Prologue
This paper is going to take you on a journey into the future, it's my journey, it's my future. It's a view that has grown over a 30 year period and has recently crystallised through work over the past year aimed at mapping telecommunications and computing into the next millennium. The first thing I want to do is point out that, as a species, we have not been here for very long (~ 60M years) and consequently our communication is still relatively immature. Specifically, telecommunications is extremely new on this timescale and has been developed in a period of only 150 years in an electric/electronic form. Only 30 years ago the telecommunication network was dominated by twisted pair, coax and radio. There was no optical fibre and no satellites, pocket calculators and portable computers did not exist. Looking at the industry today you could be forgiven for thinking that little has changed over the past 30 years in terms of the way we construct and configure networks and services. In short we appear to have inherited a copper and radio mind set! Will we continue to charge for distance and bandwidth in the future; or to operate personal computers like mini-mainframes; suffer unweildy protocols and disparate software overheads; and live with interfaces that suit the machine rather than the human ? In the new millennium none of this will be practicable or viable - we can therefore anticipate some dramatic changes in our industry. For example, out of sheer necessity we are going to have to replace physical travel with telecommunications and telepresence at some point. Quite remarkably, in my view, we have all the raw technology required to effect such a change today. Our industry, as far as I am aware, is the only one capable of increasing its basic abilities by at least 2 fold, year on year, whilst using less raw material and energy, and with an added ability to reduce costs and price by a similar magnitude. Everyone else is consuming more and more raw material and energy while we are using less and less to do more and more. The key question is, "Where are we going ?" My personal prognosis for the future is as follows.

Genesis
As a student in London in the 1960's, I lived in a hostel where you could get to watch TV any night of the week except a Thursday. The reason was Star Trek - you just could not get in the room. How impressive was the range of technology that Captain Kirk and his crew had ? Most was overt and obviously required whilst other items were quite covert and equally necessary. At that time I coined The Three Captain Kirk Problems as my vision of future communication. Of course, being an engineer there were really four !

1) Instant point to point voice communication

2) Instant man-machine voice communication

3) Instant matter transportation

4) Instant machine-machine communication

In the last decade we have tackled most of these effectively and have realised mobile communication that is already ubiquitous on a national scale, and clearly could be expanded on a global scale. Instant man-machine voice communication is coming: it's quite staid but you can steer through a PC or a computer with voice command, but we still lack machine cognition - which is probably another 10 - 20 years away from any practical realisation on a par with human abilities. The machine-machine communication problem was not overt. It was a covert operation in that the bridge computer was always in touch and updated by engineering and Star Fleet command, and nobody had to plug into a 9600 bit per second modem and worry about V24 to get there. The machine communicated of its own volition those things we would like machines to do.

Let us start our journey start with the outrageous - matter transportation - this has to be the engineer's dream. A ball-park figure for how much energy you would need to disassemble me, transport me over some distance and reassemble me in about 100 seconds can be gained from E=mc². Well, the answer is something of the order of 10^"7 modern day power stations - that's quite a lot and is clearly some way off. Let's go one level down. As a human being I fall apart something like 3 to 10 times during my life. The molecules of which I am made, it doesn't really matter which ones or how many, any bag of molecules will do - they're still me - and if I was to code up all the information that constituted Peter Cochrane, grab a bag of carbon and put the information in, what would I then have to do? I'd have to transmit something like 10-22 bits per second - that's bits of data and not bits of me !, I'd need about 10⁷ fibres, so that one's out as well. So let's step back a little further. What could I do? If I take the entire contents of the human brain (if I could get at it) and transmit that information, then at a 0.1% usage (that's a guess at the utilisation), then 100 Gbit/s is required for 100 s. Such bit rates have been achieved already using WDM on optical fibre. Perhaps one day we will be able to access the brain direct move our mind from one place to another to have tele-experiences In reality the best we can do today is to use the concentration of about 106 optic nerves to provide virtual access to create the illusion of telepresence.

For inanimate objects there are alternatives. Molecular deposition technique using plastics allow tele-fabrication, or a laser scalpel can carve out some object at a distance. Both techniques look a little like a profiling lathe at a distance You might say 'what use is that?' Well, machine tools, artefacts, things that you want to discuss and you want to handle could actually be transported right now.

Back To Reality
The history in telecommunications exhibits an exponential trajectory in terms of increasing capacity, reducing costs, raw material, energy consumption ubiquity and usage. Interestingly the take up has lagged our ability to a significant degree. The reason why? Until relatively recently we have not had the electronics to realise the ability to consume the bandwidth.

Let us take time out to reflect on what has been achieved. All the capacity in a 1000 pair copper cable fits into one tube of a coaxial cable. All of the multi-tube capacity of a coaxial cable goes into one optical fibres over and over and over again. This has affected a paradigm change in telecommunications. Bandwidth is now free, loss is becoming non-existent with optical amplification and we see bandwidths in excess of 50 or 60,000 GHz available in principle. Today we access < 0.005% of the fibre bandwidth available and perhaps we might be able to get up to 0.1 or 1% with currently available technologies. It seems to me that everything we have seen optical fibre do so far will be totally eclipsed by what it's about to do by moving from the linear to the non-linear regime. It has hidden properties that we have not discovered yet, it has potential for exploitation that will stretch well into the 21st Century. We already see people doing experiments with bit rates of 10Gbits over 10"6km of amplifying fibre. In principle I could send you a message on an optical ether and you might miss it on the first occasion, but don't worry, it will pass by your door another 23 times before it sinks into the noise. This opens up the possibility of revolutionary new kinds of networks and ways of operating.

As the cost of transmission continues to go down and we must start to ask questions about the balance between transmission, switching and software. We need to radically reduce the number of nodes in networks, increase repeater spans, consolidate switches, reduce the network management overhead and remove the constraints posed by the software burden. We also have to subsume the fact that people will need to use many different bit rates during a communication session. We have to move away from thinking that the local call is just London and surrounding district but the whole of the UK, moving to Europe and gradually the whole planet. E-Mail is the only practical realisation of such a service available at present. We might also reflect on fascinating feature of this subscription service: you can send off a question into that medium and out of the ether pops some kind-hearted soul who will give you a reply and helps you - marvellous! Now that is communication !!

Mobility
Whilst cellular technology is now well developed, and satellite mobile will no doubt follow, we suffer an apparent lack of spectrum. However, we have yet to exploit microwave frequencies up at 180 - 300 Gbits and higher. (The way that rolls out probably has less to do with technology and more to do with politics and competition. But we also have the ability to take radio off air, frequency shift it, feed it down fibre that is transparent through optical amplification, and get that signal to emerge in a distant cell undistorted.. So that if we were working multi-site we could have the same facility in all the buildings throughout our organisation. So we would be sharing the same work space and it would give the perception of sharing the same location.

Another exciting prospect is that of optical wireless. The performance of free space optics in the home and office is very similar to microwaves, but with advantage of greater bandwidth. Systems are already in the research laboratories that offer the potential of active badges/communicators, interdesk/computer links. Application in the local loop might also be anticipated as an alternative to fibre.

Switching
At present we only use time and space for switching. At the present rate of expansion it is becoming clear that we will not be able to realise the density of electronics to meet future growth by using these two parameters alone. It will become imperative to move into a third parameter to get down another size notch and get the equipment density into existing buildings. For example, about 7 to 10 years ago a typical repeater station floor had to accommodate about 2.4 Gbits of speech circuit capacity total. That same floor today has 6.8 Gbits and the projection is that it needs to handle 40 Gbits by the end of the millennium. We can't do that with electronics as it stands. We need another degree of freedom - wavelength. Recent developments have seen the demonstration of suitable technology with contactless 'D type' (leaky feeder) fibres embed in printed circuit backplanes. Using an Erbium doped fibre which amplifies when pumped optically gives a loss-less, multi-tap facility with 10Gbit/s and higher rates distributed almost endlessly.

An interesting concept here is the notion of the infinite back plane. A tap and board may be linked to others in Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds throough the use of optically amplifying fibre that offer total transparency.

These concepts naturally lead to the idea of switch replacement by an optical ether operating in much the same way as radio and satellite systems today. The difference being the near infinite bandwidth. Demonstrators have already shown that a central office up to 2M lines could be replaced by an ether system, but suitable optical technology is probably still some 20 or so years away. Such a system would see all of the software, control and functionality located at the periphery of networks with Telco's becoming just bit carriers.

Satellites
Point to point satellite technology has been literally eclipsed by fibre with over 55% of all global communication is now carried by fibre. However, satellite has a new role and that is one of getting into hard locations and mobility. The path delay for geostationary satellites is problematic for real time communication, but there are solutions. There are proposals, for low level (~1000km) asynchronous nets with satellite's about as big as a football. - The notion is that you can catapult them into a low orbit from aircraft or super guns, to form a cellular system in the sky using 70 or so low cost units. Whilst they would periodically fall out of the sky (and as an engineer I worry about that!) their replacement would be low cost.

Other exciting developments include direct satellite - satellite links using free space optics, on board signal processing and switching, more compact and efficient coding schemes, individually positioned multi-micro beams, the use of much higher microwave frequencies and even optical links from satellite to ground. All of this can be expected to extend the use of satellite technology an order of magnitude (or so) beyond that of today. Fundamentally satellite systems look set to migrate to mobile, and difficult/rapid access, applications.

Growth
The growth of telecommunications continues and it's hardly likely to stop, even during the present global recession there has been no turn down. I suppose a sad reflection is that, as with everything else in this world, 85% of all the telephones are with the people who've got the money - there's 15% of us on this planet who've got good communications - the rest haven't. It would be nice to think that in the new millennium we could start to correct this disparity. Indeed long term global stability is likely to become almost wholly dependant on us achieving such an apparent ideal.

Future Goodies
In 1995 a wrist-watch pager will be commercially available, and around 2000 a wrist-watch communicator (with video !) will be realised. I suppose my argument would be that I don't like the notion of having a picture on my wrist-watch - even Captain Kirk didn't have little pictures - he only had voice communication, and when he had visual communication he used very large screens.. The present communication an computer interfaces are very frustrating. The telephone is fundamental 150 years old - and I still have difficulty discerning any difference between my wife, daughters and 4 year old son (barring the content of course. The CRT is a piece of 1935 technology - all we've done in the intervening period is add a few more lines and a splash of colour. It's still the same planar, fairly boring, medium that it was in 1935. The keyboard was designed for the purpose of slowing people down (it certainly slows me down!), a very awkward way of getting into a computer. The mouse belongs to 1974 and is like using tweezers instead of your fingers. So, what can we do right now and what might we do in the future?

• Using a very closed subset of voice communication with a machine, we can get a satisfactory I/O today. My guess is that natural human voice communication (and full cognition) with a machine is going to be another 15 years away (and perhaps 20)- but by constraining the set that is being discussed, then a workable level is possible.
• The advance of electronics sees our ability double and price go down year on year Consider data storage. Your mother enters the maternity unit and is handed your storage cube. All of your the birth processes recorded. Throughout your early years everything you do is recorded - your daubings at play-school, your development in junior school through to senior school, university, all the information of your working life, you retire. Through you retirement you take lots of holiday snaps, play lots of games, all recorded, and on the fateful day you hand it in as you go into the undertakers! Throughout the whole of that history you didn't have to bother erasing that store. That is what our present rate of progress means in the next millennium.
• As the electronics trajectory goes continues we can expect to see machines that will be 1000 times more capable that the machines that we have today within 10 years. So in the new millennium we can expect computing power 1,000,000 times greater and storage capacities that are far far higher than we can even contemplate today.
• The impressive thing is that the cost per bit to store soon gets to the point where storage is free! So we're moving towards a world where the transport of information is free and not related to distance. Storage of information is free and we don't care and processing power will become infinite. So perhaps we ought to be able to do new things!
• A simple question: 'when will a super computer equal a human being from the point of storage and sheet computational capability?' Let's put aside for a moment life and all of those difficult arguments, but just those two parameters, and the answer is 'the year 2010 is the time when the super computer equals the human being'. I would suggest to you that in some areas it's already effectively past us. By the year 2030 it will arrive as your friendly PC. How real is this possibility ? When I first came into the industry I worked on computers that were about 4 times bigger than a washing machine, they had a big red START or GO button and a large speaker on the front that made noises so that you knew something was happening. They were a little less powerful than my wrist-watch given away with petrol !!

Mind Sets
My 16 year old daughter shares my mindset. She has a love of books (difficult to pass a book store), refers to the book, interfaces this machine like as I do - a 'what's in the box mentality'.

My 8 year old son was very disappointed to hear that even if he plays for England, he still has to be able to read and write! The only reason that he's bothering to learn is that I won't tell him about aeroplanes any more. His attitude to the machine is to thrash it until it does what he wants it to do - never reads a book, he's going to be an engineer!

My 3 year old son is the most remarkable of all. One day I caught him with a picture that he'd drawn, stuffing it into the printer! It took me about 30 seconds to figure out what was going through his mind and it seemed quite logical - if you put in on the screen and it comes out of the printer, the converse must be true!

The attitudes to technology's entirely different. The 16 year-old can remember black-and-white TV, no computer, no VHS; the 9 year-old - colour TV, VHS. The three year old has always had all of this plus a computer! He approaches the technology in an interesting way - my wife can't drive the VHS; he can. He's totally unabashed. He will go in and get on the Mac PC and he's in there - he's not perfect (I have to lock up out from time to time) but he can do quite remarkable things, unthinkingly, but he treats it likes his domain, and I think that we will see generations of people coming who will approach information technology or computers in communications in this new way

I've always found it quite fascinating that, when I want to speak to the fellow next door, I walk out the front door, knock on his door and talk to him. When my kids want to talk to the kids door, they ring 'em up! When questioned about this, the hypothesis was that if they made more 'phone calls, my salary would go up! I've been trying to disabuse them of this.

What Drives Me Mad
I have trouble with the mouse, the keyboard, the screen, protocols, paper, information flow and decision making. I want to put my hands in the screen, I see it's a time for change and there are some very humanistic problems that need sorting out. I have a vision of a future-desk which will be a friendly environment - with a very big screen so I I can see all the pages of a 40 page document, and not just 3/4 of one page! It will have full size visual images of people that I can actually communicate with and talk to in a natural manner so I get eye contact and body language.

Why do we produce all this paper?. I have a feeling we've got locked into writing things down for historical reasons. For the last 5000 years, carving notches on sticks and scribing in the sand and on clay tablets and on paper has been the only way that we've been able to store and transmit information reliably - what are we continuing to do it for?

Virtual reality - it's a great experience and might even be a a useful tool. But I don't want to wear a headset all day! I want active spectacles or active contact lenses that generate images straight onto the back of the eye to give the perception of being there?

The Lust For Technology
Everybody knows that to have the best fighter aircraft in the world you have to go faster. That has been the law since the 1st World War and until recently it was true. What has been found is that by the time you get up here, you can't see anything, hit anything, turn corners, carry any payload, go very far, and you're very visible on radar and leave a tremendous infrared streak across the sky. So the designers have come down in speed to where we have now got quite a massive payload, incredible manoeuvrability, virtually invisible on radar, tremendous range, and you can see somebody to hit them. The thing that is quite fascinating is that it's not so far removed from the Spitfire and the P52 Mustang from World War 2.

Now the question is, as we develop our networks, do we see the same lust for technology (the latest technology is exciting so let's do it)? My personal perception is that we are going to see not so much gain as we think with synchronous digital hierarchy - wavelength division hierarchy here ought to pay back quite considerably - and it is neural networks and self organisation where there is a lot of research and interest but also a tremendous amount of doubt.

Complexity & Brittleness
The worst A10 that came back after the Gulf War had lost half the tail, one engine, and half of one wing, and was flown back. Alternatively, if you stand in front of the F111 and pull out your handkerchief and sneeze, the wings fall off! Very brittle, very high performance, and so there is a trade-off between sophistication and tuning things right to the edge and crudity and resilience, and we have to get that balance right. One of the biggest problems that faces us is the software problem and I would suggest to you this that if we were to detach ourselves from where we are today, and I was suddenly to walk in and you'd never had a computer before and there was never any software before, and I gave you a machine that was 1000 times better than the one you are currently working on. I said to you 'write some software', the question is would you construct the software the way that you do it today? I don't think you would. I think you would do something different.

Software
Let's just get a taste of the scale. It's becoming quite frightening - the complete works of William Shakespeare take up about 400 m. of paper - you print out the line code for a small telephone switch on about 1 km and by the time you get to a central office you're in the 4-6 km range. Network control centres are in the 6-10 km region, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is about 4.3 km - it's getting a to be lot of paper. Now the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) was abandoned on the basis that the software was impossible and yet it's about the same scale as an ATM switch.

A full stop in the wrong place and the spacecraft misses the planet. Very minor things pose a considerable problem for us in the future. We have to find new ways of solving this increasing risk burden.. Quite perversely the unreliability of hardware is coming down rapidly, that is it's becoming more and more reliable; whilst software unreliability is going up and we're getting this sub optimal solutions. That balance from an engineering point needs fixing and if we don't we're going to suffer - we are going to see systems go down.

Experiments with software generated ants and other artificial life forms have exhibited self organising colonies that are able to achieve very complex social behaviour on the basis of a few lines of code. To write a deterministic programme to replicate this with precision each would be an incredibly complex job. Perhaps the future of software lies in this direction !!

Robotics
There are now around half-a-million robots in the world mostly in the form of arms on assembly plants. In the future, when robots become autonomous and self organising we may get caught out in the same way that we got caught out with cellular radio. We will not have radio stations in the middle of cornfields ready for robots to do the things they have to do. They will need to know where they are, we will need to know where they are, and when they get in trouble because of their limited ability we will have to have a capability for human interdiction to get them out of the hole they've got themselves in (quite literally).

Robot arms have already been linked to a tomographic display and, with tremendous precision, been able to remove tumours from the human brain. The same robot arm has been used for operation on the human eye and people say 'good grief, I would not like that. I'd sooner have a man doing it'! Well, consider this. Last night your surgeon went out to a party at 10 o'clock, he was drinking and dancing through 'until 4.00. He got up at 7.00 this morning and went for a run to clear his head, got back home, had a row with his wife, his 16-year-old daughter threw a fit, he ran out of the house in a huff, jumped in the car, went down to the end of the drive and ran into the side of a truck! He arrives at work trembling slightly and he's going to operate on your head! Give me the robot!

Security
Security is an ever-increasing problem and if we are going to have telepresence and teleaction, then whatever I do needs to be certified that it is me that's doing it so what can we do? We can combine the scanning of the human face, eyes, lips, hands, thumbs, to provide a degree of security with voice recognition, patterning, handwriting, and ultimately, if we are not convinced, we could ask for the second name of your third child or some other obscure piece of information. Using a variety of those techniques, we can get error rates better than 1 in 1010, 11, 12. So at a distance we will be able to tell who it is. Perhaps we could build that into the skin of a telephone or the computer or the terminal, whatever kind we use. The certainty is we will need to pay increasing attention to this aspect of computing and communication in the next millennium.

Empires
My perception is that empires are lasting for shorter and shorter periods. The Japanese empire might now be perceived to be on the decline: they've got all the money so the young people are losing interest in working; they've moved women into politics which has been caused with the adverse working conditions and they're now demanding that their menfolk don't go out at 6.00 in the morning and come back at 12.00 at night totally wiped out because they've been out drinking with the boys. Where will that wealth go to? My perception is that that cycle will tighten and we will see perhaps a swing back towards Germany, Europe, back out to North America, and then the Pacific rim - or some cycle of that kind. What will result from this speed up is that the technology which is driving it will force it to go faster and we will have to be able to form companies at a distance and do work at a distance.. The problem is that we don't have the telecommunications network yet to do that but that's the sort of thing that we want to be able to do - the virtual meeting. The technology exists to do it - it just needs strapping together. We should be able to have three or four people in different countries linked in virtual space and have them meeting. If you think of the number of meetings that you go to where your physical presence isn't actually required, it's a very high number.

Consumer Technology
I perceive that domestic technology is going to have more and more of an impact. Virtual reality is tipped to move int o the home within 5 years. Already you can clip together 2 Game Boy terminals on a lead and play each other across the room. A $50 modem from Radio Shack allows the kids to play across town. (My kids have had strict instructions about this!) It's much more fun to play another human being on flight simulators than it is to play the machine. If you start to combine greater or better display technology (VR) with this, it gets very exciting indeed.

Suppose it is Cup Final Day, Wembley Stadium, 100,000 people in the Stadium - less 1. In the minus 1 seat is the virtual presence terminal with a fish eye lens giving full 360o vision back into your home, swipe on the terminal with your Amex card and you could sit there in your seat and look to the left and right and back and up and down and get the full perception of Wembley Stadium and the people around you. You are no longer sat in the living room with this cardboard box on your head that allows you to see just a little bit of the action - you can see all of it. It would change the way in which that society operates.

Already we see cameras being strapped onto cars, cricket-stumps, helmets on 200lb quarter-backs They even put the camera on the football (very unusual) - whee - it's not a human experience (usually). But it's very interesting the different view that you get watching sporting events - it changes your perception.

I think some of these things are quite exciting and stand to change the requirements placed on the communication infrastructure.

Final Thoughts
Today there are limitations - that's for sure. Tomorrow - unlimited bandwidth, distance and applications, decreased service costs and time to realise. In my view, technology can do almost anything - the question is what is required?