Q&A: AT&T’s de la Vega discusses the three-screens of the future

Q: Can you tell us about anything AT&T Labs is working on now?

A: There’s a lot of exciting developments on how to connect devices at very high bandwidths over very short distances. Stuff that you’d think would be very difficult to move between devices is going to be done in seconds. I think how you transfer information is going to dramatically speed up, and how you connect devices to that information will dramatically change. It will be near instantaneous in the future compared to the long amounts of time it takes today.

Q: Is there anything AT&T offers today that is representative of the types of services you want to offer in the future?

A: One of the most wide-open developments is the App Store with Apple. It’s a great example of everything we’ve talked about, not in the future but today. You have an environment which requires partnership, entrepreneurship, hardware, software, e-commerce and great applications. When they were all brought to bear in an easy-to-use fashion, the usage of those applications just skyrocketed. But it was that ecosystem of bringing entrepreneurs and software developers together with a great device and a great network—that was the magic. I think we can repeat that many times over as we look at making things simpler on TVs and other devices that today are relatively hard to use. Sometimes the simplest applications are the game changers.