Possible Worlds

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Possible worlds for telecomms

Ian Pearson, BTexact Technologies

It’s a hard time to be a futurologist. On the one hand, I work in a technology company, and technologies themselves are very predictable. On the other hand, trying to second guess government and regulatory environments, and how boards will respond to these in competition with other companies in a very uncertain marketplace, is not so easy. Further complicating the matter is that many of the new technologies have little historical analogy, so predicting the impacts on society is also hard. Still, that’s what I’m paid for. Time for a vision.

Before ADSL was invented, it was all very clear. We would install fibre to the home, or at least the kerb, by the end of the millennium, and would run at least 10Mbits/second across it. This would be mimicked in other countries and we would end up with a global superhighway. The web would run over this, as would digital interactive TV. ADSL put a knife in the dream, by offering risk averse telecomms bosses a low cost, low-risk evolution instead of an expensive and risky parallel network deployment. Government finally destroyed the potential broadband by regulation that increased the risk while reducing potential profits, and when a mobile industry rose like a phoenix from the fixed broadband ashes, it was promptly plucked and stuffed while it was still learning to fly. So what is left of our brave new world. Where can we go now?

It is my belief that the main original markets that existed for broadband no longer exist, though there are new ones of course. We already have satellite broadcast entertainment, we will soon have massive storage density on cheap hard media, and the web is so plagued by poor performance that it can only begin to recover once a full broadband network is in place. It can’t achieve its potential on a gradually-upgraded network. I think that the way forward now is via highly distributed, storage based networks. Tiny chips will be truly ubiquitous in our environment very soon. They will largely self organise into highly capable but very simple networks that offer sensing, processing, storage and communications. Bigger and more powerful chips in our portable devices will provide the bulk of the power but will be able to treat the environmental chips as part of their available functionality. The resultant networks will be symbiotic and will be mostly free-to-air, so we won’t have to pay for calls or downloads. Software radio in the devices will facilitate a range of possible network options. However, the vast storage capability of the system will ensure that almost everything we need will be close to hand so won’t need to use networks at all. The capacity of the symbiotic network environment will provide the residue of communications that we still need. The users will benefit from vastly superior performance and low costs.

There are many possible variants of this world, and the technology potential must be taken seriously, since it could greatly reduce the price that can be charged for network transmission. As this revenue source declines rapidly, so we will have to make our money elsewhere. That will mean us having to finally head towards our old corporate aim to become a communications company, not a network company. People need the right information at the right time in the right form. They want to be able to communicate with someone in a natural way that feels like being in the same room. And they also want most of the routine administrative clutter to be removed from their conscious lives. We excel in many of the technologies that can achieve these goals, such as virtual environments and avatars, adaptive knowledge management, locations based services, context, and natural language processing. We have many insights into processing and distributed systems that continually elude the computing industry. People may not pay for transmission, but they will always need to communicate, and transmission is just one small component of communications. In BTexact Technologies, the next generation phoenix is already developing but it must be carefully nurtured.

So here is our future. Networks will be almost free. The traditional transmission business will evaporate, but at the centre we will see what people are really prepared to pay for – quality of life. Communicating is as essential to us as eating or having sex. But today it is so clumsy that we still have to get together physically to communicate properly. Continuous development of communications technology will bring us just as much profit as we have ever had, but it won’t come directly from the transmission of bits across networks. It will come from making sure we send the right bits. That needs insight, not just off-the-shelf network components. We have overlooked that insight for too long as we cling to the remnants of a decaying telephone industry. If we want to survive as a company, we must let go of the past and reach out to the future.