Technological determinism is a well-attested approach to describing why change happens. Broadly, the thinking has been that technology drives social and cultural change. As applied to business and economics, we might postulate that technological determinism explains why industries grow and die; products get adopted or discarded.
In a sense, we might view the “broadband drives economic growth” assumption as a form of technological determinism, in the same way that the invention of the wheel is said to have revolutionized human mobility, allowing humans to travel greater distances and carry greater loads with them.
The invention of language, ironworking, double-entry bookkeeping and the steam engine are cited as other examples. As always, we might err in trying to reduce highly-complex changes to a single source of causation. Even important innovations such as the printing press have impact based on a variety of other underlying trends, all operating simultaneously.
So we might argue that the way we code symbols on various mobile networks explains why 3G was replaced by 4G, or 4G replaced by 5G. It is more complicated than that. 2G mobile networks used either frequency division or time division. 3G switched to code division or used time-division-based GSM.
4G substituted orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. So we might infer that the technology change drove the business change.
It is more logical to argue that business changes drove the technology innovations. As use of mobile phones became mainstream in the 2G era, usage grew, which necessitated additional capacity on the supply side.
Mobile operators responded by increasing the effective use of spectrum by moving to smaller cells. Shrinking cell diameter by 50 percent boosted spectrum reuse by about four times. Assignment of additional spectrum has been the other big driver of capacity increase, though.
But Moore’s Law also plays a role. With each passing decade, computing and storage costs fall by more than an order of magnitude. As a practical matter, that means complex computational tasks are cheaper to execute.
So each generation of networks has been able to use more-complex signal processing to boost effective capacity. Some might be tempted to argue that Moore’s Law, therefore, is an example of technological determinism.
It is complicated, but the driver has more to do with the growing use of mobility services and use of the internet and its apps that create the demand for more capacity, which in turn drives the search for more-effective air interfaces and multiplexing techniques.
All of that is underpinned by the ability on the part of mobile service providers to generate more revenue from end user demand, which also rose.
Technology often enables changes of a wider sort. But there is almost nothing “deterministic” about that process.
No comments:
Post a Comment