NEW YORK-Wireless devices and the services they deliver in the Internet age represent an opportunity so large it is nearly unfathomable and dwarfs any second-place possibilities, according to Bill Joy, chief scientist of Sun Microsystems Inc.
Nevertheless, the United States, which pioneered the Internet, enters this golden age of telecommunications with one hand tied behind its back, Sun’s co-founder said at Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s “1999 Global Convergence Summit.”
“The United States used for [personal communications services] half of its frequency band available for the next worldwide standard,” Joy said.
“We are ahead in the wired Internet, but we have structural handicaps in wireless Internet.”
By contrast, Japan erred when it chose a unique early-generation technology that no other country wants. However, it has plenty of radio-frequency spectrum available for third and successive generations of wireless. Furthermore, about six months ago, Japan introduced “I-phone,” which allows callers one-button access to the Internet, Joy said.
Within a decade, the annual wireless device market will be up to 3 billion units sold, not only for communications among people but also to run appliances and other machinery, he predicted.
“Basically, people will get a new phone every time the battery goes dead,” Joy said.
“Whether it’s a wallet-size [personal digital assistant], a phone or a pager, the device will represent people in simple transactions, the way credits cards do today.”
Just as the U.S. Department of Defense developed the Internet, it also developed the building blocks for the “agent technology that allows devices to move and act in your behalf,” Joy added.
When agent technology comes of age, two-way pagers, Palm VIIs and cellular phones will prove much more convenient than “booting up your PC.” Even in its heyday, the personal computer market will look “puny” compared with the wireless device market as it hits full throttle during the next decade, added Joy.
“The PC market will be around forever, but there is too much software in there now for quality to improve,” Joy said.
Sun Microsystems, whose slogan is “the network as the computer,”sees a companion trend to the proliferation of wireless devices as mobile surrogates for personal computers.
“People want fractional ownership, the amount (of computing power and information access) you need when you need it,” Joy said.
“That’s causing another incredible trend, the re-centralization of [computers] to run portals and the virtual places people want to access with a variety of devices.”
In Joy’s view, the largest hurdles relate to network coverage and the interoperability both of networks and devices.
“The biggest problem is gaps in coverage … If you’re in the U.S. without analog, you’re toast. Even if you have it but don’t also have a three-watt amplifier, you can’t use analog,” Joy said.
“You do have tri-band [Global System for Mobile communications] phones, but the coverage map is terrible in the U.S.”
Rather than letting the free market work for second-generation standards, Joy said this country would have been better off letting a technical committee pick one 2G standard and allowing competition for the standard after that.
“A uniform cellular system exists everywhere except the U.S. and Japan, and Japan will have one in 2003,” he said.
On the other hand, the worldwide cdma2000 third-generation standard is like the proverbial camel, defined as a race horse designed by a committee, in his opinion.
“If you want a universal cell phone, cdma2000 will have to fall back to all the old systems, and reconfigurable hardware makes a lot of sense for this because it uses power efficiently,” Joy said.
The challenge for network designers will be to utilize observations about “complex, adaptive systems, like ecosystems and economies,” in designing infrastructure that can handle the diversity of interactive and responsive components, he said.
On the device side, industrial engineers have their work cut out for them in “reinventing individual devices and the way they work together.
“What will machines do when they talk to each other?” asked Joy.
Telematics is another promising niche that is an offshoot of these developments. Joy said he would keep his car for 15 years in order to hold out for a new one equipped with instantaneous and dynamic mapping for traffic jam avoidance.
“The overall pocket device will be about a $1 trillion a year market,” he said.
“The auto industry sells about 50 million cars and trucks worldwide each year. Adding a few thousand dollars of these value-added services would far exceed the profits of the entire auto industry.”
Wireless networks and devices also will run “the spaces we walk around in” Joy said. In buildings, for example, they might allow light bulbs to provide a visual or audio alert when they are about to burn out.
“This is the idea of `ubiquitous computing’ promoted by IBM (Corp.) and Xerox (Corp.),” he said.
In the shorter run, said John Patrick, IBM’s vice president of Internet technology, “instant messaging will show us some things that will surprise us.”
E-mail today is popular but slow, whereas instant messaging delivers real-time communications. In the not-so-distant future, instant messaging will become “a command-line version of the things we use browsers for,” Patrick said.
