The words Technology and Art are often linked at the surface – the shape of a building, the style of a car, the function and form of a chair.  Below the surface, inside the inner workings of buildings, computers, complex systems and mechanics, the linkage between art and technology is less immediately obvious but still very real to those engaged in ‘making a difference’.  Mathematicians  seek ‘elegant’ solutions, engineers see ‘poetry in motion’.  The creative forces that drive artists to shock the establishment are close cousins of those that drive designers to defy conventions and deliver ‘disruptive technology’.

These desires to make a difference are not inhibited by the complexity of systems or science.  We may marvel at a painter’s skill with brush, paint and canvas – not least because we know our own artistic limitations.  Within the highly specialised worlds of science and technology most of us are barely aware of the daring high-wire performances of those who produce the stuff that eventually becomes part of everyday life.  These people inhabit strange worlds and struggle to be understood – even amongst fellow technologists in adjacent disciplines.  They protect their borders and agonise over when to expose their ideas to the world at large.

Much of the technology that we use everyday has developed incrementally; an initial idea is overlaid by successive improvements and occasionally joined (integrated) with some separate stream to produce a novel twist.

Arno Penzias, Nobel prize winning scientist, reduced the entire evolution of telecommunications (and much else) to three basic phases – (a) making things, (b) making things that work, and (c) making things that work with other things.  Most of what is claimed to be ‘new’ comes from the latter category and is a great driver for economic growth but there are still a great many artistic souls striving for originality and then making them work to the standards that users have come to expect.  As one technology is stretched to its limits (or often just beyond) another arrives to take up the race.

In the leading edge examples of new Call Centre designs enabled by broadband connectivity we can just glimpse the shape of phones to come.

From the rudimentary use of the Internet for voice telephony, and the convergence of video and graphics and music and games and the whole gamut of networked and remotely hosted business systems (a broad and comprehensive interpretation of ‘applications services’) we can realistically assemble a fair idea of what will be deliverable in the next 2 years.

Fragmented, frustrating and very much the preserve of geeks, these strands will sooner or later be woven into a richer fabric  – packaged and given new marketing tags.  And for those wedded to the way things were, it will add up to yet another example of ‘disruptive technology’ - not only changing what we as consumers expect from Service Providers but also confounding the rule-makers, upsetting the apple cart in all quarters - from government telecoms regulatory policy to the business life of thousands of people engaged in selling and supporting these services.

The acid test of when the tag ‘disruptive’ is fully justified is to check whether incumbents are trying to block it.  There’s a rich history of resistance to innovation – leastways until incumbents have had time to catch up with market realities.  The French gave up on trying the block satellite TV’s cultural invasion, IBM ceded that PC’s were gaining ground over mainframes, the Chinese are still struggling with aspects of the Internet (aren’t we all?), Mobile phone companies are learning to live with multiple sim-cards and sure enough some countries are trying to block Voice-over-IP Internet phone calls. But I digress…..

To start with, it will not always look like a phone – it may well be a lap-top, hand-held or other computing device – but may equally be part of countless other devices, cameras, DVD/CD players, TV’s,  calculators, games consoles or the bedside clock-radio.

This cocktail of convergence will come about because a key characteristic will be the freedom of being untethered – not wired or fixed but wire-less and wandering about.  This new nomadicity is best described as ‘portable’ rather than ‘mobile’. Whilst we’ve all grown used to making phone calls when traveling at high speed it remains a fact that for anything other than SMS messaging, 95% of mobile data users are virtually at a standstill.  The laws of physics are still going to curb the quality of our communications but even the proponents of 3G mobile phones will eventually produce interoperable kit that might begin to conform to customer expectations.

These customer expectations will be high because of the second key characteristic of the unwired and wandering nomadic networker; that is that the normal expected standard will be a broadband connection.  Not dial tone so much as Internetone - always there when you want it and possibly sometime when you don’t.  By broadband I mean, of course, something far better than 2Mb/s and fully conformant to international definitions – unlike the relatively narrow aspirations of wired DSL.  But I also mean low latency - the responsiveness that you might get in the wired world and which is vital for interactive data services (and games players).  These data services include voice telephony, for in this new wider wire-less world everything is packetised and uses IP.  As much as establishment pundits might decry early primitive low-quality versions of Internet Telephony it is a fact that major Telco’s everywhere are moving towards using VoIP switches in their trunk networks, even if they are not yet telling their customers this.

Consider what happens when you have 2, 3 or even 4Mb/s to play with.  The voice call could be studio quality and still leave room for an adjacent videostream, producer feedback and a text prompter.  An incoming voice call, as with the current crop of ‘call centres without phones’, could trigger the display of a mass of textual and graphical data interspliced with relevant interactive software, emails and voicemail.

“look I’ll show you his email”, or “listen to what she just said” or “last time we spoke you promised……”, or “while we talk about that let’s have some background music.”  Is this a call to you – the real business you – or to you –  Daddy – or to you in any one of the multiple personas that we are or that we seek to project?

Portfolio People – not just at work or at home or in the hotel – are not the only beneficiaries of converged communications because even those of us who claim to lead simple, pure and uncomplicated lives will not be able to resist a technology that is not just better but so much cheaper than today’s technaff trinkets.

And this is where the ‘shape of phones to come’ gets really interesting.  The technology is now proven to deliver radically different, fully converged, broadband enabled, spectrally efficient, low-cost, ubiquitous (none of this out of range nonsense), pervasive (inside or outside buildings) complete communications up to about 4Mb/s per user and nomadic up to about 65mph.

From a consumer viewpoint it might be considered a scandal that its not yet happened in Europe.  If, however, you happen to be working for a mobile phone company or a Telco or a mobile handset manufacturer or a promoter of wireless LAN technology for your community, or keen on ADSL (like tilting trains, the latest expensive ‘fix’ and alternative to providing a properly engineered infrastructure) then you will see all this as disruptive and downright unwelcome. Fortress phoneland is on the back foot and the question is how they might respond.

The likely answer is that they’ll respond to the new  technology in 3 ways.  Firstly it will be rubbished – to delay market take up.  Secondly they’ll join the bandwagon when the pioneers have proved the performance and the market has been educated.  Finally they’ll be stimulated to think again about the comfort of copper and the madness of mobile.

Those copper assets that they largely inherited from the taxpayer will begin to look like a burden.  Those expensive 3G spectrum licences already look like a hole in the head.  We can expect vigorous campaigning to allow them to use a little tiny bit of the 3G spectrum for something really useful.  And we might detect some of the more astute planners thinking through the scope for delivering affordable fixed location broadband via fibre to the home.  Right now, if you are unfortunate enough to live in an area that has been fibred, you cannot even get wideband ADSL – it only works on copper.

The technologies that are coming together are all individually proven.  It is their combination, their integration and interoperability that will be so devastating.  If any single element deserves to be highlighted as 'new’ it is the adaptive antenna technology and base station processing systems from ArrayComm of San Jose CA that is shifting the mindsets into high gear.

Think mobile and you think cellular – 10 miles down the road you should get a seamless handover to the next cell – if there is one.  Everywhere you look there are mobile phone masts - base stations beaming out stuff for you and everyone else on the off-chance that you might be within range.

Just imagine that every user had their own personal cell. Just imagine that the stuff for you was sent only in your direction and nowhere else.  Just imagine that the same frequencies could be used for umpteen others at the same time.  And just imagine that it wasn’t based on linkage with old analogue phone systems but was digital (IP) from end to end – just like the Internet without the dial up.  And just imagine that it is interoperable with seamless handover from the wireless LAN at home or the office when you step outside and wander out of range.

Just imagine that a single 5MHz band (80 times less than the old 2G mobiles) is enough spectrum for the whole of Europe with huge number of diverse wholesale and retail service providers.  Would that be an ‘elegant’ solution?  Is this poetry for many ears?

And if anyone has any doubts about the reliability of these designs, it just happens that the very same technology has been fingered as  vital for ‘homeland security’.

So when, I hear you ask, will the revolution dawn?  Some of this stuff is ready now in Australia.  Korea, America and Russia are not so far behind.  Global manufacturers like Kyocera and LG Electronics are investing millions in productisation.  My best estimate for Europe is (beyond localised 'pioneer projects’) to be starting in 2004 and rolling out to 2007.  Five years from now we will all have very different expectations, very different suppliers, very different service choices and very different ways of using these new technologies.

There is a common view that pioneers are people with arrows in their backs.  Because of real customer needs (with scattered and remote communities) innovative Nordic ventures led the world in the early take up of mobile services – but then, just like wireline ADSL, the industry got obsessed with stretching that technology beyond its natural capabilities.  Now Europe is in the junior league of broadband-enabled regions but a new technology is arriving and its time to step back and look afresh at the shape of phones to come.

The poet and singer Leonard Cohen was almost certainly not thinking of technology when he penned his psalm in praise of inspiration – but maybe, just maybe, there’s a pioneering technologist somewhere for whom Cohen's poetry meant so much more.

‘You lifted me up, You set me free,  You gave my soul a beam to travel on.’

This text was written in November 2002 as a script for a short radio talk.  Run-time 12 minutes.