Wireless Business Opportunities

1
Wireless Business Opportunities

• A venture capitalists perspective
• Andy Rappaport
• August Capital
• January, 2003

2
Caveat Emptor

• These days, I get paid to think only about small
  company opportunities.
• Today, I am going to address radio opportunities,
  primarily.
• Dont take my technical insights too literally!

3
Whither Radio Chip Innovation?
Qualcomm
RF Micro
Silicon Labs
Silicon Wave
Atheros
CSR
Time Domain, Xtreme, etc.?
Implementer
Improver
Innovator
4
Why So Little Real Innovation?

• Regulation of spectrum creates pseudo monopolies
• Pseudo monopolies control critical technology
  entry points
• Explicitly controlled entry points are inherently
  not meritocratic
• Innovation depends on meritocracies

5
Fortunately, Economic Rationality Will Prevail

• Value lies in scarcity
• Spectrum has been historically scarce relative to
  demand
• Technology is creating more usable spectrum
• and putting it in the least likely places
• So, the nature of scarcity is changing
• and thus the power of spectrum licenses is fading

6
How Is This Happening?

• Deliverable capacity scales as a function of
  bandwidth, power, and processing gain
• Processing gain (broadly defined) is the only
  aspect subject to Moores law
• Sowhile Moores law could benefit all spectrum
  users equally, quantum changes in unregulated and
  unconstrained applications are trumping
  incremental changes in constrained uses

7
Impact of New Radios Should Be Like uP impact on
computing

• First, break the oligopolies through new
  applications
• Next, encroach on traditional apps through
  discontinuous use patterns driven by new
  economics
• Then, rearchitect applications, protocols, and
  networks to optimize power efficiency of
  processing

8
So What Are The Challenges?

• Move to Network Arbitrariness
• Uncooperative co-existence
• Total delivered service vs. quality of individual
  links
• Distribution of energy consumption
• Distributed processing gain

9
Most Interesting Business Opportunities

• Chips to support new styles of wireless
  networking (platform)
• Shift apps away from carriers
• Cost/power effective wire elimination
• Enable new applications
• New communicating devices/systems (applications)
• Protocol/network architecture innovation