Setting Wireless Engineering Standards

In Portable Design we’ve long covered the evolution of wireless standards and applauded when new wireless interfaces finally emerged from standards bodies. It’s only by having universally recognized standards that these technologies can really be successful.

But what about standards for wireless engineers? Every year hundreds of schools in scores of countries graduate thousands of wireless professionals. Some graduates have a pretty basic education in the field, others a very advanced one and still others a lot of depth in a very specialized area. Unfortunately there is no common set of educational requirements for entry into the field and a great deal of variability globally in the quality of training. There are a lot of good people out there, but it’s hard to tell who they are.


Last year the IEEE Communications Society (Comsoc) launched the IEEE Wireless Communication Engineering Technologies (IEEE WCET) Certification Program to provide eligible individuals with a quantifiable method for demonstrating their expertise in wireless communications. Designed by IEEE ComSoc and an international collection of industry experts, the program was also designed to offer employers based throughout the world with a certifiable means for gauging the qualifications of wireless professionals.

According to Celia Desmond, the WCET project director, the project involved over 100 people worldwide working together for two years to develop the exam, which was first administered last October. In December, 2006 Comsoc formed the Practice Analysis Task Force (PATF), consisting of 16 industry experts with a wide range of experience. Every effort was made to focus on the practical knowledge and skills needed to be a successful wireless engineer; academics were only allowed to be involved if “they had one foot in planted in the industry.” The task force defined the scope of the exam and categorized the materials into seven knowledge areas: wireless access technologies; network and service architecture; network management and security; RF engineering, propagation and antennas; facilities and infrastructure; agreements, standards, policies and regulations; and fundamental knowledge.

Having drafted an initial set of questions, Comsoc then held focus groups around the world at wireless conferences and IEEE regional meetings. Each focus group took upwards of three hours, during which participants critiqued and refined the questions. The results were then sent to 14,000 people in the wireless industry, of whom 1,000 responded. They were asked, “In your company, how important is it that people know this information and be able to perform these tasks?” This feedback was used to determine the percentage of questions in each topic area; for example, technical questions make up 20% of the exam, while infrastructure takes up only 6%.

The exams were next sent to a group of industry professionals to build a question bank; other groups reviewed the questions. The rigorous program development process was highly moderated all the way through by Professional Examination Services.

The first exam—150 multiple choice questions administered on computer at regional testing centers—was held worldwide in October, 2008; a second one from March 16-April 4, 2009; the next one is scheduled for Fall, 2009.

Applicants for the test receive “A Guide to the Wireless Engineering Book of Knowledge (WEBOK)”, a 250-page treatment of technical, infrastructure and regulatory issues facing the wireless industry. Comsoc warns that “The WEBOK should not be reviewed as a study guide for a wireless certification exam…It is rather an outline of the technical areas with which a wireless practitioner employed in industry should be familiar, and offers suggestions as to where to turn for further information and study.” Applicants can also take a practice exam online to help them further identify areas they need to review.

The US$500 fee ($450 for IEEE and IEEE ComSoc members) covers the application, processing fees and “seat fee” for taking the test. A certificate is sent to those who pass the exam.

Portable Design strongly supports the WCET program and urges its readers to check it out. Interested professionals can visit www.ieee-wcet.org for program information and updates including eligibility requirements, testing dates and locations, application information including deadlines, examination specifications, links to training organizations, and free resources such as a glossary, a list of references, and sample questions for helping candidates thoroughly prepare for the exam.

IEEE Communications Society, New York, NY (212) 705-8900 [http://www.comsoc.org/]

--John Donovan

Innovate or Stagnate

The New York Times today carried a story about how the U.S. is losing its competitive edge. A report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) found that the U.S. ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions based on 16 indicators of innovation and competitiveness, including venture capital investment, scientific researchers, spending on research and educational achievement. In terms of progress over the last 10 years the U.S. came in last.

By almost any measure the U.S. has a greater number of academic researchers, Nobel Prize winners and corporate R&D labs than anyone else. However, the foundation report adjusted for the size of each economy and its population. In most categories the U.S. wasn’t even close:

Adjusting for populations enables apples-to-apples comparisons, but it requires caution in interpreting the results. Luxembergians (Luxembergers?) may be highly productive rich people, but I don’t expect to see all our R&D suddenly fly offshore to this tiny banking center. Of course I could be wrong: Skype is headquartered there, eBay is eyeing it and the country is courting Internet startups. OTOH China’s huge IT investment should have huge payoffs, as will Russia’s investment in higher education and Singpore’s major incentive program to cultivate and attract innovative technology companies.

In the Times’ words,

“Some countries, including Singapore, Taiwan, Finland and China, are pursuing policies that are explicitly designed to spur innovation. These policies typically try to nurture a broader “ecology of innovation,” which often includes education, training, intellectual property protection and immigration. This is in contrast to the industrial policy of the 1980s in which governments helped pick winners among domestic industries.”

It’s also in contrast to anything the U.S. is doing, which includes under-funding education; enacting punitive (or at best counter-productive) immigration policies; and providing practically no funding or even tax incentives for worker retraining.

I lived in Singapore for a few years (1988-90)—working for the old National Computer Board—and got to observe first-hand a country run by technocrats: the “Switzerland of the Pacific” (or the more acerbic “Disneyland with the Death Penalty”). While I’m not enamored of Singaporean politics, their ruling bureaucracy runs like the proverbial Swiss watch. Highly skilled foreign workers are openly courted and offered a path to citizenship—in contrast to the U.S., where when your H1-B or student visa runs out you have 30 days to get a job or leave the country. Over 20 years ago Singapore set out to be a ‘wired island’, computerizing all businesses and agencies and giving everyone high-speed Internet access. Singapore ranks ahead of the U.S. in almost all of the ITIF’s innovation scores.

More recently Singapore has set out to be a Center of Innovation, teaching Lateral Thinking and Innovation from the grade school level on up. This initially met with some humor, since Singaporeans aren’t known for being a very creative, over the top lot. But Creative Technologies showed that a Singaporean tech company could be a contender on the world stage, and the government has set out since then to provide a wide range of incentives to encourage innovation.

The Obama administration has targeted most of the shortcomings in the ITIF’s innovation list for both attention and funding. But our newly minted technocrats would do well to take a close look at a more holistic approach like Singpore’s. Forget the overtones of Japan's industrial policy in the '80s. "It's the economy, stupid!"

Surviving the Crash

As of this writing, the papers are celebrating the heroic U.S. Airways pilot who successfully crash landed his plane in the Hudson River, saving all 155 passengers on board. Will the captains of the electronics industry be able to save their own ships from the current economic crash?

While the electronics industry in general and the semiconductor industry in particular have had recurrent ups and downs, there is little doubt that this down cycle is going to be one of the worst ever. Both industries are likely to look very different when they emerge from the trough.

Forget Startups

According to the National Venture Capital Association, VC fund-raising fell 71% in the fourth quarter of 2008 due to the recession and aversion to risky investments. For all of 2008, U.S. VCs pulled in just under $28 billion, down 21.4% from the $35.5 billion raised in the prior year. This money is largely going to established startups who are already selling a product and who, with some more marketing oomph, are likely to make a profit. On top of this, in all of 2008 there was only one initial public offering (IPO) to come out of Silicon Valley. With investors risk averse and no exit strategy in sight, VCs are becoming risk averse, too. New startups are toast. This will starve the industry of both innovation and the acquisition targets that enable larger players to innovate fast enough.

Forget Profits

This almost goes without saying. Innovation is the key to profits, since consumers are willing to pay a premium for cool new features. But competition always drives down price; if you can’t continue to compete on features, you’ll soon find yourself in the death spiral of competing on price. During a recession, it’s almost impossible to avoid the latter. It becomes a matter of survival of the fittest, and major industry consolidation is already underway. In good times, the market will penalize you for sitting on a pile of cash; now only companies with large cash reserves and well diversified cash flows are likely to survive. One financial analyst summed up the situation by describing his recommended positions during this recession: “Cash and fetal.”

Go Fabless

The days of “real men have fabs” are over. The CAPEX is unsustainable and TSMC can do it better than you, anyway. AMD has pushed its fab off its balance sheet, talking Abu Dhabi into investing in it (good luck, guys). Cypress is outsourcing all fab work under 90 nm, and TI is doing the same at the 45 nm node. Except for hanging onto an R&D fab—Cypress has even managed to monetize theirs as the Silicon Valley Technology Center—there’s no excuse for not diverting the CAPEX you’d otherwise spend on a fab into R&D. This is a game only the big dogs can play, and even they’re banding together to spread the pain around.

Get out of DRAM

If there was ever a commodity product, it’s DRAM. Everyone involved with it is losing money; Qimonda is in such dire straits that its owners can scarcely give it away. Micron converted much of its DRAM fab capacity to manufacturing flash memory, which until recently was a license to print money; now flash looks to be the next DRAM.

In the 90’s Korean companies undercut the Japanese to take over the DRAM market from them; now the Taiwanese are out to do the same to the Koreans. They’d better look over their shoulders at the Chinese. It’s time to end this losing game and get out of DRAM. Let SMIC or Grace make it all. Good riddance.

Consolidate

To achieve the critical mass to survive an extended downturn, consider merging with your competition. Lattice and Actel both have similar technologies, and both continue to watch Altera and Xilinx walk away from them; they’d be stronger if they combined forces, just as Lattice previously did with Vantis.

Cypress and Micron would be another logical pairing, though it’s difficult if not impossible to imagine T.J. Rogers and Steve Appleton jointly running the company. When you factor in executive egos, you’re more likely to see consolidation take the form of acquisitions, resulting in the industry having fewer if larger players after it all shakes out.

I’m beginning to understand why the ancient Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times,” isn’t a blessing but a curse. These are going to be interesting times. Fortunately, like everything else, they’ll pass.

CES Thursday

I arrived at the South Hall to pick up my press pass with the usual fear and loathing: I don't gamble and I hate crowds, both of which define Vegas. Fortunately the crowds this year at CES are a lot smaller than last year, and the number of startups willing to gamble their annual marketing budget on a booth has also diminshed. There's still plenty worth seeing, but at least you don't feel quite so much like a salmon swimming upstream when you go to see it. I'm interested to see whether large trade shows like CES can weather the coming economic storm or instead blink out like once-mighty Comdex. My guess is that small local shows are the wave of the future and large shows the new dinosaurs.

My vote for the most fun exhibit is Nvidia's 3D demos of Guitar Hero. People were standing in line to grab a pair of 3D glasses to watch a computer-generated version of Sting rip through some hot licks. OK, so these guys are just chipheads, but they definitely know something about demand creation.

Qualcomm's demo of Android running on their Snapdragon chipset was also noteworthy, if not being quite as snappy. T-Mobile's G1 handset, made by HTC, may be the first to run Android--using Qualcomm's chipset--but Motorola, Samsung and numerous other manufacters have announced pending products based on the Android platform. Expect Android to unleash a wave of new handset applications, drive pricepoints down and cause heartburn for carriers whose 'walled gardens' will be under attack.

Steve Ballmer's opening keynote painted an optimistic future for technology: "No matter what happens with the economy, our digital lives will only get richer." The big opportunities for the tech industry are the convergence of the PC, phone and TV; a more natural interaction with devices that will incorporate speech and hand gestures; and 'the connected experience between devices' ("Was it good for you, too?"). Windows 7 beta will be available shortly and will "deliver the ultimate Windows experience." One can only hope that will be resemble Windows embedded and not Vista.

Blackberry’s Got Seoul

The Wall Street Journal announced today that Canada’s Reasearch in Motion (RIM) has finally cracked the Korean market. One more domino falls before the inexorable march of the Blackberry.

The South Korean South Korean government said it will remove a regulatory hurdle to the sale of advanced cell phones by outside manufacturers. In 2005 the Korea Communications Commission ruled that cell phones connecting to the Internet in Korea must use domestic software, called Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability (MIPI), that was supposed to make it easier for local programmers and cellular service companies to offer Web-based services. Since foreign cell phone makers didn’t find it worth their while to modify their phones just for Korea, the ruling helped Samsung and LG account for 80% of handset sales in the country. Korea has about 35 million cell cell phone users and sales of 5.1 million phones in Q308.

The WIPI rule will be rescinded as of April, opening up the previously protected Korean to foreign competition. The ruling is the result of a more open regulatory environment following presidential elections earlier this year. But it is also a reward for RIM’s persistence in applying four times since 2006 to gain entrance to the Korean market without using WIPI software; complaint from legions of Road Warriors stepping off planes at the Seoul airport probably didn’t hurt, either.

It may also be karmic justice now that Samsung has passed Motorola to be the second largest cell phone seller in the U.S., Mot now has a chance in Samsung’s own backyard. And Nokia—number one in handset sales internationally, with Samsung being number two—can suddenly compete in Korea, where it has a huge factory but no sales.

Expect the famously hip Korean teenagers to snap up Apple iPhones as quickly as they hit the stores. And expect their workaholic parents to be sneaking peaks at their shiny new Blackberries while the rest of the family watches TV.

Don't Shoot the Messenger

David Carr has a column in the Media & Advertising section of today's New York Times that's worth reading, whether you're a provider or consumer of news: Newspapers Jettisoning Top Talent to Cut Costs:

"Right now, the consumer has all manner of text to choose from on platforms that range from a cellphone to broadsheet. The critical point of difference journalism offers is that it can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio and provide trusted, branded information. That will be a business into the future, perhaps less paper-bound and smaller, but a very real business."

Carr takes the example of Circuit City, who fired all their most experienced (read: highest-paid) employees and then saw their customer service ratings tank, which ultimately put the company into bankruptcy. The same thing is happening with newspapers, according to Carr--and the tech trade press, I'd add. "It is not just the cutting, but the cutting of more-experienced staff, a kind of slow-motion suicide," in Carr's words.

I needn't point out my blatant self interest in siding with Carr. But in the small world of the tech trade press, we've all seen the results of taking the Circuit City route. Colleagues get laid off, editorial quality declines and advertisers look to other venues. That has helped some smaller fish like Portable Design (full disclosure), but the overall effect has been a decline in quality coverage of the industry. There are fewer of us left and we're all stretched pretty thin.

What's the Alternative?

Ultimately content is king and the vehicle for providing it is secondary. This may be reassuring news to editors and journalists, but it doesn't address the problem faced by publishers. Print costs continue to escalate while ad budgets decline. That's one reason for a big shift from print to online advertising, which is cheaper. But as any publisher knows, when your advertisers trade print ads for online ones, you're trading dollars for dimes--which is largely why advertisers are going online. Your publishing costs decline sharply but your revenues decline even more sharply. So the cost of your editorial staff now becomes your number one expense. What do you do?

Killing print entirely is one option. If you were having trouble making money on print before, keeping a smaller version of a magazine going once ads move online is even less cost effective. Why not kill it off altogether and go 'online only' as Byte, eNews and many others have done long since?

Because rumors of the death of print are both exaggerated and premature. Computers are a better retrieval mechanism than print pages, but the latter are still a helluva lot better presentation medium. I read four newspapers online every day--and check in on numerous blogs--but I far prefer to read feature articles in print. I read the news in EE Times every day but read the print editions of EDN and Electronic Design in preference to their digital editions, which I notice they're starting to flog of late.

I also actually read ads in print, where you can glean much more technical information than you can possibly fit into an online banner ad. Granted, click-through information is useful--though not very, unless you construct separate landing pages for each ad---and even then you need to cajole readers into registering in order to capture any really useful information. Just put a URL at the bottom of your print ad and you get the same results. When I click through from a banner ad, I'm usually just curious; when I go to a web site after reading a print ad, I'm serious.

So print is the preferable place to push products.

Product Mix

So my simple answer to a complex problem is: you need variety of information outlets, all of which channel the views and opinions of the best people in the business. News goes online, features in print, show coverage in videos and interviews in both video and print. The perceived value of each of these channels--which will vary directly with the value of the content you deliver through them--will determine the success of any business plan built around them.

With the publishing industry going through a major transformation right now--the dynamics of which the best and the brightest are all trying to decipher--it's prudent to spread your bets by maintaining a wide product mix. None of those elements alone may prove sufficiently successful, but in the aggregate they should.

If you have compelling content.

Wi-Fi on Amphetamines

Almost lost in all the election media frenzy was the FCC’s approval yesterday of a plan to open the white spaces between broadcast TV channels to cell phones, laptops and a wide range of portable consumer electronics devices. These frequencies between 54-698 MHz are highly prized, as they can easily penetrate buildings and other obstructions; they also enable far faster communication than you can get over Wi-Fi, which operates at 2.4 and 5 GHz.

“White spaces are the blank pages on which we write our broadband future,” said Democratic Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein during the meeting. “Let's hope this is not just Wi-Fi on steroids but Wi-Fi on amphetamines as well because it will be that fast.”

How fast is that? Cable modems—the fastest it gets right now—can theoretically deliver 20 Mbps downloads, though mine typically tops out at 5 Mbps when no one else is online and the wind is right. While I haven’t seen any test results, some sources are predicting multi-channel MIMO white-space modems in a few years delivering 40 Mbps—an 8x improvement over the best you can hope for currently.

I Hear You
The decision was hard fought, with Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Bill Gates personally lobbying the commissioners on the importance of opening up these channels, which they claimed would spur both competition and innovation. AT&T and Verizon—who paid heavily for C Block spectrum in the FCC’s recent auction—were against the idea, though their obvious economic self interest didn’t contribute to their credibility.

The strongest opposition came from the entertainment industry, who feared that unlicensed devices on these frequencies would interfere with wireless microphones. Even Dolly Parton weighed in, asking the commissioners to delay the hearing so she could comment further. Dolly Parton appearing before the buttoned-down FCC would certainly have caused enough of a media circus to break into the evening news—and derail the proceedings. In the end Chairman Martin ruled that the public interest was best served by opening up the white spaces for unlicensed portable devices.

Trust and Verify
Low-power, unlicensed wireless devices are covered by Part 15 of Title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Under Part 15 compliance is a self-approval process where the manufacturer performs the necessary tests and determines that the device complies with the rules. The FCC makes the rules and trusts the manufacturer to verify compliance. Every low-power wireless device you own has a Part 15 compliance stamp on it somewhere.

In this case the FCC went one step further, conducting extensive device tests to verify that in fact unlicensed devices could co-exist in the white spaces without causing interference to legacy users. “Normally, the Commission adopts prospective rules about interference and then certifies devices to ensure they are in compliance,” Martin said in a statement. “Here, we took the extraordinary step of first conducting this extensive interference testing in order to prove the concept that white space devices could be safely deployed.”

Hang In There
While the FCC ruling has immediate effect, the white spaces won’t open up until next February, when all U.S. analog TV signals go off the air. It will then take some time for consumer electronics manufacturers to get their new wireless devices certified and into production, and it will take longer to get the wireless infrastructure in place.

So “Wi-Fi on amphetamines” isn’t right around the corner, but it is coming soon. It will be worth the wait.