Ashlee Vance reports for The Register from the SuperComm conference in Chicago (20-24 June):
"...The US tends to enjoy a position of prestige in most things IT. This, however, is not the case in telecommunications where major US corporations have been punished by a bust of magnificent proportions, a mess of wireless technology standards, and mediocre broadband adoption rates... The main worry is that the EU and Asian countries are outdoing the US with regard to the help they provide to advance telecommunications technology. The US tends to put the bulk of its research spending behind defense technology, biomedical research and high-end computing. This is due, in part, to the priorities the government has identified and a belief that a deregulated telecommunications market will take care of itself...
"[Peter Rooney, deputy director of the House Committee on Science] and others, proposed that the telecom sector adopt policies similar to those used by semiconductor companies. Chip makers tend to lay out very specific long range technology roadmaps... This type of focus helps the government out, letting it know where investment should be directed...
"'To have a roadmap, you need a way of getting together,' said Jeffrey Jaffe, president Bell Labs Research for Lucent... Jaffe argued that creating an entire communications infrastructure and guessing where it might go next is a tad harder than narrowing in on cramming more transistors on a processor. He then put the focus back on the government, pointing to the EU's Sixth Framework research model as something the US should consider...
"Al Vincent, director of the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, backed up the position on government spending, saying federal funding for telco programs has been 'increasing at a fairly decent clip.' The US currently spends 2.6 percent of its GDP on research as compared to the 1.9 percent spent by the EU, although the EU hopes to raise this total to 3.0 percent by 2010. 'The basic story is that the government side is slowly increasing, and the industry side has dipped and is slowly coming back,' Vincent said....
"'I think the telecommunications industry has been grossly ill-served by its early success (with the Internet and cell phones),' [said Preston Marshall, a program manager in DARPA's Advanced Technology Office]. 'It has made the telecommunications industry incredibly evolutionary with products that are two or three times better. Our threshold for funding is something that is 10 times better...' Marshall suggested that researchers would be really useful if they 'banned IP' from their minds all together and looked to the unknown.
"Overall, the government officials put a lot of pressure on the private sector and research bodies. The Feds won't fund any project that could harm current business models, because there's no sense in knocking our own companies. So they want the private sector and universities to come up with technology that will benefit everyone equally and that has no application today. Great. Get to it.
"Exactly how these telcos are to get together and agree on what these magic technology areas might be is difficult to imagine. With the antitrust regulators watching the telcos every move, it would seem a tad difficult to set up a meeting to discuss how they all might move forward as a collective." [Thanks to DeWayne Hendricks for the pointer to this article.]