John Roese’s Blog CTO, Nortel

In the past several months, I have been involved in a number of discussions around the world, where governments are trying to push for “next-generation” broadband as a government-sponsored initiative. The reason for this is that in the last decade many countries have used broadband roll-out as a way to stimulate economic development and GDP growth. In fact, many studies and reports (including the data in the graphs below) show clearly that where Internet and data services have been deployed, the GDP has expanded at a significant rate.

Source: Michael Minges, TMG Telecom, and ITU World Telecommunications Database Statistics, 2003.

It ...

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Location: Flying to Vancouver

First, let me apologize for being absent from blogging for a bit. I’ve had an unusually busy and complex several weeks. Hopefully, you all found the guest blog from Andy Lippman interesting and had a chance to see some of the recent dialog I have had with other bloggers, such as Om Malik (GigaOM). One of the challenges of blogging when you have a few other full-time jobs is finding quality time to write and, ironically, when you’re not able to write it’s amazing just how much interesting content and dialog emerges, creating a pretty significant backlog of topics. I hope to tackle many of those topics in the coming weeks.

Over the last ...

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I’m pleased today to host a guest blog from well-known industry thought leader Dr. Andrew Lippman. Andy, one of the founding directors of the MIT Media Lab, is half-way through a year-long sabbatical with Nortel as our first (but certainly not last) Visiting Fellow. The possibility of Andy doing his sabbatical at Nortel was explored by both sides during our Technical Conference last year, during which MIT hosted 300 of our top engineers for an evening event. A professor of Andy’s stature taking a sabbatical to work for a corporation is quite unique and says a great deal about Andy’s opinions of Nortel and our vision.

Among our key objectives in bringing a visionary like Andy into ...

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Location: Ottawa, Canada

Thanks to all for the comments and dialogue on the previous posts. Today, I'll get back to discussing technology, which is the real purpose of this blog.

One of the goals that drives me and certainly one of the big challenges and opportunities for the industry is to figure out how we can achieve a better-than-reality communications experience through the use of technology.

I wanted to share with you an event that happened at Nortel this week that represents a step on that journey.

Yesterday, I held a global employee session within a virtual mixed-reality world, using a prototype platform we’re investigating as part of an incubation effort. We had 150+ people participating in the virtual environment, hundreds of others ...

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Since it’s the beginning of a new year, I thought I would go out on a limb and posit some predictions on what we might expect to see in telecom and IT in 2008. As with all predictions, these are at best qualified guesses, but let me try to explain why I think they might happen.

#1: WiMAX (production) and LTE (trials) will get some real air time and more people will see that they offer fundamentally different experiences and have different ecosystems than either cellular or wireline networks.

Today, far too many people look at emerging 4G technologies and try to compare them to 2G and 3G cellular networks. The challenge with that is that the total experience, ecosystem and ...

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Location: Ottawa

Over the last several months, a number of you have left comments or asked questions about Nortel’s strategy and direction. Some of you have also left similar comments and questions in other industry blogs and forums.

I thought an interesting and more personal way to tackle some of those questions – instead of just doing a long blog entry – would be for you to hear directly from George Riedel, our Chief Strategy Officer. So, just before the holiday break, I took the opportunity to do a podcast interview/have a conversation with George while we were both at Nortel’s headquarters in Toronto for various meetings.

I essentially asked him many of the questions that you’ve been asking ...

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Location: Ottawa, Ontario

You've heard me talk in past posts about how we need to work as an industry to turn the challenges of Hyperconnectivity into opportunities. Nortel's Carrier Networks team has taken the conversation to another level by speaking directly to consumers about what they'd like to do if they had access to more powerful wireless networks.

I've invited Carrier Networks Vice President Scott Wickware to share some of his thoughts about the research that was announced today. Scott also poses 3 polling questions at the end of his post related to "What do YOU want or need from the next generation of wireless networks?" I'd be interested in your answers....

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One of the key drivers behind Nortel's Unified Communications strategy is the realization that success in the applications business of the future will not be based on who can build the best single application, but rather who can present the most comprehensive and useful experience to the user.

In the past, the success of an application has been measured based on its ability to address a very specific function (ERP, e-mail, CRM, ...). In the future, the very definition of an application will change – as will its measure of success – to instead be a composite entity that embraces all of the relevant information and tools needed to have a complete and unified collaboration experience.

Early examples of ...

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Location: Ottawa, Canada

It's been a great week for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, which I've talked about in a previous post. As a Board member of this effort, seeing the XO laptops go into mass production, seeing the first country orders come in, and now with the Give One Get One (G1G1) program at its mid-point, an idea is becoming a reality.

This week, I was on BNN after the market closed, talking about OLPC and, while there are still lots of people who know little about the effort, the fact that major news outlets and media are seeing, touching and understanding the possible impact of this effort is making the ...

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Location: Ottawa, Canada

On Monday of this week, Google and a few other folks (actually a pretty wide range of semiconductor companies, handset vendors, cellular operators and others) announced the long-awaited G-Phone (Google Phone). What’s interesting, however, is that it really wasn’t an announcement about a phone at all, but rather about: an alliance called the Open Handset Alliance; some software that might constitute an operating system based on an open interface; and a software developers’ kit (SDK) to access the functions of the phone and, possibly, the mobile network for the purpose of enabling flexible applications development.

This announcement rivals the hype of previous “earth shaking” technology such as the Segway human transporter. Because ...

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