IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March/April 2021 - 47

selling services and that the Internet is just
another television channel.
5G is the fifth generation of cellular telephony. The big surprise of the fourth generation
(LTE or Long-Term Evolution) is that we do not
need a special voice network because we could
use VoIP techniques over a data network.
The defining premise of 5G is that the networks should be aware of each application's
needs. This was indeed true in the early days
when every element had to be tuned to each
application. Hush-a-phone made sense in that
context - it was simply an element of the telephone network. Another special network was
needed for video. This doesn't mean that you
had a separate physical network. It is the job of
the network control plane to resolve conflicts
between the competing requirements for the
shared facilities.
The fast lane is one way for applications to
buy priority. Selling such lanes and hosting
applications is the business model of 5G.

Versus Best-Efforts
This is why the concept of best-efforts is so disruptive and why it is so hard to understand. It
allows the applications to resolve the conflicts
among themselves without the need for a control
plane. In fact, it can work better than a control
plane since instead of a busy signal, the application
can adapt, such as using text instead of voice.
We've had situations where people have been
unable to communicate because they can't get a
good cellular signal, but there was enough connectivity for the diagnostic messages. That capacity
could've allowed testing for help.
Embracing best efforts requires changing our
metric of success. In the 1970s, we could measure call completion by determining whether the
other phone rang. By that measure, there was no
need for an answering machine to take a message. Once users could create their own solutions, answering machines became the norm.
Without the ability to take capacity from the
commons and sell it to the highest bidder, how
does a provider make money? There are many
examples of how to fund public infrastructure
such as roads and sewer systems. How should
the IEEE navigate a transition which threatens
the current shareholders?

March/April 2021

5G-THE FUTURE THAT WAS TO BE
In 2004, we saw IMS (IP Multimedia System)
based on the premise that we need a special control plane in order to make multimedia work.10
This was despite the fact that multimedia was
working quite well. But the basic idea that you
need to build applications into the network did
not die. It simply hibernated and emerged as 5G
even though its use cases are already working
quite well.
Recently T-Mobile had a major outage. One
of the reasons they cited is that their dependence on IMS.11 Another reminder that traditional telecommunications architecture is not
very resilient.

5G Radio
As John Apostolopoulos observed, Wi-Fi 6
and 5G radios are basically the same.12 The main
technical difference being in the frequency
bands and the economic model. This is entirely
a policy decision. If anything, Wi-Fi 6 has a compelling advantage because it can interoperate
with the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure, whereas a
5G requires spending billions of dollars to
achieve the same thing without any of the synergies of Wi-Fi!
The primary difference is economic, and telecom providers must recoup billions of dollars
investing in a brand-new infrastructure. App
developers, on the other hand, cannot depend
on 5G, thus do not drive demand for 5G radios in
the interim.
Both radios offer very high performance
within the same radio. The problem is extending
such high-performance guarantees beyond the
radio.
But, before we leave the subject of the radio,
is not it strange that 5G is entirely about wireless. If the protocols are so important, why are
they not available via fiber (or other wires) and
Wi-Fi? T-Mobile further muddies the water by
rebranding its service as 5G using existing radios
but with 5G network protocols.
These are all tell-tale signs of what I call marketecture. It looks like system architecture but
is designed by the marketing department. I
wrote about a striking example in my previous
column. The Android TV box that Verizon Wireless provides is branded as " 5G " but contains

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March/April 2021

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