OF TARTS AND TELEPHONES

Dick Pountain/01 October 1997/Idealog 38

That prime architect of modern comedy, Lenny Bruce, used to do a bit about telephone operators which ended with the advice that "you can't afford to get too snotty with the phone company or you'll end up with a dixie-cup and a thread.." Of course we have to allow for transatlantic differences in telephone technology, so that translates into a "tin-can and a piece of string..." Either way the sentiment is clear - that the telephone company is a big, sinister monopoly that will ride rough-shod over the complaints of mere civilians. Of course that was back in the 1960's, a more primitive era, before the phone companies were deregulated and we all became their valued 'customers'. Nevertheless suspicion of the motives, and, well, just the sheer size, of the telcos remains prevalent, and nowhere more so than in the computer business.

I'll certainly never forget visiting the Telecom 95 trade-show in Geneva. I'm not easily impressed by trade shows, but I felt like a farm-boy entering Las Vegas. IBM had a stand five stories high with what appeared to be a half-scale model of the planet earth rotating on top of it, and that was one of the smaller stands. You could smell the wealth and power of a global industry, up there with the airlines and the power generators, an industry that talks down to governments and affects the economies of whole regions. The computer industry, Bill Gates notwithstanding, is as a flea upon its back.

Of course we all know that telecom and computer technologies are converging; that the Internet is threatening the telcos grip on person-to-person communication; that OFTEL has recently decreed that BT must be more competitive and look beyond voice telephony for its main revenue. The fact remains though that two industries could hardly be farther apart in their technical culture than the telecoms and computer industries are - indeed they remind me of that corny old fancy-dress party theme "vicars and tarts" and I don't think I need to spell out who is who <fx: adjusts frilly red garter>. The telecoms industry has emerged via a history of state-run monopolies, adherence to world-wide standards and homogeneity of hardware, while the computer industry has exactly the opposite characteristics - innovative, entrepreneurial, scornful of standards and favoring rapidly evolving, heterogeneous hardware.

My guess is that most readers of Pro are computer tarts through and through. We scoff at those little green stickers on modems. We'd all like to have ISDN lines, but scorn BT for not marketing them properly. We don't believe that any hardware more than a year old can still be any use. Until very recently I might have recognized myself in this description, but now I'm not so sure <fx: fiddles uncomfortably with frilly red dog-collar>. It's just too easy to take technical standards for granted, because a good working standard merges into the landscape and becomes invisible. How many real global standards - and that apply to everyday life rather than to science or engineering - can you think of? OK, here's one; whether you hire a car in Jakarta or in Paris, it will have a steering wheel, and the foot pedals in the same order Accelerator, Brake, Clutch, so you can drive it immediately. And here's two; you can pick up the phone (if there is one) and dial from anywhere through to anywhere. And, er, that's about it.   

For the automobile industry it was probably market forces and Henry Ford that swung them behind the standard, but for the international telephone system it took years, treaties, blood/sweat/tears, government regulation and engineer's inspiration, and most crucially, a sense of public duty. It's that last virtue that is so signally lacking in the computer industry. Can you begin to imagine a world telephone system run by Microsoft, Netscape, Novell and IBM? You'd have at least five handsets on your wall.

All this matters because the 'inevitable' convergence of telecoms and computing is not yet a forgone conclusion. The telecoms industry, like any good vicar, takes forward planning very seriously indeed and has arrived at a package of future technologies. ATM is their chosen transport technology for the network backbone, and now it can even be run into the subscribers' premises over copper wire, using xDSL technologies like ADSL. On the software side, the telecom industry has committed to the CORBA distributed object oriented computing standard. The problem is that on the computing side of the divide Microsoft is just as equally committed to destroying CORBA in favour of its own DCOM/ActiveX, while sundry axe-grinding LAN hardware vendors strive to delay (and hopefully to prevent) the introduction of ATM at local level - keep your eyes peeled for Terabit Ethernet coming to a store near you. The telcos want telephone numbers for addressing, but the computer industry wants to move to IP addresses. The latest issue of Byte typifies the schizophrenic symptoms: one article approves of Ipsilon's IP Switching (a way to reconcile ATM with routed networks) while another approvingly writes of 7 network technologies that have "put a hole in the boat carrying ATM to shore".

I'd naively begun to think that convergence - the same technology running from my PC right across the world - might remove the black magic from comms for ever. Instead we seem to be shaping up for a war, and mere size by no means guarantees the telcos will win. The Internet may soon start to erode their revenue base, while computer firms are much dirtier street fighters than they're used to dealing with. And the problem is I'm not sure which side I'm on any more.