Artificial Intelligence
Cyber
Future Telecoms
Quantum
Robotics
Wise words and waggishness… September 2024
Reading time: 3 mins
How a focus on usability and use cases is creating opportunities for new innovation
“At this early stage for 6G, rather than obsessing over all the components, let’s focus seriously on what outcomes we want from it,” says Camille Mendler, chief analyst with consulting firm Omdia.
While we may be some years away from any actual deployment, 6G, it appears, is already shaping up towards a more human-centric design. The emphasis of 6G – indeed of future telecoms services in general – looks set to move on from being primarily about networks and services to being centred more on the experience of the user. Developers and entrepreneurs may have an opportunity to reimagine the whole communications market on new, people-focused lines.
“Some of these will be industrial outcomes,” continues Mendler, “such as, how can 6G improve manufacturing output? But equally there is value in looking at human outcomes. For example, how can 6G help to make humans more aware of dangers in the workplace? Can 6G help make offices better places to work in? Then we can work back from that and design it right.”
Certainly some 6G futurists expect the technology to usher in digital sensory experiences for humans, allowing users to remotely touch an object, feel texture, perhaps even control remote objects with thought, all within realistic immersive worlds. It feels like the stuff of science-fiction, but human-centric design, as applied to networks, will be about much more than just the movement of data, says Purva Rajkotia, director of global business strategic initiatives with the IEEE Standards Association.
“It will drive a revolution in the design of future networks, augmenting their importance as social infrastructure and playing a pivotal role in addressing social challenges in the areas of work, education, inclusion, and equality,” says Rajkotia. “A more human-centric approach will, for example, help us react better to emergencies such as pandemics, as well as enabling persistent personalised access to digital services and resources, both virtual and physical, without the constraints of time and location. It will also provide opportunities for entrepreneurs to design systems that improve the user experience, opening new areas of development and enabling new use cases.”
None of this, of course, will come to pass without agreed standards on how it can all work.
“Human-centric design means that from the very early stages of setting standards you need to build in design features and ergonomics that are close to users’ hearts,” says Adrian Scrase, an independent consultant with EA Consult Services. Scrase is also a visiting professor at the University of Surrey, a fellow of the Wireless World Research Forum, and former CTO of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
It is not as easy as one might imagine, he warns, to come up with technology standards that are human-centred. “In my ETSI career we worked really hard at this, setting up a user group to address the issue,” he explains. “But it would be difficult to argue that these efforts had been entirely successful. It proved tricky to get coherent user input for a number of reasons. It can also be hard to get R&D people to buy into this domain, as it doesn’t attract funding.”
“When it comes to mobile broadband, people want their handsets to last a full day or more, a full week if possible”
Adrian Scrase, EA Consult Services
There are some things though, says Scrase, that we can all agree on. “We want reach, such that services are accessible regardless of our location,” he notes. “And we all want reduced power consumption. When it comes to mobile broadband, people want their handsets to last a full day or more, a full week if possible. Standards can drive this.”
It falls to vendors and developers to design products, and operators to deploy services, that take into account user needs. Plenty can go wrong at this stage in ways that can alienate rather than involve humans. Just consider 5G, which after much hype ended up frustrating subscribers with a number of shortcomings, such as a tendency to drop back to 4G at the drop of a hat.
Testing is of course crucial here. One of the UK’s foremost future telecoms innovation sites is Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab, which is undergoing a strategic technology refresh from 5G to 6G. Its future network research focuses on a human-centric model, bridging the physical and the digital worlds through a digital representation of the physical world around us.
It’s an example of how innovative research can be conducted with usability always at the forefront, but this is also about tackling issues that have arisen through the development of 5G – learning lessons, as such. Nowhere is this more pertinent than in network energy consumption.
Improvements in 5G energy use are in the spotlight every 18 months with new 3GPP standards. Recent ones include the development of base stations that go into a deep sleep mode at night when traffic is low, and wake fast when they are needed. The higher and higher network speeds that users are demanding means we’re going to be using more energy by design, so we need to keep asking how we can get more for less.
Smart Internet Lab test bed refresh from 5G to 6G
Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab test network is undergoing a strategic technology refresh from 5G to 6G. The testbed capabilities will evolve to enable:
Building AI into the next generation of connectivity standards might offer a number of dividends of a human-centric nature, believes Christian Gabetta, managing director of Heights Telecom, a developer of gateways and Wi-Fi extenders for deployment by communication service providers.
“In the homes and workplaces of the future we need to be designing features like prioritisation of traffic, more security, and sensing that reacts to where people are as they move around,” he says. “We can use AI that can detect if you might have had an accident, based on patterns of movement that it has been following, potentially automatically triggering an alarm. We’re doing a lot in areas like this. We also work a lot on energy management, because in many cases new human-centric technologies deployed in the home or workplace can end up consuming a lot of power, especially if they are operational 24/7.”
A more human-oriented approach to data security is also needed, he argues, one that goes beyond networks and laptops: “As a society we need to start thinking along human-centric lines about protecting a wider range of devices so that they aren’t Trojan horses allowing the hacker to get a foothold.”
Omdia’s Mendler agrees that we will need to see 6G working hand in hand with AI, not just to track and report at a human level but to predict, forewarn, and suggest.
“I anticipate time and motion observation allowing you to see where there is wastage within a process,” she says. “Could 6G, working with AI, suggest a less wasteful path for a vehicle or person to take, reducing energy consumption? Can more accurate data collection and analysis lead to greater human efficiencies? As urbanisation increases and more of us live in cities, it will be more important to measure the flow of how people move, how they consume energy, what the quality of the air they breathe is. We need technology that is both human-centred and which allows decisions in real time. This will be something that 6G will enable.”
This means, she believes, that the way we build and design networks has to change, since so much future activity will be going on at the edge of that network. This could result, for example, in the convergence of IT and telecoms into unified cloud networks, and the end of the era where these elements are designed around businesses not people. Omdia has been working in this field with vendor InterDigital and Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
Is human-focused design the key to more secure communications?
“With security, the problem is usually a human one,” believes Adrian Scrase of EA Consult Services. “But you can potentially design some human error away, for example by supplying phones that come with a complex password, discouraging people from setting it as 0000.”
“Humans are awesome, but we’re not perfect and sometimes our imperfections create openings for cybercrime,” observes Dave Gerry, CEO of Bugcrowd, a provider of crowdsourced cybersecurity services. “No matter what you do to try to prevent cyber risk, it’s best to assume that there will be vulnerabilities that people outside your organisation will discover. This demands emphasis at the design phase on how people think and act. You can’t put 100% of your effort just into making the thing work, even though the economic incentive is pulling you in that direction. Developers need to be transparently accountable for the security of their products as they’re going through the design phase in a way that’s about more than just compliance.”
Gerry has noted a tremendous amount of engagement on this issue from a number of large telcos. “We do a lot of work with Deutsche Telekom, and they take the human side of security incredibly seriously,” he explains. “Much of this is led by their largest subsidiary, T-Mobile, in the US. They’ve done a great job of pulling in hackers at the design phase, not just on the software side, but with hardware and devices. They are one of the larger customers running on our platform and engaging with the hacker community. There’s others, like Telefonica, Telstra and Optus. It’s time the whole industry turned in that direction.”
Human-centred design will be an important antidote to the siloed thinking that we have seen throughout the enterprise technology sector. Ergonomic principles that have permeated the consumer device market have not generally been ported into the development of business solutions. A new generation of services and applications will need to do better, starting with basic observation of how we work and play. By putting human-focused design at the top of the agenda we can create more responsive businesses, ones that can respond in an agile fashion to market demands. That will depend on new thinking and new approaches at all levels.
What’s the Matter? The role of standards in creating a better human experience
There’s always room for a maverick. But the fact is that many of the tech sector’s greatest successes originate from a multitude of developers unifying around a common set of standards. Are there examples of collaborative human-centric development that the telecoms industry could learn from? Well, how about Matter – a smart home standard that is being backed and built by Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung, among others.
Matter is based around a common communication protocol that smart home device manufacturers can implant into their gadgets so that they will work with other devices, and with all the major smart home platforms.
Launched in late 2022, it started with locks, lights and plugs and now covers robot vacuums, refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, smoke and CO alarms, air quality sensors, air purifiers, room air conditioners, and fans. The ultimate idea is that smart home adopters can connect and control all their devices through Matter. We now await a gathering of entrepreneurial spirits who can get behind a 6G-driven version of Matter for offices, factories, hospitals, and transport hubs. What’s good for the smart home is surely good for the smart workplace and smart city.
Guy has been a technology journalist for over 35 years during which time he has edited and written for numerous newspapers and magazines. A particular specialism for the past 20 years has been the market for wholesale telecoms services. As one of the main freelance writers for Capacity magazine, Guy has written in depth on topics ranging from developments in subsea cabling and the evolution of the Internet of Things to Carrier Ethernet standards and the challenges of network security. He has also contributed to European Communications, Mobile Europe, Vanilla Plus, IoT Now and The Register.
Artificial Intelligence
Future Telecoms
Materials
Quantum
Reading time: 3 mins
Future Telecoms
Reading time: 9 mins
Artificial Intelligence
Quantum
Reading time: 5 mins
Materials
Reading time: 4 mins
Quantum
Reading time: 5 mins