KeynoteRichard Rotondo is Vice President, Marketing for Motorola. He delivered the Day 2 midday keynote address on seamless mobility and municipal wireless networks and applications. * * * There are some basic tenets. Motorola is trying to make everything evolve around the user, as opposed to the device or the network. • That takes interoperability and connectivity among various networks.
• They’re also looking at the other places wehre people spend their time: the home as well as the automobile.
• Mobile communications and seeing the evolution of the cell phone into something more.
• The real value will come when the true mobility is leveraged. You need the right device to be walking around town with. So Motorola is evolving the devices to allow that. In Europe and Asia, the cell phone is used for far more than what Americans use it for.
Regardless of device, content, or network, your content follows you. It moves seamlessly between devices and networks.
What’s driving this? There’s a huge growth in cellular and hotspots are all over the place. People are abandoning land lines and going wireless. And there’s a proliferation of Net based services, including VoIP.
What are some of the more interesting concepts? One is the concept of ambient networks. Today, we have lots of devices in our homes that don’t talk to one another, but eventually they will. • In the ambient air, you will have devices that are always communicating with each other. They tend to be more intelligent than what we have today. Zigbee and RFID allow these things to happen.
• Uninterrupted access—moving from one device to another. You know where in the content you are, so your session in persistent.
• Devices contribute to the network. As you go down a street and pass a device, they can connect and pass on information to you. All devices cooperate to give contiguous coverage.
• The continuous experience, making things user-centric as opposed to what the content is.
The mobile Internet is the big driver. All of this together is seamless mobility. But some disruptive forces are at work as well: • Everything is going digital. When you digitize, you change distribution, access, storage, etc.
• The next big disruptor is that the entire world is going broadband.
• Devices are getting more and more intelligent and do more things.
• The emergence of the third screen. We started off with TVs and moved to laptops, and then we moved to the cellphone: VoIP, handoff among networks, including LAN
Motorola is making a pretty big bet. What’s driving that bet is that everything is digital. If there’s air there is broadband. These devices will be intelligent and networked and very responsive to you, adding up to the seamless mobility concept. There are a few paradoxes: • When you take it further, you see always-on networks. But there are times when you don’t want to be reached.
• You want to be the center of it all, but you can lose it all through identity theft. There are issues.
• There’s tons of information but less intelligence. Something will need to improve the way data is delivered and more useful to us.
• It’s great to monitor, but you don’t want to be monitored.
• The technology is complex, but it’s got to be easy to use.
• The more technology, the less personal it feels. You used to make a lot of effort, but now these are almost disposable types of relationships with people.
Two types of drivers: mobile broadband, and content. All these come together to create next-generation mobile broadband. IP architectures, mobility management, mesh networks, wireless backbone networks—all these things are coming together.
Canopy is going through an interesting evolution: It started with a pre-WiMAX and proprietary technology, but it’s moving to a standards-based technology, from fixed to mobile (with adoption of mobile WiMAX/802.16e), and moving toward a 4G network.
And there are plenty of mesh networks, which can really make any radio technology work better. It’s the right architecture for what you’re trying to do. It works really well. Moto-Mesh: When Mesh Networks was acquired, we had a single-radio solution, now we go to four, and that’s moved into multiple bands—licensed and unlicensed in the same box.
By having multiple radios and frequencies, you get into mixed use scenarios. These need to be mixed-use networks to make sense: public works, public safety, etc.
The whole area of short range and personal area communications: UWB, Zigbee, RFID. These are how a lot of these devices will talk with one another as well: a lot of short-range communication that is broadband.
According to Forester, 14 billion things will be connected to the expanded Internet. A lot more things than people, and the Internet will be driven by machine to machine communication. Some of our customers started with machines talking to databases, but now it’s for traffic control, etc.—machine to machine.
A lot has to happen to make seamless mobility vision become reality. What it’s all about is how things are going to change: • Voice is changing to multimedia content. You have one to one voice and text messaging and voice mail, and this will change to shared experience.
• User-directed interaction to goal-directed interaction. The content management will evolve. Multi-mode and multi-band radios will evolve to all band network agnostic cognitive radios.
• Smart things that are smart on their will move to smart things that talk to one another.
• Content is device-centric, but there is some overlap, though it’s still being directed by you. Ultimately where it’s going is goal based: You have software and management systems that go out and find databases, people, sensors and it brings it all together for you in a seamless network, and the data is presented in an intelligent way. It’s a little ways out there, but the concept is that these networks form and reform based on what you need at the moment. It’s based on what you need and not what you tell the network to do.
What does this mean to municipalities? There is some relevance. • First of all, it’s seamless mobility, networks working together.
• Second, content will move among people, places and things, within context. The information will be device agnostic as well as device aware. Don’t send a huge stream of information to the cell phone, just a little bit. Or, speech to text.
• The information will be location aware. You’re driving around town, and say Corvette. You get a list of where all the dealers are. You get to the dealer and say Corvette, and it shows you where they are on the lot.
• User agency awareness: not only between people and agencies but between devices and systems.
Here’s a little taste of how it might work today. At an incident scene, you have a self-forming network and no infrastructure. Another car shows up with WiMAX, and Wi-Fi and WiMAX connect together. And you’re going to want to manage the info flow on a quality service. Networks and pieces of infrastructure all work together.
All these networks are coming together, self-forming systems, video location-based information. Is this the grand vision of seamless mobility? No, but it’s a first step.
Depending on the agency and person location, they’ll get customized information. By adding in location, user and device awareness, you add intelligence into your data. • It’s always on, and always there. As you move between networks, you stay connected.
• Applications move across devices. The cell phone does a lot more than it used to; it’s still small and portable.
• You must have systems that protect the privacy, safety, and security of the public.
• It’s full mobility across all these networks, and it’s seamless connectivity.
Motorola is putting together focused solutions for different kinds of professionals. The networks don’t all talk together yet. The devices aren’t yet intelligent.
It’s going to take a lot more R&D, but even with that, it’s bigger than one company, so it’s going to take partnerships. Motorola and Microsoft have a new partnership. They’re in the same game, but come at it from a different perspective?
Where is this technology going? It’s making everything to go, no matter the device you have in your hand. Interoperability and connectivity across public and private networks. And it’s really coming up with some sort of device that allows you to have the functionality of a laptop or phone in something much much smaller and compact.
These evolving communications will impact society, and the impacts may or may not be what you expected.
Municipal wireless—what’s the future? It plays a big part in the seamless mobility vision. You are providing an ambient network, at least at street level. When you combine seamless mobility and muni wireless, things are going to change. It’s up to us to think about how we manage them and roll them out to our constituents to get the desired effect.
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