A look at the future AT&T and Sprint

When writing about future technologies, it’s easy to forget about the operator. While focused on current business plans and near-term improvements to networks and services, carriers aren’t ignoring the long term, but they often loathe discussing their plans for fear of tipping off the competition. By comparison, equipment vendors often are more than eager to talk about the research and innovation wending through their labs — their future bread and butter.

In researching this month’s interactive feature, focusing on the evolution of wireless networks and services over the next 15 years, I felt it imperative to include the operators. After all, they will be the ones expected to deploy these new technologies, offer these new converged services and adopt these new network architectures. Two U.S. operators more than obliged. From AT&T Mobility, CEO Ralph de la Vega agreed to an interview, and Sprint offered up both Russ McGuire, vice president of corporate strategy, and Mathew Oommen, vice president of device and technology development, to discuss the evolution of Sprint’s services and network, respectively. While my interview with Oommen will be posted at a later date, the interviews with de la Vega and McGuire are now both posted on TelephonyOnline and on the interactive feature site.

As you’d probably suspect, neither de la Vega nor McGuire laid out a detailed footprint of their future network or service plans. They probably couldn’t, even if they wanted to. Many of the technologies that may inform the wireless network of 2025 are still in the conceptual phase today, and it’s hard to predict what applications or services will be in demand five years from now — to say nothing of 16 years. But both de la Vega and McGuire were able to discuss in detail what a future world of wireless hyper-connectivity would be like for the average person. They also were able to identify some of the key challenges the industry faces in creating that world.

For de la Vega, the biggest hurdle is the inadvertent creation of hyper-complexity alongside hyper-connectivity. The more the industry innovates, it seems, the more it expects customers to understand the technology they use. That notion has to go away, de la Vega said. If AT&T is going to truly connect a myriad of everyday devices to the network and the mobile phone, it has to work “like magic,” he added.

McGuire sees the industry’s challenge as one of context. Many of the applications we will rely on in the future already have been developed; many of the devices we will use already are connected to the network and to one another. But those links are just connections sending raw data. What information a device receives, how it is filtered once it gets there and how that information relates to other information will be the problems the industry will have to tackle in the future. McGuire discusses how a “social grass” will grow, allowing different applications, different networks and different devices to intuitively parse the most pertinent information needed for any given context.

Again, we want your participation in the interactive feature. (You can read more about the concept here.) Tell us what do you think about de la Vega and McGuire’s portraits of the future wireless carrier or paint your own. The I-feature site has its own comment engine, or you can simply comment on the individual stories and blog postings.

E-mail me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com.