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Talking about next generation
As BT's chief technologist and director of the innovative BT Labs, Peter Cochrane makes it his business to determine what will turn into tomorrow's service. Carl Weinschenk and Meg McGinity of our sister title Tele.Com caught up with him at BT's New York Office
Are there any technologies or developments that service providers are missing the boat on by not investing?
'There are a couple of features that are starting to scream out there. One is third-generation mobile. Another is machine-to-machine communication. There are about 14 billion microprocessors and six billion of us and increasingly, machine will want to talk and communicate. About 40 per cent of all the traffic my company carries is machine-to-machine, not person-to-person. We have a gross curve - it says that by 2010, 95 per cent of the traffic will be machines talking and only five per cent will be people. So we will have to start thinking about some fairly innovative changes.'
What are your predictions about what we'll need for the changes?
'Right now, the mobile phone network has cells that are, typically, 10 to 15km across. If you get into a city, they may be a couple of kilometres. We are going to need cells that are 200, 100 and 10 metres across. We're going to have to put up both microcells and picocells. Instead of having a network that has a lot of very thin parts that lead to bigger parts, it's going to lead to a network that's fat everywhere.'
Is this suggesting a network that's passive in the middle?
'Yes. The problem is mindset. There are still people in networks who think that distance and bandwidth are important - but they're both irrelevant. Distance and bandwidth don't cost anything. What we are looking for is very low cost, very fast access. It doesn't cost a great deal to do that. We have the ability to put a cellular sit up in every room, in every building or on every street corner.'
So is the migration from circuit to packet switched networks a small step towards all this?
'Let me be slightly contentious. There's not a hope in hell that IP or ATM will replace and provide the service quality that you get in a phone network. It will never happen.
Are you saying a lot of people are spending unwisely?
'Here's what's going on to save their butts: the key parameter that we should worry about when we talk about communications is delay. What's bad on the IP and ATM networks is the management o f delay. What you actually need is circuit switching, no delay. What's the solution in IP and ATM? They're going to bolt down the routing path so that you get constant delay.
That's actually circuit switching. So the IP and ATM communities have just reinvented circuit switching.
For it to work, you need to displace somebody else so that your bits can go through smoothly. Who are you going to displace? Will there be arm wrestling, as in 'We're more important than you' or 'We'll knock you out of the way and make you wait, but we'll pay more'? So we could pay more for less delay.
You could have grades of service and, if you've ever made an IP call, you know how bad it can be. If you've ever made a call using a satellite phone network, you know how bad it can be. It's absolute garbage. What's going to save it is 95 per cent of the traffic being machines, because what we will do forces them to wait while we come straight through.'