Former AT&T exec turned entrepreneur, Hossein Eslambolchi, chairman and CEO of Divvio, offered his vision of telecom’s future at this week’s Management World conference in Orlando. If he’s right, we don’t yet know the meaning of complexity.
Happy with his predictions from the 1990s about the emergence and dominance of IP in the telecom world, Eslambolchi said, for example, that the Internet we all love today was not designed for the needs of the 21st century and he painted a future with markedly higher data usage and one that will require both service and software transformation. He offered a Top 10 list of technology trends that David Letterman may not be jealous of, but some so-called technology experts might.
For starters, and current economic crisis aside, Eslambolchi said next-generation speech and natural language understanding will redefine the human-machine interface and the resulting Semantic Web will make Google and Yahoo! interfaces seem primitive in five to 10 years.
Knowledge mining rather than data mining will become the order of the day over the next decade, he said. The difference being that knowledge mining allows a network operator to make real-time decisions, especially about security issues. “Neither intrusion detection systems nor firewalls are capable of handling the level of security that will be required,” he said.
He said open-source components will dominate at the network edge. He said that the global expanse of broadband will flatten the world economy. “Geography means nothing in an IP-based environment. We have to be cognizant of the downstream ramifications we are seeing in the global economy as we move forward,” Eslambolchi said.
E-collaboration and social networking will continue to grow into the enterprise; consumer mobile applications, sensor networks, and IP-connected appliances and devices will proliferate creating trillions of end points in the network, making IPv4 obsolete.
Closing in on the top of his list, he said wireless Internet access will explode, driving rich mobile applications with WiFi, WiMAX and 4G connectivity, although his confidence in WiMAX is waning. “I was a big proponent of WiMAX, but LTE will ultimately win in the long run — however, watch [Sprint’s WiMAX trial in] Baltimore,” he said.
Personalization was Eslambolchi’s No. 3. It will create a new class of personal devices and service convergence. Next, he said security requirements will continue to increase exponentially. “In the ‘80s, we had intelligent networks, but dumb devices. In the ‘90s, the IP bigots said we will make the network dumb and end-points intelligent. I said hold on. We need to have intelligent networks and smart devices.”
His No. 1 trend is that wireless IP will dominate, significantly impacting network design, operations and management.
Eslambolchi also predicted that by 2010 we would see cognitive radio networks, speech-to-speech recognition by 2001, fuel cells with longer battery life, and nano-computers by 2015 that use quantum physics to do classical tasks and move us toward quantum computing as Moore’s Law breaks down.
“Even Intel recognizes Moore’s law will stop,” he said.
By 2020, location technologies will permit virtual communication anywhere on the planet. Networks will have exabytes of broadband traffic that will require intelligent optical chips. Next up: holographic storage.
For those OSS companies still around, opportunity will knock. “In these networks, network management and software management become very critical,” Eslambolchi said. “The world will get more complex. We have only seen 1/100th of the complexity we will see in 2020.”
