Reducing Friction is Purpose of AI

If telecom companies truly operated with complete efficiency (maximum gain, minimum waste) and effectiveness (consistently doing the right things to operate and grow their businesses), we would never see failed acquisitions, mergers that failed to deliver intended benefits, marketing programs that failed to boost accounts or reduce churn, or technology initiatives that swiftly delivered the promised value. 

Telecom firms--like all others--suffer from “friction.” As a practical matter, when all business processes become more frictionless, it should lead to outcomes such as higher lead-to-customer conversion rates, lower churn and higher account retention, plus higher renewal rates, as well as enhanced productivity (the ability to produce and sell more while reducing the cost of doing so). 

To reduce friction, many agree that better insight is required of operations, customer experiences and expectations, supply chain and partner behavior. And almost everybody agrees at some level that artificial intelligence, machine learning or deep learning will underpin the efforts to glean much more insight. 

But it often is hard to imagine how artificial intelligence can be implemented, as a practical matter, since AI is a capability, not a product; a learning system, not a discrete set of attributes. 

One does not go “buy AI off the shelf,” so to speak. So it might be better to cast AI as a tool for reducing unwanted friction, where the theoretical scenario is:

• 100-percent efficiency and knowledge of buyer demands, preferences, tastes

• complete understanding, in real time, of the state of a firm’s supply chain

• as-good-as-can-be-expected employee productivity, based on knowledge of actual behavior

• full effectiveness of all information technology systems, devices and software

• real-time knowledge of any legal or regulatory compliance issues

• Robust feedback loops and intelligence gathering that aids in the development process for new products and features 

In practice, no organization operates that way, all the time. There are inefficiencies in all operations processes, capital allocation, employee alignment with organizational objectives, understanding of customer demand changes and supply chain processes. 

source: capgemini

Fragmented customer profiles, departmental silos, inefficient workflows, shadow IT, slow feature deployment and redundant processes are examples of friction. And friction matters because it gets in the way of customer and user experience, not to mention sales and profits. 

Friction also exists whenever a firm or organization has to work with other stakeholders outside the firm boundaries, including  customers, partners, suppliers or regulatory and political entities. 

Frictionless systems aim, at a high level, to deliver insight, allowing an organization to accomplish its desired outcomes in both an effective and efficient way. And it is hard to imagine effective friction-reducing knowledge systems not using artificial intelligence, deep learning or machine learning. 

So maybe we should speak less about AI as a technology and more about how AI enhances core business processes to remove friction.

When Better Broadband Might Not Help

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, in detailing the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on various sectors of the Wisconsin economy, recommends three priorities: 

• Get Everyone Back to Work

• Fix Broadband:

• Support Innovation

It is what one might expect, but also shows the difficulty of generating economic growth where it might not be happening organically. An isolated region heavily dependent on tourism might prefer to diversify, but there are good reasons why all sorts of firms and industries do not locate themselves in remote areas. 

A region with low population might similarly wish to spur economic growth by focusing on one or two new potential growth areas, but with no natural advantages in human resources, distribution networks or other underpinnings of an industry. 

That is not a criticism of a report by the WEDC, simply an observation that economic growth is not easy when low population, remote location, lack of skills or knowledge or other attributes that attract people and firms are lacking. 

Nor is it easy to suggest how the situation might be changed, by any set of feasible government policies other than reopening the economy.

There is a direct and measurable causal link between “going back to work” and worker income and tax revenue. The causal link between broadband and economic growth or innovation is much harder to demonstrate. 

In fact, there might be correlation without causation, in the same way that better broadband tends to exist where people are wealthier, live in higher-density areas, have higher education attainment and are younger. 

People generally believe there is such a causal relationship, but the reverse might generally be the case. Economic success leads to demand for better broadband. 

Virtually everyone “believes” (or at least acts as though they believed) that advanced technology (faster broadband, artificial intelligence, IoT, 5G) leads to an increase in productivity. People, organizations, firms and countries that have and use more of such assets are presumed to make faster productivity gains, and generate more economic growth.

The problem, aside from inability to measure precisely, seems to be that the evidence is suspect. It still does not appear that better, faster, more extensive broadband adoption actually is related to productivity gains.

source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Broadband and innovation are good things. It simply is not clear that better broadband leads to economic growth in any direct way.

How Much Business Value from Influencing 5G Standards?

Historically, there has been business value when a firm is able to influence the setting of technology standards in ways that play to the firm’s strengths. 

Some argue 3G, 4G and 5G provide examples.  With the exception of “market-driven” standards such as Windows or IoS, it is less clear to me that vendor influence actually delivers so much value in setting telecom standards. 

“Standard setting does not always create market power for the standardized technology,” say economists at NERA Economic Research. 

“The gains from formal standard setting can be defined as the difference between the royalty that the technology owner can charge after being selected formally as the standard and the royalty that she could charge if no formal standard were set,” they say. 

source: Statista

Some will point to quantitative measures to suggest Chinese firms have a clear lead in 5G patents. But more patents do not necessarily mean better patents, some will note. 

By some accounts, patent portfolios are rather more distributed than often appears.

source: GreyB

In settings where compatibility requirements are high, standards competition may be very important as the choice of a standard may virtually eliminate, not merely disadvantage, competing technologies. 

One hears it argued that Europe benefited from its “leadership” of 3G, while the United States benefited from its “leadership” in 4G. It is hard to parse such statements. One might note that European firms Ericsson and Nokia benefited hugely in the 3G era as suppliers of infrastructure. 

The same argument is heard about U.S. firms in the 4G era, but the argument is nuanced. Firms such as Qualcomm lead in chipsets, but no U.S. firms lead in radio infrastructure. To the extent there was “leadership,” it was in applications and service development, not infrastructure or necessarily “economic benefits.” 

Also, the growth of open source and virtualization tends to degrade any potential value standards influence might have, as, by definition, open source means buyers have choices beyond the usual cast of supplier characters.

One way of putting it is that what mattered was the economic benefit derived from 4G, not the “leadership” in standards or infrastructure supply, and that mostly because it was application developers, platforms and content suppliers that drove the value of what could be done with 4G, not the network infrastructure or connectivity supply. 

The same “value” often tends to be believed about patent portfolios, and there is evidence that the causal link is quite weak: patent portfolios do not often lead to market dominance. 

It is not the infrastructure; it is the value a nation or a firm can wring from it that matters.

Ultra-Low Latency Use Cases is Where Most New 5G Apps Will Develop

Though capacity matters, the big use case upside for 5G is expected to come in the area of ultra-low latency applications or perhaps ultra-reliable and ultra-low-latency use cases. If prior history proves a useful guide, many of the new use cases will develop only after five or more yeras. Many could  flourish only in the 6G era, even if essentially prototyped on 5G networks. 

source: Nokia

It takes time to envision and then retool entire business processes to take advantage of the new network’s performance attributes. And many additional parts of the ecosystem, such as edge computing, also must develop in tandem.

Public Policy is Devilishly Hard Stuff

Public policy success always is harder than you might think, if only because the causal relationships between a policy and an intended outcome are tough to confirm, and often because unintended consequences are common as well. At other times policy failures are hard to diagnose or predict. But policy failure rates arguably are fairly high, despite good intentions. 

An examination of a recent program to increase broadband internet access adoption and quality might provide an example. “we find no positive effect on home broadband adoption from programs funded by the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (‘BTOP’),” say economists George Ford,  T. Randolph Beard and Michael Stern. 

BTOP, which added about $4.7 billion to ongoing efforts to supply access to the estimated six percent of U.S. households without terrestrial network access to internet access at a minimum of 25 Mbps, seems to have had no effect. 

“We find no effect of the BTOP programs on home broadband adoption,” the economists say. “The evaluation of BTOP and similar programs has been done before. As for BTOP generally, econometric analysis by Hauge and Prieger (2015) found that the effect of the BTOP “stimulus spending on broadband adoption may well be zero.”

Another study found the “program had no significant impact on broadband adoption rates.” 

That is not to say success, measured as service adoption, is impossible. Comcast’s program for low-income customers seems to have added as many as eight million households. Generally speaking, lower prices tend to spur higher buying rates for any desired product. The issue is that many “non-buyers” of internet access have reasons for not buying that are not strongly affected by price reductions.

“Though using an admittedly crude calculation, Rosston and Wallsten (2019) estimate the own-price elasticity of demand for broadband (for low-income households) to be only about 0.10 to 0.13. A 10 percent reduction in price only increases subscriptions by about one percent,” the authors say. Other studies suggest similar low price elasticity. 

“It does not appear that price is the primary reason for non-adoption,” they conclude. According to U.S. Census Department surveys, most people who do not buy internet access report they do so because they “do not need it.” Perhaps only half a percent of non-buyers say “price” is the reason they do not buy. 

source: Phoenix Center

One might well draw the conclusion that the drive to make such access available is fully consistent with our presumed general positions on equity: everyone should be able to avail themselves of internet access. That is perhaps an obviously different goal from “everybody uses the internet,” which is a choice individuals make. 

It is worth noting that individuals also vary in the means they use to satisfy that need. A significant percentage of consumers consciously choose to buy mobile access rather than fixed access, as their sole form of access. 

And some people, especially some older people, might never decide they “need” the internet. That is a generational issue that fixed itself with time. There was a time when many older people believed they did not need linear video services. Many more might believe they do not need streaming video, either. Those demand profiles change over time. 

The point is that public policy is a devilishly complicated endeavor. Even well-meaning policy goals may miss the mark. Ensuring that everyone has quality fixed network internet access seems a well-established and rational policy aim. 

We might still find that some people do not wish to avail themselves of such services, even when price is not a barrier, especially when substitutes (mobile access) are available.

Work from Home Forever?

A reasonable number of observers--maybe even most--seem comfortable with the notion that huge numbers of workers, kept home because of the Covid-19 pandemic, will “never” return to former work arrangements. Some of us are pretty sure the underlying trends in place before the pandemic will reassert themselves over a couple years, perhaps taking as long as five years to do so in all cases. 

source: eMarketer

To be sure, 44 percent of workers say they do not wish to work from home, ever. About 12 percent say they would rather do so essentially all the time. Another 18 percent would prefer to work from home three to four days a week (roughly half to 80 percent of the time). More than a quarter of all surveyed workers would prefer to work from home 20 percent to 40 percent of the time.

What remains unclear is what percentage of actual jobs, and what percentage of firms, actually believe that can be done with no downside.

Often No Difference Between Unlimited and Metered Usage Plans

Comcast, in reinstituting its monthly usage cap, which had been waived in response to the stay-at-home orders caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Where the usage cap had been set at 1 terabyte, now Xfinity internet metered plans have a limit of 1.2 terabytes. As often is the case, the practical difference between an “unlimited” usage plan and a plan with a high usage allowance is nonexistent. 

In other words, if typical monthly usage ranges between 250 gigabytes to 350 GB per month, a usage cap of 1.2 TB is effectively four to six times more than ever is required, so effectively “unlimited.”  

source: OpenVault

Many people argue that any pricing policy other than “unlimited” is somehow unfair. Perhaps this is an expectation created by the ways people come to experience use of the internet, with many free to use apps supported by advertising revenue models, with subsidized usage at schools and public Wi-Fi hotspots. 

Most products, though, are priced based on usage or volume: clothing, shoes, water, trash collection, groceries, gasoline and other fuels, electricity, airline tickets, dental services, data storage or compute cycles. 

Many refer to internet access as a “utility.” There often seems to be an unstated implication that internet access therefore should be free, low cost or unlimited in terms of use. But no other utilities are priced that way. They all are usage based, and for good reasons. Price is a tool for encouraging people not to waste expensive or carbon-impactful resources.

5G Economic Impact?

It is a no-brainer that 5G economic impact will be somewhat substantial over the next decade, if only because communications is a significant portion of global economic activity all the time. In 2018, for example, mobility by itself represented nearly five percent of global gross domestic product, by some estimates.

Other estimates often peg all communications spending at about  three percent of GDP to 3.5 percent of GDP.

source: Researchgate

Most economic assessments attempt to include the related economic benefits, in addition to the direct benefits. The multiplier might be in the range of $5 in benefit from every $1 in telecom spending. 

Still, direct impact is substantial. If global GDP is $142 trillion, then 3.5 percent in direct telecom spending is $5 trillion. Mobility is not all of telecom spending, but likely represents 65 percent or so. In that case, 5G might be included in the $3.25 trillion, mobility generates. But, of course, not all spending is on 5G. So reduce 5G share to perhaps half and 5G might represent $1.6 trillion in revenue.

It is nothing to dismiss, but is a far cry from the $7.5 trillion some estimate. 

Despite Declining Demand, U.S. Local Phone Service Prices are Rising

As a rule, retail and wholesale prices of connectivity products tend to drop with time, much as prices for computing and storage also do. But the trend is not uniform. Prices for some products rise, even if the overall trend is for lower prices. 

In the U.S. consumer market, linear video subscription prices have increased almost yearly for decades. In U.S. business markets, private line prices climbed after deregulation but then began to fall about 2012 as demand shifted to ethernet access services. 

Consumers might have a sense that internet access prices have increased, but U.S. internet access prices fell between 2004 and 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Using 2004 prices as the benchmark, prices in 2020 were about 61.5 percent of 2004 levels, according to BLS data. 

source; BLS

That same trend also operates globally, as a rule, according to the Alliance for Affordable Internet, even when looking at mobile data, which generally is more expensive than fixed network data. 

By way of comparison, private line services purchased by businesses and other organizations have spiked since about 1995, but in 2020 remain just a percentage point above 1995 levels. That is likely because demand has largely shifted to ethernet-based access services.  

source: BLS

Traditional local phone service prices since deregulation have risen about 45 percent, which might be surprising. What happened is that business profits, which once subsidized consumer services, substantially decreased, forcing consumer prices to reflect more of the actual cost of providing those services. 

Also, a more-recent trend is that demand has steadily decreased since about 2000, so the costs of the network essentially are spread over a much-smaller base of customers. That tends to work against price decreases. 

source: BLS

5G Health Issues from Millimeter Wave "Very Low" to "Nonexistent"

Health issues caused by 5G mobile networks are “very low, if they exist at all,” concludes a  group of health experts who study environmental and health issues associated with electromagnetic exposures from across the non-ionizing spectrum. 

“The likelihood of yet unknown health hazards at exposure levels within current exposure limits is considered to be very low, if they exist at all,” they say. “We anticipate that in all cases, exposure levels will remain well below major international exposure limits and that network operators will be aware of their obligation to maintain their systems within compliant operating parameters. 

“When exposure levels are maintained below current exposure limits, neither health agencies nor guideline/standards setting organizations have identified hazards from exposure to millimeter waves or RF signals in lower frequency bands used in previous generation technologies,” the group says. 

“First, unlike lower frequency fields, MMW (millimeter wave signals) do not penetrate beyond the outer skin layers and thus do not expose inner tissues to MMW,” they point out.  “Second, current research indicates that overall levels of exposure to RF are unlikely to be significantly altered by 5G, and exposure will continue to originate mostly from the “uplink” signals from one’s own device (as they do now).”

“Third, exposure levels in publicly accessible spaces will remain well below exposure limits established by international guideline and standard setting organizations, including ICNIRP and IEEE,” they add. 

Traditionally, the concern with non-ionizing radiation of the type routinely used by mobile networks is tissue heating. But “whole-body heating is not a concern for millimeter wave exposure because the deposition of RF energy is confined to the outermost layers of the body.”

Will We Really See a Change in Growth Rate for Work from Home?

Most observers seem certain that work from home trends will get a permanent boost from Covid-19 experiences. The only real question is how big a change might occur, as WFH has slowly been growing for decades. As with other trends, the pandemic might accelerate an ongoing trend. The magnitude is the issue. 

Remote work is  distinct from “work from home full time,” has a few meanings. It can refer to those full-time employees of a company who telecommute, rather than work on site.  It includes organization employees who work from home at least some of the time, travel for work or bring work home. 

But it also includes home-based workers. Those are very different use cases. 

By some estimates, as much as 17 percent of workers  essentially are full time WFH. In other cases, including those who telecommute a few times a month, the percentage of workers doing WFH is as low as five to six percent. 

But if you count traveling employees who sometimes work outside the office, possibly 63 percent of all workers sometimes work from outside the office. 

source: SlideModel

But many jobs cannot be performed at home, and that might include as much as 63 percent of all U.S. jobs, for example. To that one might add work done by home-based businesses. 

“According to the 2018 American Time Use Survey, less than a quarter of all full-time workers work at all from home on an average day, and even those workers typically spend well less than half of their working hours at home,” say economists Jonathan Dingel and Brent Nieman. 

Doubtless all the types of remote work, telecommuting and work from home will get an extra boost after the pandemic. The issue is whether the growth curve changes enough to notice. Many suppliers who benefit from WFH hope so.

But lots of changes are fairly short lived, as business and consumer behavior might suggest after the internet bubble burst and Great Recession of 2008. Lasting impact can be hard to spot, as prior trends simply reasserted themselves.

Flat Growth for Asia Telcom in 2020; Return to Growth in 2021

Average revenue growth for the Asia-Pacific telecom business will be flat to low-digit to single-digit in 2020, compared to four percent in 2019, according to Fitch Ratings. Growth will return to pre-pandemic levels in 2021.

source: Fitch Ratings

Balance sheets will be maintained by cost cutting and capital investment reductions or dividend cuts, says Fitch. 

In most countries discretionary capex has been slowed to conserve cash, without skipping necessary capacity investment. But Korea, China and Singapore are pressing ahead with 5G plans. 

In part, that is a reflection of the importance of mobile broadband average revenue in some of those countries. South Korea mobile ARPU is higher than fixed network internet access, for example. In Singapore, mobile ARPU is equal to fixed network internet access ARPU. 

source: Fitch Ratings

The other noteworthy observation is that capex intensity is far lower in Singapore and South Korea than in India or the Philippines, for example. It is easier to sustain capex programs in adverse circumstances when capital investment is a lower percentage of revenue. 

source: Fitch Ratings

Internet Access will be 64% of Total Service Provider Revenue in 2024, Says Omdia

The two biggest revenue drivers for connectivity providers in 2024 will be mobile data and fixed network broadband, according to Omdia analysts. Internet access, in fact, will be 64 percent of total connectivity provider revenues in 2024. Voice services on all networks will generate 14 percent of total revenue. 

source: Omdia

Global revenue trends will be negative for voice, positive for internet access, smart home and video. Mobile data revenue will grow about twice as fast as fixed internet services. 

Service	Revenue $ Billion	% of Total
Mobile Voice	147	10%
Fixed Voice	61	4%
MobileText	14	1%
Mobile Data	570	41%
Fixed Data	329	23%
Video	120	9%
Smart Home	162	12%
Total	1403

Source: Omdia data, IP Carrier calculation

In terms of strategy, revenue growth will be most critical for mobile data, since that is the single biggest revenue driver. Voice services and messaging simply must be harvested and run to maintain profit margin. The growth areas of video and smart home must be cultivated.

Will Internet Access Patterns Return to Normal?

The percentage of subscribers provisioned for gigabit service increased to 3.75 percent in the first quarter of 2020 year-over-year, essentially driving changes in a couple of months that otherwise might have taken a year, according to OpenVault. But what remains to be seen is the sustainability of those trends, once most people return to work and school. 

What is clear is that average data consumption at the end of the first quarter jumped to 402.5 gigabytes, an increase of 47 percent over the same quarter of 2019, when the average was 273.5 GB.

The areas of sharpest growth were power users consuming one terabyte or more of data. The percentage of subscribers who were power users in 1Q20 reached 10 percent,  an increase of 138 percent over the 4.2 percent of power users in 1Q19.

Median usage was 233.6 GB, up 60 percent from 1Q19 levels, driven by heavier media consumption, Open Vault says.