GigaOm

The algorithmic revolution has arrived in health care and medicine, and is already making an impact on new business models and the underlying structure of health systems.

Meanwhile in the broader digital economy the buzz is growing around machine-to-machine (M2M) and the Internet of things (IoT). The question is where people fit into the M2M and IoT universe and what impact that intersection will have in the health economy -- an area that amounts to nearly 20 percent of the overall US economy.

New types of sensor technology, rapidly growing analytics enabled by big data, and the new business models that IoT may catalyze will have a major impact on health care in the future. Health care systems rely on complex supply chains, complex diagnostic and monitoring technology. Increasingly, where the production of health care occurs is moving away from the clinic and into the home. This opens up opportunities for everyone from cable service providers to telcos and a broad range of digital service providers to engage in the health care market and upend business as we know it.

Key findings of our analysis of this marketplace include:

• New sensors will drive medical devices and build on the momentum of wearables, which to-date have mostly focused on personalized fitness.
• Sensors and wearables will enable “citizen science” in a broader social, political, and environmental context. The health IoT, if developed in a sustainable manner with robust business models and privacy/security protection, could bring a more revolutionary paradigm to health care and medicine than genomics alone could manage.
• Health IoT, mobile health, and the slow transition to electronic medical records (EMRs) will generate vast amounts of data. The winners will be those with the power and insight to become the next generation of integrative platforms that can monetize those areas, which collectively we call the connected-health economy.

The UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom has just released an interactive “map” of the country’s radio spectrum, showing which frequencies are assigned to which use types -- all the way from the 8.3-11.3 kHz band (weather stations) to the 250-275 GHz band (radio astronomy).

[Commentary] Wi-Fi has so dazzled us with its achievements that many people can’t see its fundamental limitations. Unless network planners and policymakers grasp those limitations, they are likely to reach misguided conclusions about the optimal role of Wi-Fi in our mobile-broadband fabric.

The case for a Wi-Fi-only world is based on false notions that existing wireless broadband providers are less innovative than others within the Internet ecosystem and that networks can grow organically, as suggested by Comcast in its recent pleadings to acquire Time Warner.

The theory is that if government were to give innovators sufficient unlicensed spectrum, a global Wi-Fi network, available everywhere, built by hundreds or even thousands of entities, would materialize, similar to what happened with the Internet. However, because unlicensed bands are short range, any Wi-Fi network, no matter how many hotspots are deployed, will still result in massive coverage gaps.

As serious as the concerns over coverage are the problems inherent to unlicensed frequencies: interference and congestion. Connecting to the Internet via Wi-Fi at hotels and airports, for instance, has become a hit-or-miss proposition. It sometimes works, but more often it’s slow or unavailable due to the escalating number of people using these networks.

A truly ubiquitous, fast mobile broadband network needs both licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Licensed spectrum gives operators manageability and predictability, which enables them to safely invest in a top-down fashion the tens of billions of dollars in the infrastructure necessary for coverage. Given the volume of traffic carried on these networks, these cellular networks will need continually greater capacity. Meanwhile, unlicensed spectrum gives millions of entities the flexibility to invest in a bottom-up manner to provide localized high capacity.

The two approaches are symbiotic and mutually interdependent -- with no foreseeable changes. Both will benefit from technology advances and both will need more spectrum over time.

[Rysavy heads Rysavy Research]

A court ruling over search warrants means continued trouble for US cloud providers eager to build their businesses abroad.

In his ruling, US Magistrate Judge James Francis found that big Internet service providers (ISPs) -- including name brands Microsoft and Google -- must comply with valid warrants to turn over customer information, including e-mails, even if that material resides in data centers outside the US, according to several reports.

Microsoft recently challenged such a warrant and this ruling was the response. In a blog post, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Howard characterized this as a necessary first step in what will likely be a long battle.

The ruling basically upholds the status quo for US companies who have tried to reassure foreign governments that data residing in their data centers outside the US will be safe from overreach by US law enforcement or security agencies.

Amazon’s smartphone could be an AT&T exclusive and come with a feature called “Prime Data”.

The leaked information was published on the Boy Genius Report, which also provided some of the reported first looks of Amazon’s handset, expected to launch in September.

What is Prime Data? That’s a good question, but if you think about Amazon’s business model, you can get an idea of what it might be. The company has long subsidized products in order to boost engagement on its shopping and services sites, hoping to spur more sales.

The data feature would likely be some amount of mobile broadband included with the phone each month at no charge. It’s possible that Amazon could even add more data to a monthly account based on product purchases or Amazon Instant Video rentals.

The Federal Communications Commission laid out all of its proposed rules for the 2015 controversial broadcast airwave incentive auction, save one. It didn’t address the most contentious rule of them all: whether the countries’ two mega-carriers AT&T and Verizon will have free rein in the auction or face restrictions on how many airwaves they can buy.

The FCC is now taking a whack at the political piñata, and AT&T and Verizon aren’t going to be pleased with what comes out. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has begun circulating proposed rules for low-band spectrum auction -- of which the incentive auction is most definitely one -- that would limit Verizon and AT&T’s ability to bid on all licenses in markets where competition for frequencies is particular intense.

What means in areas where there’s the most demand for mobile broadband airwaves, such as the big cities, the FCC will set aside up to 30 MHz of airwaves for carriers that don’t already own a lot of low-band spectrum.

T-Mobile is bucking the trend of focusing single-mindedly on faster networks. Using a new antenna technology, it’s building better, more consistent mobile data networks.

T-Mobile will roll out the new technology to multiple cities.

So if you’re a T-Mobile subscriber with an LTE handset, 4×2 MIMO basically means you’re going to get a more resilient connection as you move throughout the network. You won’t actually see your peak speeds improve, but you’ll be able to maintain a fast, consistent connection far more often, even when the network starts getting crowded.

[Commentary] If you thought the in-house data silos of the client-server era were a nightmare, get ready for the hairball that the Internet of things could engender.

As tens of billions of “things” -- sensors, machines, mobile devices -- get connected to the Internet and to each other, there will be huge value in the data they generate across applications ranging from agriculture, to senior care, to public works. But there’s a lot of heavy lifting to do first.

We know we can collect the data -- but how to process it, analyze it and share it securely in a way that makes sense and doesn’t give people the heebie-jeebies? Some parts of the Internet infrastructure are ready for this IoT onslaught already.

“If just 15 to 18 percent of all dark fiber is lit up now, there’s still tremendous amount of capacity available,” said Chad Jones, VP of LogMeIn’s Xively IoT business. “It’s not that we need the pipes, but we do need a ton of infrastructure atop the pipes. The next thing is we’ll need a bunch of clouds meeting different requirements from all these data sources and we’ll need business intelligence and stream processors etc.,” he noted.

Verizon Wireless has largely stayed out of the pricing battle waged between AT&T and T-Mobile, but it revealed it’s suffering a casualty or two as well.

The country’s dominant carrier lost core phone customers in the first quarter of 2014. Verizon didn’t have a bad quarter by any means. It increased its customer base by 539,000 retail postpaid connections, down from its 720,000 net additions in 2013.

But all of those new connections came from customers connecting 4G tablets to Verizon’s network. Verizon signed up 634,000 net new tablet connections, increasing its total base on connected slates by 15 percent in a single quarter, to 4.3 million devices. Verizon added 866,000 new LTE smartphones to its network in Q1, and those pricier devices tend to produce higher-value customers who invest in bigger data plans.

Where are those low-end phone customers going? The obvious answer is T-Mobile, which has been hitting its competitors over the head with its Un-carrier pricing and promotional lures for the last year. But AT&T is also a likely destination.

The world is still sucking down bandwidth like it’s an elixir of the gods, with global bandwidth demand reaching 138 Tbps in 2013, a 4.5 fold increase from the 30 Tbps of capacity from five years before.

But it’s the mix of that growth that’s worth noting, according to a report out from Telegeography.

Traffic on private networks owned by Facebook, Amazon, Google and other web giants is driving the majority of that growth -- about 55 percent of it averaged over that five-year period between 2009 and 2013. The remainder comes from public network traffic operated by carriers like AT&T, Comcast, Level 3 and others. Those public carriers still make up most of the traffic, however.