OFC Rump Session: Reimagining global comms
Imagine a world plunged into digital silence. No texts, calls, emails, or internet.
At this year’s OFC conference in San Francisco, three teams of telecommunications experts will tackle a provocative thought experiment as part of the Rump Session: if Earth’s entire communication infrastructure vanished overnight, how would they rebuild it?
With a clean slate and ten years until implementation, the teams will outline what they consider is the ideal replacement global network.
The Rump Session’s audience will choose the best solution.
The scenario
OFC is asking the three teams of experts to imagine a world where global communication has been destroyed following an exceptional event.
Thankfully, only the network has been destroyed: manufacturing facilities, R&D sites, and communications expertise remain intact. So humanity has a chance to design a brand new network unencumbered by legacy equipment.
The ten-year implementation window is to allow emerging technologies to be considered as part of the new network build.
Considerations
Gazettabyte asked two telecom specialists outside the optical community how they would tackle the networking challenge.
If all the communications networks are down – fixed, mobile, satellite and broadcast – then it makes sense to get a simple universal comms system up and running as fast as possible, says William Webb, a consultant and author.
That would ensure there is enough communications to keep the population informed and allow those working on more complex systems to have communications while doing their design work.
For Dean Bubley, analyst and founder of Disruptive Analysis, the scenario triggers many questions.
Where will the demarcation point be between optical, wired and wireless networks?
“Is wireless just for the last kilometer or the last 10 meters of the access network?” says Bubley. “Or does wireless have a role for long-haul and transport as well, especially given the lower latency, and higher speed of light through air or a vacuum than through glass.”
Bubley wonders how to build in an expectation of continued innovation. Avoiding lock-in or static solutions is important: “Standards are fine, but there needs to be scope to try new things as well.”
Should Government oversee the restoration project or is the best approach to encourage competition and free market wherever possible? “Where does regulation fit and what does it focus on?” says Bubley.
Webb says the quickest way to get going is satellite coverage and portable antennas so people can use it when on the move even if it is nothing like as convenient as cellular.
The next stage would to launch High Altitude Platforms (HAPs) – tethered balloons and similar – to deliver cellular coverage relatively quickly.
A mix of tethered balloons near cities and high-altitude drones for other areas would deliver cellular comms within months, bringing cellular online at 4G-like capabilities.
“We can then work on a combined fixed-mobile solution. The ideal solution would have one fibre network delivering comms to homes, offices and cellular/Wi-Fi base stations, and one set of masts, ” says Webb.
Webb would forego network competition: it’s better to build a near-perfect network and then have a wholesale-retail split.
“Build from cities outwards, and stop building when the HAPs and satellite solution has the capacity to manage residual premises. Assume fibre to the edge of premises and Wi-Fi inside,” says Webb.
He would not rebuild cable networks or copper networks.
“But this sort of thing is best done by getting a group of us together and debating and discussing,” says Webb.
Just what the OFC Rump Session will do.
Origins
Antonio Tartaglia, one of this year’s Rump Session organisers, came up with the evening event’s theme.
“The Rump Session has always been my favourite OFC event. Joining the OFC Technical Program Committee, I was asked to contribute ideas,” says Tartaglia. “As a member of the public, I asked myself: ‘What is the Rump Session you’ve been dreaming of?’”
Tartaglia, system manager and expert in photonics technologies at Ericsson, is keen to learn what the teams of experts will come up with.
His educated guess is that optical technologies will take the lion’s share of the new network.
“It will also be hard to ignore low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite technology, that provides coverage where other technologies would not make economic sense,” says Tartaglia. Optical technologies will also play a big role here.
“But even in a brand-new world, I expect LEO satellites to complement, not replace terrestrial mobile networks as we know them,” says Tartaglia. “They are the result of decades of deep optimisation.”
“As scientists and engineers, we spend so much of our day-to-day work on improving the current state-of-the-art networks and taking that small next step forward in terms of technology, product or a solution,” says Dirk van den Borne, another of the Rump Session organisers.
He finds it intriguing to imagine how engineers would design the network if they could ignore existing installed equipment.
“This session will be thought-provoking and might spur great conversations at the conference and beyond,” says van den Borne, director of system engineering at Juniper Networks.
Rump Session details:
- When: April 1st Time:
- Evening time: 19:30 to 21:00
- Location: Rooms 203-204 (Level 2)
Books of 2024: Part 3
Gazettabyte is asking industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In the penultimate entry, Prof. Yosef Ben Ezra, Dave Welch, William Webb, and Abdul Rahim share their favourite reads.
Professor Yosef Ben Ezra, PhD, CTO, NewPhotonics
My reading in 2024 continued to augment my technical knowledge with insights on how to bring innovation to the market.
As part of our mission to shift the industry with innovative products, I have been focussing on decision-making as the key to transitioning from technology development to product-market impact and fit. Our company entered a new phase at the beginning of last year, moving from an early-stage technology start-up to a customer-centred growth company. In reading The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries, I better understood how we must apply evidence-based decision-making even as we establish a more agile environment where rapid experimentation and learning from customer input takes precedence over extensive planning and development cycles. This insight was critical as we moved from research to delivering a product that met market demand.
Another instrumental read in 2024 was Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. With our team growing quickly, the company leadership began facing significantly broader input and issues tied to decision-making that reached beyond engineering. Kahneman’s insights on the interplay between two systems of thinking—intuitive and deliberate—provided an expanded mindset for dealing with a range of cognitive perspectives and biases that influence contextual, practical, and effective decision-making, which is vital to our progress.
The final book I’ll reference has proven to be an essential follow-up to an earlier read that played an instrumental role in starting our company: Blue Ocean Strategies. We strongly identify with this, so Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, was an excellent follow-up for me. Ultimately, it spotlights the importance of originality and boldness in innovation. It aligns strongly with our aim to avoid imitation and incremental improvements to connectivity and instead seek transformative advances that offer substantial, long-term value.
I identify strongly with the idea of pursuing a daring and groundbreaking product introduction that reaches new heights, like the distinction Thiel explains in horizontal versus vertical innovation.
Dave Welch, CEO and Founder, AttoTude
One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson. A fun read about a similarly fascinating time of technology, politics, and human behavior.
William Webb, Independent Consultant, Board Member and Author
I much prefer fact to fiction and often read books about politics, economics and philosophy. But occasionally Amazon suggests something different and I give it a try. Two such random suggestions this year stood out.
The first is Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson. A true story of a woodworker in Scotland with his own small company that has to suddenly change tack when a major client cancelled a huge order. It’s beautifully written with a love for woodwork, craftsmanship and friends. It’s not normally my sort of thing, but this book is one that you won’t put down and will make you think again about what’s important in life.
My second suggestion is completely different – Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI by Anil Ananthaswamy. The book sets out the mathematics behind how large language models and other AI systems work. It is written for someone with fairly rudimentary mathematical skills. It isn’t a light read, but I found it valuable to understand just how models are trained and the compromises and choices behind it all. AI is so important for the future and now I feel that I’ve got a good handle on how it works.
Abdul Rahim, Ecosystem Manager, PhotonDelta
The book I enjoyed most this year is Overcrowded: Designing Meaningful Products in a World Awash with Ideas, by Roberto Verganti.
The book treats innovation as a gift towards the beneficiaries of innovation and presents a framework for innovation of meaning. This framework is different from design thinking, which is geared towards finding solutions to a problem in an empathetic manner. Roberto’s framework requires a sparring partner who challenges, questions and criticises in the journey of innovation of meaning. The photonics integrated circuit (PIC) community can learn a lot from this book.
The other book I read – well, listened to – is How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. This one needs no explanation.
