The future is here. Can it be managed? Key technologies are arriving, but their deployment poses major challenges

Chief Executive, The, July, 2005 by William J. Holstein, Russ Mitchell

To take a snapshot of the future, visit the center of the universe for broadband and mobile technology. The South Korean capital of Seoul is circled by a lightning-quick fiber-optic network, pumping high-speed content into the high rise offices and residences that extend to the mountainous horizons in this city of 12 million people.

On the streets, buzzes, chirps and musical cadences of customized ring tones are sounding off everywhere. Teenage girls chatter into matchbook-size cell phones that they wear, like jewelry, around their necks. Young adults catch up with their text messages while riding crowded subway. In cafes, it's not unusual to see business colleagues sitting around a table in suits and ties talking individually into their mobile handsets, oblivious to one another. On their walk back to the office, they can turn on a new service that delivers real-time television onto their color handset screens.

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It's all part of the country's bid for "ubiquitous computing," a dream shared around the world. Elsewhere it might be called "embedded" or "utility" computing. But the common aspiration is that everybody should have access to voice, music, video and data services on any device they choose--wherever they happen to be.

Increasingly, it seems the technologies that will enable this vision already exist or are close to being perfected, panelists told the 1st annual World Information and Communication Technology Summit in Seoul (organized by Chief Executive in cooperation with the Ministry of Information and Communication and Saturn Communications). Third-generation mobile telephony is rolling out in key markets (see story, page 41). Companies know how to build the underlying networks that will accommodate converged offerings (page 43) and the semiconductor industry is rapidly developing new chips (page 46). Moreover, it's becoming clear that proprietary software cannot completely dominate this emerging world order (page 48).

Ironically, then, the key challenge in building the technological future isn't technology.

One major conundrum is policy. Will governments allow cable operators to offer Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which could completely disrupt the business model of major telecom providers? And how will government agencies that regulate telecom service providers and those that regulate broadcasters cope with the fact that the two industries are blurring? Will governments create partnerships with the private sector and articulate national technology visions to force the adoption of standards so that networks can be "interoperable," or seamlessly integrated?

For chief executives, it's clear that the information technology and telecommunications industries, once considered separate, are in the process of being smashed together and the new rules of engagement will have to be defined. "As the two industries come together and this capability of embedding invisible computing around the world starts to change how we communicate and how we interact with our services, there will be a lot of challenges to promote an open standards-based environment," said John Giere, chief marketing officer of Lucent Technologies.

The key question for business is, What will customers pay for and how can we organize ourselves to deliver that at a profit? Current distinctions, such as the one between fixed line and wireless telecom providers, may no longer make sense. "The difficulty is not in the technical space," said Daeje Chin, minister of information and communication. "If you make the networks interoperable, that's a done deal. That's easy. But when you talk about service operators working together, and having them converge their services, that's the key. It's a licensing issue and a business model issue."

So a period of disruptive change lies just ahead for almost all players in IT and telecom. It is in places such as Korea that many chief executives are looking for hints of how that is going to happen. The country has achieved remarkable success in broadband, handheld devices, semiconductors and display devices. "The strengths are that we have a world class IT infrastructure and a lot of subscribers," said Chin. "Fortunately, there is a big pool of consumers who want to adopt early innovations. That's a big benefit to us. Once we figure out the products and software, we can test them, debug them and finish them."

Giere, whose company has maintained a Bell Labs research presence in Korea for 25 years, says his company has learned about home networking and also about software that allows a Korean subscriber to play a game on his or her home television screen, leave home and continue playing on a mobile device and even go to a friend's home and "ignite" that same session on the friend's devices. Lucent is exporting some of this know-how to other markets.

Siemens has been in Korea since the early 1960s and is involved in many different sectors of the Korean economy, but in the ICT industry, last year acquired 51 percent of a Korean networking company, which is a key player in building metropolitan-level Ethernet switches. Josef Lorenz, senior vice president of Siemens, said most of the switches that Siemens is building in Asia are based on Ethernet technology and are in sharp contrast with those it is building in Europe and North America, which tend to be Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks.