Reflexiones

Reflections
Where in the visión for telecom?
I´m worried about telecom. Service prices continue to drop eith no bottom in sight, as bit transport be comes a commodity. Telephone companies everywhere are losing ther landline business to wireless, and both Wi-Fi and voice over internet protocol (VoIP) threan even further disruptions. As the profitability drains out of the industry, research isbeing starved. Where is this headed?

The theory is that a commodity business does not support research, because there is no potential for added value. Can this be so in telecom? This question puzles me, and as an engineer i worry about our own culpability. Where i sour visión for what we could accomplish with technology? Do we have a dream, or are we at the the mercy of cost-conscious businessmanagers?

Through the past decades, we have always had some visión for the future of telecom. Usually it was wrong, as it happens, but it was always something positive to rally around. I also belive that even when a visión provesitself faulty, the constituent research often bears fruit in other directions. During the last quarter-century, our visions have included the dick tracy wristeatchtelephone, the the videotelephone, home information systems, and video on demand. More recently, the catchphrase has been something like “anytime, anywhere.”

Well, we did all those things-differently tan we had expected, of course, but generally much better tan we hade ver dared to dream. Today you can a wristwatch pone. Videotelephones are available, too, although not many people seem to wantthem. And the concept of home information systems-accessing a centralized database though your home televisión set-was turned inside out with thr development of the world wide web and its vast universo of decentralized pages. The ubiquity of wireless has surely made “anytime, anywhere” an everyday reality.

Meanwhile, progress in semiconductor technology-following moore´s law predictions of adoubling of transistors every 18 months- has given us unbelievable processing capability. Optical technology and wiriless breakthroughs have opened up unfathomable bandwidth. It´s all there tantalizinggly in front of us. Unfathomable bandwidth. It´s all there tantalizingly in front of us. But what are we going to do with this capability? We need a visión to take to the business leaders and to thegovernments-a brief “elevator speech”: given us your blessing, and this is what we can do for you.



You´d think our credibility would be good. How much economic and social benefit has been reaped from the development of the internet? Giant corporations with market caps in the hundreds of billions of dollars have been born, and the everyday lives of the people have been uplifted in amultitude of ways, large and small. We created a wonderful economic and social engine, but now people yawn and ask what else we havein mind. So far, the only answer seems to be more of the same, only faster-maybe a lot cheaper, too, with all the going-out-of-business sales.
There are two schools of thought on visión. One approach is to feature the technical capabilities of the infrastructure, whilethe other is to feature its social potentials. In the forme category, a typical slogan would be: “a hundred megabits per second for a hundred million people .” or perhaps we could say that the new network would be secure and ultrateliable. Its a field of dreams approach-build it and they will come. We don´t know what society would do with those capabilities, but it will be something good.
Theproblema with this technical visión is that people in the Street are skeptical that they need a hundred megabits. It´s not an instant seller. We say to them that we could deliver high-quality video over the internet. But we already have more televisión tan we have time to watch, they think. When we offer up grind computing and videoconferencing, we get blank stares. They´ve never Heard of internet...