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Twice in recent weeks I have found myself in unfamiliar places listening with amazement to people worrying their way through issues and ideas that their technological neighbours have long-since resolved. It is as though the diverse tribes of technology, huddled together in their own camps, do not yet fully understand the creed of convergence that they would all proclaim. Last month the London summit for the mobile telecoms sector on Long Term Evolution (LTE) was most certainly an event that I would never have paid to attend. I was not invited but agreed at short notice to stand in for a speaker who couldn’t attend – and I took the opportunity to turn up early, well before the scheduled panel discussion. Turning up early was a really good move. I discovered that I was also expected to speak for 20 minutes in a session on alternative technologies.Apart from the opportunity for practising impromptu speaking it was fascinating to hear the LTE delegates trying to grapple with the need for greater spectrum efficiency, smaller cell sizes and the challenge of coping with greater throughput capacity. In the music industry there has been much discussion about the ‘Long Tail’ theory which claims that on-line music sales defy ‘normal’ market behaviour. At this Mobile LTE conference I found myself asking the audience why they needed to keep promising consumers future performance levels that defy gravity. I reminded the delegates of the Italian children’s story of Pinocchio, where the puppet’s nose grows longer every time he tells a lie. In contrast to the Long Tail music market I wondered whether the mobile phone industry had adopted a Long Nose theory – continually stretching the promises and taking an ever-increasing time to deliver the impossible. It was if the lessons of over-hyping 3G and WiMAX were yet to be learned. Setting ambitious goals can, of course, inspire innovation. It may be wonderful to reach for the moon but it would be sensible to know before the launch that there will be some worthwhile benefit when you actually achieve lunar landing. These LTE delegates, concerned as they were about delivering on the mobile promises, seemed blissfully unaware of their dependence on the Next Generation of Fixed access – the ubiquitous availability of fibre capacity (FTTH) needed for the back-haul of millions of high capacity Femto-cells. What was interesting, and competitively comforting, was that these opponents of iBurst were quite unable to contemplate any future other than the standard mass market, vertical integrated, approach that justifies large-scale investment in sub-optimal equipment. Meanwhile at another unlikely conference - ‘The Future of Local Media’ - I was asked to stand in for a delegate from the Communications Management Association. Once again I found an almost total disregard for the impact of convergence of different technologies. I now understand what people mean by being ‘from a different planet’. The delegates, (mainly broadcasters, programme makers and newspapers) were most definitely from Planet Poetry. The chances of them ever understanding what the network infrastructure builders are doing on Planet Plumbing seemed remote. These odd encounters with distant tribes were surprisingly stimulating. It made me think about iBurst in different ways – it reminded me just how brilliantly different iBurst can be in a world of unimaginative conformity. It also made me think about the next iBurst Forum. It may be nice to meet old friends and reaffirm truths that are already self-evident. But what would be really interesting would be to encounter some delegates and speakers from other planets – the clinicians who need iBurst for Connected Health, the Local Governments who need secure mobile access to boost their productivity, or the large-scale property developers who need both fixed and mobile next generation access to make sure their 21st-century cities are places where 21st century communities can grow and prosper. As the credit-crunched economies of many countries struggle to respond to the global fiscal fiasco I am sure that it is not just in the UK that policy makers are beginning to understand the need for Poets and Plumbers to work together. David Brunnen
Managing Director, Groupe-Intellex, UK 
See also :
http://www.groupe-intellex.com/editorials/7-cma-leaders/165-poetry-plumbing-future-local-media.html | 
