Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

So far, most of the imagined application scenarios of 5G network can be realized through 4G, and 5G has not found its own application scenarios.

However, there may be one exception: turn local terminals such as mobile phones and computers into "computers on the cloud" display screens, where all operations and storage processes are done in the cloud, eliminating the hassle of constantly upgrading devices. If we want to get a low latency so that the cloud computer is as fast as the local computer, maybe only 5G can do it for us.

The awkwardness of imagining application scenarios for 5G

5G is already on its way. With the deployment of networks in big cities and the increase in the number of compatible terminals, many people will use this technology, which is said to be 10 times faster than 4G, in the next year or two. In fact, needless to say how many times faster, as long as you can really ensure that where there is a signal, mobile Internet access is as fast and stable as fixed-line broadband, and even Wechat video is no longer "stuck", this is already a huge leap.

Depending on the configuration of your computer in your home, it is likely to download a big movie at full broadband speed, which is faster than copying from a removable hard drive or USB drive. The configuration of the router at home is uneven, so that sometimes the two terminals in the home even the local area network, the speed is not as fast as the external network and then connect to each other.

Therefore, we also have to understand such a basic fact: the network speed that finally arrives in front of you will not only be affected by the source and transmission network, but also by your own gateway and terminal. The water towers connected to residential buildings all output surging water, but the faucet in your home is a small water pipe, and there is nothing you can do about it.

For the upcoming popularity of 5G, many people have carried out wild application scenarios, such as VR/AR, but the performance of various terminals wearing glasses or helmets is not satisfactory. The "first year" of all kinds of R has been called for a long time, but it has not really become popular.

Another popular saying is that 4K/8K 's UHD video should be popular, but when you think about it, you don't need to consume UHD video on the move; from a production point of view, it's a little improved. If the Internet speed is fast enough, it is really convenient for the mobile phone to upload the original size video file without compressing it after taking a picture. This poses new challenges to the local storage space of mobile phones and the cloud storage capacity to be purchased in the future.

Another theory is that because of the low delay, the manipulator can be operated remotely and the remote operation can be realized. Unfortunately, this is not the first of the 5G era. As early as the summer of 2016, at the Asia Mobile Communications Conference held in Shanghai, I saw the booths of Ericsson, Huawei and other manufacturers, and there were already manipulators drawing and playing table tennis.

Professor Cai Yigang, a senior researcher at Nokia Bell Labs, told the official account Yuntang College that most of the application scenarios advertised now can be realized through 4G, while 5G is just with higher technical specifications and has not yet found an application scenario. He even pointed out that "most of the domestic reports on 5G are false."

The 5G vision put forward by the International Telecommunication Union has three major application scenarios: enhanced mobile broadband, large-scale machine communication and ultra-reliable low-delay communication. Professor Cai believes that at present, 5G is enhanced mobile broadband, and there is nothing that cannot be done before 4G and can be done suddenly when it comes to 5G.

The vision of "computers on the cloud" predicted by Google Stadia

Perhaps, there is one exception. This is to move the computing units of mobile phones, computers and other devices to the cloud, making them a display screen of "computers on the cloud", thus avoiding the trouble of constantly upgrading and replacing them. This is really what the previous network conditions can not do.

According to the carding of Lei Feng net, it is recognized in the industry that cloud games were born as early as 2009, but they have not been widely used. Cloud games can't do without 5G, but mobile devices need 5G to achieve greater bandwidth and lower latency. In the 4G era, cloud games are mainly realized by optical fiber, but just as mobile games in China and PC games are developing rapidly in parallel, mobile games are a broader market.

Google chose to launch cloud gaming platform Stadia this year, which is more aggressive than Microsoft's previous solution, Xbox streaming service. According to the company, Stadia has made about 100 innovations in basic network architecture, hardware, compression and coding, and the way it is transmitted from the data center to the player's home, so streaming speed is not a problem at all, exceeding the speed at which the human body reacts and processes information.

Google may have had the technical conditions for streaming in a good LAN environment a few years ago, but if everyone can get the same speed through an external link, it can only be done on a 5G network.

Now that even the Internet speed of streaming games is available, it is not to mention just doing productivity work, editing videos, rendering 3D scenes, and so on. An operating system environment installed in the cloud, with cloud storage space that you may have paid for, you don't need a backpack, and your "computer" can follow you wherever you go.

Moreover, since the local terminal only uses input devices such as keyboard and mouse and output devices such as display screens, it feels as fast after connecting regardless of its original computing power; or, even if it is an office computer, or in an Internet cafe, you can ensure that you are connected to your desktop and documents, and some information security risks can also be easily solved.

In fact, such scenes were first mentioned in sci-fi prediction videos by Microsoft, Apple, AT&T and other companies in the late 1990s. The prediction video at the time didn't think of the VR/AR and the particularly large, ubiquitous screen, only that if you went to school or checked into a hotel, you could log on to your desktop on the outside monitor, keyboard and mouse combination.

As future generations, we can only be ashamed to admit that the best we can do now is to access online disk documents and watch movies in the cloud. We still need local machines, operating systems and local storage space, and we don't dare to log in to personal accounts on public computers.

It is true that some people use tools like Team Viewer to connect directly to their remote desktops at home, but this requires that the computer at home is turned on all the time, and that there is enough high-speed Internet both at home and outside, and the terrible delay is a nightmare for operators. In addition, you can also access large software in browsers through ways such as Uzer.me and BrowserStack that are really close to what I call "cloud desktops", but the inefficiency and frequency of disconnections are also quite touching.

If 5G can really reach, or even exceed the connection and display speed of local computing and local area network, and completely solve the problem of delay or dropping, then there will be a completely cloud-based remote desktop that you can use as a local computer. Maybe it's not a fantasy.

Bid farewell to the bitterness of upgrade and say goodbye to configuration

It has been 12 years since the birth of the iPhone, during which new styles such as tablets and two-in-one have emerged, which together with traditional laptops form multiple forms of mobile terminals, which are distinguished by screen size and shape, but the boundaries between them become more and more blurred.

Today, many changes have taken place in the mobile phone industry, Apple's long-term dominance has been challenged, and new manufacturers have brought more choices. But what hasn't changed is the tradition of people constantly replacing new terminals and periodically paying for larger storage space, longer battery life, and faster processors.

Accordingly, the pricing of equipment has rebounded to a relatively high level after a brief sharp dive in the early years. Because mobile applications and functions continue to engulf the full potential of hardware configuration, new mobile phones will "change cards" in a year or two, and it is difficult for laptops to achieve both "frivolity" and "performance." even if there are some fine works of industrial design in the middle, they have to give up because they are out of date.

If possible, I would like to pick up the IBM era of the ThinkPad 701c "butterfly", Toshiba Libretto, Sony VAIOP such as the "pocket book", but they can only stumble to run the then operating systems Windows 95 and XP, and there is no room for upgrade.

Other products, even contemporary ones, have reduced usability because of software problems. For example, I have always imagined that the mirror-smooth iPadPro could run on macOS or other desktop systems, and iOS wasted a lot of this good touch screen and high-speed AI chip. I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Imagine that you can pull out the unused desk lamp computer iMacG4 from the storage room, turn on the Windows10; on her petite 15-inch screen, or bring it back to life by accepting a "stockade board" that may sell for only a few dozen yuan in Xianyu. Imagine that mobile phone manufacturers can no longer use the storage space of 32G-256G to make differential pricing, and will not let you pay unjustly for more photos while other configurations remain the same-and so on, is there still the word "configuration" at that time?

What is even more exciting than all of the above is that having to throw away old mobile phones and computers because we don't have to worry about outdated configurations may avoid generating a lot of e-waste and effectively protect our fragile environment in the future.

According to the latest report from the United Nations, the world's e-waste totaled 48.5 million tons in 2018, equivalent to the combined weight of all commercial aircraft built by humans so far. At the current rate, the total amount of e-waste in the world will reach 120 million tons per year by 2050.

In terms of value, the value of these waste electronic products is equivalent to the annual gross national product of Croatia, Costa Rica or Tanzania. Only 20% of this e-waste goes into recycling.

Do you still want to keep local computing and storage?

Of course, things will not be as perfect as described above. After experiencing the painful memories of unreliable networks, it is difficult for us to relax and give up our local storage space and computing power and hand over everything, including the operating system, to cloud service providers.

On the other hand, as mentioned above, the longer the transmission chain, the greater the chance of data attenuation and problems. If Wechat and video may be good in the same city, the cross-border may not be smooth. Once the other party gets into the subway or elevator, there is a high probability that the line will be disconnected.

So even the most aggressive cloud system promoters may have to come up with some backup plans. As for the decline in sales, Apple, which has turned to the banner of privacy, is further dependent on its internal computing power and makes the best use of the most precious A-series chips in mobile phones and tablets.

While Apple launched subscription services such as news and movies at its spring launch, Apple stressed that personalized recommendations for content were carried out through local computing and would not upload user preferences to Apple servers, causing many viewers to exclaim at that time.

In 2014, I interviewed Dai Weili, co-founder of Marvell, an American semiconductor chip company, while moving point technology. Because hosting the operating environment in the cloud is an idea that I have had for a long time, when I asked her if such a future would emerge: "…"... will the local computing and storage capabilities no longer matter and slowly disappear? " She replied:

"I agree that more and more functions will be moved to the cloud, but not just the cloud or the far end of the so-called data processing center can solve all the problems. In fact, cloud can also be divided into many kinds and many layers, such as mobile cloud and enterprise cloud, just like having a small virtual computing center in the enterprise. There are also on-board clouds, where all kinds of files need to be backed up, but at the same time you can get real-time information to ensure safe driving. All of these are relative. Clouds are becoming more and more important, but the whole process of data collection and calculation will be allocated to different so-called clouds. "

Now it seems that Dai's words happen to be a popular explanation for the concept of "marginal computing" that was not yet formed at that time.

On March 8 this year, I participated in an event held by Tiger, at which Yang Jingyu, head of Aliyun Edge Computing Technology, was invited to briefly talk about the concept of edge computing. Among them, he talked about how different types of data collection and operations are reasonably allocated to the cloud, end and edge to be processed.

He mentioned that the "urban brain" is a project that uses sensors such as cameras and Internet of things devices to improve urban governance. Take the transportation system of Hangzhou as an example, when a large number of cameras are connected to the network, each has real-time live images with high bit rate, which is not suitable for all of them to be transmitted to the central cloud immediately. It is best to set up the machine somewhere in the street and complete some pre-processing and structured operation of the original data.

He believes that when the delay is reduced to a certain extent, it will be possible to do the math. But if everything goes to the central cloud, the pace may be a little slower, waiting for 6G or even 7G, then the same effect, with edge computing, may be achieved in a 5G environment. For example, the school computer room does not need to buy a large number of desktops, does not need to change, and can turn on machines in the cloud on demand-which coincides with the "cloud computers" that I have always imagined.

I think, with the simultaneous arrival of the 5G era, the concept of edge computing can indeed add another effective boost to the computing power that has seen the dawn. You can let the screen without CPU and computing power light up in the nearest place where you can connect to the edge server, and start your work, just like holding your phone looking for WiFi.

This may allow us to fulfill an earlier prophecy at some point in the future. The first time I saw it was in 1998, when it was mentioned in the futuristic bestseller the Revolution of Learning:

TimBemers-Lee, founder of the World wide Web, points out that new 'information apps' even appear in cereal boxes.'my child will, as usual, look for a prize in the box, pull out a tube, spread it out into something flat, elastic and magnetic, stick it on the refrigerator and start roaming the world,'he said.

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