Design Thinking for Innovation

of University of Virginia

Final assignment by Zia

Visualization Tool of Week 1 selected.

What do have pizza and 5G in common ?

Challenge: I am working at a international telco in the cellular business. We provide connectivity for  our customers via cellular networks since decades. As the application and the requirements of  customers besides plain telephony and SMS has significantly changed to “mobile Broadband” with  Smartphones in the 4th generation of cellular networks (4G, LTE), the 5th generation (5G) sets the aim  of getting the Industry connected. The demands of the industry are very different to the mobile  broadband demands as latency plays the most significant role (e.g. in a production environment). To  convince the management of changing certain things in the 4G networks to cope better with the  demands of 5G (and the vertical customers, i.e. industry) an approach was needed to explain the  need for certain changes.

Selection: As technical content often needs illustration or analogies to be understood by  management (e.g. of the CEO is a financial guy and not an engineer) I have thought about either   choosing “Visualization” or” Story Telling” as tool to convince the management about needed  changes. I selected “Visualization” as visuals get easier into the brain and keep more easily (see video  6 in week 1 at 06:15 mins “Pictures and images enable us to not only help people understand what it  is we're trying to do, but to help really persuade them in the worthiness of, of, that particular idea, or,  or, the strength of, of that concept.”)

Application: So the question is “What do have pizza and 5G in common ?”

This sounds already like a funny question, so it attracts already the interest of the audience !

The answer is easy: deliver pizza / data fast !

We all know that there is nothing more annoying than ordering a pizza via internet or phone at you  favorite pizzeria and once it is delivered to your house it is cold already ! So the problem is that the  pizza gets colder as longer the way to travel is (from the pizzeria to your house). The solution is  straight forward, but might need a change of what we and the pizza business are used to today: so  how can one guarantee that the pizza, once ordered, is delivered still being hot ? … There are  multiple ways, but I use one particular to illustrate: This is “one needs to shorten the delivery  distance !” ... Ok, it is clear to everyone that delivering a pizza from 20 km distance is more  challenging then from 3 km and as longer the travel as colder the pizza is. The obvious choice for  improving the situation is to get closer to the customer with the pizza baking place ! The analogy for  cellular networks is that data processing is done in a node called UPF (user plane function in 5G).

This UPF is typically deployed once per city (bigger cities like New York might even have a dozen). But  the main information is that they are centrally build where the (smartphone traffic is). So, for an  industry plant in the suburbs of NY this is a problem, as they might need extremely low latency for  their production environment (called URLLC – Ultra Low Latency and Reliable Communication in 5G).

So, like the pizza delivery in the example about the need is clear: reduce the latency for pizza / data  delivery to meet the requirement of a hot pizza / data delivery in 1ms. So similar to building multiple  pizzeria across the city, the cellular 5G networks needs to be re-architected to place multiple UPF to  place where low latency is needed.

Insight: I was quite successful when explain this pizza visualization on a white board to my  management !  … And every time they order in the COVID situation we are currently in a pizza for  business lunch, they remember my Design Thinking visualization !

Approach: The reflections I got with using this visualization were extremely motivating that as apply  such analogies from every-day-life to technical content more often when talking to none-technicians  ---

