Telecoms industry must rethink the way it builds

A new book launched by the team at Bell Labs outlines why networks being built today are not ready for the demands of tomorrow.

We are at the dawn of a new era in networking that will be shaped by the digitisation and connection of everything and everyone with the goal of optimising human decision-making and automating everyday routines and processes.

This is the core message from Dr Marcus Weldon, CTO of Alcatel-Lucent and President of Bell Labs, in a new book written with his Bell Labs team, called The Future X Network: A Bell Labs Perspective.

It is the first book published by the eight-time Nobel Prize-winning Bell Labs research team in its 90 years of existence. Weldon says the book aims to set a technological context for these changes and begin a dialog that will help the industry set the right course for the profound change ahead. The change, he says, will be driven by this technological revolution – only the sixth such revolution of the modern era.

“The communications industry is facing unprecedented challenges to meet ever-evolving user demands. Over the next few years, the industry will have to re-think how it builds, deploys, and operates its networks, while making the right technology and market decisions to thrive,” said Emmett Dages, President of CRC Press. “The Future X Network provides a rare insider’s perspective into the future direction of the industry and the technological breakthroughs that will be required at the architectural and systems levels.”

The book outlines how Bell Labs sees this new technological era unfolding and the key breakthroughs needed at both the architectural and systems levels, as well the market realignments that will result. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a major area of change and the network, systems and business model innovation that will underpin this new digital future.  The book includes challenging perspectives on the Internet of Things, security, cloud, wireless, the home, broadband, the enterprise and more.

“We are at the nexus of a human technological revolution that will be different than any prior era, as it will simultaneously be both global and local, with innovation occurring everywhere,” says Weldon. “The global-local collision of markets and technologies will make this technological revolution one of the most disruptive and far-reaching – it will make the first ‘information age’ driven by the creation of the internet and the Web seem more like a preamble than an age in itself.”