Winning the Long Competition (eBook)

The Key to the Next American Century

Alan Pentz (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-1676-9 (ISBN)

Infos

For the first time since the Space Race, the United States is facing a serious competitor with a plan to achieve technological dominance: China. Between China 2025 and the Belt and Road Initiative, it's become clear that the Chinese government is determined to capture the economic power that new technologies like AI, automation, 5G, and the cloud represent. And with economic power comes military power, and then political power. To win this competition, the US must return to the historical model it used to build the interstate highway system, put a man on the moon, and build the computer and the Internet-but has become an afterthought over the past few decades. In Winning the Long Competition, Alan Pentz lays out a roadmap for increasing our investment and innovation in core areas. He shows government managers where to invest and points innovators to areas where the funding will be plentiful. As we move into the next American century, the only way forward is to harness all the resources and creativity of both our public and private sectors.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

1. Where Are We Today?

Before the cloud took off, before mobility got smart, there was Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

While often a polarizing figure, Jobs was unquestionably good at stoking anticipation for new Apple products. So when the company announced that Jobs would be unveiling its newest product since the iPod at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference on June 29, 2007, rumors began to fly about Apple’s first phone.

Expectations for the event were almost comically high. Many began referring to Apple’s unknown device as “The Jesus Phone.” No one knew exactly what to expect. Would Apple’s new phone be a hit, or would it be dead on arrival?

When June 29th finally came, Jobs took the stage in the packed theater, and the crowd fell silent.

After briefly summarizing Apple’ s history of innovation, Jobs got to the point. “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class [of innovative products]. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device.”

The crowd began to stir.

“So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.”

Jobs paused again.

“An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.”

The audience began breaking into applause.

“An iPod, a phone…are you getting it? These are not three separate devices! This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone! Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone, and here it is.”

By this point, Jobs had the entire room eating out of the palm of his hand. Even today, watching the video almost feels like a religious experience.8 In that moment, the era of the smartphone—and soon the cloud—had officially begun.

In many ways, the iPhone tells the story of the 2010s, a time when previously separate technologies began to blend together to spawn the mobile, cloud-based economy we enjoy today. Today, the iPhone is significant not just for its technological convergence, but also for how it perfectly encapsulates the American Formula.

Four essential components of the iPhone all began as projects for the US government. The Global Positioning System (GPS), the internet, Siri, and the multi-touchscreen were all funded by the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation (NSF). That doesn’t even account for the fact that the microchips it runs on were largely funded in the initial stages by the Department of Defense or that Apple’s eventual biggest rival, Google, was originally funded by another NSF grant.

These technologies, first developed and championed by the United States government, eventually became available to private enterprise. When they did, they set the stage for private enterprise visionaries (like Jobs or Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page) to create revolutionary new products and services that would propel the world of mobile and cloud computing. Companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all led the way, consolidating technologies and developing exciting new devices and platforms at a rapid pace.

This era of rapid innovation wouldn’t have been possible without the huge boost in capabilities made possible by 3G and then newly introduced 4G networks. While it was plain for anyone to see the enormous potential of this early smartphone, it was 4G that drove these devices and made further innovations possible. As we move into the 5G era, we’re on the precipice of another technological turning point. Although we don’t yet know what specific innovations it will inspire, the broad picture is already coming into focus. In this chapter, we explore the implications of a 5G world—both its potential and its challenges—from an American perspective.

Understanding 5G

Throughout this book, we’re going to be spending a lot of time discussing 5G networks and the many considerations necessary to make them a reality. So, before we go any further, it’s important to define this term and explain how we’ll be using it in the context of this book.

In many ways, words like 3G, 4G, and 5G aren’t much more than marketing terms. No two 5G networks are the same—though they do share some basic traits and technologies. Network carriers like AT&T and Verizon in America, as well as their counterparts from the industrialized world and their equipment manufacturers (Ericsson, Huawei, etc.), came together through the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to create a set of parameters that everyone agrees upon. (Confusingly, “3GPP” refers to the standards body that helped to develop technologies like 3G, 4G or LTE, and now 5G.) Over many years, committees of engineers work together to define what the next generation of wireless network systems will look like and how to build them.

The term 5G, then, simply means “fifth generation.” With 5G, service providers all agree to work within a certain set of specifications—such as which chips to use in a phone or device, and which spectrum bands to use—but from there, they’re free to design and deploy their technologies however they see fit. As a result, one 5G network implementation can and will be different from another.

Over the course of a given generation—be it 3G, 4G, or 5G, that carrier will update their network several times. In other words, there won’t be a day when a switch will get flipped, and we will magically have 5G. It will be a process that will develop over several years.

Despite these differences in approach and implementation, we can still sketch out the basics of how 5G works and how it will likely be built out. 5G builds on top of all the 4G infrastructure already in place: cell towers, base stations, backhaul, etc. However, unlike 4G, which uses mid-spectrum bandwidths to send and receive data, 5G also uses higher bandwidths (30 GHz and above). These high bandwidths are well-suited for carrying high volumes of data and heavy traffic, but their range is limited. That limited range requires a lot of micro antennae or small cells to bridge the signal back to the larger towers that currently power our cellular communication. Building out America’s 5G infrastructure, then, will require us to install a robust network of small devices—block by block and streetlamp by streetlamp—across the nation to seamlessly relay our data and keep all our devices talking to each other.

Why 5G Is Important

The key driver of the modern economy is data and the ability to compute with that data. As the world goes increasingly digital and becomes ever more dependent on the cloud, the ability to compute data quickly and at massive scale is the name of the game. When 4G was introduced, it came with throughput speeds ten times faster than 3G. The leap from 4G to 5G will be even greater, with estimated average speeds ranging from ten to a hundred times faster.9

With data moving at a hundred times the speed of 4G, the process of disruption begun in the 2010s will accelerate. Just like we saw after the iPhone was introduced, this rapid acceleration will give rise to new businesses and products that were previously unimaginable just two, five, or ten years before.

For this reason, we can’t entirely predict the 5G future we’ll soon be stepping into, though it will almost certainly involve tremendous growth in the following areas:

1. Autonomous vehicles
2. The Internet of Things (IoT)
3. Home automation
4. Wearables
5. Smart cities and infrastructure
6. Artificial Intelligence
7. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
8. Advanced biogenetics
9. Robotics

5G will also allow companies to complete the disruptions of the 4G era.

Did Software Eat the World?

In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote a seminal op-ed in The Wall Street Journal called “Why Software is Eating the World.”10 The piece embodied the subsequent era of cloud-based companies taking over the economy and leading a rebound in the US stock markets after the Great Financial Crisis. Software enabled by rent-as-needed servers from Amazon Web Services; widespread deployment and adoption of broadband, 3G, and then 4G; and the rise of the smartphone dramatically increased the reach and profitability of software companies. One need only look at the top ten companies as measured by market capitalization in 2008 and 2020.

In 2008, the most valuable companies were in energy and financial services. The only software company on the list was Microsoft, which was milking a legacy Windows monopoly. Microsoft had yet to implement its very successful and profitable cloud strategy. By the time Andreessen wrote his op-ed in 2011, Apple had climbed almost to the top of the charts, while Microsoft held on by its fingernails (again, that cloud strategy had yet to be implemented).

By March 31, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the world, the top seven most valuable companies were all primarily software companies (one could argue about Apple), and two of them were also Chinese, demonstrating the country’s rapid...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.10.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Technik
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-1676-2 / 1544516762
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-1676-9 / 9781544516769