Transcriber: Marta Quirós Alarcón Reviewer: Denise RQ
Many of you might find it surprising,
but I've got something in common with Clint Eastwood.
And that's that we both get completely over excited
about things that are invisible.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And while I'm pretty sure
that I'm not going to over-exite anyone here tonight,
I would like to think that I could make you see something
that you might not necessarily look at every day
and see beyond the invisible.
For him, was the invisible Barack Obama on a chair,
and for me, it's the lowly radiowave,
something that you use every single time
you make a mobile call or you use your sat nav.
This is a bunch of our students from our lab
engaged in cutting edge telecommunications research, as you can see.
But what they're actually doing,
and they've done this especially for this TEDx event,
they're actually reenacting something I saw a group of kids do.
What those kids were doing
they were in an area that had a really poor signal.
They'd somehow figured out that higher up, the signal was good
so that if they carefully coordinated jumping and pressing "send"
on their text message, the text messages got through.
I was completely intrigued by this,
because they clearly knew nothing about radio waves,
they clearly knew nothing about electromagnetic spectrum,
and yet, they had a really tangible interaction
with that very intangible medium.
I just think that's very, very fascinating.
I'm afraid to say
that also engineers have a far more boring way
of making radio waves tangible.
We speak in terms of frequencies,
and, in fact, the whole radio wave world is organized from a frequency perspective.
So there's a finite range and, within that range,
we put frequencies aside for TV, for radio, for public safety,
for mobile phones, for military uses, etc.
And the really, really good thing for me
is that very many of you want to do more and more things
that need radio waves to function.
There's six billion mobile users in the world,
all wanting more data, wanting richer data,
wanting it faster.
We're not now just interested in communicating with other humans.
As the world becomes increasingly instrumented with sensors,
we want to actually also talk to the objects in our lives.
So that's hundreds of billions of more wireless connections.
A very obvious question,
and a question many people are asking today,
is are there enough radio waves to go around?
The answer, if you look at the situation currently,
is that there aren't.
If you actually take a formal frequency allocation chart,
it actually looks very much like what I've drawn here:
it's crowded, there's very, very little space,
it's really, really hard to get access to the empty frequencies,
it's absolutely impossible to move anyone out of the frequencies they have already.
Why should this matter to anybody here?
What's the tangible effect of that on your lives?
I think the simplest way I can say that
- sometimes, it can be hard to find
the exact, right way to say that for people -
but the simplest way I can say that
is think how frustrating it is to send a text message on New Year's Eve,
and it'll just be like that every day of your lives
if we don't do something about it.
Engineers have been looking at this situation
for the past number of years,
and one thing that people began to do
is they began to look behind the scenes and say,
"What's really happening in those frequencies?"
"How are they being used?"
It's actually possible to go out there with a measuring device
and figure out what's happening,
and look at how occupied or how busy those frequencies are.
This very precisely-drawn diagram actually looks like something
that we would get from a spectrum analyzer
when we measured how busy frequencies were.
Suppose, for example,
that this was a bunch of frequencies that are owned by a specific service.
What you actually begin to see
is that some of those frequencies are really, really heavily used,
some of those frequencies are completely lightly used,
and some of those, not at all.
Despite them being empty, or despite them being lightly used,
no one else,
except the owner of those frequencies and their customers, can use that.
The idle capacity just lies there, wasted.
Essentially, what we're doing to this resource
is we're taking a resource that is by nature plentiful,
and we're managing it into scarcity.
Some resources are naturally scarce, like oil.
but what we are doing
it's the rules that we're choosing that's making this scarce
and making it a resource that we cannot get plentiful access to.
I think it's really, really interesting to think of the resource like that,
because that's what we do to a lot of resources in the world today.
For us, what we want to do, is manage the outer scarcity,
we want to manage it back into abundance,
and that has been a challenge for radio wave, for radio engineers
over the past number of years.
The really difficult thing, it turns out,
is that radio waves are very, very hard to share.
It's hard to allow other systems and other devices into your space.
The best way for me to explain this at the moment
is to think about this venue.
If, for example, somebody decided to grab another microphone
and stand up there, and talk at the same time as me,
we couldn't share the space
with both of us speaking as loudly as I'm speaking now.
We'd interfere with each other, we'd cause interference.
I've been sitting in the audience for the afternoon,
listening to fantastic talks,
and this is the most attentive audience I've ever seen in my life,
but think for a minute.
Suppose you were a bunch of engineers that I was teaching,
and you were slightly less attentive,
it would be possible for some people to whisper and not interfere with me.
But if everyone was to start whispering,
it would interfere with me eventually.
Alternatively, and I'd hate to stop anyone,
if anyone would like to shout adoring comments at me from the audience,
I personally wouldn't consider that interference
even if other people might.
But my main point here is that interference is contextual.
It completely depends on the circumstances.
The more open and undiscriminating you are
in allowing everyone and anyone into the situation,
the more unforeseen the circumstances,
the more uncertain, the more unexpected things that can arise.
The key message is that traditionally,
we have always designed technology for certainty and for expected circumstances.
What we need to do now, what we need to do for the modern era,
is we need to rethink how we design,
and we need to design for the uncertain, and we need to expect the unexpected.
How do we do that?
The answer actually is, as we make radios, like people.
People are agile, they can look at circumstances around them,
they can understand that they have to behave in a particular way;
they can learn, they can change their behaviors.
This is actually what we do when we design the radios of tomorrow.
We take a mobile phone, which is already a fairly fantastic and amazing device
with huge amount of capabilities,
and we add much more to that device.
We give it eyes and ears by adding sophisticated sensors
that allow it to observe the world around it.
We give it a brain through drawing and techniques
from artificial intelligence and machine learning.
We give it guile and the ability to strategize
by using things called game theory, mechanisms from game theory.
We make it sociable by designing protocols
that would allow radios to actually communicate with each other,
negotiate with each other, bargain with each other.
We make those radios highly flexible,
so they don't need to behave in the way they were designed for, at the beginning.
They can change their behavior.
Ladies and gentlemen, this kind of radio can share,
it can look out there, it can spot what spectrum is free,
it can understand
whether those radio waves, those frequencies, are completely free,
whether it needs to share it with other people.
It can ask its pal radios if it's annoying them,
it can temper its behavior to do that,
and it can strategize how to get the most out of that.
It's a sociable radio, it's a society of radios,
a social network of radios is the way I see it.
Where are we today?
Where we are at the moment is that this kind of technology is emerging,
but unfortunately, the rules that -if you want to put it like this -
that would breathe life into this kind of technology
are really slow to follow.
If you have to stand back and ask why that, it really is because of fear.
There are many, many reasons that people tend to fear new and changes.
I think the first one, and it's a really, really important one:
this technology signals an erosion of authority,
it actually moves the power away from the central authority,
from the regulator, from the particular political entity,
out into the distributed machines themselves.
They figure things out, they decide what interferences,
somebody doesn't tell them what it is.
The second way I think it challenges people and brings fear into them
relates to the fact it challenges
how we can own and control networks of the future.
To explain that,
I need to just step back for a minute and explain a related point.
There are probably many people in this audience,
especially a TEDx audience,
who are probably very interested in Internet freedom,
net neutrality, or have opinions about ACTA, and PIPA, and SOPA.
The reality is that the vast majority of people
who think about these things or engage in debate about them,
do so and think about all of the things that sit on top of the physical network.
It's about the content and the copyright issues.
It's about the applications and access to data.
It's about the protocols
and whether those protocols are snooping or are providing privacy.
It's never about the physical entity of the network itself.
In my opinion, we ignore the physicality of the network,
the network infrastructure, at our peril,
because whatever we do to free up the situation higher up the layers,
we undo that if we don't think
who owns that network, who controls that network,
and where can I play a part.
When I stand back and say
the kinds of technologies that I'm talking about here
can actually bring new freedoms,
I want you to think a little bit about WiFi.
WiFi is: - and another term for this is - a user-deployed infrastructure.
What I mean by that is that everybody here can deploy WiFi.
We don't need to be an expert.
We can just go out and put it out there.
But the term "hotspot" is a particularly apt term for WiFi
because that's what it is,
it's spots of connectivity.
The rules only allow WiFi to work at certain frequencies and certain powers,
and it limits the range,
so you never have a large scale network competing with other large scale networks
that are owned and controlled by other entities.
Suppose now we change the rules,
and we allow the kinds of radios that I'm advocating to operate,
what we will see is that these radios could easily be deployed by any of us.
We don't need to be an expert
because the expertees will reside in these radios.
They can seek out new frequencies,
they can seek out frequencies that are better for longer range,
they can alter the power, they can change their behavior,
and they can knit together into a blanket network,
into a large scale network,
a network that would strike fear into the incumbent.
The final thing I'd like to say in terms of fear,
and I think this is another important point,
these radios are completely hard to define.
They're hard to police, they're hard to certify.
They're unbounded.
Putting this into context
- I think you can think of it this way, and this is my equation for the evening -
If the Apollo 11, with the electronics of a toaster, got somebody to the Moon,
I think we have to say
what can a very, very sophisticated machine
- like I've described here, and like it's evolving all the time -
what kind of things they can do,
what kind of networks and emerging properties they have.
There's huge advances that can be made
and for me, that's a fantastic opportunity;
and for many people, that unboundedness is something that's fearful.
What I want to say to people here tonight is forget the fear,
think about new, and think about new worlds order.
These radios can offer us many new opportunities
and, in a way, they really reflect what's happening in our lives already.
I spoke about them challenging authority,
and we see that happening all around us
through citizen journalism, through e-citizenship,
through crowdsourced science,
where we come from the bottom up and challenge the powers that be.
They also challenge how we consume,
so we're moving away from ownership to access,
we're moving away from hyper-consumption to collaborative consumption.
Whether I'm talking about couchsurfing, whether I'm talking about dublinbikes,
or whether I'm talking about sharing radio waves, that is all the same thing.
They also reflect the change in economic status that we see in the world;
that bottom-up notion coming in again,
the kickstarter approach, the funded approach,
and I think that's really, really interesting.
Finally, I think they hugely reflect the trajectory
that the mobile phone is taking.
Once upon a time,
it was completely unimaginable that anyone would create content
other than experts who'd been trained in this;
and now everybody does.
Once upon a time, it was completely unimaginable
that anyone would design applications
except software experts who worked with specific hardware,
and now, hundreds and thousands of apps are uploaded every day.
While currently it's inconceivable
that a large-scale blanket network would be built by anyone
except the central authority and an expert network planner,
I think we can be the network builders of the future.
So I'd say, ladies and gentlemen, occupy spectrum and embrace the new.
Thank you.
(Applause)