pavyedav | boredom and inherent curiosity, in one

In order to inaugurate my coming back to the Bay, I’ve decided to overhaul my general blogging approach. First off, I’m actually going to write again - I think my break of over a year has been enough. Secondly, while I may pepper in little anecdotes that have no direction or focus whatsoever, I am going to try to make my posts strictly about technology, specifically in the wireless communications industry.

To start off again, I want to discuss a problem that cellular service providers currently do not address. When two smartphone users are in the same vicinity (assuming there is no WiFi) trying to access different content - for instance, user 1 wants to check his e-mail and Facebook accounts on his iPhone, while user 2 is interested in watching on-demand TV on his iPad - the bottleneck that occurs due to the data-intensive usage of user 2 is simply not fair, for either party. Both users pay for the same 2GB of data usage, but neither user gets a good experience. This is exactly the fundamental flaw in the cellular provider’s approach: the lack of a dynamic usage model.

Look, I understand that whenever the term ‘dynamic’ comes into play, it automatically connotes greater complexity, higher expenses, and likely the use of some technology that has not been researched sufficiently. But it needs to be done. If user 2 can be able to pay a bit extra to enjoy his/her on-demand programming, specifically through a pay-per-unit-time approach, then both users get a better experience.

Let’s actually look at pay-per-unit-time. If user 2 knows that he/she wants to watch an on-demand TV program in the next 30 minutes, then user 2 should be able to have the option to pay a bit extra (whether it be $2.50 or $10; the economics would have to be analyzed) to get a faster and more reliable connection. The cell companies can very easily be able to guarantee higher throughput for user 2, especially once LTE becomes more fully established across the nation.

A more difficult hardware approach to this problem would be to use cognitive radio. I’ll admit that I’m plugging cognitive radio because it hits closer to home, since I did research in this field while I was at Berkeley, but it is a concept with great potential. Cognitive radio would use the same approach of having to pay extra at the time to get a higher quality connection, but the technical aspect is different. Instead of the cell company’s reworking the transmissions to guarantee user 2 a higher throughput, user 2 would dynamically change to a channel in the spectrum that provides better connectivity. Obviously, cognitive radio is still a growing area of wireless research, so we probably would not see it implemented for a few years; but it is something to consider.

Having an option to pay per unit time will not only generate more revenue for the cell companies, but also give freedom to the consumer, which is really what most consumers want - not necessarily just the cheapest thing.