WS 127 The benefits of using advanced mobile technologies and global spectrum harmonization
EMILAR VUSHE: Good afternoon. We are about to start our programme. We are sorry for a little bit of a delay. A prior workshop started late and then, therefore, ran late to the IGF schedule. We welcome to what I think will be a very interesting workshop given that spectrum is at the heart of much of the way the world accesses the internet. Some are landline and some are satellite. They provide an important means of connecting world wireless networks. Today, we're going to explore the advance of technologies and advancing access to broadband communications. As we've heard throughout the IGF, it's an important enabler to a greater collaboration, social interaction and a contribution to overall economic development. In addition to just talking about the technologies , we will focus on the need for additional spectrum, how that need needs to be managed, and efforts at h harmonisation and how that has to be factored into a larger process where other legitimate uses of spectrum exist or continue to need to be accommodated. But what we are seeing as a backdrop here and Dr Pepper will speak to this, we are seeing uncredible projections of increased mobile traffic which underpins the need for more spectrum. Cisco has predicted an 18-fold increase. There is a real question as to whether the existing spectrum and the 700 mega hertz is enough to meet this need if these projections come anywhere close. This is part of the discussion that will be happening in preparation. Let me turn to introduce today's panelists. I'm going to introduce them in the order in which we've all agreed they're going to speak. First is Dr Robert Pepper, on my far right, who leads Cisco's global technology policy team. His background spans government and industry, where he was in key technology positions in the federal information commission for well over 15 years and has been with Cisco since 2005. Even though he left government, he continues to be an invaluable resource to the government through Cisco and his work on advisory committees in the United States and the United Kingdom, dealing with spectrum policy and spectrum technology networks. Next, we have Alex, who is a doctorial candidate in the department of geography. We will hear a little bit about Alex. He has been working with APC on their spectrum development project. Next is Jacquelynn Ruff, she is the vice-president for international public policy at Verizon Communications. She too shares with Dr Pepper a background in government, having been at the federal communications commission. They is a lawyer and an engineer. She spends a good deal of time working with international organisations, not just the IGF as a forum, but also APEC and the OECD. Next is Joseph Canhanya, who is a legal expert in the government of Kenya's national communication secretariat. Last but not least is Peter Lions, directors for spectrum policy in East Africa. Peter brings to the discussion analyst background where he focused on emerging telecom entities, technology companies. It is an interesting overlay to the discussion. I will ask Bob to kick off today's discussion. Thank you.
PANELIST: Thank you, Jennifer. The UN broadband Commission recognises that we will use radio technologies for providing access to broadband. There is work we have done at Cisco with our forecasts with the visual networking index, which is a rolling five-year forecast of both demand and adoption of broadband and the internet. By 2016, there will be three and a half billion people on the internet mostly with broadband. The way that they're primarily going to connect is going to be through wireless technologies . If we think about it just as a matter of practical, you look around this room, if you can get on the Wi-Fi network here, you're connecting your device with wireless technology. We see a decreasing number of devices being connected with fixed wire connections. Increasingly, the devices we are portable devices. As a result, as you will see, we're forecasting that using radio spectrum to connect devices both while you are outdoors and indoors is becoming the most important thing way for accessing the internet and will become the prime airway which people in growing economies will access the internet. We're forecasting as part of our study that by 2016, global IP traffic will reach a run wey of 1.3zeta bytes per year. Putting that into perspective, if you add up all of the traffic and all of the traffic for the internet from the beginning of the internet through this year, it will be 1.2 zeta bytes. In 2016, in that one year, that will be more traffic across the internet than all of the history of the internet to date! We're seeing a huge growth in internet traffic. When we take a look drilling down on my bile traffic, from 2011 to 2016, we are forecasting 18-times growth of mobile traffic. This doesn't include fixed Wi-Fi. Mobile traffic will increase by that much. If you look at the increment, the increased use of mobile data from 2015 to 2016, it it is more than four times the total of the total internet traffic this year. What causes this? We have more people connected. We have more devices. If you take a look at the devices, there is a significant shift taking place in the types of devices being connected to access the internet. In 2011, for example, 48%, about half of the devices connecting - sorry 56% were laptops. By 2016, we're forecasting that 48%, about half, will be smartphones and laptops will only be 25% of the way we access the internet on wireless devices. The tablets are growing quite rapidly. We are expecting in terms of the traffic about 10.5%. That may grow given the proliferation of tablets. It is going to be video that is driving the demand and the utilisation of the internet and broadband. Video of all kinds and video doesn't mean traditional one-way video streaming or downloading movies. It is also two-way video. It's Facetime, it's Skype video from device to device, from my tablet to your tablet realtime video communications. It is short form. It is long form. It is going to be view to the big flat screen television in your home. What is coming - when we did this most recent study, for me, this was the most startling finding. This is not a forecast. This is real data from 2011. It was the first year there were enough customers or consumers in the world for us to actually measures 4G traffic. We found that 4G users consume 28 times more data than non-4G. 2G and 3G blended together. It is a none incremental change. It's leap in data utilisation and consumption. So, as we move to the LTE networks that are going to be needed to support the demand, it will create additional demand. The other trend we are seeing which is a major shift is if we look at the mobile data, right, the data that is associated with a mobile device like my smartphone for which I have a contract or a pre-paid or post-pay relationship with a mobile operator, right, if we take a look at that traffic, what we are forecasting is that by 2016 globally 22% of that traffic will be offloaded. It will be offloaded to Wi-Fi. In the US, it will be 37% we're forecasting to be offleaded. What is offloading? It is where for the convenience of the mobile operator, my device looks for a cell. It could be licensed spectrum, but increasingly it is unlicensed Wi-Fi. It could be the Wi-Fi, the biggest trend that we now see in the mobile industry are the licensed operators using Wi-Fi and other smart cell technologies in combination with their licensed macrocell offload data traffic. The network is fixed. The device is mobile. What happens when my signal comes from my mobile device to the tower, it goes into a mixed network fibre. So, we see this as resulting in the trend we call the heterogenous network. It is licensed for outdoors. 80% of the use of a device is indoors and sitting down. But we need a lot more spectrum outdoors and then i indoors we need the Wi-Fi and the smart cell that we have in homes and offices. We did a cloud study and cloud readiness. When you look at cloud applications in aggregate, cloud is the next big thing. Everybody agrees with this and everybody sees it as a big trend. What we see in cloud, you have basic cloud services and advanced. People use not just one but multiple cloud applications. When you look at looking at what we call concurrent cloud applications and begin to look at advanced cloud, it's going to require significant download speeds of 21 megabytes uploading about 9 megabytes and low latency, latency of less than 100 milliseconds. Even for intermediate cloud, it will require more than 150 milliseconds. This has very significant implications for the wireless networks that are being built which are going to require fewer hops, shorter distances anding a regation back into fibre. Over the next five years, global mobile data traffic will grow 18%. Some are forecasting even more. There will be more users, each using more bandwidth. Each user will have more devices and each device will be more powerful. It will be driven by video. 4G and LTE is going to drive non-incremental change. This is going to be in a very good sense a disruptive change but we have to get ready for it. Networks are becoming heterogenous. Small cell indoors and smart cell o outdoors. It will be fibre or in rural areas it will be satellite, especially in rural developing markets. We're going to need more of a spectrum, much more spectrum for both the macrocell 4G reasoned outdoors and we are going to need more for the next generation of Wi-Fi which is either 80 or 160 mega hertz wide channels. We can only find that in the inner frequencies around 5.85 gega hertz. For the outdoor networks, the macrocell is at 700 mega hertz. The band goes from 692 all of the way up to 862. There are different regional plans but these plans also need, I believe that they're going to converge but they need to be harmonised. We will work quickly on the digital television transformation. There is a lot of talk about white spaces. A lot of that discussion is very misplaced. I say that as one of the people that created the concept of white spaces at the FCC. The white space concept is using spectrum that is allocated for one service, television. There is a geography where there is no TV station. You can opportunistically use it locally. That is what we need to do. There are some people who are proposing white space in a very different way and to take spectrum from the licensed band and create some separate for u unlicensed but that really fights the spectrum characteristics, the prop gation characteristics. We will have that for licensed broadband. If you want broadband, you will need broad bands. We will have opportunistic spectrum being useed. Thank you.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Bob. Alice is next.
Alice Munyua: Hi everyone. I can't even hear myself. Can you hear me? Just a show of hands, does anyone know what spectrum is? Okay. I know it can be quite confusing. There is a little bit of science to it. In terms of how spectrum should be managed and the opportunities it's a no brainer. First of all, I want to talk about the relevance of spectrum to developing countries. Developing countries are benefiting immensely from spectrum and some are poised to be benefiting a lot more. There is a lot more benefit that can happen. It requires good regulatory practice and advocacy. Just to give you some internet statistics. About three African countries which are considered to be the leaders in ICT, I'm talking about Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. So, in South Africa, we have only eight fixed line telephones per one hundred people. In terms of mobile phone connections, we have 126 mobile phone connections per 100 people. Chances are you know someone who has two phones but they would probably have a phone. We have eight fixed line telephones per 100 people. In Kenya, you have 64 people per 100 people who are using a mobile phone. Of that less than 1% are using a fixed line. It's less than 0.5% who have a fixed line ADSL. In Nigeria, we have 75 mobile phone users per 100 people and only0.35 fixed lines. You have decent, for Africans countries, internet access. In Kenya, 29 users in every 100 people. In Nigeria, we have 28. Most of these people will be accessing the internet from a cellphone. This is the year that it's happened and more people will access the internet through a cellphone through wireless technologies than through a fixed line. Because of the importance of mobile phones, spectrum is relevant to developing countries. About ten years ago, a very important concept in the debate was leap frogging. But basically mobile phones allowed people in Africa because of infrastructural deficiencies to leap frog that need for fixed lines. They are still needed for many reasons. But the mobile phone technology was the great enabler that enabled tens of or hundreds of millions of people in the developing world to access and make a phone call for the first time. The second round of leap frogging is now happening in terms of mobile internet. The other importance of spectrum is called the last mile, your internet communications go through a lot of infrastructures and go through undersea cables and go through satellite transmissions and go through copper and fibre wires in the ground and the last mile, in the developed world has conventionally been fibre and copper, but this last mile which can get people the connectivity is often through wireless technologies . We talk about LTE as well as GSM and 3G technologies . It is not necessary using a mobile phone and having mobile internet but it is augmenting existing infrastructures to provide internet to everyone. So, yeah, it is extremely relevant to developing countries. There are opportunities and challenges here. The first opportunity is that in many developing countries there is less use of spectrum because there are less technologies there before. The challenge is that it can be expensive and that spectrum also needs to be managed efficiently. If it's not managed efficiently, there is interference. Then there is bad quality of service and, yeah, it doesn't provide what you want it to provide. You need human capacity in dealing with this. You need regulatory capacity. We do need strong regulations when it comes to spectrum. The one issue when it comes to spectrum is a level playing field. Spectrum is sold. It is sold for a licence fee and used for a certain amount of time. It's either auctioned or the price is set by the government and it is assigned to different operators. It has the advantage and they're able to afford spectrum. It can be negative to your competition. If more spectrum is a a awarded to more players, we have competition. On top of that, you also want the spectrum to be used efficiently. So there are arguments that a higher price will authorise the operator to use the spectrum more efficiently. On the other side, it is not necessarily so if that inhibits competition. In the second point, the big issue is regulatory capacity. It can be a bottle neck to getting spectrum out there. You need great human capacity in the regulator. It helps if you have an independent regulator. Before we allocate the spectrum, asign it to different users, and before you assign the spectrum to different countries, you need to conduct the complete spectrum audit or at least a near complete spectrum audit that gives you a sense of what spectrum is free and what spectrum is not free. It is another challenge. Many developing countries have not completed a spectrum audit. South Africa has been waiting for a spectrum audit to be completed for more than three years at the moment. I have mentioned this, auctions. There is an argument that spectrum will be efficiently used if somebody pays the highest price for it. So, it is cost and competition implications. Opportunities for developing countries is (a) what is called the digital dividend and this will come when analogue broadcasting of television and radio gets switched off and digital broadcasting gets switched on. Many African countries are behind the deadlines on this. Nigeria and Kenya and South Africa are behind. Obviously, the issue is regulatory capacity. The second issue is while there is a great demand for broadband, you don't want to leave people behind who are relying for most of their news and media from radio and television. When you do this analogue switch off and digital switch-on, you need to have everyone buying your devices. There is a question of subsidies there. That is often a bottle neck and that needs to be dealt with. Another opportunity is white spaces. It was discussed earlier but white spaces are the little gaps that were allocated in the spectrum not being used. With the better technologies and the better use of spectrum, these are able to be used. The second thing is adaptive regulation. Possibly regulation needs to be adapt to specific conditions and specifically geographic conditions. It might be a good idea to allocate spectrum geographically instead of allocating spectrum to one company who may not necessarily use it for the whole area. You might want to sell that on a regional business is. You would need databases to orchestrate that. In every country, we need to map out what spectrum is available, what spectrum is allocated to what functionality, what technologies and this also needs to be transparent. The only way that this can benefit everyone is it is a transparent process. Spectrum audits need to be conducted and available on the website of the regulator or the ministry of communications. Yes, it is also a good idea to consider not always just auctioning off spectrum to the highest bidder but to set aside some spectrum to new market entrants to encourage competition at the same time and to make use of unlicensed spectrum, which in most countries is what Wi-Fi is. Those bands needs to be protected and other unlicensed spectrum that could be useful for the public good must be identified. Thank you.