Fundamentally, e-business is about communications: a buyer and a seller performing a transaction, a business engaging in an electronic conversation with a prospect, a manufacturer moving a digitized design for an aircraft component across the Pacific.
The communications infrastructure being created to enable those interactions has far-reaching implications for how e-business will evolve. One of the challenges we have set for ourselves in Research is to ensure that the pace of that evolution is accelerated through exploitation of both the underlying hardware technology and innovative software.
Today, most e-business takes place over a local-area network connection or a telephone line, but increasingly we will find ourselves untethered. In this vision of pervasive computing, mobile devices will be fully functional clients that will greatly expand people's ability to engage in e-business. Achieving this vision depends on the convergence of many technologies, and we are deeply involved in most of them, from our ultra-high-speed silicon-germanium technology to Wireless Application Protocol software that will make possible a new class of cellular phones with built-in browsers. Already, we are prototyping the key components of the client and server software for these mobile browsers.
Of course, bottlenecks can be caused even by wired connections, especially analog phone lines to the home. Ending this bandwidth famine by bridging the famous "last mile" between the high-speed backbone networks and the home will likely involve at least one of the three leading options: digital subscriber loop, cable modems and wireless local loops. Each has advantages and disadvantages. But all will allow end-users to move from tens of kilobits per second up to the tens of megabits per second (Mb/s) required to handle a full spectrum of multimedia communications. Signal-processing experts at Research are engaged with the standards bodies that are mapping the future specifications for digital subscriber loops, using the existing twisted-pair telephone wiring to handle up to 50 Mb/s data rates for homes close to the central switching station.
To meet the demand for data transport unleashed by faster network access, the backbone networks themselves will need to dramatically increase in capacity. Here, the real challenge is not so much the optical fiber bandwidth as the ability to efficiently switch and route traffic. A new class of scalable, extensible, high-speed packet switches, developed at Research and offered through IBM Microelectronics, has become the chip of choice among leading communications equipment providers for building the next generation of intelligent networking hubs.
Besides the switch fabric itself, the network must provide intelligent functions, such as security and guaranteed quality of service. To meet this challenge, networking equipment providers are inventing a new class of highly specialized devices -- network processors -- that will allow network managers to download software to update routing protocols and even add new functions to an existing network hub. Our goal in working with the IBM Microelectronics network processor team is to add key research expertise in scalability, security and quality of service to the IBM product family, and to ensure that we can maintain our leadership in this increasingly competitive marketplace.
In short, the explosive growth of communications capabilities poised to become available to end-users will vastly enlarge the resources enabling e-business to flourish. While this will provide enormous business opportunities for all of IBM and our OEM partners, it will equally extend the opportunities for our customers to grow their businesses and better serve their own customers.
David McQueeney is vice president of Communication Technology and
director, Zurich Research Laboratory.
