We caught up with Kamal Mokrani, Infinet Wireless’ Global VP, at GITEX 2017 to discuss the demand that today’s hyper-connected world puts on our networks and what wireless innovations we should anticipate in the next couple of years.
Q: What will Infinet be focusing on at GITEX this year?
A: Middle East specifically is important to us. Our first international sales were in countries like Saudi Arabia. It has been, and still is the biggest country for us. GITEX itself, after Hanover or Barcelona, is probably the most important show for us because it brings everybody from the region. It’s more quality than quantity. This is a platform for us to show our latest products. Dubai itself is a very interesting location for us because it likes to be at the forefront of new technologies. You think about smart cities and the first taxi drone is being launched here in before the US, before the UK, before anywhere else.
The vision of the UAE is quite impressive as well as technology is concerned. We find GITEX as the perfect forum, a meeting place with like-minded people.
We are showcasing a couple of our new technologies with which we are doubling capacity of anything that exists in the marketplace today. Bearing in mind that next year, we’re talking about 5G, we’re talking about IoT where capacity is going to be the biggest bottleneck if we remain in today’s technology is everything is going to be interconnected, and it is happening already.
Take a simple example, if a car is operating without a driver, there’s so much intelligence in that car to allow that to happen. There’s artificial intelligence, there’s quick decision making. All these need to be linked back to first of all, on board computers, but also back to somewhere to make sure that the car is moving, it knows exactly how much traffic there is out there before it gets there. All this information needs a network. Because it’s mobile, it needs a wireless network and this is where we come in ourselves. This is where we are positioning ourselves.
Somebody asked me yesterday about smart cities. Smart cities is almost old hand today. We’ve been acting on this quite a while now. For example in Cairo, our networks are being used to control the traffic lights, to ease flow of traffic, to point the traffic where there is less pollution, so there’s a lot of sensors all around. If you’re driving and you need to go to Dubai Mall and you want to know where the nearest available car park space is, you know it before you get there. So it tells you, “Go this way because there’s twenty spaces left. Don’t go in that way because it’s full already”. This is miles before you get there. This is all part of smart cities, we’re doing this already.
We’re getting a lot of interest. Of course, they’re asking us to tweak things a little bit and this is where Infinet is the very flexible. We think we know what the market wants, we come out with a product and they say, “Can you change that?”, or, “We want to connect to a different system that has protocol X that we have not taken into account”. We say, “Yes, let’s sit down. Give us the specifications, we will adapt our product”. Because we know whatever we do in Dubai, we can easily export elsewhere. I was in Colombia and China in the past two months and they’re just eager to know, “What are you guys doing in Dubai? Because we want to replicate them”. We know they’ve done it, they’ve done it successfully.
Q: In light of these rapid changes and developments, what considerations does Infinet need to make when launching a new product? And how important is scalability in this environment?
A: The pace of change is very quick in this particular field. We sometimes are ourselves put under pressure to come up with new things very quickly by the big players. The key things are, increasing capacity all the time. This is always number one. One thing that maybe people don’t realise is latency. You need to minimise that because if that drone taxi, for example, if there’s two passengers on it and something happens so the signal comes and you want to send a signal back, “Take this action”, you want that time to be as short as possible. This is mission critical.
This is one of the areas that we’re developing all the time, improving on latency. To give you an idea, today, in general wireless, thirty to forty milliseconds is acceptable. We’re saying, “No. We want to bring it down to three or four milliseconds”.
Latency, when it comes to wireless transmissions is super important. We’re forever pushing it. Right now in the marketplace we’re the ones that deliver the radio signal like the camera feed or any control in the quickest time. I don’t mean we do it over a hundred metres, we can do it over hundred kilometres as well. That’s quite important. These are probably the key trends at the moment. People talk about high capacity, low latency; we’re doing it already without sacrificing signal.
Another issue which are always faced in the wireless world is interference. Everybody’s got a mobile phone, maybe two. Everybody’s got laptops, iPads. Out in the street, you got people blasting their Wi-Fi, access points, it creates a lot of radio noise. We’re forever ‘cleaning out the airwaves’ so to speak. Interference mitigation is quite an advance science but this is one of the areas as well. Because you have a mission-critical application, you don’t want your laptop or your fridge – because your fridge will have WiFi eventually – to create noise and affect the traffic. This is one of the areas that we are spending a lot of time and R&D effort, this interference mitigation.
Q: What developments and trends surrounding wireless do you predict will emerge in the next couple of years?
A: We’re predicting a revolution in the wireless technology itself. Right now, we are developing the next generation already.
We are again going along the lines of increasing capacity and lowering latency, interference as well, but also looking at different frequencies. The revolution that’s going to happen from our point of view next year is to squeeze more data in even less radio capacity. We can only do that up to a point because physics is physics. We need to go to other frequencies and region by region, it will vary.
The next big change for us is what is known as SDR, software-defined radios. It’s like having a computer, but you can put any application you want on it so you can make it do a number of things. We give you an almost irrelevant hardware platform and you can put anything you want on it. You can change a number of things. This is the big revolution in terms of wireless and we are there already. In fact, our latest products are, I’d say 60% SDR-based. The next generation next year will be 100% SDR-based.
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