Corporate: Netravali's Future-Talk

INTERVIEW
Crystal-gazing the future

Meet Arun Netravali. The philosopher-scientist who heads Bell Labs explains how cheaper access will fuel an explosion in Web-based services.

By Ashutosh Kumar Sinha

With 60 patents, including in the area of video compression and 3-d television, the 54-year-old Arun Netravali, President, Bell Labs-the research arm of Lucent Technologies-is no stranger to innovation. Recently, the philosopher-scientist came up with his seven deadly predictions that included the statement that, in the next decade or so, bandwidth prices will be nearly zero, and communication among devices will overtake those between human beings. While on his trip to India to oversee Bell Labs' activities, Netravali took time off to speak to BT about how global telecom companies will need to look at newer revenue-streams since access will become cheap, and how there will be an explosion of Web-based services in India.

Q. About 50 per cent of the world has not yet made the first telephone call. What kind of a communications revolution are we talking about?

A. The revolution will lie in the fact that basic service costs will come down tremendously so that a larger number of people are able to make calls. On another front, the costs coming down will also create new services or businesses, new business models, new capabilities, and so on. That means there will not be one universal service but something that appeals to different markets.

But with costs coming down, will companies enter the mass market where margins are wafer-thin?

If you have an infrastructure that simultaneously supports both these things, it is possible to have high-and low-margin services, but on a large volume.

How will the arrival of broadband change the face of rural India?

There are going to be newer services coming up with broadband. What you have is a pent-up demand for creating Web services across India. So, you will see a large number of businesses around the Net. Second, when people talk of broadband, it would be mostly for a given application requiring large bandwidth. Or a large number of users who create a huge demand. In urban centres, some of that demand comes from a large number of telephone users who use small bandwidth. But when you add that up, it becomes a lot.

You are heading an R&D company which is leading us into the future. What ultimate technological innovation would you like to see and experience yourself?

I would like to see a more intelligent network that is completely optimised, to which I can talk as to other human beings. And it gets the routine jobs done, freeing me for things that interest me the most.

Will the machines then have the human touch too?

They could. The Net could do all sorts of work behind the scenes to present itself in an almost human form. It starts to look like it has the human touch.

So, when can we see something like the Star Trek-humans being digitised and zipped across?

That would be getting into the realm of science fiction. If you stretch it too far, it begins to look like science fiction. Taking a human being and digitising the surface to create a picture is known to us. But transmitting live flesh and blood, I think, that is science fiction.

How do you define failure at Bell Labs? Behind the four patents that Bell Labs registers each day, there must be failures somewhere...

Well, we do not expect each patent to be commercially successful in its own right. Because, a lot of times, successes happen after you have built something. You then build the next layer and then the next layer. And on top of that comes the real success. In the case of patents, success is when you get a large amount as patent licence revenue. But, maybe, 50 patents had to be written off, none of which fetched any revenue. But they were the basis for the 51st patent which produced that kind of revenue. I think the success of Bell Labs has to be seen in the context of whether we were the first to anticipate customer needs.

With so many wireless devices proliferating, will basic telephony be relegated to the background?

I think it will be confined to areas where wired telephony is the lowest cost option. In certain places, it is not. So, what will happen tomorrow is that we will be able to segment the market much better. Today, there is one thing for everybody. Tomorrow, I think it will be possible to create services that are targeted at specific segments, and only then will we have the right capability at the least cost.

You said that in the future, access will not be charged for by telecom companies but services will be. How will the telecom companies make money?

I think people will have different business models. Some will have a large-bandwidth low-cost model, and may charge you a flat access rate. We have that in cable television today. That could happen in basic services too. There will be some people who will give you basic service for free if you agree to their bundled services. So, one of the good things about deregulation is that the smart businessmen who figure out different ways of offering all kinds of new products and services are those who are likely to make most of the money.

What are some of the key areas of human-machine interface that Bell Labs is working on?

We are looking at Speech Input-Output (IO). How to make machines speak English or other languages in a natural way. A few years ago, if you listened to a machine, you got tired after a few minutes because it sounded too robotic. So, we are helping make it more natural, with different accents. We are also working on speech recognition so that you can have a conversational dialogue with a machine.

With so many wireless devices and embedded chips proliferating, how many computers would there be in a modern house in, say, 2010?

A friend of mine just bought a Mercedes. And he told me that his car had 37 different computers. Just one car, right? He told me that his house had 270 computers. Many of them are hidden computers and processors. You know that the number of hidden computers is much more than the computer population of the world itself. Now washing machines have computers, toasters have computers... We are living in a situation where processors have become a commodity and control of things can be far easily done with the help of a processor. So, I think, there is no end to this as the market grows.

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