Notes for a global critical communications plan - Part 4 - Achieving affordable, secure solutions in the digital age

Part 4 looks at the complex relationship between people & technology, and how a user-driven process based on real current and future critical communications requirements should dictate the choice of the right combination of existing & evolving technology.

An essential part of being-human is our ability to manipulate our natural surroundings in order to provide ourselves with the resources to satisfy our basic needs. Satisfying these basic needs, in turn,

then allows us to apply acquired ideas and knowledge to moving up the hierarchy of needs to group cooperation, novel forms of communication and the creation of advanced societies. These advanced societies then develop even more advanced technologies through a succession of ages from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, all the way through to the Industrial Age and now the Digital Age. The application of fresh ideas leads to novel forms of technology that drive fundamentally new forms of existence. In exactly the same way as those previous ages, the digital age will challenge us to think in new ways and create new forms of organisation and communication, leading eventually to a new kind of human being.

During times of rapid, chaotic changes such as those taking place in the early 21st century, generational gaps – chasms? - can open up between the older, more experienced generation attempting to protect its past achievements and a younger, more open-minded, inquisitive, aspirational generation striving to open up a new world of possibilities. New business models challenge the old way of doing things. However, one eternal truth remains and is perhaps even more important in the digital age: all solutions must be moulded by real user requirements. A technological solution without a market or tangible need is unlikely to succeed. Requirements can change faster than solutions can be developed, so we need agile companies working with agile authorities to develop agile standards for an agile world. Does the current 3GPP world give us this?

It can also be hard to find the right language to explain this changing world. We invent new terms and new words for the new objects and services that appear in our living environment and transform the way we live. Communication itself depends on the use and understanding of a common language. Our visual cortex becomes overloaded with the multiple signs, images and messages that we must process daily; the text disappears into the background as we are led towards faster, more visual, but arguably shallower lives. The technical part of technology itself – represented by the acronyms and bulky service manuals of the 20th century – evaporates in the digital world. GSM, TETRA, LTE, SDN and NFV become fossilised acronyms only understood by an esoteric clique: users themselves no longer care about technology for technology’s sake. A brave, new service-centric world opens up where customers and end-users define how, where and when a particular solution will be used.

Successful entrepreneurs and innovators from the past can teach us valuable lessons about what the future may hold. Human behaviour can be changed forever by visionaries applying a deep understanding of what is possible, desirable and perhaps even necessary at a particular time in a particular place. The simplicity and beauty of the products designed and manufactured on a massive scale by geniuses such as Henry Ford and Steve Jobs give us clear examples of this. Ford saw a future when everyone would be mobile and then brought that future into the present by refining and perfecting production techniques focused on one simple, affordable design that could be purchased by an aspirational, well-paid workforce. Jobs obsessed about the smallest design details of Apple products and brought together multiple technological advances in single, simple devices that were/are both desirable and useful, opening up a new world for hundreds of millions of people, disrupting an already growing industry to usher in the authentic digital age.

However, even the greatest visionaries cannot overcome the laws of physics, the limits of the naturalworld and our capacity to cope with excessively rapid changes to our environment. An analogue world has become a digital world within a generation. The Internet Protocol is now totally dominant in the fixed and mobile spaces. We are moving to a “mobile first, cloud first” world of massive economies of scale, enormous data centres and the rapid virtualisation of softer, rapidly vanishing, software solutions. The relationship between the physical, digital and virtual worlds is blurring as ever more complex systems are devised to cope with the deluge of data from billions of connected devices. The consequences of one wrong decision in this new environment could be very severe indeed for individuals, organisations and, potentially, the whole of mankind in such a highly interconnected and interdependent world. The highest levels of security and resilience must be built into our solutions as all communications become critical.

For this reason, it is always necessary for strong, democratic, inclusive Governments to set out the desirable long-term goals for society with a tentative, flexible road-map of how they might be achieved. People always come first and a collective society must have sufficient power to place the necessary constraints on dominant corporations, when their goals start to diverge with the goals of society. This is not an easy task for over-burdened legislators lobbied incessantly by powerful organisations heavily and incessantly promoting their particular solutions which will undoubtedly bring specific benefits to sections of society. Legislators must strive to use the best tools at their disposal to make rulings on the costs and benefits of alternatives, designing better systems for evaluating competing models based on the longer-term social benefits. It is very difficult for profit-maximising enterprises to provide the right balance of services for public safety and critical national infrastructure.

However, humans are habit-forming creatures driven by memories of what worked and what did not seem to work in the past. It is alarmingly easy for a dominant idea, group or structure to capture power and convince society to buy into its vision and then actually make it happen as part of a self-fulfilling prophecy masquerading as an eternal truth. We become used to “a certain way of doing things” that makes it hard for us – and the generations that follow – to explore new models of reality and better ways of moving forward. During the latter decades of the 20th century, public services were privatised, financial markets were liberalised and globalised; and market forces were unleashed on an unprecedented scale. This model of reality led to increasing inequality, eroded trust, and allowed powerful global entities to tighten their grip on financial – and political - power. This model also prioritised individual, short-term goals over collective, longer-term goals that could generate better results for future generations. As market forces exploit public services for private gain, the complex social systems underpinning the economy become more fragile and prone to catastrophic failure. This trend must be reversed as soon as possible.

There are numerous reasons why markets can fail in a digital economy, where local interests and smaller companies are always at danger of being dominated by larger incumbents with greater resources and stronger global connections. Government intervention can be vital to maintaining a healthy, sustainable economy that benefits the majority of society, providing a secure environment for social and economic actors to carry out value-enhancing activities that benefit the maximum number of people. Affordable, secure solutions must be made available for everyone, and this must begin with Governments funding emergency services and critical national infrastructure projects, paying or guaranteeing an adequate wage for local public sector workers and making sure that public safety groups have everything they need to carry out their work and save lives.

There can be no trade-offs between providing dedicated access to ultra-secure, advanced communications services for public safety officers and guaranteeing access for all citizens to high-quality, ubiquitous commercial services. There can also be no trade-off between the creation and protection of massive social value and public services via a fair and robust tax regime and the need to encourage entrepreneurs and innovators to experiment and invest in new ideas, products and services that, in turn generate the economic resources from which valuable public services and the needs of the most vulnerable in society are fully funded. These are surely the natural, achievable goals of a strong, robust, caring society with a sustainable, long-term vision for the future.

There is no single technology, no single solution that can do everything that users want or need. We are gradually moving away from the “take-it-or-leave-it” approach of the past towards the pick-and-mix approach that will be facilitated by a new breed of increasingly social enterprises who understand users and offer them the right combination of technologies for their needs. The ultimate goal may well be a golden “5G Era” where multiple trade-offs are made by entities supplying different baskets of services with different QoS and QoE to different types of customers, while still allowing connections to be made by anyone or anything to anyone or anything else in real time to facilitate the best possible outcomes. It is perfectly fine – in fact, a noble aspiration – for humanity to strive for perfection, but we will have to travel down a very long and winding road to reach this particular Promised Land.

In the next part of this series, I will take a look at the players who are likely to succeed in the new critical communications space, by understanding specialised users’ needs and being able to deliver superior products and services tailored to these needs that guarantee high levels of security, privacy and reliability. Can the dominant players of today still succeed in the new world that is just beginning to take shape?