In the coming years, telecommunications technology will increasingly use more photonics and fibre optics, while technological devices that will take the market by storm will likely be the result of a collaboration between research and marketing staff. So says Dr John Mayo, president of AT&T Corp’s Bell Laboratories, who addressed Paris’s Informatics Press Club late last month. Mayo says the market should see simple photonic switching in the next few years, adding that it might first be used in cross-connect between fibres or to provide broadband services. We’ve had photonic switching in the labs for some time: the issue is not whether it can be done, but finding the incentive for doing it. The technology is ready: photonics is beginning to take over the transport of information via glass fibre. In fact, we’re putting in place cables with no electronic devices, says Mayo, who shared the IEEE’s Alexander Graham Bell Medal in 1978 for his research that used the transistor to show the feasibility of the digital T1 carrier system. But, he continues, the infrastructure, such as a parts industry for photonic switching, is not yet there. As the economy and market develops, we will bring these switches out. Indeed, it is very conceivable that, as electronics reaches maturity, photonics could take over its functions. Photonic microcomputers, in contrast, will likely not arrive on the scene for another decade, he says. Commenting on how rapidly new technologies become familiar and how quickly old ones devices are forgotten, Mayo recounts an anecdote: For the first timeI recently met a young man who had never encountered a rotary phone. He didn’t know how it worked, he thought you had to push the numbers. He quickly realised that it turned, but not that it had to be pushed all of the way over to the end! So, you see, things that we have always considered easy to use are not so, necessarily. Mayo says the diffusion of multimedia services should not be impeded by a lack of fibre optic cable installed to individual homes and businesses.
By Marsha Johnston
Fibre in local loops is not even a desirable way [to deliver multimedia services] because in the US, for example, we have 80% of homes with coaxial cable, so the ideal is a marriage between coax and fibre, he says. Rather, he suggests, to achieve the wide diffusion of multimedia, we believe what is needed is just a combining of public and private networks and all of the information that is on them, because we have a lot more capacity on existing fibres than is needed. Bell Labs’ spends $3,400m a year on research and development, employing 25,000 researchers in eight states and nine foreign countries. Its accomplishments are formidable. It has averaged one patent every day since its founding in 1925, on technologies including the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, the electrical digital computer, sound for motion pictures, and stereo recording; seven Nobel Prize winners, one of which is still vice-president of research; and five National Medal of Science winners. Software-related research, says Mayo, represents one half of the total research and development expenditure, or some $1,700m – and 10% of that, or $340m, is targeted at basic, rather than applied, research, of which approximately $100m goes to software. In fact, it’s hard to do anything these days that doesn’t involve software, he says. Asked about NCR’s activity at Bell Labs, he says that when AT&T acquired NCR Corp, they had no basic research, so they began to interact with us, but we didn’t increase our research as a result. NCR – now Global Information Solutions has no research of its own under way at Bell Labs, but is free to use whatever we develop, he says. The future of communications technology no longer lies with the research department, he believes. We’re in an era when the technology is rich, but the devices are not desired by the customer at the prices they have to pay. The new partnership is between the research and marketing organisations because so much can be done and just has to meet
the needs of society. He marvels at how integral telecommunications technologies have become to society in recounting the remark of a doctor at a recent medical conference who said, There are three forces in medicine today. They are the silicon chip, the laser and the glass fibre. That’s the same thing I say in my talk about telecommunications!
