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Q. How much is a 6% increase of college applications to their universities worth for teams in the Final Four?College goes to Final Four --> 6% increase the following year in high school students who send their SAT score to college (14% increase for black high school students). Figure below shows increase in scores sent for the year of sports success and 1, 2, and 3 years after success.Devin Pope‏ @Devin_G_Pope http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/devin.pope/research/pdf/Website_Sport Econ Attention.pdfA. TL;DR Bumps public awareness and number of applications.Wichita State (Final Four 2013): 30% increase in applications. Publicity worth $450M. School is more selective.Doug Flutie Effect: Connection between on-field athletic success and university prominence. In 1984 beat U of Miami. Two year bump for Boston College.Free advertising, especially small schools. National Exposure (in state applicants already aware, smaller bump). More out of state applicants, more tuition (Rutgers spends/loses money in athletics because of this reason). More donation, more merchandise sold.Florida Gulf Coast (Sweet Sixteen 2013): 27.5%Virginia Commonwealth University (Final Four 2011) 20%more applications. More out of state students. $3.4M more in tuition.Butler University (Championships 2011 and 2012): $1.2B worth advertising. 52% increase applications.George Mason University: ($677,474,659 in free media attention and advertising. Admissions increased by 350%. Out-of-state applicants increased by 40%. 25% increase in alumni activity/donations.University of Florida championship account for 79% increase in applicants.Villanova: Private schools 2–4X increase over public schools. Better reputation, better quality applicants, more selective. Final Four 2009. $6M worth free advertising.Georgetown: Patrick Ewing 45% rise 1983–1986How March Madness Affects AdmissionsHow March Madness success boosted admissions for 5 universitiesWhat College Basketball Success Means for Schools Like VillanovaMarch Madness Payout: Final Four Schools Surge In ApplicationsAcademic Spending versus Athletic Spending: Who wins? (deltacostproject.org)How March Madness Affects AdmissionsFlorida Gulf Coast University basketball players at the 2013 NCAA TournamentMichael Perez / APHAYLEY GLATTER MAR 16, 2017Brackets are about to be busted.It is not a question of if, so much as one of when and by whom. Maybe Iona College will make a deep run; a plucky Winthrop University team will pick off Butler; or Florida Gulf Coast University will put together another string of upsets. As the NCAA tournament sets off at its maddening pace, lower-profile colleges will surely capture the national spotlight. And the admissions offices of the schools that play their way into Cinderella’s glass slippers could have some extra work come next application season.According to a recent analysis of federal Department of Education data by Bloomberg, schools that beat performance expectations during March Madness receive a bump not only in public awareness, but also in the number of applications they receive. For example, as Bloomberg points out, after then-15th-seeded Florida Gulf Coast’s wild run through Georgetown and San Diego State to advance to the Sweet Sixteen of the 2013 tournament, applications to the Fort Myers, Florida, campus spiked 27.5 percent. A similar trend was observed at Lehigh University after it bounced perennial tournament contender and then-second-seeded Duke from the first round of the 2012 tournament. And it’s not just one shocking upset that results in more applications: If a team makes it further into March than expected—such as Wichita State’s surprising Final Four berth in 2013—it can also experience increased interest. Wichita State, for its part, received almost 30 percent more applications following its success on the court in 2013, Bloomberg reports.RELATED STORIESWhy Sports and Elite Academics Do Not MixThe increased interest in these so-called Cinderella teams, however, may not be all that surprising. Certainly the magnitude of the application spikes is dramatic, but these findings from Bloomberg fall within the expectations of the so-called “Flutie effect,” which draws a connection between on-field athletic success and university prominence. In 1984, Doug Flutie—then the quarterback of the Boston College Eagles—threw a miraculous Hail Mary pass to upset the University of Miami Hurricanes. After the electrifying, last-minute victory, Boston College saw a surge in applications. The game between the Eagles and the Hurricanes took place the Friday after Thanksgiving and was broadcast to a national audience, perhaps allowing Boston College’s victory to pique the interest of students around the country. The NCAA Tournament’s Cinderella stories can benefit from a similar national reach: March Madness games are live streamed on NCAA.com – The Official Website of NCAA Championships, and the NCAA inked a $10.8 billion deal with CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting. Schools like Georgetown, Boise State, and Texas Christian University have also seen a rise in applications after successful basketball and football campaigns.And it’s not just the quantity of applications that is affected by athletic success. According to a 2013 study published by Marketing Science, an application pool’s quality also changes. Doug J. Chung, the author of the study, noted that although students with lower SAT scores are more likely to be swayed by a school’s athletic prominence, the number of applications from high-achieving students also increased following on-field achievement. And these Cinderella stories may have yet another thing going for them in terms of favorability: People love underdog stories. Studies show that people have a propensity to root for and ascribe positive qualities to entities they think are less likely to prevail or inherently disadvantaged. Perhaps college applicants are attracted to the inspiring, surprising disruption Cinderella stories bring to the NCAA tournament.Thirty-six percent of freshmen who enrolled in college for the first time in fall 2015 applied to at least seven schools.What’s unclear, however, is if this spike in applications results in an increase in enrollment. The ever-elusive yield rate (the percentage of admitted students who attend a specific school) for schools that surprise the country during March Madness is not clear. The schools may become more selective (Chung notes in his study that admissions rates “decline by 4.8 percent with high-level athletic success”), but that does not mean an institution skyrockets to the top of an applicant’s list because its team advances in the tournament. In these cases, an increase in selectivity is only natural: Applications to an institution may increase, but the number of slots in a freshman class does not.If Google search data is any indication, smaller schools participating in the NCAA Tournament may already be reaping the benefits of national attention. Trend data shows a spike in searches for schools including Iona and Winthrop during the month of March. Certainly much of this could be coming from sports fans trying to make the most informed bracket selections in their office pool, but prospective students may also be finding their way to these institutions’ websites. And so, as more students apply to multiple colleges (36 percent of freshmen who enrolled in college for the first time in fall 2015 applied to at least seven schools), perhaps applicants will tack onto their lists a school whose basketball spark burned hot for a few triumphant days in March.How March Madness success boosted admissions for 5 universities (educationdive.com)It’s almost time to go dancing — in the NCAA Tournament, that is. For many schools, appearances are routine: The last time Duke University didn’t make the tournament was 1995. But what happens when a school not known for its athletics makes a big, unexpected run in the tourney? An admissions boost.Almost every tournament brings a Cinderella story of sorts. The admissions surge that follows such runs is commonly referred to as the “Flutie effect,” after Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie, who threw a Hail Mary pass to beat Miami in 1984. This enormous win began a two-year jump in application rates for BC. Since then, numerous schools have recorded a significant uptick in admissions after successful football or basketball seasons.Making it far enough in the NCAA Tournament creates a huge, invaluable boost in media attention. Essentially, these schools get free advertising on a national level. This is especially beneficial for smaller schools that can’t normally afford a level of exposure that allows them to go from being no-names to household names in a span of about two weeks. As a result, becoming an NCAA Cinderella story often means a sizable boost in admissions and, more often than not, an increase in out-of-state applicants that translates to more tuition dollars. Taking this into consideration, it's easier to understand why schools like Rutgers, despite criticism, would spend millions on athletic programs that actually lose money.Here are five schools that benefited from such boosts.1. Florida Gulf Coast UniversityThe most recent example of a school benefiting from the Flutie Effect is Florida Gulf Coast University, which became the first school in history to be seeded 15th and make it to the Sweet 16. As of November, FGCU has seen an admissions increase of roughly 27%. While it is still too early to tell how big the increase will ultimately be — FGCU’s admissions period does not end until May 1st — the numbers seem to be following the trend of Cinderella schools that preceded FGCU.2. Virginia Commonwealth UniversityVirginia Commonwealth University’s admissions statistics offer an even clearer picture of the effect successful tournament runs can have on admissions. In 2011, VCU made it to the Final Four. The following year, its team made a third round appearance. By 2012, VCU saw a 20% increase in applications. And while an increase in applications is important, it is the difference between in-state and out-of-state applications that really matters. In 2008, VCU reported that 92% of freshmen were from Virginia. In 2012, that percentage had dropped to 85. This 8% difference meant almost $3.4 million more in tuition for the school during the 2012-13 academic year.3. Butler UniversityButler University made two impressive back-to-back runs in 2010 and 2011, both times making it all the way to the championship game. Since then, Butler commissioned a study that determined the university received national media attention valued at $1.2 billion over the span of the two tournaments. In addition to receiving an enormous amount of free advertising, Butler also saw a 52% increase in applications from 2009 to 2011, with the number of applicants increasing from 6,246 to 9,518.4. George Mason UniversityGeorge Mason University found itself in the Final Four during the 2006 tournament. A GMU professor conducted a study that found the university had received an estimated $677,474,659 in free media attention and advertising during this run. Subsequently, its overall admissions increased by 350%. The number of out-of-state applicants increased by 40%, bringing them to 25% of the overall total. In addition to application boosts, the free media attention also caused a 25% increase in alumni activity, presumably increasing donations.5. University of FloridaOK, the University of Florida isn't a small school, but it still benefited from winning back-to-back championship titles in 2006 and 2007. Keeping with the trend, its 2006 win was followed by an increase in admissions, and the 2007 win only helped continue that boost. In fact, Florida received a record 26,325 applications in the fall of 2007 — a 9.5% jump. It was estimated that the back-to-back victories were responsible for 1,805 of 2,286 new applicants, or roughly 79%. The study also showed that the quality of the applicants — based on their average GPAs and SAT scores — remained the same.Would you like to see more education news like this in your inbox on a daily basis? Subscribe to our Education Dive email newsletter! You may also want to read Education Dive's look at how the world's 10 richest billionaires are shaping education.What College Basketball Success Means for Schools Like VillanovaVillanova Wildcats forward Daniel Ochefu hoists the national championship trophy, April 4, 2016.USA Today Sports—Reuters By BRAD TUTTLE April 5, 2016In all likelihood, it just got harder to get accepted as a student at Villanova University.On Monday night, the school’s men’s basketball team won the NCAA championship over the University of North Carolina in dramatic, buzzer-beater fashion. And while the link between success in a university’s sports programs and its student applications is well-chronicled across a broad range of colleges, the impact is felt especially strongly when small private schools like Villanova (ranked #75 on our Best Money Colleges list) achieve exposure and fan-favorite status on the national stage.As one extensive 2009 analysis summed up, “private schools see increases in application rates after sports success that are two to four times higher than public schools.” With more applications, colleges can be more selective with acceptances. Achievements in the sporting arena, then, tend to result in higher “quality” students and an overall better reputation for the college in the future, the study explained: “Schools appear to exploit these increases in applications by improving both the number and the quality of incoming students.”As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, when Villanova last reached the NCAA tournament Final Four in 2009, the university received the equivalent of $6 million in free media publicity. Considering that the school didn’t reach the final game, let alone win the championship that year, the 2016 basketball bonus felt by Villanova will be far greater—perhaps even as impactful as the school’s 1985 NCAA championship over Georgetown, acclaimed as one the biggest upsets in all sports, bringing Villanova an unprecedented level of exposure.Speaking of Georgetown University, it too has benefited as an institution by way of basketball success. Applications to Georgetown rose 45% between 1983 and 1986, around the time Patrick Ewing was leading the basketball team to three appearances (and one championship) in national title games. The so-called “Flutie Effect” is associated with another school in the Northeast, in light of Boston College applications surging 30% after the school’s football team beat the University of Miami in 1984 thanks to Doug Flutie’s last-second “Hail Mary” touchdown pass.More recently, surprisingly strong performances in the NCAA basketball tournament by the likes of George Mason, Wichita State, Butler, and Gonzaga universities have also been correlated with big increases in student applications—with rises of 81% at Wichita State and 41% at Butler following years they made the Final Four. The free media exposure granted to Butler and George Mason during their Cinderella runs in the tournament have been estimated at a staggering $450 million and $677 million, respectively.Understandably, sales of team and university merchandise gear can soar as well when an unheralded program makes a splash in the tournament, like Florida Gulf Coast did in 2013 when it became the first #15 seed to reach the Sweet 16.While some question the degree to which the Flutie Effect or Final Four Effect truly nudges applications skyward—in many cases, applications were rising for other reasons not related to sports—most agree there’s some noticeable impact.“Whether we can say it was directly caused by the run for the Final Four, there’s no statistical proof,” Dr. Robert Baker, director of the center for sport management at George Mason, told USA Today a couple of years ago. “But in reality, the correlation is so strong between those things happening and the vast amount of exposure, you can draw that assumption that they were related.”The big takeaway is that all of this exposure heightens a school’s profile—especially if it was a fairly low profile to begin with—resulting in more student applications, more selectivity in who gets accepted, and (perhaps) higher enrollment overall. While this scenario can make it more difficult for students hoping to get into these institutions, the boost to a school’s reputation works out nicely for alumni (like me, ‘Nova Class of ’95), even if the team never got within a sniff of the Final Four when they were students.[youtube=Villanova vs. North Carolina: Kris Jenkins shot wins national title]So my old college buddies and I are hoping that a “Kris Jenkins Effect” is taking shape right now.March Madness Payout: Final Four Schools Surge In ApplicationsVillanova may have lost in the 2009 Final Four, but the school received almost 10% more applications the following year. // Tim Busch for Villanova AthleticsAs time expired in the NCAA men’s basketball championship game, Villanova University forward Kris Jenkins chucked up a buzzer-beater that wrote his Wildcats into March Madness history. “Nova Nation” – as their fans are called – were ablaze with energy, taking over the rest of the nation’s social media with the most positive Twitter press of any college this spring.Highs like these can be goldmines for schools, and Villanova hit the jackpot.“The outcomes for the basketball championship are off the charts,” says Patrick Maggitti, provost of Villanova. “There’s this shared excitement and enthusiasm and belief in what we’re doing, and that excitement plays out when we have parents and their high school kids visiting campus. There’s a positive vibe and energy.”Historically, this energy actually has had an impact on prospective students and their families. From 2009 to 2013, there were 20 teams in the Final Four of the NCAA “March Madness” men’s basketball tournament, 16 of which experienced an increase in freshman applications above the national average in their respective universities during the next application cycle.Specifically, these schools received 12.9% more applications the year after making the Final Four, significantly higher than the average increase for four-year colleges nationally -- 4.2% -- for each of those years.Percent change of applications received by 4-year colleges, national vs. March Madness Final Four schoolsCreate line chartsThe correlation is striking, and the scoreboard shows that winning on the court can lead to winning off of it. Applications indicate interest in the university, and getting a school’s name out there to millions of prospective students across the nation after performing on one of college sport’s biggest stages is a slam dunk.“We travel to college fairs all over the country,” said Bobby Gandu, director of the Office of Admissions at Wichita State University, which made the Final Four in 2013 as a 9-seed. “Prior to the Final Four appearance that we had, people might walk by our booth at that college fair and think, ‘Okay, that’s Wichita State.’ Nowadays, if someone walks by our booth at a college fair in another city that we’re not geographically close to, they’ll look at us and say, 'Wichita State, that’s the basketball school,' so it gives us the opportunity to have more conversations with people.”Butler University in Indianapolis, whose fifth-seed 2010 team included head coach Brad Stevens (now the head coach of the Boston Celtics), guard/forward Gordon Heyward (now of the Utah Jazz) and guard Shelvin Mack (also on the Jazz), experienced the greatest leap in interest, receiving over 40% more applications in just a year.According to Lori Greene, Butler’s vice president for enrollment management, this gave the school a brand new type of momentum.“At that time, the institution realized that it was also time to look at our marketing efforts,” Greene says. “Time and dedication were spent in a branding campaign, trying to make sure that individuals knew what Butler was all about.”From Greene’s perspective, it worked. In the years since the 2010 Final Four run – which was also followed by a similar run in 2011 – Butler has continued to attract more students, with almost 13,000 applicants last cycle.With over 3,000 four-year colleges in the U.S., any opportunity for a school to stand out is huge. College sports, whose biggest events draw over 28 million television views and 275 million Twitter impressions, can help thrust schools into the national spotlight, especially schools without national notoriety. Upsets can propel unknowns into relevancy, as was the case with Florida Gulf Coast University, who received 27.5% more applications the year after their highly-publicized journey to the Sweet Sixteen as a 15-seed.In late autumn, over 350 Division I men’s hoops squads will begin their quest for the Final Four and March Madness fame. However, for one ascending school in Indianapolis and for other benefactors of the tournament’s limelight, getting in the basketball mindset won’t be hard.“It’s the hundred-day countdown to the basketball season,” says Butler’s Greene. “We’re already in it.”Academic Spending versus Athletic Spending: Who wins? (deltacostproject.org)This brief from the Delta Cost Project looks at academic and athletic spending in NCAA Division I public universities.Conclusion:The belief that college sports are a financial boon to colleges and universities is generally misguided. Although some big-time college sports athletic departments are self-supporting—and some specific sports may be profitable enough to help support other campus sports programs—more often than not, the colleges and universities are subsidizing athletics, not the other way around. In fact, student fees or institutional subsidies (coming from tuition, state appropriations, endowments, or other revenue generating activities on campus) often support even the largest NCAA Division I college sports programs. Recent trends suggest that the most significant economic slowdown in recent years has done little to reverse the growth in athletic spending, particularly in those divisions heavily dependent on institutional support. The growth in athletic spending is not expected to abate anytime soon, as media contracts fuel more money into the system and the “have nots” continue to chase the “haves.” Not only does athletic spending per athlete far exceed academic spending per student, it is also growing about twice as fast. College sports are certainly valuable in that they allow students to pursue healthy, competitive activities that they are passionate about. But big-time college sports programs often seem to serve as advertising vehicles, boosting exposure and prestige for those universities that are successful. While a winning team may generate some new students and donors, the price of participating in Division I athletics is high. And disparities in academic and athletic spending suggest that participating public colleges and universities reexamine their game plans.National championships don’t guarantee more college applications - UNC Media Hub NOVEMBER 28, 2017 by COLE DEL CHARCOEvery football fan remembers Doug Flutie, or at least the Hail Mary.With six seconds left on the clock in a 1984 football game against the juggernaut University of Miami, Flutie took the snap as quarterback for Boston College. Flutie bounded six strides back before being chased out of the pocket. He stepped right, then lunged into a throw. As he let go, the ball soared like the eagle on his jersey. The ball sailed past one, two, three Miami defenders, then fell into the arms of a leaping wide receiver. Game over.The nation was stunned. Some no-name, private Catholic college just took down “The U.” But something most people couldn’t imagine when Flutie was hoisted up by his teammates was just how much this play would change his college.Applications to Boston College rose 30 percent within two years.Welcome to what was quickly called the Flutie Effect.The Flutie Effect is real — universities with drastic improvements in visible sports get more applicants — except when it isn’t.Here’s what the data say:It’s real when a school goes from mediocrity to consistent winning;It isn’t real when winning programs win because they always win;It isn’t real when a school only marginally improves their on-field performance.When losers win a lotAt Boston College applications flew in from around the country. More applicants than ever, and 30 percent more two years after Flutie.The game was televised nationally, which led to one thing for the college: free publicity.“Athletic success has a significant impact on the quality and quantity of applicants to institutions of higher education in the United States,” wrote Harvard University researcher Doug Chung in his paper on the advertising effect of college athletics.Chung concludes a school jumping from mediocre to great at football can raise applications by nearly 18 percent. Boston College was an outlier. But to achieve a similar increase to that 18 percent in applicants without a big sports improvement, he says, a university would have to lower its tuition by almost 4 percent.When winners winFor teams that already win consistently, a championship can help, but not nearly as much.Analysis of admissions data shows that the common effects of national championships in the two revenue sports in the NCAA, basketball and football, are, in fact, positive.Take, for example, the newly minted dynasty of Clemson University football. They’ve had winning seasons for years that culminated in a championship last season. But the real change has come over the last decade — when the winning really started.Robert Bennett, the senior associate director of admissions at Clemson University, said he thinks the Flutie Effect is real.“The answer is probably yes, but is there a way to measure it? Not directly,” Bennett said. “And as far as does winning a national championship affect admissions, the answer is probably yes, but it’s hard to tell how much.”Clemson is still waiting for the effect to be measured on the class of students currently applying the year after a national championship.The university’s application rates have been on a steady rise with help of the school’s improving football team. It’s unlikely that admission rates will jump significantly after the championship since the application rate has already been helped by success on the football field.“(To say) Our application pool has grown exponentially may be a little bit of a stretch, but it certainly has grown,” Bennett said. “Since 2005 [it] has more than doubled.”When Clemson’s current football coach Dabo Swinney was hired, the hype around the Tiger’s program really picked up. It’s hard to attribute a specific rise in applications to the improvement of the program around Swinney, but Bennett thinks the effect might be the type of people who choose to enroll.Once Clemson started winning on the football field, it started attracting more athletically-inclined students.“I think the culture is more activity, and what I mean people are more physically active,” Bennett said. “I think more students come here because they like sports, but then they get involved in club sports or going out on the lake.”As Bennett points out there are dozens of factors that could influence applications numbers. Beyond that, Clemson is a special case because its students are admitted directly into a major, not just the university, keeping application rates relatively stable.The long-time winnersAt UNC-Chapel Hill, a long-time successful basketball school, there’s less evidence of admission increases following stand-out seasons. The number of applications for admission have been on a steady upward trend for a while.According to the office of admissions at UNC, from 2006 to 2016 there was an average increase of 6.72 percent in applicants to the university. But it didn’t all come at once.Surprisingly, the rate of increase markedly slowed in some years after UNC made it to basketball’s Final Four. That happened in 2007, following the Final Four in 2006, and in 2010, after the national championship in 2009.In 2015, UNC saw a decrease in the percent of applications. However, after the team made it to the Final Four in 2016, application rates increased more twice as much as normal, 13.7 percent.This increase comes even with the fact that UNC has a consistently top-tier basketball program and is acknowledged as a strong academic school.Stephen Farmer, the vice chancellor for admissions, said there isn’t a strong correlation in Final Four appearances and an increase in applications.“We know students are drawn to Carolina for our stellar academics, commitment to student success and vibrant campus community, which includes our athletic programs,” Farmer said.UNC-Chapel Hill and Clemson University are both public universities and are considered large. The Flutie Effect appears to have limited impact for those kinds of schools, especially ones considered academically elite.The private school champsSmall private schools with a history of athletic success experience even fewer results from the Flutie Effect.Take Duke University. The school has five basketball national championships, the fourth most of all colleges, and three more than the second most successful private school.After Duke won a championship in 2015, application numbers didn’t rise. They actually fell from 32,513 to 31,186.The results were a little different in 2010, after the team won a championship. Applicants rose from 2009 to 2010, but that was part of a consistent upswing in applicants, presumed to have been caused by the economic crisis.So, while the actual influence of the Flutie Effect depends on the nature of the university, one result is certain — his Hail Mary pass against Miami won him the Heisman Trophy.Forbes Releases Tenth Annual Ranking of America's Top CollegesPay-To-Play: The Business Of College Athletic RecruitmentWhat Villanova's 2016 National Title Says About Defense In College Basketb...

Moving Lights (or just "movers" in the industry) sure are fun. No concert, dance, tradeshow, musical, or Event is complete without a bunch of them moving around, and some are even used well (though, less and less, I notice - I get more grumpy about this as I get older!).They came into mainstream being in the early 80's, were popularised from the early 90's, and came down in price over the next 10 years, so now, they are so cheap your local pub probably has a few over the dance-floor, and you can buy a basic one for US$400 or so (though, those are not the ones used for a touring show).One enormous, reputable vendor of moving lights in the 90's (and still now... kinda) was vari*lite, the band Genesis funded moving lights development through vari*lite for their Abacab tour in '81.Moving lights fall into two main categories: moving head, and moving mirror [1]. A moving head light looks like this:The egg-shaped thing moves around (up and down, left and right) with a very fine resoloution, so the beam from the front of the light can be placed pretty much anywhere, except behind the chassis (in this image, directly up). The egg-shaped thing contains the lamp, and many motors that control how the beam looks - more details below.Moving mirror lights looks like this:The moving mirror lights work from being mostly static, where the light beam is focussed, has colour and patterns applied, and shoots out the front lens, onto a mirror, which moves on two axis (up-down and left-right), but only around 135 degrees on each axis. The mirror moves incredibly fast, but it cannot shine in many places, as you can guess form the image above. For many purposes, this is not a problem, and the apparatus can be hung in any position, and the mirror head assembly can be rotated to suit the show (then locked off for the duration of the show).Why so different? Well a few reasons, and biggest one is cost: moving mirror lights are cheaper to manufacture (smaller motors, and less moving parts, as we shall see). Also, it seems, vari*lite had some patents on some big areas of moving lights, that stopped others from developing them, but that's no longer the case (I am not sure of the details).Moving lights are used extensively in the entertainment industry, which by its nature is transient: many shows are set up in a venue for a few days (or just one night), then packed down and moved out to the next venue, sometimes every three days for years on end (eg, U2, etc). Some moving lights stay in a venue permanently, ready to be programmed for whatever show is in that venue. Others stay in a venue for months (or even years), for the duration of that show (for example, a musical theatre show on Broadway). Others are hire stock, and the hire company wants to get those expensive things out on shows as much as possible.All this means, moving lights need to be tough to withstand touring, and modular, so they can be repaired in the field, without being totally replaced. As is true in any business, the more robust and modular a Thing is, the more it costs... but the longer it lasts.Moving head lights hugely dominate the scene now, compared to moving mirror fixtures, probably by a ratio of 9:1, so I'll spend my time on moving head lights, with which I have the most experience. I was a lighting technician on events for 10 years or so, in my 20's (1993 to 2003). I did some touring around Australia and some based in various cities working from lighting hire shops, preparing equipment and working on shows. I have not worked in lighting for 10 years now, but I keep up with the developments, and there have not been many significant changes in the last 15 years or so, apart from LED technology (more in a moment).Moving head lights can be split into two further categories: profiles and wash lights. The image above is of a profile style. These are used to project patterns, that can be sharply in focus (or not, as the lighting designer chooses). Wash lights have a broader beam, to provide a "wash" of colour across the stage, with soft edges. A Wash light looks like this:Below, here's a pic from a show with a mixture of wash and profile lights (most shows will have a mixture of both). The white beams are from profiles, and the blue from wash lights:The white beams have been split into around a dozen smaller beams using a "gobo", making it look like there's a lot more moving lights than there really is - we'll talk about gobos shortly.Moving lights are controlled by specialised computer software (usually built into specific hardware devices), and are organised in a building block fashion, so key to answering this question is to understand how any one fixture works internally, then scaling this idea up over many fixtures, via a control system.Moving head Profiles and Wash fixtures have a lot in common (called the beam path, from the light source, to the front lens), so I'll go through both together, and note what elements are profile-only. The specific order of elements in the beam path changes depending on many variables, so I'll list these in one possible order.Moving lights weigh between 30 and 50Kg (66 to 110 lbs), and are roughly 400x500x700 mm (16x20x30 inches), throw around 1500 to 2000 BTU/hr, and draw around 16 amps at 120v... but there is a huge variety. The cost from US$400 to US$20,000, with an average being around US$8000 for a typical high performance touring fixture.The following elements are located in the "egg":Light sourceThe light source in a moving light may be a HMI (Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide - "Hydrargyrum" is Latin for Mercury), where, as Wikipedia says, the lamp operates by creating an electrical arc between two electrodes within the bulb that excites the pressurized mercury vapour and metal halides, and provides very high light output with greater efficacy than incandescent lighting units. If not a HMI, lamps are HID (high intensity discharge) of some sort, an arc lamp (as opposed to a lamp with a filament, "incandescent", as you may have at home). Arc lamps are very efficient (lots of light output, for their energy consumption), expensive (US$500 to US$900 per, for ~2000 hours of use), and fragile.Way - and I mean WAY - more efficient, are LED's, and the entire lighting industry is being taken over by LED fixtures, which are shockingly good, and getting better. Their application for profile-based moving lights is limited currently, as the beam path means the light must go through many filters and lenses which each reduce the intensity of the light, so we need to start with a very bright source to begin with. However, LED's and associated electronics are getting more sophisticated, and we'll see more and more of them coming on the market. LED wash lights on the market are quite effective in smaller environments (eg, venues up to 1000 people).Here's a LED wash light. Each hole has one really bright LED in it (actually, probably a tri-colour LED):Some specialised moving lights (VL5's, one of my faves) use incandescent lamps, but that is very out of fashion now.Behind the lamp is a reflector, that sends as much light as possible in one direction, and an aperture of around 50 to 75mm (2 to 3 in.) diameter, which is the start of our beam path.IntensityHID and HMI lamps generally cannot be dimmed (that is, made less bright), they only have two states, on and off, so a mechanical dimmer is necessary. There are a variety of mechanical operations, but all work on a similar principle. Because the beam is not focussed (because it has not passed through any lenses yet), any obstruction between the beam and the end of the beam path will cast a shadow that has very fuzzy edges - so fuzzy that effectively, all that happens is that less light comes out, from 100% (nothing in the beam path) to 0% (the beam path is fully blocked).A small thin metal sheet, perhaps with some sort of regular pattern of holes in it is used to dim the beam. More holes lets through more light, less holes lets less light through. The precise position of this mechanical "shutter" is controlled by a micro-stepping motor - the thin sheet of metal is mounted on the shaft, and can be adjusted in very small increments - a quarter of a degree, for example - giving extremely precise control of the intensity (usually measured in %, from 0 to 100).Below, here's an exploded diagram of one type of mechanical shutter assembly. The two "lawn mower" blades marked (4) are the thin sheets of metal that rotate in and out of the beam path (represented by the large circle). The stepper motors that control the blades are marked (7) (the x2 means there are two stepper motors, one for each blade).Moving light light sources get incredibly hot (LED's are the exception, which always run much cooler), and blocking the beam path so close to the light source generates intense heat, so Special materials are used here.All that being said, in many environments, moving lights tend to be operated at full intensity most of the time (that is, nothing in the beam path deliberately dimming the light), but some exceptions would be in "fine arts" applications - drama, dance, opera, etc, where more subtle lighting is appropriate.StrobeThis same mechanical dimmer can move (rotate) extremely fast, from fully closed to fully open, many times per second, giving moving lights a built in strobe effect that's remarkable; when a few hundred movers are strobing in synch, it's an amazing look. This effect does not work well on TV for some technical reasons, so the effect alone is seldom seen in that medium, but often used in live performances.ColourColour is subtractively taken out, via possible several methods, but a common method is graduated colour flags of cyan, yellow and magenta, giving an effectively infinite range of colours (and who's to say where one colour ends and another begins?).Colours can be smoothly cross-faded over any time-frame (say over 10 minutes from a dark blue, through red, orange, yellow, to white, to simulate a sunrise), or pretty much instant if preferred - or anywhere in between.In the below image, a series of flags (two each for C, Y, M, and "dim", for "dimmer", as discussed above in Intensity). The flags rotate in and out, again on the shafts of stepper motors, very accurately.In the below images, an isometric rendering of the same assembly from front and back, you can see each of the eight flags have their own stepper motor. Each flag's curved end starts as clear, and gradually gets more saturated in its colour of cyan, yellow or magenta, as it moves in over the beam path.Because subtractive colour mixing is not perfect, the result is often poorly saturated reds and purples, so many moving lights also have a colour wheel, with special dedicated colours that can be selected (as well as "open white" - no colour). These wheels work the same as the pattern wheels, below, and are either "in" the beam path, or "out" of it (eg, "Have you got the red in that?").Patterns (profile only)In lighting parlance, a patterned beam is created from a gobo ("go between"), a thin piece of metal with a shape cut in it, placed in the beam path, producing a silhouette of the shape. Another common gobo technique is for it to be etched or painted on a disc of glass, which can be a range of colours. Basic gobos (for a static, not moving) light looks like this:There are literally thousands of designs available. These are 3 to 5 inches in diameter. Moving light gobos are smaller, at 1 to 2 inches, and fit onto a wheel of 8 or so, like this (these are glass gobos):Notice how each gobo has gear teeth around it - that's so when selected, they can be set to rotate at a range of speeds. Most moving lights will have two gobo wheels, one for rotating gobos, and one for static (or, non-rotating) gobos. One gobo wheel might be set to "open" - no gobo in the beam path - while the other is set to one of the 8 on the wheel.But this two-gobo-wheel mechanism means gobos can be overlaid (that is, both placed in the beam path), to create interesting effects (because they are in different places in the beam path, an adjustment of the focal lenses can result in a cross-fade in patterns, a neat trick... but because both gobos are in the beam path, intensity is noticeably reduced however).Effects wheel (profile only)The effects wheel is another wheel that some profile movers have, much like the gobo wheels, where other things can be placed - more gobos, special colours, or "effects". One example effect is "frost", which fuzzes the edges of the beam in a specific and predictable way. Another is a prism, that splits the beam into many versions of the same thing (mostly out of favour these days).Zoom and focusMoving lights will have a bunch of lenses (up to six) to zoom (control the size) and focus (control the edge definition) of the light beam. More advanced fixtures will have broader zoom ranges. The "frost" in the effects wheel can make the beam in and out of focus (fuzzy edges) very quickly (especially, if the "frost" slot is right beside the "open" slot), the zoom and focus mechanisms are slow (a worm drive, usually), which is very precise and has lots of torque, but sacrifices speed.Pan and tiltTwo sets of stepper motors actuate the yoke (technically, one set may be mounted in the "egg"), usually via a gearing system and toothed drive belts. As all stepper motors, these are incredibly accurate (for example, a fixture throwing a beam on to an area 20 metres (60 feet) away can be moved an inch either way to precisely line up with a performer or set piece.Moving head lights can rotate around 500 degrees, and tilt around 290 degrees, giving plenty of coverage of the stage.Moving lights can be mounted hanging above the stage nominally pointing down, side-of-stage mounted on a vertical truss, or floor mounted, nominally pointing up. In the control system, the axis' can be inverted so this makes sense when controlling the devices. Movers are sometimes placed on diagonal trusses, or moving trusses as well - they can be placed in any position, so long as they get their two inputs...InputsMoving lights require two inputs: power (regular power, usually auto-sensing 100 to 230v), and data. Data is usually the industry standard DMX-512 (actually RS-485, serial via two twisted pairs), using 5-pin XLR connectors (kind of like a mic plug, but with five pins), like this:AddressingEach fixture needs to be "addressed", so it knows what to "listen" to in the data stream that DMX512 carries. DMX-512 controls 512 channels of information that may be from 0 to 100 (nominally represented in some control systems as %, but actually 0 to 255).Moving lights "take up" n channels - the more basic fixtures will take up 5 to 15 channels. More advanced fixtures might be 40 to 60 channels. For a 60-channel fixture, fixture 1 would be addressed as 001, fixture 2 addressed as 061, and so on.DMX-512 was originally designed for controlling static lights, such as you might see in a theatre or old concert, and 512 is more than any but the most enormous shows could need of "conventional" fixtures. But, it's only 10 51-channel fixtures, and larger shows will have dozens or even hundreds of moving lights on them (the musical theatre shows I worked on had 30 to 60), plus 350 conventional fixtures - that's pretty average for musical theatre.So, it's common to have several - or even dozens - of "universes" of DMX-512 running for any one show. Most lighting desks (discussed below) will have several 2 to 8) universes of DMX-512 outputs, and system techs might set one universe for the conventional lights, another universe for one brand of fixtures, or all the floor fixtures, or all the fixtures towards the front of the stage, or some other division that helps with testing, troubleshooting and maintenance.Addressing is done via a small control screen on the fixture itself (the same screen also allows techs to access diagnostics, and test functions), and some are touch screen these days (in the old days, it used to be a block of 8 DIP switches, for 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and you'd switch them on and off to make any address from 1 to 512. Plenty of room for error!).Here's part of an addressing chart (for a 30-channel Cyberlight, actually an old-school moving mirror device) - this is for ONE of the 30 channels, channel 7, which controls the colour/gobo wheel (a lighting designer might specify some additional special colours to be placed in the gobo wheel for some reason, and the device does not really care what's in there):So, if on the control system, you adjusted channel 7 to be at a value of 88, the gobo wheel would be rotating (that is, from one gobo to the next) at a medium speed. If you set the control system at 47 (for channel 7 of this moving light), gobo position 6 would be in the beam path, and projected on stage. It might be out of focus, so an additional focus adjustment in channel 32 might also be necessary.ControlSo we have a few dozen fixtures mounted over, beside and on the stage itself, they're plugged in to power, addressed, and have data daisy-chaining from one to the next. The techs have done basic tests (and when powered up, each fixture does its' own POST (power on self test)), each fixture is in it's neutral position (lamp on, dimmer closed so no light comes out, no colour, no gobo, pointing nominally straight down) and verified that everything is working.While that's always a big job (a medium sized concert for 15,000 people might have 60 moving lights, and 100 conventional lights, would use a touring crew of three and a local crew of 6 to get set up in 5 hours), in which you get very dirty, get numerous cuts and bruises, fix the 20-30 broken things that's typical of each setup, and run a few miles of cable, it's actually kind of the "easy" bit.The pointy end of the whole dealio is the control system, that "tells" which light to be what colour, intensity, point in what direction, and move how fast, to what position, when (amongst many other things).Here's a picture of a dedicated lighting control desk, called a Whole Hog 3 (my personal fave, but a getting a bit old school these days):The two screens are touch-screens, for selecting things. Most of the buttons and wheels are "soft" - they can be programmed to do whatever you like, but there are some conventions, for example, the four smaller grey dimpled wheels are often used to control colour wheels for mixing up a colour required. The blue trackball is usually used for positioning a beam's location on stage, kind of like a mouse pointer, but in real-life - the light beam moves around on stage as you move the trackball. Like a mouse pointer, you can move it fast or slow, and be quite precise.Almost all lighting control desks ("lighting desk", or just "desk") work in a similar way: in the set-up phase of a show, a lighting technician ("programmer") and a lighting designer work together [2] to create "palettes" of different things - groups of moving lights, colours, gobos, focus's, positions, etc - commonly used building blocks for the show. As programming goes on, the palettes will be added to and edited. I worked on touring musical theatre shows, so my examples will be based around that, but it's very similar for any event or show. For a large show, this may take several weeks of programming set-up. For smaller shows, if unlucky, it might be two hours before doors open!Then, the show "cues" (instructions to the system, that's triggered at a certain time in the show) can be programmed, from these building blocks. For example, the designer might say, "give me the front wash lights, at full, dark purple, in the downstage line position" - the programmer would simply:Push the "front wash" button to select the fixtures in this group (say, 8 wash lights)Type "@ full" on the keypad for full intensity (the 8 wash lights in this group would suddenly come on, very bright, pointing straight down in their neutral position, in the colour of white)Push the "dark purple" colour preset - the colour would instantly change to dark purplePush the "downstage line" position button - all the fixtures would instantly pan and tilt to the pre-set position, a line on the downstage (front) edge of the stage(These commands could be given to the system in any order, but it'd be normal for the programmer to follow the designer's speech pattern. It'd take less time to make the moving lights do this than it would to say it - the above is five button pushes, and a good moving light programmer touch-types).Then, the designer would go on to describe other lights' (usually, groups of lights) position, colour, pattern, etc. Once the designer was happy with the "look" on stage, the cue would be saved, and named (or saved in another palette, if that "look" was often used, reducing five button pushes to one button push in the future). Then, work on the next cue begins - maybe from the previous state (so, only the CHANGES will be recorded), or from scratch, so all the data will be recorded.The "moving" part of moving lights happens in two ways - a repeating movement could just be one cue - instead of the "downstage line" position, we might use a "position" called "audience circle", which happens to have a movement sequence recorded in the cue - say, every moving light pointing into the audience, and describing a circle at a certain size and speed. The size of the circle, the speed, and of course the colour and gobo can be set as the designer wishes.The other main way to do a "move" is to transition from one cue to the next, say, from the "downstage line" position, to the "downstage cross position", where, instead of pointing straight down, the fixture on the far left points to the far right, and so on. The move between these two cues can be set to occur at any speed (though, the maximum speed, is the speed the lights can move at, which depends on their weight, motor settings, make, and model, and so different fixtures may be specified by the designer for these reasons, as the speed of motion of moving lights is obviously an important factor to how the show looks).A musical theatre show might have 1,000 cues, each one painstakingly created from the building blocks, over the space of several weeks. A rock concert would tend to have "cue lists", one for each song (allowing the band to choose a set list at their whim, and drop or add songs for a specific show), and a song may have 10 to 300 cues in it, depending on the style of the show. There might be 20 colours in the colour palette, and 30 positions. At a trade show exhibition stand for cars, 20 moving lights might just rotate through the same three cues all day long (some of them would have a gobo of the car manufacturer's logo, that roves across the floor of the stand, of course, and maybe out into the aisle a little bit).When a touring show "loads in" (sets up) in a new venue, the fixtures will be in similar but different positions (and if the cues were executed, they'd look all messed up, because the positions were programmed for a different venue). But, by editing each position "building block" that every cue is based on, selecting each moving light, adjusting its pan and tilt, and overwriting the old settings, executing the cues will become correct immediately (because the colour, gobo, focus, etc does not change when the venue does).Thus, "touching up" the "position presets" is the bulk of the work on a venue change. The same applies when a fixture breaks and has to be replaced - a new fixture of the same type is hung in the same position, but because a tiny change in the hanging position can be amplified by the throw of the beam, some positions may need to be adjusted.All this is well and good, lights in the correct position illuminate the subject nicely, but especially for concert stuff (tho for almost all shows of any type these days), a big part of the look is the light beam in the air. Light can only be seen in the air when there's something in the air for the light to bounce off, into your eyes. We've all seen "god's fingers", shafts of sunlight before or after a distant storm, where the sun is hitting droplets of water or fog - a similar thing happens in performance spaces, but it's artificially generated.The most common method is "haze", where a light grade oil is "cracked" by forcing tiny bubbles of air through it, it's "atomised", and floats through the air. It's safe, tasteless and odourless, and seldom leaves much of a residue beyond the immediate area of the machine.Other methods of particle suspension is "fog" (by applying warm water to dry ice, producing a low (one to two feet) thick miasma on stage, or "smoke", where oils and glycol are mixed and heated, to produce billowing smoke (that often has a noticeable smell/taste, and may come in different flavours like bubblegum does). Smoke may interfere with the voices of performers, but is cheap to make, and effective if it's appropriately distributed. Smoke tends not to have the "hang time" of haze, so hazers, while expensive, are most often used for most shows.[1] Only two types of moving lights, moving head and moving mirror... ok, there are some others, but they barely rate a mention. One is a Comear DeSisti NAT, which is a truly weird device, where the head moves, but kinda like a mirror, but the beam can be in more places... but not as much as a moving head light.There some older disco effects which have very basic movement built in (usually, the lamp moves, and the other elements in the fixture are static), and there are oil projectors, where a disc of coloured oil is projected thru. The beam of light heats the oils at different rates, and the effect is projected onto a surface. Very 70's, and a great mesmerising effect - ideal for a 70's party, if you can still find a hire shop that has them.[2] The number of people on a lighting crew depends on the size of the show and the budget. Smaller shows, it's one person does it all (unload the truck, hang all the lights, run the cables, trouble-shoot broken things, design, program and operate the show, and pack it all up at the end - and probably drive the truck to the next venue as well!). On larger shows, there may be dedicated programmers for different types of moving lights, or different parts of the stage, teams of technicians (rigging, repair, etc), and so on. or, anywhere in between.

PrologueFirst, let me start off by saying that I agree with Benedict Evans that 5G as a technology isn’t all that earth-shattering. It’s really just a continuation of a well-established trend: fatter and fatter data pipes. Imagine being able to take your home Wi-Fi everywhere and that pretty much describes 5G.Getting excited about 5G, or talking about amazing new applications it enables, is pretty much like getting excited about a new version of DSL or DOCSIS.— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) March 14, 2018This is not to say that 5G is not important, or diminish the work done by hundreds of thousands of engineers, scientists and other wireless industry professionals around the world … or that it won’t catalyze the development of a host of cool new applications bearing all of the latest buzzwords and acronyms.It’s just more that I find the underlying economic and geopolitical story far more interesting and meaningful. Sort of like the 2006 film Babel starring Brad Pitt, it is a multiple-storyline epic featuring two main protagonists that lead completely separate lives for the first four acts while gradually converging … until the climactic moment when their paths smash into each other.As the curtains open on Act V, we find the two protagonists having finally taken the stage at the same time. And while we can make some guesses as to how things unfold from here, the reality is that the story is still being written.The implications are enormous and bigger than the wireless industry itself. Indeed, this is perhaps the most important area to pay attention to in today’s increasingly tech-driven geopolitical arena.But we are getting ahead of ourselves; to fully appreciate the saga we need to start at the very beginning … where we find ourselves on a deserted Hamptons beach at the break of dawn, sometime in the mid-80s …Act I“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”Opening paragraph to A Tale of Two Cities by Charles DickensI remember the iconic scene[1] in 1987 film Wall Street when Gordon Gekko officially brings Bud Fox, an ambitious young broker, “inside” the curtain. It is a critical scene in the movie, made even more dramatic by use of what was then a novel piece of modern technology — the cellular phone. Gekko delivers the coup de grâce to the young broker by expounding — in real-time on that phone — on the beauty and awe of the sunrise from his beachfront palace as a metaphor for a new world of hitherto unimaginable wealth that he was about to enter.The first cellular phones were analog radio devices that would connect to a local tower that oversaw a fixed area, or “cell”, on a dedicated frequency. The radio-frequency (RF) technology was pretty much the same as that powering walkie-talkies — the trick there was figuring out how to connect the walkie-talkie to the circuit-switched phone network.Call capacity was limited because there are only so many slices of frequency into which you could divide spectrum before you run into quality issues. As a result, early cellphones and their related service plans were extremely expensive and generally limited to wealthy moguls like the fictional Gordon Gekko.But while Gekko extolled the “virtues” of unmitigated greed, scientists and engineers were working on the next generation of wireless standards, and trying to solve the fundamental problem of how to cram more channels into the same allotment of limited spectrum. It is essentially the same problem that they continue to try to improve on today.At the time, there were two competing methods on how to do this. The first was something called time-division multiple access (TDMA)[2]. With TDMA, you could have multiple users share the same frequency by dividing the signal into fixed time slots that were assigned to each active user.The second method was code-division multiple access (CDMA).As with TDMA, the goal of CDMA was to permit multiple users from sharing the same slice of frequency but instead of having fixed, assigned time slots to differentiate between users, CDMA used unique codes to identify each user (hence the name). These codes could switch and hop across multiple channels, making it more flexible than TDMA.From a technology perspective, CDMA was better because it was more scalable especially as the world became more digital and less analog over time. But as we saw in the battle between VHS and Betamax[3], sometimes it is not just about technological superiority.Act IIThe race was on between the two competing standards.Western European countries latched onto the TDMA method and a generally open, collaborative approach, releasing Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM)[4] in 1991.The world’s first GSM call was made by Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri on July 1st, 1991 and commercially deployed at the end of the year on a network built by German conglomerate Siemens and a then-relatively unknown conglomerate subsidiary called Telenokia. It would later drop the prefix, adopt the name of its conglomerate parent and become widely known simply as “Nokia”.Helsinki, Finland (Photo: Paasitorni)The competing CDMA method was not entirely novel — it had been pioneered as early as the 1930s by scientists from the Soviet Union. Interestingly, wireless phones based on the CDMA method were used in Moscow as early as 1963. However, it wasn’t until a former electrical engineering professor from MIT named Irwin Jacobs latched onto the technology that it found mainstream, commercial applications.In 1985, Jacobs launched Qualcomm — which stood for “Quality Communications” — based in the Southern California paradise of San Diego. The new company was initially focused on mobile satellite communications and because satellite bandwidth was so expensive and precious, there was an intense focus on bandwidth efficiency, which is what had led Jacobs to CDMA.The company went public in September 1991, raising $68 million to fund its CDMA research and later an additional $486 million to help commercialize a CDMA-based ecosystem. Qualcomm was perhaps the highest flier in the high-flyin’ 90s, ending the decade with its stock price increasing around 180x from its IPO price eight years earlier.Knowing nothing else but Qualcomm’s stock chart in the 1990s, one could have reasonably concluded that CDMA and its superior technology had won.But that was not to be, at least here in Act II.One issue for Qualcomm and its CDMA-based “cdmaOne” standard was that GSM had gotten a big head start.The “cdmaOne” standard was not adopted as a standard until 1995[5] at which point GSM networks in Western Europe and the United States had already reached 10 million active subscribers. By the time cdmaOne networks were deployed at scale, GSM networks had already reached over 100 million active subscribers.The other issue is that for voice, the technical advantages of CDMA were not that significant. TDMA did a fine job of transmitting voice and capacity constraints could be alleviated by adding additional wireless radios or reducing the size of each cell, especially if those radios could be purchased at affordable rates.Taking a more open, collaborative approach, GSM had also incorporated certain features such as a standard ID schema that allowed cellphones to be used across multiple networks by simply switching out the SIM card — which was much more important in Europe with its multiple country networks vs. the United States where people tended to travel internationally far less frequently.Ultimately, GSM won decisively by achieving scale and driving down cost. Because GSM networks were first to market, equipment manufacturers were able to deploy networks more quickly and inexpensively. Because GSM operators reached scale, handset manufacturers designed handsets around GSM standards. Because GSM was developed with a more open, collaborative approach, its technology licensing fees were lower. And because costs were lower, active subscribers tended to go with GSM networks vs. cdmaOne when given a choice.In September 2001, shortly after 9/11[6], I moved out to Hong Kong, which had deployed a GSM network.I was amazed at how much cheaper and better my cellphone service was compared to the United States. It was incredibly convenient to be able to simply switch out a small SIM card and start using your phone on another network. I loved my Nokia 8310 handset[7]. And I still distinctly remember how one annoying thing about work trips to South Korea — one of the few markets that had chosen CDMA over GSM — was having to use a clunky loaner Sanyo handset that didn’t have my address book or Snake[8].My Nokia 8310 handset (circa December 2003)GSM and Nokia had won the 2G war. CDMA-based technology was expensive and clunky and few people wanted it. By the early 2000s, Nokia was a giant, one of the world’s most valuable companies, at one point accounting for 21% of Finland’s exports and 70% of the Helsinki stock exchange market capitalization.But we were really just getting warmed up.Act IIILong before Apple unlocked “Smartphones” on the Technology Research Tree in 2007[9], wireless industry executives had suspected that data and not voice was going to be the long-term future of wireless. Fresh off the release of GSM in 1991, the various industry groups that set wireless standards had already begun trying to figure out how to transmit data at high speeds over the airwaves.Most had already known that GSM’s TDMA approach — perfectly adequate for voice communications — was just not going to cut it for data. While data could be transmitted over GSM networks, the transmission rate was capped at speeds reminiscent of the early days of dial-up modems. As nostalgic as I was for the halcyon days of the mid–90s, it was just not practical for anything outside of short-form messaging (i.e. SMS/texting).As wireless industry executives tried to find solutions for this technical issue, every path seemed to lead back to San Diego.San Diego, California (Photo: PV Magazine)It’s not enough to just have a good idea — you need to execute.While wireless operators worked 24/7 to deploy mostly GSM mobile networks around the world in response to the surge in active subscriber growth, Qualcomm was busy executing … and betting its future on CDMA. It too worked round-the-clock — frankly, an amazing accomplishment considering San Diego’s gorgeous year-round weather — to solve fundamental issues related to implementing wireless networks using the CDMA approach.Its main approach was to patent specific methods on how to perform various functions that were important in enabling wireless communication. For example, US Patent No. 5,280,472[10], issued on January 18, 1994, called for a “CDMA communication system in which cellular techniques are utilized in a distributed antenna system environment”. This particular one would cover instances where wireless signals need to be split up and re-routed and amplified within large buildings that remote tower-generated wireless signals would have difficulty penetrating.This was just one of an estimated 16,000 patents filed by Qualcomm over the years[11], of which at least 6,000 are related to wireless. In addition to building its IP portfolio, Qualcomm took a lead role in fostering eco-system development, including at various points producing handsets, network equipment and designing RF chips and chipsets.Photo: Gizmodo: Qualcomm's Amazing Wall of PatentsAs various 3G standards — represented by confusing acronyms like UMTS, W-CDMA, TD-SCDMA, CDMA2000 — emerged and were implemented, it became abundantly clear that CDMA was the common technology tying all of them together. With such a large patent portfolio around this method, it also became clear that Qualcomm was going to be collecting a recurring, steadily increasing stream of royalty payments for the foreseeable future.As 4G standards (LTE) rolled around in the mid- to late-2000s, cementing data as the key focus of the wireless industry, Qualcomm emerged as the dominant toll collector in one of the largest and most strategic industries on the planet.Act IV — Part I:For most of the first three acts, China is a mere after-thought, a minor character that is largely relegated to watching the main action from backstage:While Gordon Gekko was recruiting Bud Fox into his insider trading cabal, China was figuring out how to motivate its farmers to really put their backs into it so the nation could avoid teetering so close to the edge of starvation.While Nokia was busy deploying early GSM networks in Western Europe, China was figuring out how to dismantle its centrally planned industry without uprooting the lives of urban workers to the point where they would pour out into the streets by the millions like they did that fateful spring of 1989.While Qualcomm’s scientists were patenting thousands of wireless patents, China was figuring out how to open its doors so it could actually start trading the things that it had in abundance — e.g. inexpensive labor — for the things that it lacked, like wireless technology.In 1987, Ren Zhengfei — a former mid-level officer in the People's Liberation Army engineering division — founded Huawei in Shenzhen, the city bordering Hong Kong which was at the front lines of China’s economic reform program. At this point, China was 100%-reliant on foreign telecom equipment for its landline industry and most major international telecom equipment companies had established a presence in the country on the promise of tapping into China’s billion-person market.Shenzhen in the late 80s / early 90s (Photo: Shenzhen Municipal Government)At first, Huawei focused on re-selling imported telephone switches and fire alarms from Hong Kong. But for whatever reason, its founders decided very early on that the company should develop its own technology in-house vs. the “easier” path taken by others like Shanghai Bell to form a joint venture with multinationals to access foreign technology via transfers. Ren believed that “foreign companies were unlikely to transfer their cutting-edge technology and that Huawei would be better served by performing its own R&D”[12].Starting from a technology base of virtually nil, Huawei nonetheless prioritized R&D from its early stages. As a private company (vs. state-owned enterprise), Huawei suffered from lack of access to capital and was forced to borrow at extremely high rates in the early years. Despite these challenges, by 1993 Huawei had released its first significant in-house developed product — an electronic switch that could handle 10,000 lines, unprecedented for a domestic company at the time. It was a mature product and comprised almost entirely of foreign components but it was still quite impressive for the six-year old company.Huawei C&C08 Circuit Switch (Photo: DIY Trade, Shenzhen Huaxinzhihe Technology Co.)One of its strategies was to focus on market segments that were ignored by foreign technology suppliers. For example, international telecom companies preferred to focus on the rapidly growing urban centers while ignoring the poor, rural areas. Seeing this, Huawei adapted foreign technology to deal with “frontier market” issues — problems such as unreliable power grids and rats that like to gnaw on cables. Its business practices were “controversial” and by international standards probably textbook “corrupt” but in China at this time, function prevailed over form.Huawei began to separate itself from its domestic peers. By 1996, less than a decade after founding, it had secured its first international customer, selling circuit switches to Li Ka-shing’s telephone company in Hong Kong. By 2002, Huawei had overtaken Shanghai Bell, the largest Chinese-international JV at the time. Around this time it began expanding into adjacent markets like Internet and data communications, which was dominated by companies like Cisco.February 5th, 2003 marked the day that the name “Huawei” was formally introduced to the American lexicon (outside of a small group of telecom industry insiders). This was the day that Cisco sued Huawei’s American subsidiaries for copying code from its routers[13]. It marked the first major instance where a Chinese technology company had brushed up against an American one — not to mention the beginning of what I can only describe as a “lengthy and systematic effort by Americans to devise ever-increasingly creative and sophisticated ways to butcher the pronunciation of its name”.The suit was settled in 2004 but the damage had already been done. By this time, Huawei had captured one-third of China’s enterprise market and has never looked back.By the mid-2000s, Huawei was pushing hard into developing markets with an increasingly sophisticated array of products and services for both landline and wireless communications. Like its foray into China’s rural markets in the early 1990s, Huawei adapted mature products for developing countries facing problems that China had dealt with the prior decade such as non-existent or unreliable power grids and inexperienced technical staff.An example from one of my early Quora answers[14] was a low-power base station that could run on solar power, targeted at African countries that lacked reliable power infrastructure. In another early answer[15], I also discuss the important role the China Development Bank played in helping Huawei expand into overseas markets.RuralStar Base Station (Photo: Huawei)By 2011, Huawei had overtaken Ericsson as the largest telecom equipment supplier in the world with approximately $33 billion in revenue and industry-leading profit margins.It was around this time that Huawei had started aggressively pushing into consumer electronics[16] as well, piggybacking on the smartphone revolution and its now massive R&D operation to vault into the Top 10 of smartphone OEMs. By 2017, Huawei was pushing $100 billion in revenue, largely driven by growth in its consumer devices division which was now challenging Samsung for the top spot in smartphone market share (by unit volume). Today, the company has around 180,000 employees worldwide with 80,000 of them involved in R&D[17].Act IV — Part II:While Huawei was pushing forward at breakneck speed (even compared to the rapidly evolving Chinese economy), China’s state-owned telecom operators were plodding along slowly, trying their best just to keep up with the rapid and accelerating march of communications technology.Prior to 1994, the state held a monopoly on the provision of telecommunications services through the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and its operational arm, China Telecom. In 1994, to kick off reforms, the first competitor was established (China Unicom) and in the following years, there would be a series of reforms as Chinese policymakers tried to mold these former government ministries into modern corporations.It was around this time that Qualcomm had first reached out to China. Although the Chinese government had already selected GSM for commercial use in 1994 — attracted by lower cost and ease-of-deployment — Qualcomm set up a partnership with the People’s Liberation Army (kind of crazy when you look back and think about it) to use its CDMA technology for military communications. However, in 1998, Chinese President Jiang Zemin “shocked the world” when he announced[18] that the PLA would no longer be allowed to engage in civilian activities, swiftly killing off the joint venture plans.The Chinese government was initially hesitant to partner with Qualcomm until they would address three priority issues:It wanted to be able to deploy phones that could work on both GSM and CDMA networksIt did not want to pay the royalty fees or structure that Qualcomm was demanding for its CDMA technologyIt wanted access to the design of Qualcomm’s CDMA chipsetHowever, as detailed excellently by MacroPolo[19], in the backdrop of late-90s negotiations to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO), Chinese policymakers decided to drop most of these demands and, under pressure from the US government, agreed to allow Qualcomm and its CDMA technology into the Chinese market. This decision would prove very costly in later years but for now, China was more focused on WTO accession.Source: MacroPolo: From Windfalls to Pitfalls: Qualcomm’s China Conundrum - MacroPoloFollowing this decision, over the next decade Qualcomm’s revenue in the Chinese market grew from zero to nearly $2.5 billion and came to represent almost one-fifth of the company’s revenue. And this was just the beginning — as China began to commercially deploy 3G networks in 2008, this number was set to explode even higher.Source: Company Filings via Capital IQIn the most recent fiscal year (12 months ending September 30, 2018), Qualcomm’s revenue from China had increased to over $14 billion and represented over two-thirds of its revenue stream.A large part of this revenue stream, especially in the earlier years, was paid by foreign smartphone OEMs like Apple[20] but as Chinese smartphone OEMs (incl. Huawei) took market share in China and around the world, they began to realize how much Qualcomm was making off its intellectual property — because they were now the ones paying these royalty fees in increasing amounts.But just as Americans are about to break out the champagne and “USA! USA!!” chants, the latest missive from the Debbie Downer-in-Chief[21] himself flashes across our feed …We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 4, 2018Somewhere between China’s reputation as the world’s most rapacious “intellectual property thief” and the tens of billions of dollars per year it pays to international technology companies like Qualcomm … lies reality.Act V is where we are going to find out what that reality is.Act VOn November 8th, 2016, Donald Trump pulled off a surprise win over Hillary Clinton in the United States presidential election. Eight days later, a far less publicized political battle was taking place, this time over a topic that only a handful of people in the world really understand at a deep, technical level.Remember the industry groups that we met in Acts I to III that played such a critical role in choosing and setting wireless standards?Well, they are still around and playing just as critical a role. Depending on which technologies are incorporated, the respective IP holders may be richly rewarded, just as Qualcomm had for the better part of the last three decades.On November 16th, 2016, members of this standards body, 3GPP[22], met in Nevada to decide whether something called “polar coding” would be incorporated into official 5G canon. It was up against an alternative approach called “low-density parity check”. Intense debate ensued over which one was better.To a casual observer, the debate of “polar coding” vs. “low-density parity check” may have appeared to be a Nerd Fight of Epic Proportions but behind all of the computer science and technical jargon was something much deeper — what it was really about was control over the next-generation of communications technologies.As you may have guessed, this is where the paths of Huawei and Qualcomm finally began to converge.You see, China was getting weary from paying tens of billions of dollars every year in licensing and royalty fees for technology invented 15–20 years ago at a time when they did not have the capability or resources to even have a seat at the standards-setting table. While they had been late to the standards-setting game for even 4G/LTE standards, the country’s leaders had committed to making sure that this would not be the case with 5G. And Huawei was the main horse that they were betting on.As Huawei had grown through the years, it had continuously re-invested this growth back into R&D. By 2017[23], close to RMB90 billion ($13.8 billion) per year, out-spending Qualcomm by two and a half times in absolute terms (i.e. before adjusting for the approximately 3x[24] difference in wages between Shenzhen and San Diego).In doing so, it had quietly built up its very own patent wall:One of these patents was around the aforementioned “polar coding” method while Qualcomm held patents around the competing “low-density parity check” method. During the 3GPP debate, Western companies largely backed Qualcomm’s method while Asian manufacturers favored Huawei’s. In the end, both were accepted into as viable alternatives in the 5G standards book and each side moved on to battle over other (likely even nerdier) topics.While accumulating the most patents is still an important part of the game (as we saw in Act III with 3G), commercialization is an equally important consideration (as we saw in Act II with 2G).And on this front, China is racing ahead. Not only is it already the world’s largest wireless market by far, with 10x the number of base stations as the United States (and 40% of global sites[25]), its wireless operators are already well into the roll-out schedule and plan to be fully commercialized (for “standalone” or “full” 5G; see Note i) by the end of 2020[26][27]:The 3GPP debate in Nevada presaged the fault lines that we are now beginning to see, not only for 5G but other technologies as well. The elections of President Trump and the rise of other right-wing political parties in Western European countries has only increased the politicization trend.On April 16th, 2018, ZTE, the second-largest Chinese communications equipment supplier after Huawei, was hit by the U.S. Department of Commerce with an export ban[28]. The ban would prevent it from accessing critical components provided by U.S. suppliers (e.g. optical chips) and force it to re-design its equipment. It was a crippling blow to the company and while later reversed, was one of the first clear signs of this increased politicization.Then, just a few weeks ago on December 1st, 2018, Sabrina Meng, CFO of Huawei and daughter of its founder, was arrested in Canada at the request of the U.S. government in what was viewed by most as a politically motivated escalation. President Trump essentially confirmed it several days later[29].And that pretty much brings us to the present.The key protagonists, Huawei and Qualcomm stand together on stage, surrounded by a host of supporting cast members. The crowd watches with rapt attention, eagerly awaiting the next twist in the story …EpilogueAs I sit here and write in the last few days of 2018, it is quite clear that we are still very much in the middle of Act V — and it looks like there will be plenty of more excitement and fireworks to come.I also must admit that I am not 100% sure how Act V and the “race for dominance” will ultimately play out between Qualcomm and Huawei, not to mention all of the other actors on stage.As you saw through the first four acts, there were many twists and turns along the way, with new characters entering the space and old ones fading away with each successive generation of wireless standards. Add to that the increasing politicization of technology and the oft-times capricious nature of geopolitics and my crystal ball is quite foggy at the moment.But I do think understanding how we got to this point is very important if we want to think about the possible future scenarios and where we go from here — and that is why I took you through this fairly expansive review of the history of wireless.That said, I do want to leave you with some final thoughts on the topic:The emergence of Huawei as a major IP holder will inevitably cut into Qualcomm’s wireless market dominance and position as the favored toll collector.Opening quote to Act I notwithstanding, this is actually not just a Tale of Two Companies; it is also about existing players like Ericsson, Nokia and Apple that have long chafed at Qualcomm’s licensing fees and dominant market position[30].As I wrote in a recent answer[31], Qualcomm collects upwards of $30–40 on each iPhone that was sold — on top of any chips it provides — due to its “double-dipping” licensing structure. For 5G, Qualcomm announced that it would charge “up to $16.25” in royalties for every phone — much lower, an indication of lower negotiating leverage.The battle between commercialization vs. technology will be another area to watch.I do not know enough of the technical minutiae — stuff like “polar coding” vs. “low-density parity check” — to fully assess but my gut tells me that the differences between Huawei’s approach and the one supported by Qualcomm may not be that material and certainly not like the difference between TDMA and CDMA during the 2G and 3G mobile standards wars.We cannot rule out the possibility (as unlikely as it may seem at this point) that Qualcomm and Huawei end up collaborating or working together out of pure self-interest (an “if ya can’t beat him, join ‘em” type situation).The likelihood of global wireless standards bifurcating into different camps seems to be increasing, although it is far from inevitable at this point.If this happens, there are two clear camps — China and the “Five Eyes” Anglophone group. If you throw the European Union and Japan into the Anglophone group (let’s call it the “U.S. Alliance”), you are talking about a combined population of around 1 billion (that is significantly wealthier on a per capita basis) compared to 1.4 billion in China — all things considered, fairly balanced.But we cannot forget about the other 5 billion+ people out there — and places like Southeast Asia, India and Africa are where the front lines of the battle for technology dominance will take place.From the perspective of these 5 billion plus, the entrance of Huawei into the fray is seen as a positive development, insofar as providing them with another option and greater leverage to negotiate on fees.This bifurcation trend may also play out in other areas of technology, not just wireless standards.Semiconductors are another strategic (and related) industry. Chips are how you take the IP from the patents and convert into real-world use cases. They are critical components in network equipment, as ZTE was reminded in April 2018.The U.S. Alliance dominates the semiconductor industry, especially upstream (i.e. semi capital equipment). Certain specialty equipment like extreme UV lithography[32] is dominated by European like ASML and Japanese players like Canon/Nikon and can be easily controlled through measures like export bans over “dual-use” technology.However downstream production is dominated by Asian manufacturers, notably Taiwanese and South Korean foundries. Moreover, the consumer electronics supply chain is deeply entrenched in China and the East Asia region.So it is very complicated, and this is what makes predicting how the various points of negotiating leverage play out so hard.National security concerns are very valid. But I think they can be addressed without forcing others to have to split into camps that are non-interoperable. That would be a shame for everyone.Finally, the one thing that I do know for sure is that we’ve come a long way since the days of Gordon Gekko and his massive brick of a cellular phone.Explanatory Note[Note i] There is a bit of confusion out there as to what constitutes “5G”. Part of the reason is that there are essentially two different levels of 5G implementation:The first is something called “non-standalone” which means augmenting the existing 4G network with 5G hardware that will focus on ultra-high-bandwidth data services.The second is called “standalone” which means everything can go on the 5G network.It is somewhat analogous to the difference between a plug-in hybrid vehicle like the Chevy Bolt and an electric-only vehicle like Tesla.Roll-outs for “non-standalone” 5G implementation are happening in 2019–2020 throughout most of the world — for example, Verizon announced that “5G services” would begin in 2019[33]. However, China is planning a particularly aggressive roll-out schedule for “standalone” 5G compared to every other country with scale deployments in 2020.Whether or not this is the right strategy remains an open question.Footnotes[1] Wall Street (1987) - Wake up call (Drop it)[2] Time-division multiple access - Wikipedia[3] Videotape format war - Wikipedia[4] GSM - Wikipedia[5] cdmaOne - Wikipedia[6] Glenn Luk's answer to Are there any survivors of 9/11 on Quora?[7] Glenn Luk's answer to Why is the smartphone industry dominated by the U.S. and East Asian nations (e.g. Japan, South Korea and China)?[8] Nokia 8310, giocando a Snake II / playing Snake II[9] Glenn Luk's answer to Will China become an innovator?[10] CDMA microcellular telephone system and distributed antenna system therefor[11] Which Are the Most Valuable Patents in Qualcomm Patent Portfolio? - GreyB[12] https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/publication/130215_competitiveness_Huawei_casestudy_Web.pdf[13] https://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/Cisco_Mot_for_PI.pdf[14] Glenn Luk's answer to Is there an indigenous Chinese product that is the best in the world?[15] Glenn Luk's answer to How does China finance its development projects in Africa and South America?[16] INTERVIEW - Huawei makes aggressive push in consumer devices[17] Caring for Employees - Huawei Sustainability[18] 1998年江泽民宣布“军队不再经商” 震惊世界[19] From Windfalls to Pitfalls: Qualcomm’s China Conundrum - MacroPolo[20] Glenn Luk's answer to Where does the money I pay for an iPhone go?[21] Debbie Downer - Wikipedia[22] 3GPP - Wikipedia[23] https://www-file.huawei.com/-/media/corporate/pdf/annual-report/annual_report2017_en.pdf[24] Cost of Living Comparison Between[25] Blog: How many global base stations are there anyway?[26] Subscribe to read | Financial Times[27] China Mobile Confirms Aggressive 5G Standalone Plan | Light Reading[28] Secretary Ross Announces Activation of ZTE Denial Order in Response to Repeated False Statements to the U.S. Government[29] Trump says he would intervene in Huawei case to help secure China trade deal[30] Apple is still selling iPhones in China despite being ordered not to[31] Glenn Luk's answer to Where does the money I pay for an iPhone go?[32] Extreme ultraviolet lithography - Wikipedia[33] Verizon’s first 5G hotspot will launch in 2019