Tailored communications

The next big question is, how are we going to give it to them? Existing systems, wired and wireless, are fundamentally structured for voice communications. Data has different requirements, yet the industry has focused on delivering data over its voice-optimized systems. This approach only adds to cost and complexity.

For example, people want voice communications everywhere all the time, whether they're sitting at a desk in the office or driving in a car at 120 km/h. Supplying that degree of mobility is very expensive. But the data-oriented applications I've described here—sending photographs, downloading music, playing video games—don't really have to be done while the user is traveling at high speed or, for that matter, in real time.

The best way to handle these different demands will be with different communications systems, each optimized to deliver content with different rules, different requirements, and different priorities. Successful communications companies will, as in every other competitive industry, start with consumer needs and then build systems, devices, services, and applications to serve those specific needs.

The legacy of the slow-moving but benevolent monopoly that decides what is good for the customer will have to go. Then the business will inevitably bifurcate: some companies will provide transport—moving the bits—and will market it to the others, which in turn will select a consumer niche, understand what the people in that niche want, and create and sell the applications that ride on the transports. Applications will be created by entrepreneurs and others who focus on determining market needs and fulfilling them; transport will be provided by those who can identify the varieties of content delivery required by the applications and can tailor delivery accordingly.

We don't even need new technologies; we have only to implement those that have evolved over the past 10 to 15 years. Using today's radio technology, for example, there's not enough spectrum to serve the entire consumer voice market, never mind the kinds of wireless applications described above. But technologies that can in effect multiply spectrum are already widely deployed, although not in the cellular industry. Adaptive-array technology (which employs so-called smart antennas) is already deployed in Asia. Ultralinear amplifiers and superconducting filters allow us to squeeze more radio channels into a fixed amount of spectrum.

The implementation of new technologies is far more gradual than most people realize. For a really new technology, cycle time from the laboratory to widespread practice is rarely less than 20 years. Changing the way we do business may be even more difficult, but the driving force will be consumers. Ultimately, consumers will vote with their pocketbooks, and they will vote for customized services and against technology for the sake of technology.

And when we finally get it right, they will embrace broadband.