The New York Times - USA (2020-10-26)

B2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020

TECHNOLOGY

I find it helpful to look for the profit
motives behind what’s happening in our
shopping lives.
So why does it feel as if every other
commercial you see on TV or online is a
phone company blaring “5G! 5G! 5G!”
into your ear holes? Because each
once-in-a-decade changeover in wire-
less technology is a shot for companies
like Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to pad
our cellphone bills without us going
nuts and to steal customers from one
another.
That’s not necessarily bad for us, but
it does mean that the next time you’re
buying a new phone or staring at a
marketing message from a phone com-
pany, you should watch your wallet.
You want to make sure you’re making a
purchase that is good for you, and not
just good for the phone company’s
bottom line.
I wrote last week that America’s
phone companies are overselling the
current abilities of 5G, the next genera-
tion of wireless technology. My col-
league Brian X. Chen has detailed how
the reality of 5G coverage differs from
the hype: Most of what exists now is
not much of an advancement.
Yes, 5G will eventually make our
phones zippier and usher in new tech-
nologies we couldn’t have imagined.
Just not now. This means you do not
necessarily need it right now.
(Readers outside the United States:
This advice may not apply to you. Some
other countries’ 5G networks are fur-
ther along or less of a mess. I’ll discuss
places where 5G is working well in an
upcoming newsletter.)
But right now is a very real opportu-
nity for phone companies. Americans
who are buying new, 5G-ready smart-
phones — like the latest crop of iPhone
models — are often directed to the
phone companies’ pricier service plans.
Those plans — including those with
“unlimited” use of internet data — are
great for many households, but they’re
expensive and inflexible for others. (It’s
more accurate to call them “unlimited”
with the air quotes because they don’t
exactly provide unlimited use of phone

data.)

To be fair, the phone companies are

spending a fortune to upgrade the

country’s wireless networks to 5G. And

it’s understandable that they’re trying

to recoup their costs.

But that’s not the only thing happen-

ing here. What Americans pay for their

smartphone service plans hasn’t

budged for a while, and the phone

companies are trying to reverse that by

giving us a reason to pay more.

The most important factors in a

phone company making money on

smartphone service are getting

customers to stick with the company

for a long time, and getting them to pay

more each month. The shift to 5G is a

shot to do both.

Phone companies’ profit motives can

help us get a good deal. But I find it

helpful to repeat a line from Brian in a

column last year. “Telecommunications

is one of the world’s most lucrative

industries, and wireless carriers will

turn a profit no matter what,” he wrote.

“You can’t beat the house.”

Read this before buying a new

smartphone

In last week’s newsletter about why 5G

is still the pits in the United States, a

number of readers asked: If they’re

buying a new smartphone in any case,

should they go for one that is capable of

operating on 5G cellphone networks?

(Phones must have specialized parts to

connect to 5G phone networks, so older

phones aren’t capable of getting 5G.)

Short answer: Even if you’re getting

a new smartphone now, it probably

makes sense to go for a slightly older

model that doesn’t support 5G. Save

your money. Buy more cookies instead.

One of the questions came from

Elizabeth Schultz in Manchester, N.J.

She has a seven-year-old iPhone, and is

debating buying a new $400 iPhone SE

or one of the just released iPhone 12

models at $700 and up.

The iPhone SE isn’t capable of con-

necting to 5G cellphone networks, and

Elizabeth is worried that AT&T, her

current phone company, might make

4G networks obsolete in a few years if

she goes for that one.

Rob Pegoraro, who writes about

cellphone service for The New York

Times’s product review site, Wirecutter,

tackled this question:

■Between the iPhone 12 mini and the

iPhone SE, I would go with the SE.

AT&T barely has the ultrafast type of

5G known as “millimeter wave,” and

you’ll get a modest or no speed benefit

with AT&T’s current 5G in your area

based on its coverage map. And I can’t

think of any scenario in which AT&T

shuts down 4G service over the life of a

smartphone purchased today. Current

phones with 5G parts also tend to be

larger and drain the phone battery

more than many people expect.

■My other suggestion is to consider

changing your cellphone plan. Service

has generally gotten far cheaper at the

major carriers since you last bought a

smartphone, but you can’t count on the

companies to tell you that you’re pay-

ing too much.

Before we go...

■My colleagues have been busy bees

on Google and antitrust! In an inter-

view with our reporter Cecilia Kang,

the government’s lead lawyer in the

case against Google said that when

AT&T was split apart in the 1980s be-

cause of an antitrust lawsuit, “con-

sumers wound up much better off.” I’m

sure he wasn’t making an analogy to

Google at all, nope!

Steve Lohr spoke to legal brainiacs

who proposed the creation of a special-

ist government regulator to police

major U.S. tech companies, similar to

how the Federal Aviation Administra-

tion is a watchdog for airlines.

An unlikely and well-funded col-

lection of professional tech skeptics

who have urged more aggressive uses

of U.S. antitrust laws helped set the

stage for the Google lawsuit, Adam

Satariano and David McCabe wrote.

Greg Bensinger, a member of The

New York Times’s editorial board,

wrote that the government’s case

against Google “is both too narrow and

too long coming to dethrone the com-

pany.” And the last word here goes to

Google’s former chief executive, who

told The Wall Street Journal that it’s

bad policy to use antitrust laws to regu-

late companies like Google.

■The deeper meaning behind a vote on

contract work:A California ballot meas-

ure over whether Uber and other app

companies should reclassify workers as

employees is “just the beginning” of a

national debate over regulating gig

work, my colleague Kate Conger said in

our California Today newsletter.

■How to take better photos of your

pets: Try a sheet as a backdrop, be

patient and consider a shutter timer.

The Allure of 5G? For Companies, It’s Money

The new technology will be great for consumers. Just not yet.

This essay was adapted from the On Tech

newsletter, which gets delivered every

weekday. To sign up, go to nytimes.com/

newsletters

JAMES MARSHALL

On Tech

By SHIRA OVIDE

into their home garages so they
could keep innovating. And if it
wasn’t the garage, then it was the
living room.
“We moved millions of dollars of
equipment just so people could
continue working,” said Andrew
Feldman, chief executive of Cere-
bras Systems, a start-up in Los Al-
tos, Calif., that is building what
may be the world’s largest com-
puter chip. “It was the only way
we could keep making these phys-
ical things.”
To continue development of Ce-
rebras’s dinner-plate-size chip
even when the office was closed,
one of Mr. Feldman’s engineers,
Phil Hedges, turned his living
room into a hardware lab. In mid-
March, Mr. Hedges packed the 10-
by-14-foot room with chips and cir-
cuit boards. There were also moni-
tors, soldering irons, microscopes
and oscilloscopes, which analyze
the electrical signals that travel
across the hardware.
To accommodate the gear, Mr.
Hedges set up three folding ta-
bles. He put half the equipment on
the tabletops and half on the floor
below. There was so much heat
from the computer hardware run-
ning day and night that he also set
up massive “chillers” to keep the
makeshift lab from getting too hot.
Pumping a supercold liquid
through plastic tubes that snake
around the hardware — “it looks
kind of like bright blue Gatorade,”
Mr. Hedges said — the chillers did
what they were supposed to do.
But they required extra attention,
especially since Mr. Hedges and
his family had just bought a new
dog, and the puppy enjoyed chew-
ing on the tubes.
“If the dog had ever bitten
through the tube, there would
have been pumps shooting fluid
everywhere,” he said.
For his wife, the bigger problem
was the never-ending whir of the
chiller pumps. “That’s what drove
her over the edge,” Mr. Hedges,
45, said.
In July, he moved some of the
gear back into the Cerebras of-
fices, where he now works on oc-
casion, largely alone. Only seven
other people are allowed in the
35,000-square-foot office, with
most others still at home with
their own gear. The arrangement
works well enough, Mr. Hedges
said, though he does not always
have the equipment he needs be-

cause it has been scattered across

so many people’s residences.

Like Cerebras, other tech start-

ups are finding that they need to

move their makeshift labs from

one place to another — or have

several jury-rigged labs going at

the same time — to keep develop-

ment going.

Voyage, a self-driving car start-

up in Palo Alto, Calif., initially

bought various self-driving car

parts and shipped them to two en-

gineers so they could work at

home. The start-up sent them li-

dar sensors (the laser sensors

that track everything around the

car) and inertial measurement

units (the devices that track the

position and movement of the car

itself ) so they could keep testing

changes to the car’s software.

But Voyage did not just rely on

the at-home setups. In some

cases, it arranged for engineers to

log on to their home computers for

remote access to a collection of car

parts set up at the company’s of-

fices.

Called “the HIL” — short for

“hardware in the loop” — this was

basically a car without wheels,

complete with steering rack and

braking system. Rather than run

tests on the contraption up close,

engineers tapped into it over the

internet and ran tests from afar.

“It helps make us more effi-

cient,” said Eric Gonzalez, one of

Voyage’s founders and a director

of engineering. “But we had to

change our road map.”

If all else failed, there was al-

ways the garage.

In Silicon Valley, the garage has

long had a kind of mythical aura.

In the 1990s, Larry Page and

Sergey Brin developed Google in

a garage. In the late 1930s, Bill

Hewlett and David Packard creat-

ed Hewlett-Packard in another.

Today, the HP Garage, in Palo

Alto, remains well preserved and

is sometimes called the “birth-

place of Silicon Valley.”

Now, in the pandemic, the Sili-

con Valley garage has become a

metaphor for making use of what-

ever space is available to do what

needs to be done, engineers said.

Mr. Hedges, the Cerebras engi-

neer, said he had moved equip-

ment into the living room only be-

cause he did not have a garage.

“If we had a garage, my wife

would have put me there — with

the chillers,” he said.

In the one-car garage of Dr.

Wessells, the Natron chief execu-

tive, the re-creation of the office

lab allowed him to test batteries

inside “environmental chambers”

the size of mini-refrigerators that

control temperature and humid-

ity. He said he had taken over the

workbench in the garage with all

of the equipment.

“I was the only one in the com-

pany who could run new experi-

ments,” Dr. Wessells said. “I just

had to keep calling our scientists,

asking how to hook everything

up.”

But there was not enough room

for all the gear. So instead of run-

ning experiments on hundreds of

batteries as Natron would usually

do in the lab, Dr. Wessells said, he

could fit only tens of batteries in

the garage. “It was just a trickle of

what we normally do,” he said.

By July, new government or-

ders allowed Natron — deemed an

essential business because it

served cellphone networks — to

get some engineers back into the

lab, with staggered hours.

The start-up also installed soft-

ware on computers that allowed

engineers to have access to the

lab’s equipment from home. The

arrangement was not ideal — it

was not like having the equipment

in front of people — but it worked,

Natron engineers said.

“It is sort of like I am sitting

there,” said Aaron Loar, a Natron

engineer who helps write the soft-

ware that operates the batteries.

“But I’m a little hamstrung.”

Natron also started manufac-

turing batteries again at a facility

in Santa Clara, where it reorga-

nized the assembly line for social

distancing. It installed plastic bar-

riers between each worker on the

line and rebuilt the building’s air-

flow system. While the assembly

line is slower, no one has tested

positive for the coronavirus, Dr.

Wessells said.

“The engineering team isn’t as

fast. The manufacturing line isn’t

as fast,” he said. “But that is just

the cost of business during Covid.”

As for his garage, Dr. Wessells

moved the lab equipment out in

August and back into the office.

That meant that for the first time

in months, he and his wife could

use the garage workbench, which

they needed for home improve-

ment projects.

“When there’s a battery lab in

the garage, you put other things

on hold,” he said.

When Tech Start-Ups

Return to the Garage

JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Clockwise from top, engineers at Voyage, a maker of self-driving cars in Palo Alto, Calif., can connect to a program to run simulations; David Packard, left, and Bill

Hewlett developing the audio oscillator in a Palo Alto garage, in 1939; and Dina Montiel sorting cathode electrodes at Natron Energy in Santa Clara, Calif.

CAYCE CLIFFORD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES ASSOCIATED PRESS

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

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