Click Here to Watch this Episode
John C. Morley: Hello, everyone. It's that time for the The JMOR tech talk show where we answer questions about technology, explain the way they should work and why they tone sometimes. And now here's your host, John C. Morley. Well, Hey, everybody. Well, Hey, everybody. Welcome once again to the J. Moore Tech Talk Show. And it's another great Friday, the last Friday of the month. Marcus, it's great to have you here. How are you doing tonight?
Marcus Hart: I'm doing outstanding last Friday. Did you just say that correctly?
John C. Morley: Yeah, it's the last Friday of the month. I mean, next Friday is going to be the second of April. And that's no fooling.
Marcus Hart: And where do Tom go, john?
John C. Morley: I don't know. I mean, this whole thing with the pandemic and just things are moving really quickly, aren't they?
Marcus Hart: Good? Is it? Definitely it is.
John C. Morley: I don't know. But speaking about things moving along, you know, Google, Facebook and Twitter CEOs, they're starting to possibly get into some hot water, and it's more than just a jaw drop. Unfortunately, the feds are turning up the heat for them. And they're going to have to start let's say explaining why they had misinformation being disseminated on their platform.
Marcus Hart: Oh man who talks about stuff being moved along pretty fast so yeah. The the vaccine hesitation and COVID it this this is just information that can be quickly misconstrued in, in Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, all of these these big boys, they know it, they know it and, and they just don't want to lose their their they base they think they can just bully in a way and to stand relevant.
John C. Morley: I agree. And now that I mean, you see these pictures of these people with their jaws basically dropped. You know, they're worried. Yeah. And I think what's really going to drive this is what's happening with unemployment. Are they going to give more are they going to give a fourth stimulus check? I mean, there's rumor that there might be a fourth one I don't know if that's true or not. But people are really just kind of like almost in waiting mode, you know, saying like, they don't want to go back to Marcus
Marcus Hart: nonie known, there's a lot of people who's gotten very comfortable with the way things are. That's why they call it a new normal, because it has been normalized.
John C. Morley: But the government can't just keep handing out money forever.
Marcus Hart: Absolutely not. It's gone, it's going to run its course. And I think it has already. And people just need to face music.
John C. Morley: Well, speaking about facing the music, and bringing Google back again. So Google's cloud cap sales commissions, as their losses are continuing to pile up.
Marcus Hart: Oh, poorly. You know.
John C. Morley: Last year, Google said that they lost 5.6 billion. Not million, billion on their cloud computing business infrastructure.
Marcus Hart: I guess the biggest question here that I got for you, John, is due to like just competition or, or just the fact that people aren't trusting what Google's doing.
John C. Morley: I think it's coming down to a couple things, Marcus one, I believe that they are starting to lose trust in the American people. We see people going to duck and other browsers, I think they're starting to lose their share. And if they keep going the way they're going, there may not be a G in the name anymore. Now, I'm not saying tomorrow, but I think they're going to clean things up before that happens. However, a lot of people I talked to, they're not putting the confidence in them. And you know, some of this is happening, because more people are home. And they're working from home. And they're starting to have a first hand experience of what's going on with IE Google Cloud, etc. And when they're starting to see issues, Marcus, that's when people decide that Wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't be doing this.
Marcus Hart: Yeah, when you got $5.6 billion of business loss, that's real money. You know, that's, that's not little money for companies, such as Google just to be playing around with. And like you said, people are seeing the Ville of being ripped here and getting a peek of what's really going on. And yeah, they're running away from these guys now.
John C. Morley: Exactly. And, you know, the funny thing is, you know, companies like, you know, the different cable providers that we have all over the world. They've been really screwing up. And, you know, nobody was really doing anything about it, except to start a complaint. But I gotta tell you, there's some clex class action lawsuits started to be filed against these big cable companies. I know Artesia, New Jersey is having some big issues, because they're starting to admit that there were problems and now they're going on the federal level. And the FCC is starting to realize it, not because of a complaint, Marcus, because of a pattern of complaints. And you know, as well as I do, the government doesn't get involved with one complaint or two complaints. There has to be a string of them over a certain period of time for them to really get involved.
Marcus Hart: Well, these companies have tried to monopolize their markets for way too long. And people are waking up, like you said, john, you're right on track here. And they're just sick and tired of it. And now with like, like those things, says it's like with every great empire and must come to a fall at some point.
John C. Morley: I always say that, if you're on this side of the table today, always be nice to people because you never know if the table is going to turn. And that goes for you on your side or goes for you being on the other side. Because the tables can turn. And I think if we have a humble attitude, and the table flips, it's not such a big deal. But when we come with this higher than mighty attitude, with an ego, bigger than the largest building in the world, that's a lot to chew on.
Marcus Hart: It definitely is and you can't bully pulpit people for long. No, you
John C. Morley: certainly cannot. Speaking about technology and a lot of firsts have been happening. You know, seeing the CEOs, jaws drop like we've never seen seeing Google Cloud cap sales commissions. These are firsts. Well, we have another First, the first man to ever talk on a cell phone. My next guest is Mr. Martin Cooper. He was involved in the wireless industry from 1954-29 years at Motorola including forming and managing the division that created and ran Motorola's cellular business when it was the world leader. You remember those times don't you? conceived the first portable handheld cell phone and introduced in 1973, the CEO of cbsi that managed Information Services and billing for most carriers in early days of cellular, conceived the law of spectral efficiency, Cooper's law that states that technology has doubled the capacity of radio frequency spectrum every 30 months since the Marconi commercialized radio at the turn of the 20th century, served on the public and private boards of directors, members of the FCC technological Advisory Council, and a trustee of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Wow, this is an amazing man, I cannot wait to interview him. Please help me welcome to the J Moore Tech Talk Show, The man who has made the very first phone call and the man who first talked on a cell phone, Mr. Martin Cooper. Well, Hey, everyone, it's John C. Morley with the The JMOR tech talk show. And I am so grateful today to have a wonderful guest, Martin Cooper, who has a lot of knowledge when it comes to and I guess knowledge is really a very short word, I should actually be saying more than knowledge, because he has a lot more than that. He has experience and so many other words that I don't think Merriam Webster has actually come up with to put in the dictionary yet and probably never will. So welcome, Martin to the show. It is a pleasure to have you,
Martin Cooper: John, thanks for inviting me.
John C. Morley: Well, let's get started on your journey. So I have to ask you, it's just looking at your background and things like that. So what got you into the whole field of cellular, and later we'll talk about 5g, what got you on this path?
Martin Cooper: Well, we were actually kind of forced into this path because I was at Motorola two way radio business, we made the police radios. And we had discovered that people really would like to have the freedom to communicate everywhere. And of course, at that time, we were talking about the 1960s there were no portable telephones. And then the Bell System which made all the phones in those days, you couldn't even buy a phone, you had to read it from the Bell System. And they announced that they were going to set us free from the copper wire. They were going to give us cellular phones and their version of cellular phones was careful. Now just think about it. We've been trapped for 100 years, we've been tied to our desk chains to our kitchens by that copper wire and now Bell System is going to set us free only one where our cars, we didn't think that made sense. But the Bell System has a lot of influence within our government. And it sounded like they were going to win the battle that they were going to get to be a monopoly and force us to have only car phones. For our cellular service. We just thought that was impossible. And that's when I decided the only way we're going to persuade the world. We're here and we are battling with the biggest company in the world. And the only way we're going to win is to actually show people what the freedom of being able to communicate with and that's how we started with the cell phone.
John C. Morley: I have to say I mean take something from wires to go wireless and now some people are giving up. I guess their home wires I still like to have both. I like to know that I have a landline but some people don't want their landline to do that. They want to get rid of it.
Martin Cooper: Well, record shows that the number of landline phones is actually decreasing now. There are 62 million landline subscriptions of the country today, there are more subscriptions for cell phones. So there people are over 400 million cell phone subscriptions solely the landline is disappearing. Now,
John C. Morley: When you mentioned about, you know, working with the wireless and getting into obviously the first cell phone, I know my very first cell phone I got when I was in college. And it was a pack probably about this big. And I think it was around four or $5,000. It was by Mitsubishi or NBC. And you had to have a workout every time you carried it with you. What was the first cell phone like that you actually worked?
Martin Cooper: funny that you say that I happen to have this, this is the very first portable handheld cell phone. This is the exact replica of the phone that I made a call on the streets of New York. And on April 3 1973. As you can see that just so you get the right idea. When we designed the phone, it was a little phone just like a modern phone. And then we had to put in 1000s of individual parts. These were primitive times, this phone only talks and listens. That's all thought does it just
John C. Morley: Tell us now that the phone looks a little smaller than my phone which I had to pack. What was what I had? And compared to that because I had this great big NDC pack that came after that came after that, obviously. So what was the transition, I guess?
Martin Cooper: Well, before cellular there were just a very few radio channels in every city. And that's what you were doing. You were talking on a radio channel, you probably have to press the talk when you want to talk and then let's go to listen to
John C. Morley: I did when I had Nextel. But when I had this phone, it was a pack. And I still remember this day I had to punch a code in and you punch the code to unlock the phone. Because at that time making phone calls wasn't inexpensive. You picked up the phone, it was analog. And I would dial and I'd hit send you know there is no dial tone and cellular most people say where's the dial tone? Well, there's no dial tone, you dial the number you hit send. And I would just hope and pray that the call went through or I'd hang up and do it again. But mine was a lot bigger. Now I saw a phone similar to yours. We call it a GT e or a saddle or cell phone, satellite phone or something like that. That's what reminded me of what you were showing me. And I think some of the Red Cross still uses them today.
Martin Cooper: While there were several iPhones as well, but look at the time you're talking about John, I think it was before 30. Where could it have been before? 1983?
John C. Morley: I had the cell phone. I'm going to tell you exactly what year I had it in. I got it at 19. Probably 1992 or 1993. Well, that was a great big pack.
Martin Cooper: Yeah. Yeah, well, they did have them by 1993, there were no more powerful. So there you go, they didn't have cell phones with battery packs. And you had one of them. But even those became obsolete very quickly.
John C. Morley: And then after that I put the pack into my car. I still remember to this day, that you know it would take a lot of battery usage and also the horn. You had to buy a separate kit to allow the horn to go off. So when you were out of the car, and people were wondering, Well, why is your horn going off? Oh, that's my phone ringing your phone ring. And that was bizarre because nobody knew what that was. That was like unheard of. It was very ahead of its time.
Martin Cooper: That's a good example of freedom means you don't have to think about the technology.
John C. Morley: If I may ask you, Martin, if you can choose, who did you call? What was your first call? Where did you call and how long was it?
Martin Cooper: Well, you remember that the Bell System I mentioned was the biggest company in the world. They really didn't think much of us. at Motorola. We were a little company. They didn't think we had any influence. And so I decided that I was going to call my counterpart in the Bell System. fellow named Dr. Joel angle. And he was running this whole enormous cellular program for at&t. And I was being interviewed by a reporter very much like yourself. And I thought about the Who I should call. I took out my address book. Remember at that time what you had to address but it was on paper and I serendipitously thought about the joy angle, and I called him and miraculously he answered the phone. I said, he said, Hello. I said, Hi, Joel. It's Marty Cooper. He says, Hi, Marty. I said, Joel, I'm calling you on a cell phone. But a real cell phone, a portable, handheld cell phone. silence on the other insulated teeth. So to this day, Joe doesn't, he doesn't dispute it, we made the call, because remember, and I guess I can't blame him.
John C. Morley: He may have chosen to not want to remember because it was such an interesting time for him. And he probably didn't want to remember it because he didn't do it. Well, I don't want to pick on them, john.
Martin Cooper: He tells me that he turns his cell phone on when he wants to make a call, and then turn it off again. So he doesn't quite get the idea of the value of being connected. And he certainly didn't.
John C. Morley: It's funny, Martin, how, you know, when I graduated, college, and even before that, the cell phone became such a staple in my car for communicating and doing business. It was like you remember the commercials, they would say when you go into your car, you're locked out of the business world at a community out of your family, there's no contact. And they use that for a long time. And then they killed that. And then they went to the portable where you're now walking around. And when they told me that I was going to have a cell phone to hold in my hand, I thought this was so weird to have a cell phone that wasn't mounted in my car anymore. But I remember the days of Martin when you had the different networks like cellular one. And I still remember that, then it was 9x. And I remember that when I made a phone call, I wanted to get the cheapest price possible. So I didn't pay for Verizon Wireless, or 9x. I went through cellular one, which at that time didn't have their own network, I learned that they resold services of either 9x or it was Verizon or whoever it was. And you couldn't get their customer service directly. You had to go through another all your cell, your one customer Yeah, we'll get you transferred over. Finally, about two years in, they gave you a special three digit code star and three digits, which would hope you over to them. And it was weird, because every time you had a billing question, oh, we can help your cell with your one customer. And it was just, you know, very bizarre. And you probably remember this too. The first time I went to New York with my car, and I had my cell phone in it. You know, you get a bill every month. Well, the next month, I got my bill, and it was about $6,000. And my bill is usually around 700. Now people would think we're crazy right now. But again, that's a long time back. selling it always was cheap to have the ability to use a cell phone and make calls even though you didn't make them as much. I still remember having a plan that was 60 minutes or 45 minutes. And you know, you really use those minutes sparingly. Because the cost for those minutes, Martin is you know, they weren't cheap. And then we had roaming, which finally they got rid of. So I would come back and I would get this bill and I would say to the company. I didn't make those calls while you were in New York. I said, Yes, I was in New York and I came back home. And if you know I made a call up actually just a few minutes before that call. And I was actually in Bergen County. Two minutes. Before that call. How could I be in Bourbon County? And then three minutes before being just outside the Lincoln Tunnel? Well, we don't know. I said I'm going to tell you how that's possible. You see, I think somebody cloned my phone. No, no, no, no, no, that's not possible. I think it is. We're going to have to escalate this to the fraud department. They sent me to the fraud department and 30 days later, Mr. Worley, it appears you might be right. I think someone else has the same cell phone number as you every time I went to New York. This was about for a few years, they would constantly keep cloning my number and I would have to constantly keep getting the number changed. Now with the sim chips and stuff, they changed all that SMS and stuff but then we went digital and that was such a relief. What do you think spurred that? Was it just things like cloning or what really made that change? from the analog world to the digital that was always fascinating to me.
Martin Cooper: Well first of all there will always be crooks around okay they were crooks in the old days thing called the blue box where they could make long distance calls you remember long distance i do be too young for lambdas it's true.
John C. Morley: I do remember long distance and i still remember when you would dial a code like 10 zero to an access code to get out and then you'd make a phone call and i remember the days of payphones and I remember one of my friends he didn't have a quarter or a dime or a card and he needed to make a phone call and I saw him take apart the phone and he crossed the two wires and I was like okay put it back together made the call and we don't see payphones around will affect the ones we see they're all just in museums and they're not they don't even offer I think pay phone service anymore.
Martin Cooper: Yeah well now demonstrates how pervasive the cell phone has gotten and even more so in developed countries undeveloped countries in africa smartphones are not the thing just any phone will elevate people give them ways to save money to transfer money and they vote we brag about what the smartphone does in this country in africa over a billion people over the last 20 years have moved out of poverty largely because of a cell phone so the cell phone is doing a lot more for people than just allowing them to call home and ask what's for dinner tonight on the way home.
John C. Morley: Did you ever think Martin that the cell phone would become as much of a household name and use and business use as it is today, did you think it would be as revolutionary as it is,
Martin Cooper: Of course we're never predicted a camera the internet integrated circuit we never predicted that the photo to get as complicated as it is today but we knew that everybody someday would have one and this is what we said when people asked us that question was someday when you were born you would be assigned a phone number and if you didn't answer the phone you had died so yes we knew that everybody was going to have a phone someday.
John C. Morley: And some people have multiple numbers and i remember when they had the ability to get multiple phone lines on one phone and that was a great enhancement.
Martin Cooper: There are more subscriptions of cell phones in the world today than there are people so i don't think there's ever been an invention or service that has been pervasive in such a short time only been 40 years zero to more than the number of people in the world is quite remarkable,
John C. Morley: Now something that always comes up a lot martin and i'm sure as it started and now today it's changed i think there's something called sars there's like a safety level for the phones was that a lot different back then i mean they were a lot more dangerous back then today they really the fcc has clamped down on everything what was all that like when you were first starting with the cell phone.
Martin Cooper: We always were concerned that maybe radio waves had some effect on people and we studied that 5060 years ago at motorola because we were selling handheld portables not very different than today's phones and we wanted to be sure that people weren't going to be hurt by them in that last 5060 years there have been 1000s of tests of research of analysis and the fact is that there is no known phenomenon that can allow these radio waves to affect you in any way at all what radio they raise guti or body is they warm it that's how microwave oven works well the amount of warming that you get from a cell phone is insignificant so the the the fcc does have rules and then the manufacturers follow those rules but the power could be 10 times or 100 times more it would be perfectly safe,
John C. Morley: But they do something out i'm not sure if it's nonsense or not i mean half the time things are putting the media you don't know if you can believe them or not they talk about a child has to be 15 years or older to be able to use a cell phone or can affect his or her head.
Martin Cooper: yeah well I'm not a doctor and I'm okay what I can tell you from an engineering standpoint, the amount of energy coming out of a cell phone is not enough to affect any mind. So people are, I think, are being overly cautious. But caution is not necessarily a bad thing.
John C. Morley: No, it's not. I mean, they write under a tower, and suddenly they think they have a headache. I think some of it is, in their mind, not that they don't have a headache, but I don't know if it was really the cell phone that caused the headache.
Martin Cooper: No, I said, You're exactly right.
John C. Morley: Psychosomatic disorders,
Martin Cooper: know you, there's less energy coming to your head from that tower, then from your own cell phone, and even that is insignificant.
John C. Morley: Now, when you develop this product, can I ask you what was the name of the model, remember, the model of the phone that you develop what it was called, was there a model number or
Martin Cooper: The very first phone we call the dynatech. And dynatech stands for dynamic adaptive total area coverage, because I had in my mind, all the technology that could make cellular much, much more effective. And as of today, the carriers are just starting with 5g to put in the adaptive part of what we talked about 40 years ago. But there, the first one was the dynatac. We start with that name. 10 years later, the first commercial phone with the dynatech 8000. And that was found with a small, smaller than this phone, waiting only a pound and a half instead of two and a half pounds.
John C. Morley: But how long was that phone able to operate on standby? And how long could you talk about it with the battery life?
Martin Cooper: By using 1983, we've gotten up to an hour of talk time. And if you were lucky, the battery would last a day. But you'd have to charge it every day. Of course, you'd have to do that with modern phones. But therefore, we talked and listen, that's all it
John C. Morley: Didn't have any other data capability it just was sending a signal to?
Martin Cooper: The only complicated thing was it would remember your favorite numbers.
John C. Morley: Is it very similar to the way I'm also a first responder and also being an engineer, I have a license to talk on FCC for my radio. And, you know, when you think about how that's doing, is it very similar to that principle? Or would you say it's a little more dumbed down than that? Because we're basically toning in a frequency number. And then we communicate on the is similar to how the first cell phone operated that it was a pre programmed frequency are not quite that elaborate?
Martin Cooper: Well, that's how all cell phones work with the Okay, technology is that when you want to make a phone call, you are connected into the network, and the network finds you a channel. And there actually, is what they do with modern cell phones is amazing technologically. But there you have a choice of 1000s of channels. And the system will select this channel that has the highest probability of having a good signal, assuming that there is coverage. There's a lot of stuff that goes out every time you make a cell phone call. But as I mentioned before, that's a sign of good technology when all this stuff goes on. And all you know is that you're getting connected.
John C. Morley: Right? There's no crackling because I know in the very beginning, you got crackling. And if it transferred from tower to tower in the beginning, I don't think the calls were really transferring to towers, then they they expanded it so that the towers could handshake and pass the call that wasn't something that came out in the very beginning, I don't believe,
Martin Cooper: Well, it was because that's what cellular is, they call them handoff.
John C. Morley: handoffs, okey,
Martin Cooper: Go from one cell to another for one signal to another that you call switches over. And it should be seamless, you should not even hear it. And of course, today it is. But we had growing pains at the beginning.
John C. Morley: In the beginning being in a car, you know, making calls and knowing that you made a call if the weather was bad. I guess it didn't make me always say it didn't make it to that tower didn't make the jump. And sometimes the call will be dropped.
Martin Cooper: Yeah, well, that was really pre cellular. When it is just a few radio channels of the city. They could accommodate maybe 100 people in New York. Well, there were 100 big shots in New York that would insist on having services. So they put 1000 people on what happens when you put 1000 people on enough channels to only handle 100.
John C. Morley: Years a great disservice. Just like what happens with the internet you have connection problems and drop outs and availability issues.
Martin Cooper: Well in New York In the late 1960s the chances of getting on a channel when you want to make a call. Were like one and 20 during the busy hour.
John C. Morley: Okay,
Martin Cooper: listen, very good service,
John C. Morley: It reminds me, it's something that still happens today, even with our technology. It's not happening during the pandemic, unfortunately. But when it's New Year's Eve, and the belle of the ball drops, and you want to call your loved ones and friends, and wish them a happy new year, if you don't have that call, ready to go before the ball is down, you're going to get unavailable, your phone's not going to be able to make a call, and it's just going to be useless, because they're not expecting that many people to just all go online at one time. You never know probably the other time, though.
Martin Cooper: Yeah, depends where you are. But you're right. In some places, there were so much capacity to really think about it that you have the option of several 1000 radio channels every time you want to make a call. While if you're in Podunk Iowa, you'll never ever have a problem. There always will be a channel. If you're in Times Square, trying to make a phone call when the ball drops, it would take a lot of capacity to handle all of those phone calls.
John C. Morley: I remember my first actual portable cell phone, and I went to Europe. And it wasn't so easy getting a call over there. Because at that time, you had to have a different phone, it didn't have GSM, it wasn't able to handle the different networks. So it was a major project to get a phone that would allow me to make phone calls. Now you can just, you know, pay for what you need as you want and dial it in.
Martin Cooper: Yeah, it is. Quite Rebecca, miraculous. It took a lot of work to make that happen. But you can now travel around the world with one phone and talk almost everywhere.
John C. Morley: Now what happened after you got that cell phone developed? What was the next step after that phone? Is that when you went into like the next tell, like where did the Where did that come? Like what was the path? So you had that first device? What happened after you engineered that first portable cell phone? What was the next step after that?
Martin Cooper: Well, we've been through multiple generations, as you know, we talked about live G, there was the one g 2g, 3g and so forth. So the first phones were analog. The technology was very similar to what a radio station was. That lasted for perhaps 10 years. But during that 10 years, we developed digital technology. Now you had the ability, first of all, to encode the voice. And you mentioned before we got rid of the crackling. What that was very simple. If we have a strong enough signal, we would like to talk and if the signal wasn't strong enough, we'd shut you off completely. So you never had crackling. You were either on or off. So the second generation was digital, 3g, introduced lots of digital services that did not exist before including internet access, and things of that nature and 4g increased the speed. And today we're implementing 5g, just as kind of a continuity. The only really big change ever that was going from analog to digital.
John C. Morley: They're saying that there's going to be a lot of changes in 5g. I haven't seen it yet other than the speeds, we're talking about the Internet of Things. And we're talking about why they needed to migrate to something that is more robust. Are we going to see this other than speeds? Are we going to see anything different? Because what all the media always says is that, you know, we're going to get 5g and this is being done because of the new immersive technology, AR and virtual reality. And also e 911 is now going to be part of buildings they say so that when you're using your phone, it's now going to go through a different network than it does now.
Martin Cooper: Well, you're absolutely right about things like virtual reality. We've got a long way to go before we have 3d virtual reality or augmented reality. But so the carriers have introduced 5g, very expensive, that's, at least for people like horizon that at&t is focused on what's called millimeter wave, very high frequencies, which are only practical in the most dense areas downtown. New York, downtown Chicago, downtown LA. And as far as people are concerned, you will not notice any difference at all. The two big things that happened with 5g are super high speeds and low latency. JOHN When was the last year Had a latency problem. So,
John C. Morley: I don't think I've had a problem. The last time I had a cell phone problem was probably about a year ago, I have the new, the new 12 hours to right now, Max. I would say it was probably a year ago. And I was trying to make a call. And the biggest issue was that the calls were dropping. And what I've noticed with these phones, the apple and all other phones, the phones are designed by Martin, as you know, to fail, the antennas go bad after a period of time. And so what had happened is once I got the new phone, it was working perfectly. It was nothing to do with the network. It was really my phone communicating.
Martin Cooper: Oh, is that you're saying you had a phone failure?
John C. Morley: Yes. I had a phone failure, and it was with the antenna. Everything else worked fine. The data was fine. But you're correct. There's no latency. The only issue that I have right now is there's one area in Franklin lakes where I am and there's one road. And when you travel on this one road, I would say they've gotten better. But 90% of the time, 85% of time, you'll get through that road, if the weather's nice, and you won't lose the call. But I usually started saying, Hey, I'm on the road here in Franklin lakes, you know where I am, I'm about a half a mile from where I'm going to lose it. So if I do, we'll have to call each other back when we get to the end of the road?
Martin Cooper: Well, John, you have captured the whole idea very quickly. What 5g offers is super high speeds that are really very useful for people, low latency, which you would never ever experience a whole bunch of complicated things that are good in factories. But what do you want? You don't want all those things that you've never experienced that what you want is good coverage everywhere. Yes. And you gave me an example: 20% of the country is not covered, and maybe a lot more than that. So the second thing you want is affordability. Yes. And today, the US has one of the highest costs of wireless internet access in the world. And that is terrible. Because at the beginning, we had the lowest cost cellular service. And the reason is, carriers are investing huge amounts of money into 5g, which we won't see any function for for years. And, and for some things like running factories, they have a thing called the Internet of Things. Yeah. And my view is, we haven't finished the Internet of people yet. And there ought to be a balance between 5g and serving the needs of today's customer. And so I sounds like I'm on the campaign trail I am,
John C. Morley: You definitely are. And and already these, these wireless providers are stating that they're not going to be allowing unlimited data anymore if you pay for it. If you're in the 5g world. Well, we're now going to cap you on the amount of data, you use unlimited calls, but we're going to start capping you on your data after a certain point. I think it's getting costly for them a question I have, you may or may not know the answer or have a rough figure. I've always just wondered this. But I pass by now and see the cell phone towers and some that look really beautiful like a tree. Others that look like a statue. you'd swear they had nothing to do with with cell phones. But what does one of those towers cost to build? And what does it cost to maintain? I've always wondered that.
Martin Cooper: Well, one way to look at it is your IP gives you the numbers, but it's different for everything. Okay, your city, you gotta rent space on top of a building and you know,
John C. Morley: I wouldn't be talking about towers, maybe I should be clear that they have erected themselves not places because a lot of times they do rent out a building, you got to pay that rent on top.
Martin Cooper: Yeah. Well, the towers, a very small part of it is a bunch of equipment in the tower. That is where the cost is. But the best way to look at it is, in general, the cost of a phone is roughly the cost of what a carrier has to spend to provide service from a tower. So if you have a tower that's serving 1000 people very likely tower is going to cost me like $300,000 that makes make sense has to do with whenever the capacity of that tower is there, but the good The amount of money spent to let you have the service that you have is half of it as of the cell phone number,
John C. Morley: And what is the ongoing price? So if they spend that price to get it built, and what's the engineered? Is there a big ongoing cost to keep that tower at peak efficiency?
Martin Cooper: Well, it's not the tower, but there's a ton of overhead involved in and there's an issue of profitability, and how much money they spend on distribution, how much money they're spending, because it's supposed to be a competitive service. So the maintenance of the battery and electronic equipment is minimal. The biggest thing is overhead services, the ability for you to make that phone call to find out why your phone's been closed, somebody is going to answer that phone. That's where the continuing costs are. And it is growing the network that they're spending huge amounts of money on. The part that I get is that you have already figured out that I advocate is anything they do that improves coverage that lets the small towns have as good coverage as the big city. That's a great thing, then they're spending a ton of money on 5g now, and some of it is justified. And some of it not because we the consumers that are paying for the service are really not getting much benefit from 5g, if any at all.
John C. Morley: Is there a broader coverage with 5g? If we had to put it onto a chart or a graph, would you say there's a marginal difference 10% as far as coverage ranges or bigger difference,
Martin Cooper: Not at all, not at all, empty has essentially the same coverage, except when it's from these millimeter wave towers, and microwave towers, in which case the coverage of a single tower is just a few 100 feet. So you may have to be very close to one of those towers to get benefit from 5g. If it's a 5g millimeter wave turn that is one of the carriers I'm not going to mention names. I don't want to get you in trouble john. And one of the carriers is doing 5g without the millimeter wave. And in that case, you get a such a this same range for 5g as you would for for 4g, you would not experience any difference at all in either coverage, or how fast things downloader or
John C. Morley: And for our viewers By the way, I'm not going to say which one either but you can actually read under the specifications, because they're required to tell you under the disclosures, how they're providing service, and you can literally see if they're doing that or not. They don't make it like front news. But when you read the disclosure, they have to tell you, especially in their public offering statement, they have to tell you what they're doing. And I find a lot of times when you call and you have an issue. I know one time I was having a problem making calls, and they were going to send a truck out. We're going to send a truck out. They did some type of investigation, they said we have no problem. I said, Well, it's an intermittent problem. You also came out when it was when the sun was out. I was there when it rained. Oh, we can't send a guy out when it's raining. Well, that's when the problem is. Oh, we're so sorry about that. Well, what am I supposed to do? Well, we can give you like two hours of credit. Don't bother. So it's like but the one thing I'm very happy with Martin is that they did come up with reverse 911 I'm not sure if that was a combination of the cell phone world because we don't see that in a row. We see that a lot with the cell phone. Now. When somebody dials 911 and they hang up the 911 system, they start doing it with cellular, but now they do it with homes to it will literally call you back. So if you're waiting too long, and they don't pick up, you just hang up and within literally a minute it locks your phone. And then it dials you back from another 911 Center, literally within 30 to 40 seconds, which I thought was kind of remarkable.
Martin Cooper: Yeah, well, if you don't do commercials on this thing, but I've just come up with a new book called cutting the cord. And one of the premises I make in my book is that we have only started with the technology and with the benefits that cell phones bring to society. Modern cell phones have a lot to be desired. It's if you try to build something that does all things for all people and have one device do it. It's not going to do any of them optimally. And I believe that the cell phone has just started its evolution and is going to have a profound influence on our lives for education. People who don't have access to cell phones will not get nearly the education that people do. People who can be involved in the educational process, full time, wherever they are. So healthcare, your future cell phone is going to be measuring your body and looking for the beginnings of diseases. And when it sees a disease, when your cell phone sees the disease starting, it will notify some database, you'll get the information on how to treat it, there's the potential that we eliminate disease because of the cell phone. So there are all kinds of things that are going to be changing. In the future. We're just at the beginning of the cell phone revolution.
John C. Morley: Where do you think we are Martin in compared to the United States? And let's say China and other countries, they seem like they're a little more advanced than we are in the cell phone arena? Am I correct or wrong? There?
Martin Cooper: Depends how you call advanced. It turns out that China has decided to put a huge investment into 5g and they are deploying 5g faster, and we are. But think about that, does that make any difference to our people don't really, I think we may be doing things in a better way. But for the most part, the US is comparable to other countries, places like South Korea, you can be anywhere in South Korea, and you don't run into that problem that you've talked about, where you don't have a signal, somehow they, as a country decided that they were going to have perfect cellular service. And they do have better service in both countries in the world. So we have a little catch up to do. But
John C. Morley: I think we're pretty close then to a lot of these other countries. So the big push about IoT, the real reason, and I guess that it's really starting to blossom is because of the availability, but the number of devices that can be online at one time. I'm thinking that 5g is giving us that ability to basically have more reliability and allow more nodes on the network.
Martin Cooper: Yeah. As I told you before, I'm not opposed to 5g, I just think there's the emphasis of you can work on one problem or another, the idea that people in 20% of our country cannot get the benefits of being educated. By having a device that can reach out to the Internet, and provide you with all the information in the world, the whole educational process is going to revolutionize and we're cutting a whole bunch of people out. So I think we've ought to be putting as much emphasis on covering those people, as we are in introducing augmented reality, and all the things that you know,
John C. Morley: I agree with you, look what they're doing in other countries with the COVID apps and trying to track things. We're not really doing that in the United States, we're doing some manual tracking, and we have some apps, but we're not at the same level that they're at, where they're able to track those things.
Martin Cooper: While you're sometimes there are disadvantages to living in a democratic country, you know, very properly, you gave me an example that before, we worry a lot about privacy in this.
John C. Morley: Yes.
Martin Cooper: And putting an ideal system in for cover and COVID would really like your privacy, I don't think you would want a system that knows where you are all the time. And that information is available with everybody else.
Martin Cooper: So there are some penalties we played for being in a democratic country where we don't want the government to have too much control.
John C. Morley: It's a trade -off. And I'm seeing that these applications that can exist can tell things, but they don't necessarily reveal things about the person. So if you self identify, for example, and put it into the app, it says that and other people can find it, but it's not really public information about you. I think the biggest way I would say, Martin is that I'm very concerned about security. And I won't have one of those devices. I won't mention the name starts with an A or A G in my home or my business. Because I believe that that voice so that information is going to a database, that database right now. is going to be sold to other third parties. It's not the government I'm so concerned about, it's about the vendors. So the governance, I think, is very important that almost like we have a W three, see, I think we need to have a consortium for not just IoT, but privacy, and it's going to come under the IoT umbrella. Because cell phones have been very mundane, and not really a privacy issue, per se. But when we combine IoT, and to have things like wearable devices, and cars and other medical devices, they're going to be grabbing certain pieces of information. And if they sell those, and we all know, like a company like F, I'm not going to mention their name. And they had some issues with controversies and some monopolies and the government, they're trying to look at that. Where does it all come down to who's going to take responsibility, and it was only about six months ago that a not for profit started, that is actually allowed to bring messages back on those three big platforms. And now today, we are still getting companies that are going to do something for a buck, unfortunately, you know, we were getting one of those agencies that was asking for your passport. And I'm like, You have no right to ask for my passport. You're an online social community. So what they've done is this, if you want to advertise in an election type way, or it's a political way, well, we're going to require your identity. So I think there needs to be something, Martin, that when these devices come out, there is a standard that has to be followed, almost like we have a ul standard, I'd like to see something like the PO, a standard, the privacy of America standard, or POW is to maybe not pow, but maybe the PO a use dinner, privacy of America universal standard. And under that there are certain things and if somebody does something wrong, well, they're going to get more in a slap on the wrist. I mean, look what happened with that doll. I'm not sure if you followed this about maybe six months, seven months ago, the family bought this doll for their daughter, father thought he was doing a great thing. The girl was playing with the doll and was having so much fun with the doll. And they were playing their games. And the doll was saying what can I sing for you? What kind of game can we play and will seem very innocent. Then a week or two goes by, and the doll gets hacked. The doll has no PIN code on it. It's linked to an app or an Android device. The Hacker gets into the website. And suddenly, that same doll that she became friends with is asking other questions. Hi, what are your parents home? Are they here all day? Is your grandmother always here? Does she ever go out? Who are your friends? Where do you go to school? What do you like to do? And this gets what I call live and very dangerous. We wouldn't give our credit card out to a total stranger, right? Then why are we putting so much trust in technology? When we haven't first tested yourself?
Martin Cooper: If you put your finger right on it again, the whole world of data is upside down now, what these companies are doing is analyzing us continuously just like us that they know our habits. Formation about us that information has value, right? Yes. And what they do is they say well, we're going to give you a free internet search, free browsing free this free now you know there's nothing for free.
John C. Morley: There's nothing free. I use a not for profit browser that doesn't steal your information. I use a duck I think it's called duck,
Martin Cooper: duck, duck, Google,
John C. Morley: duck, duck, duck, go go. Yeah, and it actually does not steal your information. And the searches are not exactly the same. But you know, your information is not getting sold anywhere.
Martin Cooper: Where the world should be is that you would give up your personal information. First of all, you should do it when you agree to have it done and pay for it. It has value. Nobody. So we have to fix that. There is organization. Interesting enough, my wife started it but it's now running by itself that is going to try to set standards for privacy, just the way you described it. Like they haven't figured out how to enforce the standards. But once you have standards now, at least we got someplace that we could use as a starting point. So yeah,
John C. Morley: A benchmark I think has to happen very similar to you remember, you're on ul labs and now they have another one for overseas. It's not ul but it's a different type of standard. That standard was adopted. And then it was passed into becoming regulation. So whenever you do something, it has to be ul and it gets it as part of local code, so that it has to be UL listed. So now what could happen is, and this is what I see happening, Martin is that we all we didn't talk about drones, but when drones are flying around, right, and I make this joke, a lot of times, there's going to be an additional rider on your insurance soon, if you order more than, let's say, one or two packages a month from the services, because you're going to need a rider on your insurance policy for whatever amount of money. Because if something happens to that drone, and it crashes into your living room, or someone else's home, well, who's going to pay for that? Well, the company can't. So you need to have drone insurance,
Martin Cooper: You know, all things unintended consequences. And there are so many, that's one of the reasons we're not going to have automatic driving cars for quite a while, the technology is going to be ready in three or four or five years. But then it's going to take another five years or longer to figure out the ethics part.
John C. Morley: Tesla's already Tesla's already doing it.
Martin Cooper: Well, sort of. So I don't, I wouldn't suggest that you drive automatically your Tesla car, they force you to keep your hands on the steering wheel all the time you take your hands,
John C. Morley: I know the car I had before, when you drive it, you just hold the wheel. Now it wasn't as smart as the Tesla but you hold you just touch the wheel or not even touch it. And it would keep you in lane Lane Keeping Assist, or would it be able to turn and it wouldn't really get off the exits like the Tesla can do. But you could be driving down the parkway. And it would just be so easy, the car would just be like, it's like I'm not even driving, I mean, my hands it's like. So I think there's a lot of issues with the data, what's happening. But the biggest problem is see, Martin is that as all this data is out there. And let's say we need to process data, everyone's going to edge computing and distributed computing, which there's nothing wrong with that. But let's think for a second that you had a cold and I had a cold, and your wife doesn't have a cold and I have a drink. And there are, let's say three places to drink from. Now if I have a cold and you have a cold, there's a chance that somebody else drinks from it, they're going to get a cold. If we had a filter, okay, on each section, and every area was filtered out, and the third area was fine, that person drank, they wouldn't get a cold because it was filtered out. You know, I'm saying now, that's a very loose example. But I think the same thing has to happen in distributed processing. When people are processing stuff in this secure environment. It's secure in the environment. But all your stuff is in the same sandbox, or the same digital space that everyone else is processing. And they can all cross contaminate each other.
Martin Cooper: Yeah, no, you're exactly right. In this business that I mentioned, my wife has started. The principle is that everybody should have control, total control over their own data. And I agree, what she offers in this business, the name of the company is resync, Wi Fi sync. We don't have any products yet, we're still in development. But you will get involved, that is your own private vault. And the information in that vault is all encrypted. Nobody can get added unless you specifically give them permission. But more importantly than that, there are tools that you can use to access everything in your vault by every imaginable way. By just by the date. If you're looking for a picture, you could look for the date, you could look for the people that are in it, you could look for objects that are in the picture, you could look for a bill that you paid over 10 years ago. But so the issue is total privacy, total control, and total access, you need all of those. So the biggest reason we don't we've got a privacy problem is people don't care very much.
John C. Morley: They're very lacking, and they don't pay attention to things. I mean, when you go to a website, you know, it says what the cookie policy is and it tells you what's going on. And companies that don't do that, you know, that's a company you want to do business with, because they don't have a privacy policy. And I think that's, you know, really important but I think education Martin is probably the single most important thing that people need to be educated about what they're doing, because a lot of people say, Oh, I'm too busy. I don't have time with that just you know, and they go to a store or they go somewhere and they don't even check that the person they're working with doesn't just know what they're doing but they're safe so i share this with people not to brag but one of our clients actually two of our clients they're on wall street they're the two of the largest international banks and they actually are the ones that give advice to all the other little banks that we all deal with every day and so what i say to people is that we went through a level nine certification and the only hire is a level 10 which is where they take blood every time which i didn't want to bother with but at a level nine certification i'm within less than let's say half a foot to touching the wire that runs the entire stock market so that's very valuable and vulnerable data there and when you just go and take your cell phone and you give it to every time joe and harry in a store you haven't asked anything about them you don't know if that person is a criminal you don't know anything because they don't run background checks how many companies you martin that actually run background checks we do we run background checks and ongoing checks to make sure that person wasn't involved that a crime wasn't involved with any type of scandal i even want to check if they had a speeding ticket because that's going to tell me something now i'm not going above five miles i'm talking about really speeding or if they had repeated speed tickets that's going to tell me something about their personality and so these are little things but i feel right now there's a lot of people in our world that don't care like don't ask don't tell but i tell people what you don't know might cost you a lot someday,
Martin Cooper: Well you put your finger on it i'm hung up on education if people were smarter we will first of all who you know we wouldn't have any worse there were if people were reasonably intelligence spending a big hunk of our gross national product on weapons to make sure that other people don't use weapons on us crazy.
John C. Morley: So exactly and now with these things like you know we come up with a digital license so that people can hack it somebody will figure out how to hack it someday but the fact of them wanting to use our biometric data now i don't have a problem with this as long as the biometric data grabs points that are not exclusively to that person so let's say they took a biometric print of your hand but they don't take the whole they just take a couple points enough to tell that it's you but not enough to be able to reproduce your fingerprint and that's where i think privacy has some flexibility because we don't need to know enough about the person to do a background when enough to prove that you're not somebody else.
Martin Cooper: Very complicated john technology is advancing to the point where you can have a camera look at somebody and potentially know what diseases they have, whether they're sick for some other reason, whether they're, what their mood is, whether they're happy or suicidal.
John C. Morley: You are right, we have cameras now that they can look at you, but look at a whole crowd, and pinpoint the people that have elevated temperatures. So our technology is there. The question is, the data is the real issue. You know, what's going to go on with the data. And I think what the government is doing, I don't agree with everything they always do. But I think what they're doing now is trying to decentralize these engines, and I'm not going to mention names, but we all know who they are. They're becoming too much of a monopoly. And by that happening, they can now become the dictator of what happens with the data. That's our problem. They need to be a small piece of it so that if they don't play nice, we just kick them off. And now we've got other people, we've got other aggregators. Many people think this one company that came out with the chip, too, they call that no, no device security or zero security and all the vices they made it seem like it was them that came out with a chip, it wasn't, it was w three C, and the not for profit consortium that actually told everyone that if you're going to be processing data, you need to have machines that are zero trust. So I think the problem is that these consortiums are the best thing that we have. And if they keep evolving, and keeping our world in it, and not staying 100% of the government 100% of the business, but also apart to the consumer, I feel then our voice will be heard. Because right now, it's how much can I pay you to be quiet? Or how much can I pay you so that you'll look the other way. And I think that's wrong. But all these big companies, Martin, no matter who I'm not going to mention or mentioned, they're all doing it. A very big company, in the very beginning of the alphabet, we used to do a lot of work with them, we got rid of them. And the reason is, and you'll figure out who I mean in a minute, but this company is nothing but a big marketing advertising company. Now I'm not against stem because I own one. But the problem is, they don't know technology. They pitch what they do, but they don't. And they buy everybody else's stuff. And then at the end of the day, they're buying huge amounts of data. About seven years ago, Martin, so I own a tech company, I'm an engineer, I got tired, and I fired one of the largest marketing advertising companies that was taking care of my IT company. They were just taking money, but they weren't doing anything for me. So I fired them. I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I bought my first full print production and graphic system. And then I expanded in later I built the center. All these companies that are advertising, they're all after the big money. They're not after supporting the business. I think that's the big issue. A lot of these companies out there, they see a price tag, and that's what they want to go for.
Martin Cooper: Yeah, well, you know, I'm an optimist. I think that the solution to this problem is somebody is going to come up to compete with these guys. There's good offer, privacy, access, all these things that I mentioned before, that are the basis of having a good data system. And either the A and G will adapt, or they'll go out of business,
John C. Morley: and get out of the way. The last few questions I have for you is this. What do you think about blockchain? Now I don't think it's great for money because people put the wrong code in and suddenly they're going to lose their money. But how do you think it is as far as a process to be something that validates like our health insurance or to validate IoT devices? What do you think about that?
Martin Cooper: You know, the only thing that blockchain does is it makes information immutable. And that's all it doesn't know that doesn't have anything to do with cryptography that's totally separate. And there are some kinds of financial information where you want to make sure that web number is established, that nobody could come in and change it. And you could kind of say that where blockchain applies trying to make blockchain work for every kind of possible record doesn't make any sense at all. It only does things that are time sensitive, where you where you need to have the information located so that nobody could come in and change it. That's all electric does.
John C. Morley: But it also has the ability to store the records on other computers. So the data is not sitting on the cloud if the validation is being stored on other people's computers, which I'm not a big fan of. But pieces of that puzzle are stored around. So could be recreated by using the peer users.
Martin Cooper: Well, but theoretically, at least somebody controls them, whoever creates the blockchain system. Remember, blockchain is not a universal something, it's some it's a tool, it's applied. And if it's tools are applied properly, they work well. And specifically, the system that any blockchain is applied to, it ought to be tailored to that application. And you will then have the example that you gave where your information is in plac