|
Interviews Employee Update Article How could a retail store "take out" a major telco? How can you download music and video games to your car's hard drive while you pump gas at the local gas station? How can you prevent your next television from being stolen? The answer to all three questions is the same: wireless technology. Peter Cochrane, Chief Technologist for BT, gave an engaging talk on how emerging wireless technologies will push the boundaries for consumers and telecom carriers alike. (He noted that in Europe, people are now using mobile phones to make purchases, including paying for taxi cabs and restaurant bills.) First, there's the explosive growth occurring around wireless technologies. Teenagers in the United Kingdom immediately embraced a new short messaging system (SMS) from BT, sending 25 million electronic messages in the first month. Now, just 12 months later, the system carries much more than half a billion messages a month. ("People my age . . . don't have the flexibility of thumb to do SMS messaging," says Cochrane. "You've got to be brought up on computer games to be really efficient.") Then there's the growth in traffic between machines, that is, messages that do not involve people. "Today, 50% of the traffic that my company transports is between machines and does not involve people," says Cochrane. By 2010, he expects that number to rise to 95%. "We will be talking for sure ... but the machines will be doing even more." What do machines talk about? Cochrane pointed to new technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology that can print a transponder (instead of a bar code) on paper for about five U.S. cents each. These transponders could be printed on food boxes to allow them to communicate with checkout stands at grocery stores (automating the checkout process). They could communicate with chips in your household appliances. "(We) stop having dialogues about what it says on the box. You throw the box into the microwave, and they have the conversation and decide how long the pizza is going to be cooked." "Suppose one of you were to come to my home and steal my TV. And my TV had already looked around the room and identified the VHS, the hi-fi, the computer, the laptop computer, and many other devices in my home. You take it to your house. You switch it on. It looks around and realizes it's not in the same room. It sends a message to me over the net and then it shuts off so you can't use it. That would be incredibly powerful in terms of reducing insurance premiums. We're already experimenting with chips in jewelry." "Now if time is money, then I think position is going to be really important. (For example) the average loading of trucks in the U.K. is around 10-15% (full). In the U.S., it's down around 40% ... On a typical day in the U.K., you can go on a major freeway and find UPS, Fed Ex, Links, and Royal Mail ... trucks going the same direction, all 10% full," said Cochrane. "So we could take at least half the trucks off the road if the packages knew where the trucks were and the trucks knew where the packages were." While the explosive growth in regular network traffic challenges carriers to keep up, another trend poses a much greater threat: the emergence of "pirate" wireless traffic carried on "parasitic networks." Pirate users could create these parasitic networks to gain always-on Internet access or other carrier services for free. Basically, pirate users will soon be able to buy a radio unit from a retail department store and send out a signal. Sooner or later, a wireless device that is connected to the network comes within range, picks up the signal, and passes it on to other carrier devices (creating the parasitic network). BT researchers have been using simulations to study the number of "hops" needed to carry pirate signals to their destinations and the life cycles for these signals. How do telecommunications carriers defend themselves against this threat? Cochrane advises them to embrace this trend toward flatter, more chaotic, mobile networks and supply the connections and radio units for them. "Flat networks will cope with chaos and hierarchical networks won't," he says. With today's hierarchical networks, "a conference of 1,000 people can bring down the network. At about 10:15 when coffee arrives, a couple of hundred mobile phones will come out in about a minute and that demand will crash the cell site." In the old telephone networks, the peak demand was 3 or 4 times larger than the mean demand, that is, a 3 or 4 to 1 ratio. "On the new mobile phone networks, we see numbers of 100 and 200 to 1, and on the Internet, it's well over 1,000 to 1." Only flatter networks can cope with the increasingly chaotic traffic, he says. The good news: As we move to networks that are increasingly chaotic, mobile and parasitic, Cochrane predicts that network resilience, flexibility, reliability and scalability will increase. (Only network latency performance will decline, by getting much longer, he predicts.) What is the net effect of this on the economy? "Every time we introduce another degree of freedom into systems that impact on our society, it results in more freedom of action, more freedom of movement, and an increase in the economic activity." |