Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs has always gotten its hands dirty researching technology that at first glance had no bearing on telecommunications. Few would predict that its original research into the laser would have spawned the fiber optics that now encircle the Earth. The same could be said for nanotechnology, that field of robotics dealing with the tiniest of machines — some small enough to fit inside a single animal cell. What can these most miniscule of machines do for the world of telecom? Bell Labs President Jeff Jaffe has plenty of ideas, not the least of which include a cell phone integrated into the fibers of your clothing or a communications network hidden in the walls of your business. Jaffe recently talked to Telephony's Kevin Fitchard about Lucent's research in the nanotechnology field.

On Bell Labs' vision for a future communications environment: Most communications networks are all about how we conquer distance and provide a real communications experience to people as if the distance wasn't there. Originally, we did that with the telephone, which was a pretty narrow pipe. We keep getting better and better. We've added multimedia and data, as well as higher and higher speeds; we've added video and voice over IP, and we've added mobility. The question is, where's the limit? How do we completely eliminate distance as a factor? And how do we do it without all of the irritants along the way? Today we have to deal with the care and feeding of our devices. We have docking stations for our PCs. We have batteries for our cell phones. All these things make communications hard. The future that we're working toward is a future in which people, at will, can have a rich communications experience any time with anyone, independent of distances or devices.

On how nanotechnology will help achieve that vision: We want to eliminate the need for people to use devices, but you can't eliminate them entirely. What we can do is create an ambient infrastructure based on nanotech sensors, which are liberally spread throughout an enterprise or even potentially on a person's clothing. You can communicate without actually having to hold a device. For example, say I wanted to talk to my kids in the house. Today, if I want to talk to the kids, I have to find them, I have to shout at them and I have to run around the house. What if I just said in my natural voice, “Hey kids, it's dinner time?” The sensor network recognizes me, finds the kids and lets them know it's time for dinner by repeating my words. This doesn't mean the kids will listen, but that's not the network's fault. You're at a cocktail party, and it's so noisy in the room that you have to shout to talk to the person next to you. A sensor-enabled world would let you talk in your normal voice, projecting that conversation to the person next to you in a crowded room. And that person wouldn't even necessarily have to be next to you. I could whisper to a person across the street and have that person — and that person alone — understand me.

On how other network technologies' need to evolve to support nano-networks: Many of [the networks] require additional non-nano research. You need speech recognition and natural language technology. You have to have higher and higher bandwidth in the network to support the communication between the users and the sensors. But you also need the services infrastructure, which is where the intelligence lies. We're starting to build some of that intelligence into IMS [or IP multimedia subsystems] today. To get to this full vision of natural communications, you'll clearly need more intelligence than what's available today, but IMS is the basic anchor.

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Seven carriers and 13 vendors are taking part in the OIF Worldwide Interoperability Demo this week at Supercomm. For more details see Telephony's Web site.
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