Institute For The Future

Telecoms in Transition

Leading European telecoms R&D and mobile services executives, equipment designers, and researchers from MIT and the Institute for the Future met last week at the 'Telecoms in Transition' workshop in Lisbon, Portugal to exchange thoughts on the future of digital networks...

 

The debate was lively on several fronts. The dominant theme of discussions was between service operators offering narrowly limited "enhanced" services including VOIP while discouraging 3rd party competitive development versus others advocating the networks become an open IP, Internet Protocol, platform for users and developers' innovations "at the edge" including open geoweb and context aware services.

 

The second dominant theme of discussions was around spectrum regulation, and rigid network operations versus 'liquid communications' proposed by David Reed and Andy Lippman co-leaders of the Viral Communications projects at MIT who talked at length about ultrawide band , software defined radios, and viral, organically configured mesh networks with out an operator. The most memorable quote came from David Reed; " Regulation shows the spectrum is full" showing an FCC spectrum chart, " But physics shows the network is essentially empty" showing a histogram of actual signals taking a fraction of real capacity.

 

There was a quite a bit of discussion and no obvious consensus over a chart someone showed describing the looming conflict between a number of big players who want to 'control' users experience in the home; the telecom operators, cable companies, microsoft, sony, yahoo and AOL as well as few crisp exhanges over over users problems seamless interoperation their smart phones, and home and office PCs and digital video appliances. Someone observed that some carriers actually block synchronization of mobile phone calendars with pc calendars.

 

Finally, there was quite a lively debate triggered by a network operators comment that the networks needed to "control users' identities" which of course was promptly countered by many voices in the room saying that users should be empowered to control their own identities.

 

Clearly, a few forward looking network operators, and service designers are beginning to think deeply about empowering users to create new 'killer apps' themselves, but some entrenched players, are still struggling to regain their hefty investments in broadband infrastructure, by "controlling" user experiences.

 

Stay tuned...

COMMENT:marina gorbisEMAIL: [email protected]: 10.10.13.158URL: "