Time to put the C into ICT

The illustrious Royal Society of Arts recently held a European Technology Forum on leadership in telecoms. The presence of one panelist was particularly significant: Gordon Smillie, nine weeks into his new job as head of BT’s ICT services provision, after a decade each with IBM and Microsoft.

Smillie says it’s time the IT industry put the C into ICT in the way that government and education already do. ICT is of course the acronym for information and communications technology.

Smillie says that telecoms carriers may be better than computer firms at storing the voice, messaging, video conferencing and document review sessions of the future.

Cable & Wireless strategy director Duncan Black concurs. In an outsourced world, he argues, firms will want telecoms carriers to see off the deadly threats of DoS attacks, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Basel II corporate governance rules. With dry wit, Black says that Sun’s Scott McNealy was right about the network being the computer … it was just that Sun didn’t have the network.

Margaret Rice-Jones, vice-president for Motorola in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, persuasively upholds 3G, as well as High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) – “3.75G”. The standards surrounding 3G, she says, should make it reliable enough to handle internet protocols, and securely too. Today’s surges of teenage use of GSM make 3G a going concern, since it increases capacity in voice calls. HSDPA? With it you can download an album in a minute.

Black’s rebuttals are swift. WiMax broadband wireless technology will put 3G in question. In the home, “tri-band” fixed-line operators such as France Telecom will offer an unbeatable mix of TV, internet and voice/video calls. 3G infrastructure, Black argues, is costlier than that for the web; 3G and 4G base stations may emit harmful radiation; 3G billing can get really complex.

Pointing to call centres, Black confirms there will always be a market for fixed-line telecoms. Yet history may be on the side of mobility more than he thinks. It is not just the long commuting times we all face, it is the individualised nature of 21st century life. Johan Othelius, vice-president of mobile internet firm Openwave Systems, observes that SMS has attached itself to radio and TV broadcasting. Tomorrow’s killer apps, he contends, will be email to the mobile phone.

For myself, I think innovation in telecoms will demand more than the forum’s main favourites – convergence between fixed and mobile telecoms, and assurances of security and business continuity. We need to raise expectations of 3G, and ensure that it does more than just work as a Band-Aid for 2G.

Mobile or fixed, tomorrow’s enterprise telecoms will be a mix of talking heads, IM and shared documents – promising fewer, quicker, more decisive meetings.

It’s time telecoms carriers fought for that kind of productivity.