The future of telecommunications. (Technology).

Despite its recent dramatic downturn, telecommunications is poised for a revolutionary resurgence, thanks to four technologies that will make it more personal and decentralized. The winners will be you and those companies that don't cling to the past.

A striking difference between computation and communications is the degree to which computers are personal, decentralized, and viral, whereas the telecommunications industry is not. The cost of installing physical plant or buying spectrum licenses is so great that only a few -- and increasingly fewer -- large and usually global companies can afford to be the carriers. Telecommunications is thus a top-down, centralist spectacle of and for big business. But that is about to change.

Four concurrent, very different but strong trends will combine to force a shift as big as Bell's invention in the first place. Unlicensed spectrum, ad hoc networks, things that link, and asynchronous communications will turn telecommunications upside down.

It is too easy to dismiss the current and dramatic downturn in the industry as a combination of overbuilding, flattened growth, license fees, badly managed debt, and inflated valuations. These reasons are so plentiful that it is natural to assume the underlying industry and technology would be stable, if only we could manage it right. That is not true. In parallel with these tumultuous socioeconomic times, there are less evident but deeper technological changes ahead.

1. Spectrum Management

More and more, telecommunications is becoming wireless, but we are just at the foothills of this change. The gating issue is spectrum (think of it as airspace). A single fiber can carry more bandwidth than the usable spectrum as a whole and as we know it. Nature only gives it to us once. For this reason, we manage it as a scarce resource, like real estate. We chop it into small parcels, protect their sovereignty, and administer them like airport security -- no trespassing, please.

Yet modern technology can change and is changing the basic ownership model for spectrum through device intelligence and modulation techniques (how we propagate signals through the air). Think of it this way: Radio signals do not really "interfere" like football players. They add up (and subtract) and are hard to separate afterward -- more like mixing paint. The separation rakes intelligence. Twenty years ago we did not have the means to put such intelligence in devices, so we had to be more disciplined and authoritarian in how we managed isolated signals. Today, we can accommodate much more "noise" and "interference," which will allow us to use spectrum very differently. You may have heard of Wi-Fi or 802.11b, the standard created to allow wireless functionality comparable to the Ethernet for local area networks (LANs). Keep in mind that 802.1lb runs on the same spectrum as your microwave oven. It is growing so fast that it makes the early Internet years feel slow.

2. Viral Telecommunications

Because some parts of the spectrum are unlicensed -- to accommodate such mundane appliances as cordless phones and garage door openers -- we have the opportunity to experiment with free and available frequencies. Rather than trying to build a transmitter that would cover a square mile or more, try thinking of each device as going a few hundred feet and relaying its messages to the next device(s), to the next, and so on.

Or, consider using unlicensed spectrum (as I do) to connect your home devices, but allowing your neighbors to share it. In my neighborhood in Boston, this works for about 20 homes. A neighbor down the street has done the same. Slowly, the city is being blanketed. Anybody can use mine free within a few hundred feet. The deal -- call it a social contract -- is that I can use yours when I am in the vicinity of your home.

Guess what: we've just built a telecommunications network, by the people, for the people, with no license fees, minimal capital investment, and lots of bandwidth. 802.1lb is 11 megabits, which is 20 times greater than the most optimistic projections of the next generation of cellular, so-called 3G.

3. Things That Link

The demographics of telecommunications is about to change dramatically, as well. The dominant population of the Net will be things, not people. By things, I do not mean laptops, desktops, TVs, or handsets; I mean common objects, appliances, and everyday artifacts that reach out to the Internet to gain intelligence. In the near future there will be more Barbie dolls on the Internet than Americans. Common users will be light bulbs, dog tags, scuba tanks, T-shirts, and a host of much finer-grain things.

The past two decades have been marked by the difference between bits and atoms. This difference, albeit in some disrepute right now, has brought us e-mail, e-commerce, and elearning. The next 20 years will be driven not by the difference between bits and atoms, but by their similarity, be it genomics or nanotechnology. As part of that, in the very near future, we will see more embedded computing (bits in atoms) and a vast number of things connected. The telecommunications landscape, particularly the networks, changes as a consequence. One change is that telecommunications becomes more asynchronous.

[4]. BEING ASYNCHRONOUS

Asynchronous communications of the past meant a letter, which two centuries ago could separate the writer and the reader by months. The alternative was teal-time, face-to-face technology.

The development of telecommunications since has done two things: a) it has extended teal-time beyond physical presence via voice, video, and, more recently, text e-chat; and b) it has brought asynchronous communications into smaller time frames of minutes and hours. In truth, each of us is leading a less teal-time and mote asynchronous life.

Once bits are freed from the constraint of real-time, the telecommunications infrastructure will be used very differently because, within reason, there is no relationship between the time needed to deliver a signal and the time needed to consume it.

The recent collapse of telecommunications, the poster child of the digital world, can be explained by early indications of each of the above four trends. For example, it is not that Internet telephony is replacing traditional circuits; it is that we are calling less.

The business model of telecommunication is accordingly and painfully changing. Charging per minute, per mile, or per bit will soon be history, replaced by a far more challenging world of subscription, advertising, transaction, and adding value to the bits. As this happens, those telecommunications companies that cling to such arcane concepts as "revenue per user" or "minute of voice," to cite two commonly used, present-day industry measures, will be as obsolete as vinyl records.

Of course, the real winner is you. It is nor that a three-minute call to Paris will cost 5 percent what it used to (it already does, so being free is not that important). It will be that you are making fewer calls. You'll be online more. Work and play, colleagues and family, weekday and weekend, love and duty will become increasingly seamless. That is the future of telecommunications.

Nicholas Negroponte. speaker, author, and the founder and chairman of MIT's Media Lab, explains how digital technology is fundamentally changing telecommunications and gives insights into the digital age. Negroponte recently started a venture capital fund, Portos, for early-stage Internet companies. He can be reached at [e-mail]