Planning for Broadband Ubiquity

As legacy businesses around the world lobby their governments to prevent the deployment of technologies like wireless broadband and VoIP, one of the largest corporate research programs in the world is already planning for everything they're trying to prevent.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 28, 2005]

Munich, Germany-based Siemens is one of the world's larger corporations, making everything from toaster ovens to transformers to DSL modems under the Efficient brand. Like GE in the U.S., the company also has a large finance arm.

The group that invited us for a visit is the research arm which is called, as you would expect, Siemens Corporate Research (SCR). Siemens' annual R&D budget is €5.1 billion (approx. $6.6 billion). The group has offices around the world, and we visited the Princeton, N.J. office, which is doing interesting things with broadband and digital imaging.

Is it brilliant or naïve to assume that the digital broadband future will actually arrive, that future that politicians support while speaking on the stump and then fight when they come under pressure from special interests that see no benefits from change and innovation?

Whether it's medical imaging, the BBC news room, a postal sorting area, or even just a company parking lot, Siemens has plans for the innovative use of digital imaging, and in every case, that requires broadband.

Safe roads
One of the more promising areas of innovation for ISP-Planet readers is image recognition for cameras that monitor roads and parking lots. In our profile of Jackson, Miss.-based AIR2LAN, we noted that the company had won a contract to provide IP cameras throughout the Jackson metropolitan area to the Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT). Where there is an open and fair bidding process, WISPs and large local and regional ISPs can compete against the RBOCs and win contracts.

A wireless broadband antenna manufacturer, San Diego, Calif.-based Trango Broadband, started out as a wireless security solution provider.

Dr. Ramesh Visvanathan, who is the head of SCR's Realtime Visition (RV) department, demonstrated several applications. In one case, a pair of cameras are used. One camera has a wide area view of the parking lot. When there is motion detected on camera one, camera two zooms in and records what was moving through the parking lot, whether it was a car or a person. The digital record is stored, time stamped, and archived.

In another case, Siemens developed an application that highlights the presence of pedestrians on a highway, improving safety.

Expensive environments
Of course, Siemens is working on applications for wealthy customers. Whether it's a camera to help the Department of Homeland Security monitor a border or a beach, or an application to make colonoscopies more precise, the health care and government verticals feature organizations with large budgets.

Similarly, an application that combines mechanical elements with sensors to help sort packages, developed for postal services worldwide, is targeted at organizations that do not need to rely on the internet that everybody else uses.

The technology question
Siemens also supplies equipment to cell phone companies, and is developing a collaboration application that will use UMTS (at 340 Kbps) and the planned HDSPA (at 2 Mbps).

However, there are many other collaboration products on the market, such as Groove (now part of Microsoft) and the Pulver.Communicator, which is free (but in beta).

Dr. Arturo Pizano, head of SCR's multimedia technology (MT) department, noted that an internal joke at Siemens, wondering what the company could achieve, "if Siemens knew what Siemens knew."

In the long run, the collaboration app is less interesting than the imaging technology, even though it utilizes the latest in cellular technology as well as GPS and Bluetooth.

The demonstration of the collaboration app envisioned an insurance adjustor in the field showing an image or video of damage, and receiving commentary in real time.

Applications
In summary, the fascinating element of the demonstration was not the technology, although that is quite interesting, especially in the field of medical imaging. It was the specific applications that Siemens shows are in demand now.

Whether it's the postal service, the Department of Homeland Security, a hospital, or even a parking lot, there is real demand for digital ubiquity, and the demand is here now.

Whoever can build the networks that can deliver the bandwidth will find a market. The bandwidth does, however, have to reach through the last mile, and to do so, it may well use wireless. Siemens is a cellular equipment manufacturer, and therefore understands the potential of cellular networks but may not see the potential of Wi-Fi and WiMAX.

Whether it is right or wrong about which technologies will be used to achieve digital ubiquity, it seems simultaneously brilliant and a little naïve to be building a business plan based on the availability of broadband.

ISPs, whether working with pro-deployment regulators or working against pro-monopoly regulators, should take heart from the fact that while the deployment and legal battles are being fought, massive enterprises around the world are designing the technology that will create an unprecedented demand for bandwidth.

— End