The Rise Of The Wireless Cloud: How DISH Wireless And Macrometa’s Collaboration Will Make The 5G Wireless Network And Edge Powerful

Wireless communication is so fundamental to our existence nowadays because it's at the very core of our digital lifestyles. The mobile phone has powerfully seduced and reprogrammed us socially, environmentally, and culturally. We all agree that the last ten years have unleashed a revolution of innovations via the mobile phone as it converged many disparate devices into one (a phone, a watch, a calendar, a contact book, a camera, a web browser, email, chat and so on) and then with the advent of faster cellular connectivity and programmability of the phone via general purpose developer tools, all kinds of amazing digital tools and services. With a few taps on the screen, we can summon literally anything – from infinite varieties of streaming video and gaming entertainment to food from our favorite restaurants, transportation to take us anywhere we want, reserve rooms and even houses in exotic locations around the world, and more. We can very literally perform almost all of the essential tasks required of us at home and at work on these magical devices. And all of this is only possible because the mobile phone is programmable using general-purpose tools and well-understood programming languages and frameworks. Basically, almost anyone with an interest in programming can build an app for the mobile phone if they are so inclined.

Now while the mobile phone has an obvious value to us because it's right there with us (all the time) as our most essential personal tool - the thing that makes it do these magical things is actually the cellular network that connects our magical mobile phone to the even more magical cloud where the backends for these apps run. Now developers love building apps on the cloud and developers love building apps on the mobile phone yet no one ever thinks about the network that connects the two unless it stops working. So the question that begs to be asked is: why is the network so tactical and why don't developers care about it as they care about the cloud or the mobile phone? I’ll tell you why - it's because you can't program the network to save your life if you needed to. The telecom network is literally the last important black box left in the technology world, that is opaque, unprogrammable, unfriendly, and resistant to change. While this has historically been justified as necessary to make it a critical infrastructure that can reliably deliver voice services to millions if not billions of users across a continent reliably and cheaply - the truth is that it's just not an infrastructure that can be leveraged to create new meaningful value unlike the cloud and the mobile phone.

Well until now that is.

About DISH Wireless

Presenting DISH Wireless - the first of its kind cellular cloud that is literally breaking all the arcane and bureaucratic rules of the stodgy and slow telecommunications world by building an entirely new architecture for cellular networks that is cloud native. Brian Mengwasser, founder, investor, wireless technologist, radical provocateur, entrepreneur, and now Vice President of the marketplace and app design at DISH Wireless explains it as “At DISH Wireless we are not building a wireless network, we are building a wireless cloud. One of the first killer apps for this wireless cloud is a 5G network”.

Put in more direct terms, what Brian is saying is that 5G is an application of a distributed hyper-cloud. What he is implying is that 5G is not the enabler of distributed hyper cloud, but rather that 5G (and all the Gs that come after) is the consequence of building a wireless infrastructure on cloud-native principles of agility, scaling from zero to infinity, programmability and making every part of the wireless network stack fungible via composability powered by SDKs and APIs. And it’s not just 5G that is the killer app but the ability to put apps and web services right on the radio so that they can programmatically access that radio network that makes the hyper-distributed wireless cloud the ultimate platform for app developers. And that's where our collaboration with Brian and DISH Wireless begins.

The DISH Wireless and Macrometa Partnership

In the relatively near future (early 2023 in a few months), Macrometa and DISH Wireless will provide a joint integration that enables app developers to not just build apps and APIs on Macrometa’s Global Data Network but also compose a wireless cloud on top of the DISH Wireless U.S. network on the fly, to deliver those apps directly from thousands of cell sites around the country - literally a millisecond or two away from almost everyone in the USA. 

This looks like a table on our poly model database that ingests or stores some data, then developers build a few APIs using Query Workers and Stream Workers to ingest, transform, analyze and actuate the data. Once this is done, the network menu can be fired up, and you can select the locations around the country that you want to deploy the app on, configure the wireless stack by comprising a private LTE network from best of breed parts (via API or via our visual console), You can also configure network characteristics such as slicing and QoS, choosing a MEC instance size and provisioning a fleet of them right on the Radio Access Network that bind to your newly created private network. After this, click deploy - and your app lights up across the United States milliseconds later powering radical new apps and digital services, because now the entire cloud is not behind the telecom network but IS THE TELECOM NETWORK.

Now everything is programmable - the backend edge cloud, the network, and the mobile device - and that is how all the amazing things we believe are in our digital futures will be realized. We at Macrometa refer to this as a state of “wait-lessness” - or no waiting. Imagine when you walk up to your rideshare uber car and the app and the network authenticate you instantly, unlocking the door, or when you check into a hotel and go up to your hotel room, your preferences for climate, lighting ambiance and even your credentials to various video streaming services and your corporate network secure access via a zero trust connection are all automatically configured as your door unlocks. You rock up to the gym and the machine pulls up your workout and automatically sets the weights and records your reps and pushes into your health app. The possibilities are endless and tantalizing.

Watch this fireside chant with Chetan and Brian for Developer Week:

Closing thoughts

Ultimately, all this may just lead to this crazy thing the world is excited about - the metaverse - an augmented reality overlaid on top of our physical world that makes our world just a little more friendly, easy and pleasant to live in.

The future of the cloud is an edge, and the edge is already here on Macrometa and DISH Wireless. Come build on the cutting edge with Macrometa and friends. Request a 30 day trial to get started today.