Q&A: Bell Labs eyes broadband's future
Published: 13 Jun 2003 13:24 BST
What else is hot at Bell Labs these days?
What's very exciting is the triple-play services -- TV, phone and data. How do you leverage services that integrate all those capabilities into one? And not only compressed video, but also high-definition TV -- things like that. When it comes to entertainment, people have said quite clearly that they are willing to spend the extra buck to get high-quality video. So delivering that on fibre is probably going to be a demanding application, but one which fibre can easily do.
Can the copper networks now used by telephone companies do that?
No.
Not with any of the new enhancements being introduced at Supercomm?
Copper is great for voice. For data, it's great for compressed video and that meets a lot of applications' needs. Security is not something that you do ad hoc.
But if you want to watch something like real-time sports, which has a lot of movement and action, you really want high-definition capability. It's silly to go through all the effort to create a high-definition standard and then compress it so that you don't see any of the high quality.
Intel, Alcatel and Hewlett-Packard are now pushing modularity, the idea that all telephone network equipment should share some of the same building blocks. How do you feel about that push?
There are places in the system where there's room for innovation, and there are places in the system where all you care about is the cost. The whole movement of our industry is to standardize those things in which you need low cost and to focus investing on innovation. So we're very big supporters of standardization, not only at the protocol level but also at the system level. We're placing better software for better management capabilities on top of that. We're achieving some differentiations for each vendor that comes in so that we can do a better job than the next guy.
Isn't that what happened to computers?
A computer's value used to be all in the hardware, and now you can buy a whole PC basically on the street and put sheet metal around it. The value's now in the software.
In tough economic times, with budgets getting slashed, it must be difficult to innovate. There's less money and lousy morale. Am I wrong?
Researchers are an interesting breed. They are most stimulated when they have a ready source of exciting new technical problems to work on. That's what researchers do: They try to create the next generation. From a research organization standpoint, getting a steady stream of new problems to solve is what's most important. How do I recover stranded bandwidth? How do I recover revenue in a network? I always find that most researchers who are presented with potential problems can do a very good job. The hard aspect of research is finding that problem.
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