IP: Sun Setting On Uncle Sam's IT Empire

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

The following is an article published in  the Australian Financial Review 
reporting on a talk I gave at the First Tuesday meeting in the new 
IT/residential complex being developed in the Gold Coast in Queensland 
Australia on 4 Nov 2001. There were about 100 + people attending and they 
were highly interactive. A streaming video was taken and I am trying to get 
it on line and available for IPers.

Till then this article requires a bit of commentary by me to put certain 
comments in perspective and to slightly elaborate on the reporters 
comments. I have inserted then in [..].

Please also note that the article uses quotations that are snips of a hour 
long talk and question period and that context and detail are missing. I 
intend to produce a more complete white paper elaborating several of the 
points I have made.

I understand this steps on many feet but I believe what I said at the talk.

As usual comments are welcome.

Dave

______________________________________________________________________________


Sun Setting On Uncle Sam's IT Empire

Helen Meredith 09/07/2001

Australian Financial Review

The global dominance of the American IT sector was in decline, with its 
industrial research labs dead and the industry no longer rich, a leading US 
researcher and academic told a group of technologists on the Gold Coast 
this week.

Dr David Farber, a former adviser to president Bill Clinton and chief 
technologist at the Federal Communications Commission, said the US economy 
was not healthy and the IT industry was perceived to be in deep trouble. 
``We are seeing the passing of an era in which we did some grand 
experiments. The net bubble burst with a vengeance. We had forgotten one 
very important thing you need a business plan to survive,'' he said.

``Now we are having a healthy dose of reality but it has taken too long to 
happen. ``In what was once a rich industry, most companies have backed off 
or destroyed their research. We are creating a lost generation.' [ leading 
to the lack of new ideas and people to create them] ' The US Government was 
going to have to accept that industry could no longer fund R&D. Innovation 
would have to come out of the experimental science labs of the 
universities. It would be up to the universities to generate the next wave 
of technology, and to do this they would need government support. If this 
wasn't forthcoming, the country's IT would be starved of a future.

[One senior manager of USG research is quoted as saying that research in IT 
is no longer needed since the USG can buy what it needs. My belief is that 
it will most likely  have to buy it from China and other counties who will 
take the leadership the US is giving up]

[ I added that there are several research labs left -- most notable 
Microsoft and IBM and that Microsoft's was in the spirit of places like the 
old Bell Labs while IBM was still active but increasingly obligated to show 
a profit and thus tended to be short focused]

Dr Farber stressed that the role of government was to supply money and 
direction but not detail. ``Let the people who know how make the decisions 
and we all know that no sane bureaucrat is going to take a gamble [ again a 
broad evaluation worldwide especially parts of Asia]. What we need them to 
do is invest,'' he said. The dilemma was that the bureaucracy lacked IT 
know-how. ``The current Administration [ in the USA] is not hostile to 
IT,'' Dr Farber said. ``It just doesn't quite get it. One of the things you 
find out when you're working in Washington is that decisions made that are 
critical to our future and that require an understanding of technology are 
being made in the almost total absence of knowledge.

[ I was making sweeping generalizations as was appropriate given the world. 
Places like the FCC have access, not enough, to technical input but they 
are one of the exceptions in a dismal picture ]

``We [ the USA] are not alone in this. There are signs of the same thing 
happening in Australia. You need to get down to Canberra and help 
government know what the devil it is doing.''

The crisis in the IT industry coincided with the onset of the broadband 
era. This was about to have a profound effect on society, in which the next 
10 years would have as big an impact as computing did in the past 30. The 
impetus would be the real arrival of optical technology, promising 80 
gigabits per wave per strand providing the bandwidth of the entire US 
backbone on a single strand.

``This will have a profound impact,'' Dr Farber said. ``TCP/IP 
[transmission control protocol/internet protocol] will probably not survive 
this. Packet switching is probably the wrong idea for optical networking. 
Photons don't like to have things done to them photonic packets [switching 
at high speed] look[s] extremely difficult.''

Running broadband to every house would pose particular problems for the 
incumbents. It seemed likely that municipalities and cities would take on 
the role of supplying data paths for their inhabitants, on the basis that 
fibre was no different from services such as electricity and water.

``More and more of us will be un-anchored in the future,'' Dr Farber said. 
Mobility would be a key component of this. ``There will be a change to the 
way we do spectrum. It has been wasted,'' he said. ``In the US we have 
fenced it off, and done nothing with it, like putting barbed wire around 
empty paddocks [Australianized].There will need to be some redefinition of 
what it is to own spectrum, perhaps looking at something like the UK 
approach to public access to land.''

Dr Farber predicts 3G will have the shortest life of any mobile system in 
history. He describes it as the last of the analog systems, saying: ``When 
you look at the prices paid, you wonder where they got their accounting 
from. The 802-11 technology now starting to pop up all over the world would 
be the foundation for 4G, becoming a ubiquitous wireless service.''

Dr Farber is the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications 
Systems at the University of Pennsylvania. 



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