CU alums and Internet company execs discuss the 'Broadband Revolution'

By Bill Steele

If you've been thinking about starting a high-tech business to cash in on the Internet boom, you might start by getting a Cornell degree.

Irwin M. Jacobs '54, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm Inc., speaks at the broadband conference April 14. Charles Harrington/University Photography

That, at least, is the impression you'd get from attending the annual conference of the Cornell Society of Engineers, the alumni association of the College of Engineering. This year's meeting, held Friday and Saturday on campus, was titled "eConference@Cornell, the Broadband Revolution: Changing Communications Technology" and billed as "an opportunity to explore an engineering topic in considerable depth," but it might as well have been called "How to succeed in business by really knowing what you're doing."

Conversations in the halls suggested that many of the attendees were engineering grads who have launched their own companies, and the invited speakers were their role-models: Cornell engineers and other graduates who have achieved a high level of success in business by combining business savvy with technical know-how. While describing the progress of their companies, the speakers also painted a picture of what the broadband revolution will mean to consumers.

"Broadband" refers to transmitting large amounts of data in a short time, like the sort of Internet connections Cornell staff and students are used to on campus, where text, sound and pictures flow in and out of computers at 10 megabits (millions of bits) per second or more. When you go home and fire up your 56-kilobit (paltry thousands of bits) modem or flip open a cell phone, you're back to "narrow-band" communication, where web pages take 15 minutes to load and voices sound like you're underwater. Cable modems, satellites and DSL (Digital Subscriber Line, a way of sending high-speed signals over ordinary telephone wire) will change all that, speakers said.

We will live in an "always-connected, multi-device world," according to Mayo S. Stuntz Jr. '71, chief operating officer of the Interactive Services Group, America Online Inc. His colleague, Mario Vecchi '69, America Online vice president for broadband development, added that "We're going to remove people from the explicit act of getting connected. You don't get connected, you are connected."

Irwin M. Jacobs '54, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm Inc., said we'll be able to put it all in a coat pocket. "Very quickly you can be carrying around as much computing power as you now have on your desktop," he announced. He described technology his company is developing that will send four megabits per second of data over a one-megahertz radio channel -- in other words, a cell-phone channel. The device you use to access all this will be about the size of a cell phone but will have a video screen and will let you make phone calls -- perhaps with video -- surf the web, get your stock quotes and more. Global positioning system (GPS) technology will be built in, so you'll always know where you are. In that future, according to Jacobs, all your devices will talk to one another: your desktop computer will know everything your pocket device does, and vice-versa.

AOL, Stuntz said, will be busy rolling out new services to entice consumers to hook up to the new systems. "Habit and affinity for brands will lead consumers to new devices and broadband," he said. Giving a hint of what the AOL/Time-Warner merger will bring, he offered a preview of "Web TV," a service that will wrap interactive data displays around a TV picture. You'll be able to look up background information on the program, chat in real time with others watching the same program, maybe even buy the furniture you see actors sitting on, Stuntz suggested.

Ken Goldman '71, senior vice president and chief financial officer of @Home Network, described how his company is rolling out a packaged service, Excite@Home, which combines Internet access with an array of online services. He predicted that at least 25 million Internet users will have broadband access within three years, and that "The dumb ISP is out," he said. "You don't make a business model out of just access."

Behind the scenes, Goldman and Vecchi said, their companies are building fiber-optic networks and "data centers" to handle the new traffic. Others are laying fiber within and between cities and some, like John M. "Jack" Scanlon '64, vice chairman of Global Crossing and president of its subsidiary Asia Crossing, are running cables between continents. All agreed that the "last mile" --the system that connects the high-speed network to your home or pocket -- is still the big bottleneck.

Toby Berger,Cornell professor of electrical engineering, introduced a session reporting faculty research on wireless communications and video transmission, with presentations by Zygmunt Haas, professor of electrical engineering, and Venugopal Veeravalli and Sheila S. Hemami, assistant professors of electrical engineering. Collectively, their research focuses on new technologies to get more information through the narrow "pipes" of wireless connections through compression and error-correction, and on ways to organize the connections of many simultaneous users.

Robert Maroney '72, president of Sigma Optics of Sunnyvale, Calif., chaired and organized the conference.