. And third does a just a marketing like 4g saturated. So let's sell 5g because we can, and then once five T gets saturated, let's do six G cause it just pushes that my phone's not good enough. My thing's not fast enough. It's a part of marketing to sell more stuff. Seeing the places, it's always, you know, education, health care, government, finance, where it's really can make a difference. Yeah. The health care is the one place where you can't get enough technology involved because the very fact that people can immediately see people in other parts of the worlds to help do operations and of course technology doing the operations itself, all those things, the more immediate it is, the more lives it's going to [inaudible]. Yeah, and actually I think is it breast cancer where computers are something like 90% more accurate than human beings at detecting it because they've just seen so many. So even like a really, really advanced breast cancer doctors seeing what may be a hundred thousand computers in millions, millions and millions, millions. So it really has a very, very good idea of what a cancer mammogram really looks like. And very early as well. Yeah, I can go. Actually I know what that mammogram looked like five years ago. I knew what it looked like three years ago actually. Now I can put together that Mark there, which doesn't look like cancer and isn't cancer now, but actually is a marker for what will be cancer in the future. It's powerful that, yeah, and the other thing I hear a lot is five G's going to make internet of things, but I don't understand that so much because a lot of smart technology, smart appliances only going to need the most minute low bandwidth, not the super fast because they're only literally giving tiny, tiny parcels of data every so often. So I'm not convinced that 5g is what's going to kick start that into being widely used. If you've got a thousand devices all doing that, that's a lot of bandwidth actually. In reality, even though each device is doing very, very little, submitting its status report back to the manufacturer to make sure that it doesn't break updating itself, getting the new updates, checking things, waiting for you to tell it to cool down, up, cool, start, stop, unload, load. Hoover. Not Hoover, all of those things. Although each one is a very small bit of data, they're constantly doing it and actually a bit like an auger. It's not the fact that they use a lot of gas at one moment. It's that they use it all the bloody time and so actually they use vast amounts of data. Imagine you've got a hundred devices in your house constantly chattering back and forth to different servers. Even. It's a small bit of data at a time. They're doing it all the time nonstop. One of the things that you find when you look at your bandwidth you use is how much of it is just little system tray stuff that's just chattering back and forth in a day, be going, do they have a subscription? Yes, they do. Do they have a subscription yesterday? Does it have, does it still have a subscription? Yes, they do constantly. Is there updates now? They're on either athletes now. No, they're wrong. Yeah. Yeah. I think I've got that. Oh my God. Suddenly it was like, I felt like one of these things, a washing machine, if you've got an update, we've got an update, but do you think 200 years ago suddenly everybody was moving to the cities to work in factories because the jobs were in the cities, not in the countryside. Do you think with the advent of this speed and what we begin to feel is a human right this super fast, do you think that people are going to start giving up on the country and all's coming back towards the cities because it's never going to get up to that person in the craft because as you say, the money's not there. The drive's not there from the commercial. Unless Corbin nationalizes the lot, then we might get it. Yeah. Well I'm not getting into politics, especially at this point in time, but you will get it. You know, five years ago your house would have had no internet. It would have been a modem. You'll just get it a lot later because there are certain things that drive that requirement constantly. So people living in very remote places won't have the access to the kind of speeds people in more built up areas have. That's for sure. But it will all keep on moving forward. Yeah, exactly. So eventually they'll put fiber down your road. It's a thought happening this year. They're ready out of time, but then you're still so far away from the actual green box anyway. Well I'm just saying so have you got anything else you want to say on the information superhighway that might be coming up my track because we're slightly out of time. It will be interesting to see. I don't think anybody thought when we got Forgey that well that would really drive. Where's the advent of applications like tick tock and Instagram. It will have unintended consequences and I wonder if that was a really useful consequence or just a time-wasting byproduct. Yeah, but time-wasting byproducts are kind of what people want. It depends where you look at it from a marketing perspective. You're marketing yourself and a lot of people are making a lot of money, but from the other side, a lot of people are spending that money and spending a lot of their hours and time and lives as well. We've chosen two really banal ones, but there are other apps on your phones. When I was in America, I use an app called move it, which just tells me all the bus train to fly taxis, all of the information in one app. So I can choose actually how do I will need to get from a to B, which is a foreigner is quite a difficult thing to understand. So there are useful applications of this technology. It's a sad fact that humanity tends to go towards the more banal ones. But I'm not here to change. People have no idea. Next week, why don't we talk about which apps we really do find useful. Yes. And which apps have sat on our phone that we thought would be useful and actually we've never used and which apps on our phone have we never used, but our children seem to have taken up news excessively. Well, on that note, I will speak to you next week. Bye bye. I'll speak to you next week and I'll be in New York.
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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.