Speech - DRCN Conference Opening, Banff

October 20, 2003 -- Dr. Roger Pederson, President and CEO, TRLabs

Good morning, and on behalf of conference sponsors iCORE, TELUS, Alcatel, Nortel, TRLabs, and the University of Alberta, welcome to Banff, Alberta – jewel of the Canadian Rockies.

My welcome address today is about 2 minutes long – about 2400 times longer than today’s snap of the finger network restoration schemes.

2400 times longer…………

That’s a remarkable feat for one of the most complex structures ever engineered by humans – the modern network making digital handshakes around the world in virtually every nation. It has taken merely a decade to encircle the world in an invisible binary cloak.

When I woke up this morning the first thing I did was check my e-mail. I expected the network to work – and it does – without fail.

That’s analogous to my car accelerating to light speed, traveling from here to Europe and back, stopping on a dime, and keeping my coffee from spilling out of the cup holder.

In May 2002, British explorer David Mills found himself marooned on a rapidly disintegrating ice floe near the North Pole. Though convinced that an airborne rescue was possible, Mills had difficulty convincing his would-be rescuers. His solution? He promptly dug a runway, took pictures of the site, and e-mailed them as proof of the plan's feasibility. Mills was airlifted out soon after.

Our reliance on networks has led to what someone has observed with tongue-in-cheek – three kinds of death in this world: brain death; heart death; and being off the network.

Networks have a beating heart in the imagination of humans. The work you have done, and will undertake over the next decade, will continue to shape the fabric of who we are as people and society – using networks as a tool in ways only limited by our imagination. We’ve spent a decade Network Building the information highway from sub-grade to passenger ready. As we continue to add passengers (more than 600 million last time I looked), they will find new ways to use networks, and with that will come raised expectation about its ability to meet our lifestyle, convenience and productivity needs and demands. We at TRLabs term this phase of network evolution – Value Building. Now that we have increasingly ubiquitous networks, what do we want to have these networks do for us?

For those of you familiar with the world’s first TV video game – Pong, we are in essence in the midst of the Pong generation of network use - the end of a beginning of how networks will continue to evolve. We can be confident that the Network of the Future will be faster, hurdle first and last mile broadband access challenges, be more mobile, and incorporate a range of new technologies – from VoIP to RF-ID to distributed computing to P2P and ad hoc capabilities.

And yet ….and here’s the challenge…. to support new user demands the network will have to be even more reliable. Networks will increasingly reflect human desire for technology to be easy to use. We will interface with it – in voice, with gestures, in highly complex forms of visualization. We will want to interact with the network in real time, placing a broad spectrum of quality of service demand on networks. Today’s viewing of images will become, for example, tomorrow’s real-time distributed visualization exchange of medical diagnostic imagery.

A bold new world of content and applications lies ahead – that will rely on a solid network bedrock. On behalf of TRLabs, a thank you to Dr. Wayne Grover and his Network Systems team for bringing together here today 145 leading minds from 17 countries on four continents – designers and builders of next-generation reliable networks. Collectively, you are a symbol of horizons so much broader produced from a networked world so much smaller.

Thank you for coming and we look forward to three days of fruitful exchange.

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