May 2006 | Peter Cochrane | Seamless Freedom: The Wireless Revolution

Former BT Chief Technologist Peter Cochrane's keynote presentation to The Wireless Event (Olympia, London). 

 "The need for regulation goes from 100% regulated and controlled - otherwise you are going to run into all kinds of interference problems- to an era where 'heh! has the regulator got a job any more?' "   

View in Google Video.

 

Seamless Freedom: The Wireless Revolution

Join celebrated futurologist and former BT Chief Technologist Peter Cochrane for a tour de force of the Wireless Revolution. As an engineer Peter is passionate about an open future for spectrum, "the Invisible Wealth of Nations". "Smart digital radio technologies give us a whole raft of new freedoms", he enthuses, "but the old analogue history still seems to dog our progress. All that�s needed is a change of mindset, the technology will do the rest". Welcome to the Wireless Revolution! 

 

Excerpts 

 

•  "I am of sufficient age to know that wireless is difficult and troublesome, problematic and not easy. I was brought up in wireless and to my great delight find that it is becoming a black box industry, it is becoming easy".  
• "The need for regulation goes from 100%, regulated and controlled - otherwise you are going to run into all kinds of interference problems- to an era where, heh, has the regulator got a job any more? And I think as we go down to very very small units and as the distances covered are measured not in hundreds of metres but in milimetres, the need for any form of regulation disappears".  
• "The spectrum in any nation always looks like this (...) - it looks absolutley jam-packed. There's no space and you will be told by government that heh! this is really valuable real estate and its very scarce. Rubbish! Actually its almost not used at all. Its mostly empty space. If you get a spectrum analyzer go take a look and you can find plenty of free space. But its the old analogue idea of having bands that is the crippler. The first level of stupidity occured with 3G. It was insane, they chopped the spectrum up into bands (...). They could have shared the frequency space (...) because the competitive space was actually the service space and not the tower and the frequency spectrum". 

 

Links 

 

• muniwireless.com | Seamless Freedom: The Wireless Revolution | 30 May 2006
• Peter Cochrane
  
• The Wireless Event | 18 May 2006
  
• Open Spectrum UK | spectrum policy sessions at the Wireless Event | 18 May 2006

 

• Sandoval County, Wireless Broadband Project | Life begins @ 100Mbit/s | Peter Cochrane | 24 June 2006
  
• Peter Cochrane's Blog: The GDP threat | silicon.com | 5 May 2006
• Peter Cochrane's Blog: More wireless equals more wires | silicon.com | 4 May 2006
  
• Peter Cochrane | Emerging Telephony Keynote | O'Reilly Media Emerging Telephony Conference 2006 | Jan 2006
• Peter Cochrane's Blog: The search for spectrum | silicon.com | 10 Oct 2005 
• Open Spectrum UK & Cybersalon | Future Wireless | National Science Museum, London | 4 Oct 2005 
• Peter Cochrane's Blog: Don't hold your breath for 3G | silicon.com | June 02 2005
• Open Spectrum UK & Cybersalon | Wireless Utopias 05 | National Science Museum, London | 26 May 2005
  
• June -July 2002 | The COOK Report on Internet | Whither No License Wireless? | Peter Cochrane Tracks Decline of BT and Rise of 802.11b in the UK  | Transcript here  
• Billing Magazine | Life Begins @ 100Mbit/s | Peter Cochrane | Oct 2001
• Peter Cochrane | Copper mind-sets | British Telecommunications Engineering, Vol 13, Pt 1, pp 10 -19, April 1994