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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 313.0/October 5,
2007
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HEADLINES:
- The
Week / Gilder: The LANs end debate
- Friday Feature / Gilder: Can WiMax compete with Qualcomm?
- Friday Blogger Bonus / The
Economy’s Not Landing, It’s Taking Off
- Readings /
|
Gilder/Forbes
Telecosm 2007: LAN’s END |
The
Week / The LANs end debate
George Gilder, Gilder
Telecosm Forum (9/30/07): “It takes
a low entropy carrier to bear high entropy messages.”
So I told the paladins of information theory in Silicon Valley last week.
Shannon entropy represents surprisal or news. A “smart” carrier that is full of
surprises confuses the message with the messenger, and does not permit
demodulation of the contents from the conduit.
For smart content, you want a carrier to be as "dumb as a
stone"--whether on opaque silicon chips or down transparent silica fiber
or through the dappled ohms of air.
It is the same information theory message of convergence I voiced in
"Life After Television." It’s the same message that will prevail at
the 11th Annual Telecosm Conference (October 16-18 at Lake
George, N.Y.), which brings nearer its annual vision of the
migration of all data onto the low entropy reaches of the electromagnetic
spectrum, whether on wires, glass or air.
My favorite epitome of the Telecosm is the Marconi Society, where I go
nearly every year to prepare for my own conference. Every year, Marconi gathers
the protagonists of electromagnetic teleputing, from microprocessor creator
Federico Faggin (of Foveon) and Ethernet father Bob Metcalfe, to Qualcomm
founder Andrew Viterbi and DSL inventor John Cioffi. Every year the society
awards a new Hertzian titan a $100K fellowship of the fiber ring or the
radio-sphere.
Last week, under current leader Bob Lucky, the belle-lettristic inventor
of adaptive equalization, the Marconi gala sparkled across Silicon Valley, from
the SRI center in Menlo Park to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View
and climaxed amid black ties and exalted titles at an exotic dung-dimpled
spread called the Circus in the horsey hills of Atherton.
A humorous high for some of us was to see that all the Marconi Horses and
Kings of electromagnetic glory could only barely and fitfully succeed in
bringing in John Perry Barlow from his ranch in Colorado on a video
teleconferencing connection. Wired or wireless, communications are still hard.
This year’s conference revolved around encryption and security, with the
newest winner of the $100K fellowship award Ron Rivest of MIT and RSA
(Rivest-Shamir and Adelman), who developed the first working public key
encryption system. Also present was a pantheon of crypto gurus including Sun’s
Whitfield Diffie and Stanford’s Martin Hellman (inventors of public key
cryptography), VeriSign chief Jim Bidzos, Taher Elgamal of Tumbleweed
Communications, inventor of SSL (secure sockets layer) and too many others to
name.
For what it is worth, none of these crypto panjandrums seemed to have a
clue about trusted platform modules (TPMs) and none of them regarded them as
significant.
As Steven Sprague says, the existing security establishment treats TPMs
exactly the way U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel regarded the emergence of MiniMills.
They all agree that "TPMs are far too limited and can't do any of the
sophisticated things that we do."
But just as MiniMills took over the steel industry in the U.S., TPMs are
becoming secretly ubiquitous. Mandated for logo compliance with Vista,
increasingly required by the government, these vault chips will bring strong
authentication to all computers and teleputers over the next five years. Cheap
ubiquitous trust on the edge will trump all fancy and expensive centralized
security tools. In the process it will bring an end to the firewalled LAN.
We'll see. The LANs end debate will continue at Telecosm.
Register FOR
TELECOSM ONLINE today: http://www.telecosmconference.com/
|
The Gilder Telecosm Forum To
learn how to join this powerful network of talented, tech-savvy investors and
thinkers online daily to debate, discuss, and decode new and emerging
technologies and share valuable and actionable investment advice, visit www.Gildertech.com
today. |
Friday Feature / Can
WiMax Compete with Qualcomm?
George Gilder, Gilder
Telecosm Forum (9/30/07): For me, the Marconi Society event [on September 28]
climaxed when I found myself sitting at the Gala dinner next to Arogyaswami
Paulraj of Stanford, an inventor of MIMO, father of WiMax, virtuoso of smart
antennas, and technical chief of mobile WiMax chip company Beceem
Communications, Inc. He was also thesis advisor for Greg Raleigh of MIMO star
Airgo, recently bought by Qualcomm.
I greeted this WiMax MIMO patriarch amiably with a challenge to explain to
me how WiMax, which scarcely exists in the U.S., could possibly compete with
Qualcomm's EVDO and its evolutionary descendants. As WiMax advantages, Paulraj
cites his forte, MIMO (multiple input multiple output) smart antennas and OFDM
(orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) and WiMax's capability of doing
scores of megabits per second.
But EVDO already exists, is widely deployed, now operates at 9.6 megabits
a second, pursues a learning curve verging toward scores of megabits per
second, and is merging with Flarion OFDM and Airgo MIMO technology at Qualcomm,
which possesses critical WiMax and MIMO intellectual property. WiMax, I say,
seems to be an industry scam designed chiefly to sell Intel silicon. But
despite all the fear, uncertainty and litigation, Qualcomm still rules.
On the contrary, I gather from Paulraj (I paraphrase, not quote) Qualcomm
is in trouble. Flarion is a near billion-dollar failure. Practically noone is
deploying it and it is already obsolete. Qualcomm is already seriously
contemplating the production of WiMax chips. A spread spectrum system, CDMA
works in 1.2 megahertz and in 5-megahertz bands, but in all wider band channels
it faces diminishing returns. MIMO depends on adaptive use of multiple frequencies.
Because CDMA spreads across all the frequencies in the band all the time, CDMA
cannot use MIMO effectively. MIMO gives OFDMA a large advantage. That is why
WiMax will prevail.
I asked how WiMax would find the free bandwidth it needs to exploit its
advantage. He responded that WiMax works all the way up to 60 GHz where there
is plenty of bandwidth.
But at 60 gigahertz WiMax loses its 30-mile reach and becomes chiefly a
point to point system. At lower frequencies, it will have little advantage over
existing EVDO technology unless it can somehow define a particular broad span
of spectrum that is available around the globe. If it uses various bands, it
will require still costly and inchoate “cognitive radios” or software defined
adaptive receivers to jump around the spectrum.
Such disputes make the tech world go round. WiMax at many different
frequencies, with many evolving technologies, is not really a standard and
cannot be ubiquitous. But there is no doubt that it is gaining momentum,
particularly in the Third World. I suspect it will make far less an impact than
expected. But Paulraj is undeniably brilliant and I hope he comes to Telecosm.
Meanwhile, Stanford’s Cioffi, last year’s Marconi winner and Hertzian
virtuoso, scoffed at WiMax as a broadband solution. Cioffi is the world
champion at applying the Fourier transforms, OFDM, and other devices used in
WiMax. But Cioffi uses them to transmit signals successfully down copper pair
wires in DSL connections. DSL is hard and still limited to a few megabits per
second. Applied wirelessly in WiMax, the same essential DSL tools founder in
congested areas on interference no matter how many smart antennas you install.
In rural areas, WiMax resolves to a point-to-point service that is thwarted by
obstacles, such as hills and trees and even trucks.
Wireless is still hard. Sprint and Clearwire are going to have to make a
lot of compromises to make it a useful supplement to existing wireless
technologies that are already deployed around the country and roughly double in
capability every year or so.
But hey, it’s a horse race that started in Einstein’s head. The
electromagnetic spectrum at the speed of light. My view is that fiber will
become nearly ubiquitous before broadband wireless transcends its EVDO limits.
Intel, Sprint, McCaw and Paulraj say I am wrong.
It’s happened before. History is a high entropy carrier.
To read more posts by
George Gilder and the Gilder Telecosm Forum members, visit http://www.gildertech.com/ and log on today.
________________________________________
Hear Ken
Fisher speak at Gilder/Forbes Telecosm 2007, October 17 in Lake George, New
York. Register ONLINE today: http://www.telecosmconference.com/
________________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / The Economy’s Not Landing, It’s Taking Off
Brian Wesbury’s “Monday Morning Outlook” (10/1/07):
Former Treasury
Secretary Robert Rubin said last week that there were only two near-term paths
for the US economy – either a soft landing or recession. His comments resonated
because they were put down right in the middle of a consensus of economists and
public commentators who believe the same thing.
The only problem is that, right now, there is
very little evidence to support this view. While most analysts are mesmerized
by the weak housing sector, the rest of the economy seems to be taking off.
Last week’s data is a
microcosm of the past several months. Housing continued to slump, grabbing the
major headlines. Meanwhile, incomes kept rising, consumption spiked upward,
manufacturing indicators improved – with one hitting a record high – and the
best real-time gauge of the labor market blew past everyone’s expectations.
We’ve never seen such
divergence between what most commentators are saying about the economy and how
it’s actually performing. Last week there were three solid reports on
manufacturing.
More from Brian Wesbury: http://www.ftportfolios.com/
__________________________________________
Readings /
Ten
Trends Influencing Euro Mobile Handset Market
http://www.instat.com/newmk.asp?ID=2124&SourceID=00000512000000000000
Entrepreneurship
Preserves Life as We Know It
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22695
Weekly
GTI Index
http://www.gtindex.com/
Google
attacks Verizon's attempt to water down 700MHz "open access" rules
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071004-google-attacks-verizons-attempt-to-water-down-700mhz-open-access-rules.html
EMC Acquires
Berkeley Data Systems
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119150678998648913.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news
__________________________________________
FRIDAY LETTER STAFF
Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
Research: Sandy Fleischmann / sfleischmann@gilder.com
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