Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

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Partnering for Network Education

By Phil February 5, 2008 6:58 pm

From the UK

I spent the day at Leeds Met University. Leeds Met is the largest University in UK and was one of the first schools to join the Nortel Technology Solutions Academy(NTSA). Leeds Met have positioned the Nortel courseware and NCTS/NCTE Certifications as a mandatory element of the MSc degree in Mobile Computing & Distributed Networks.

I went to Leeds to meet with the faculty and students that are participating in the NTSA.   NTSA is a program that Nortel rolled out last year to work with universities worldwide to provide course curriculum and lab products to enable advanced education in communications as well as specific capabilities in configuring and managing Nortel products.

While there I met with Prof. Colin Pattinson - Running Stream Professor in Network and Distributed Computing and member of the Worldwide Academic Council. It was interesting to hear his views on how the partnership for education was important to creating a symbiotic blend of general knowledge as well as specific technical knowledge designed to enhance the career options of their graduates.

While I was there I did a short colloquium an the coming transformations in the industry that Hyperconnectivity and Convergence 2.0 are bringing. It was interesting to interact with the students and hear their views.....as well as how they are using the tools that enable these changes. I believe this a critical rounding of the graduates, not only to understand today's technologies and implementations, but also where we are going.

Overall an exciting visit...next stop Dubai.....

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  1. Phil,

    I was present at your lecture at Leeds met earlier in the week. I really enjoyed it, as a level one student just starting my journey into the subject I found your forward looking sumary of most use!

    The point that I found most interesting was that current bandwidth constraints limit the users experiance depending on what medium they are on. It will be a very exciting time when these limits are shrugged off and all mediums are capable of “transmitting the level of human input.”

    I’d love the opotunity to see the slide show you used again as there were many points I’d like to do some further reading on. Is It available anywhere?

    I now follow your blog with interest, thank you once again!

    Ben Waine

    February 7th, 2008 at 2:57 pm by Ben Waine

  2. Ben/Phil - Do you think we will ever get to the point where we have more bandwidth than we can use? I’m a skeptic because there are too many critical paths. I think that the industry will always be riding a wave of ‘bandwidh critical paths’. Today in my home I’m a Verizon Fios premium subsciber which means I have fiber to the premise with speeds of at least 15Mbps down and 5Mbps up. My broadband connection is no longer my critical path. But my experience is still far less than it could be because of other factors, mostly processing bandwidth of the Internet sites I connect to. But even within my home LAN, which is a 1Gbps LAN, my media server struggles to play the HD video stream I’m sending to it because of graphics processor constraints. The content format industry seems to be able to keep ahead of the transport and processing industry. Just wait until we get to holographic image processing!

    February 9th, 2008 at 12:22 am by Another Nortel Watcher

  3. ANW
    You have identified the key question, which element of the path is the barrier at any point. There are certain parts of the chain that are driven by Moore and by the disk growth, others by the network, and even others by economics. Finally, you are the ultimate limitation as you cannot process information beyond your IO capabilities (reading/writing + 5Kbps, voice = 16-64 kbps, audio = about 1Mbps compressed, video = 7-25 Mbps, wrap around video (including non-peripheral field in stereo) = about 100 Mbps, holographic =1Gbps-?. However, having a video wall that you can approach yields much higher bandwidth requirements (much as a theater needs more that HDTV as some sit closer and only see 50% of the screen, therefore there need to be 2x the pixels in both dimensions of 4x overall). If we assume that a 6 meter wide by 2.5 meter high video wall (in you kitchen/dining room for example) is to be approached to with .5 meters and not see pixels, then the field of view is about .3 meters. This would mean that to equal HDTV across the wall at that viewing distance would require 20 “screens”. For vertical, it would require about 10 “screens”. There fore this wall would require the equivalent of 200 HDTV screens to project an image that would look seamless at .5 meters. While the technology for creating such a wall is definable (if the screens were not contiguous, the bandwidth would be phenomenal. Assuming 7 Mbps per “screen”, such a wall would take 1.4Gbps to fill.

    Anyway, while there are limitations to the current model, there will always be some form of limitation, until we get to neural plugs and a network that is capable of sending/receiving at neural speed (not sure what that is actually).

    February 10th, 2008 at 6:23 pm by Phil

  4. Phil,

    OK, now can yo change channels without a 2 minute delay :)

    February 11th, 2008 at 12:37 pm by many

  5. With Multicast joins yes, with streaming directly it takes longer. However, caching can change the user interface…….

    February 13th, 2008 at 1:17 pm by Phil

  6. Dear Phil: I am M.Sci. student of Carleton University in Ottawa (Systems and Computer Engineering Department).
    As you mentioned, NTSA program is with universities worldwide, and therefore Carleton University also eligible to participate. May you kindly suggest right contacts for the topic of computer modeling and simulation of the Brain Machine, communication devices, neural network devices?
    Would appreciate very much as I have some progress in developing neural decoder and believe industry’s interest may be attracted to that area.
    Thanking in advance,
    Yuri.

    yboiko@sce.carleton.ca

    February 17th, 2008 at 8:33 pm by Yuri

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