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Articles Peter Cochrane Forward Planner The dust jacket of the US edition of Peter Cochrane's book, Tips for Time Travellers, includes a commentary from another famous futurologist, Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT's world-renowned Media Labs, said: "Most futurists are voyeurs. By contrast, Peter Cochrane looks ahead with the authority of a digital activist, one whose anarchy is establishment the next." This is praise indeed for the work of somebody who claims to live and work in an environment that is five to 10 years ahead of the rest of us. Yet, when you meet Cochrane - who is head of advanced research at BT's Martlesham Laboratories and leads a team of 660 - he is adamant that: "You cannot predict the future, but you can certainly build on it. And that is what my group has become very good at. We take the best technology on offer, combine it with the best that we can build, and create the futures that we live. All the time, we consider the many implications the projects throw up." And the implications for some of these are immense in fields such as education, health care, personal security, retailing, entertainment, not to mention the important ways it can impact BT's role in computing and communications. Cochrane insists that all members of his multidisciplinary team (including entomologists, psychologists, cosmologists, designers, artists, "as well as some of the best engineering brainpower assembled anywhere in the UK") are focused on the future. "And I am perhaps the furthest ahead, and the ultimate guinea-pig, testing, re-testing and refining the projects we are working on," said Cochrane. Everything is geared towards increased productivity and efficiency, and getting the utmost out of a world moving towards instant connectivity and communications, has massive and increasingly cheap bandwidth; and huge computing power. He carries pagers, mobile phones, and a signet ring that incorporates data from his medical records, his passport and driving licence, bank statements, and more. It also monitors his heart condition as he travels the globe. In Cochrane's office, you soon notice 'little brother', a video system linked to a 100Gbit/s network that allows everyone at Martlesham to see and know immediately whether he is in or out, and what he is up to. Soon, Cochrane says, the picture might be accessible from his Web page. The office is also filled with computer screens, communications gear and gizmos, but not a scrap of paper in sight. Cochrane said: "Everyone here communicates electronically, and I have told my staff I'll respond within 12 hours, 365 days a year. Paper is banned: if it's important it's scanned in, otherwise it's straight in the bin." Cochrane's groups are working on, or have worked on, intelligent agents that can navigate nets while at the same time learning about our likes and dislikes, need and desires. Combined with artificial life and software reproduction, this has led to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Several products have reached the prototype stage that include computer and telephone interfaces geared specifically to the way individuals work or play, as well as intelligent mobile terminals and devices (see, for example, the SmartQuill in ET 26 October, page 22). There is along list of applications his group has developed or whose outcome it has influenced. Such as network and system algorithms, chip implants, iris recognition for use in the banking sector for security, telemedicine and tele-education, e-commerce and even wearable portable computers. When it is suggested that some of these have very little obvious relevance to the future prosperity of a telecoms carrier, Cochrane looks almost dismissive. "Our group's goal from the start, in 1991, has been 'to boldly go' and be first, technologically, managerially and also operationally. That implies creating core competencies for the future, and making sure BT is not wrongfooted by technological, market or social change." His £40m annual budget, sanctioned directly by the BT board, is spread far too thin, Cochrane rues, but he still considers he has one of the best jobs within the company. He notes that BT has invested about £28bn on its vast networks, and is spending in the region of £2.5m annually to modernise it. Cochrane said: "But it takes about 10 years to rebuild it, and we have to have a vision of what the network will look like in 10 years and, equally importantly, anticipate the kind of applications and products that will run on it. "Supposing people stop using pointed sticks to write, supposing they want to download speech straight into a computer, suppose they want to send digital images of holiday snaps straight to their grandma's TV screen, how will the networks cope? And we have to start thinking not of just 'Intel inside', but perhaps 'UMTS inside' of every item you have being able to communicate; of your car being able to link with the forecourt garage where you fill up; of you putting bits into the hard disc of your car entertainment system; of your hi-fi linked via networks to your PC and TV. There are huge implications for all this." So, while applications are the main thrust of the team's projects, the nature of the future network is also a concern, specially its security and ruggedness. Here, the word 'chaos' begins to play an increasingly important part in Cochrane's explanations. "Mobile phone networks for instance, invoke chaos, I have just returned from a conference in Florida, attended by more than 3000. During every coffee break, hundreds of these delegates brought out their mobiles and tried to make calls at the same time - surprise, surprise, not all managed to get a line. You get the same effect on the M25 when there is an accident, or planes being delayed at Heathrow: that is of people swarming the networks. There is a lot of work in place to try and solve the problems involved." And the problem is not confined to the mobile world. "On an ordered phone network, the peak to mean traffic flow ratio is typically 3:1. But if you look at the Internet, the ratio can often exceed 1000:1 and of course, that network has simply been tagged onto the 100-year-old voice network dimensioned to take three to four four-minute calls a day. People swarm, and are attracted to the same site simultaneously. And this problem is only going to get worse." Cochrane believes we need a complete rethink of the Internet, which will not be able to meet the demands made on it as things are at present. The inability to control delay, latency and extremely poor reliability all preclude realtime applications. "we'll get to the next stage by increments, of course, and I suspect there will be something of an arm-wrestling contest between ATM and IP. It just makes no sense to put IP over ATM." Any new network will need to be based on optical fibre, and will have to look beyond the hierarchical thinking behind today's phone networks. It must rely on far fewer layers, so Internet connections will need to be routed only through two or three nodes. That, Cochrane says, will make things incredibly easier and faster; there is no choice, he maintains, with the growth of machine communications at its current rate. "Today, 40% of all network traffic is machine-to-machine. By 2010, we anticipate that will be nearer 95%, with only 5% voice traffic." Unfortunately, he notes, we have evolved to a state of near engineering lunacy in computer and telephone networks, with an unimaginable mix of technologies. IP transported by X25 or frame relay, over ATM, via SDH or PDH, on a new backbone of WDM. All this is compounded by network control and management software overhead that dwarfs the cost of hardware. This is all grossly uneconomic and will be unsustainable. Cochrane says that, for the future to work, networks need to slim down to IP over WDM with integrated and minimalist control and management software overhead. With 30 years of experience behind him - from digging holes for the old GPO, writing code for System X, working on ISDN and other transmission systems and the first fibre-based network to span the Atlantic, and gaining numerous degrees and doctorates - Cochrane seems to be the ideal engineer and innovator in charge of thinking the almost unthinkable and questioning the world we take for granted. In between these activities, he even finds time to write a weekly column for a daily newspaper, author books, help his kids with the homework, lecture at universities and act as a consultant to budding technology companies. |