Peter Cochrane: Ignorance, 5G and the FTTP fiasco

Peter Cochrane castigates the "dominance of ignorance" over fibre and 5G in the UK

Can you imagine anyone building a house, an estate of houses, or indeed office blocks and industrial buildings without all the modern conveniences of running water, waste disposal, electricity, gas, IT networks and access roads?

Alternatively, can you imagine selling high performance sports cars in a country with cart tracks and no paved roads? By analogy, this is 5G in the making.

In the continued frenzy and hyperbole of 5G I have seen numerous meaningless demonstrations supporting ever more ridiculous claims and forecasts. The latest of these being a wireless speed-test at 21.5Gbit/s download (no one ever shows the upload speed!) and a van driving around in circles in a car park showing off a continuous gigabit connection.

Compared to 4G... 5G requires somewhere between five and 20-fold the number of base stations

None of this is at all difficult or in anyway surprising - it is just engineering! But when I ask my usual ‘dumb' question of, "Okay, so how does this all link into the internet", it all falls silent and faces go a bit red.

Compared to 4G, which has failed to deliver big time in the UK, 5G requires somewhere between five and 20-fold the number of base stations. You can't beat physics.

High-speed wireless means higher carrier frequencies, greater transmission losses, more echoes and shorter distances. But even more importantly, it all demands high-speed bi-directional connections into the network and, in turn, that means more optical fibre: copper and microwave wireless just can't deliver.

High-speed wireless means higher carrier frequencies, greater transmission losses, more echoes and shorter distances [and] high-speed bi-directional connections into the network

This situation has been predictable and well understood for more than 30 years. But as science, engineering, knowledge and wisdom have waned in the face of political dogma, marketing dreams, and management wishful thinking (supported by ‘acceptable' ignorance) billions have been wasted by investing in the technologies of copper lines, and sub-standard 3G and 4G networks that have failed to deliver.

On my worst days I run into people who think that global communication is supported by satellites and we can do everything we need using terrestrial radio. Explaining the realities of where we are and why, trying to disabuse them of their misconceptions and errors, turns out to be non-trivial. And very early in these discussions this Isaac Asimov quote always pops into my mind:

"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Sad to say that this state of affairs has migrated from the US to the UK and is costing us dearly. The failure and fundamental inability to understand the basics and to do ‘joined-up thinking' doesn't see the dire road, rail, broadband and mobile networks of the UK connected in anyway to a lower than average productivity and GDP per head.

And, of course, the result is a lack of money for healthcare, defence, education, social services and so on.

The friction of atoms and bits moving equates to lost income on a national scale and neither 5G nor any other white-hope wireless or Low Earth Orbit satellite system is going to fix it.

It isn't that the UK lacks the engineering skills and capabilities to see, understand, and build good systems. It is that the dominance of ignorance gets in the way, muddies the waters, attenuates the energies needed and, worst off all, wastes money on a vast scale. That brings to mind another well-known quote:

"People in this country have had enough of experts."

Michael Gove, currently Secretary of State for the Environment

So what is to be done? Can this be fixed? The UK is not alone here, the world is in a dangerous place, and only if there is a resurgence of engineering and truth led industries and organisations can we hope to get our key infrastructures delivering on realistic promises.

Peter Cochrane OBE is the ex-CTO of BT, who now works as a consultant focusing on solving problems and improving the world through the application of technology.