Dream team to map out tech future

Mary O'Rourke showed a clear determination to transform Ireland's telecommunications infrastructure in June, when she announced the formation of what can only be called a tech dream team or to give it its formal name, the Telecommunications Advisory Committee.

Along with notable Irish members, the committee includes some of the stellar figures in the Internet and telecommunications business today, people who were also pivotal to its history.

Chaired by Mr Brian Thompson, vice-chairman of telecoms giant Qwest, the panel includes Mr Don Heath, president of the Internet Society (the toplevel international Internet organisation, highly influential in determining Internet policy), Dr Vinton Cerf, senior vice-president at MCI and chair of the Internet Society, and the man often referred to as the Father of the Internet (he and a partner invented Internet Protocol, the language which enables computers to talk to each other over the Net), and Mr Ray Smith, chairman of Bell Atlantic and a man with years of telecommunications experience and innovative business management behind him.

Grumblings have been heard in some quarters, questioning the need for international star quality on a telecomms advisory panel after all, say critics, the same advice is available as a home-grown product.

That may be true to some extent, but people like Dr Cerf bring a breadth of digital vision which cannot be matched not yet, at least by anyone here. He is so central to the Internet's history that he has received the ultimate geek tribute a computer server bears his name at CERN, the Swiss physics laboratory where the Web was conceived by Englishman Tim Berners-Lee.

Dr Cerf is also busy at the moment planning the real "next generation Internet" (not to be confused with the ultra high-speed network of the same name being developed by the federal government in the US). This one will enter space itself, not just cyberspace, and will be used to communicate with manned space voyages and planetary colonies of the future.

Sound a little too sci-fi? Not at all when I tracked him down this week, he was out at NASA's Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the midst of a flurry of activity planning what he says most people are now calling the InterPlaNet. He launched into a cheerful account of Internauts and astronauts, but he was just as interested in talking enthusiastically about Ireland's technology potential.

He was in Ireland in mid-July for the first of several consultative meetings of the advisory committee, and pronounced himself most impressed with the State's overall technical bent and with Mrs O'Rourke "one peppy woman". He noted, "Until I came out there I hadn't realised the extent to which Ireland has created a strong technologybased economy."

He's satisfied with the initial thrust of the committee's meeting, although he wouldn't be drawn on detail. Was he recommending flat-rate Internet access, for example? He wasn't talking specifics, instead noting and this should interest Web and technology entrepreneurs out there "The outcome of this committee could be considerably enhanced by the creation of a really capitalised market."

Interestingly, the committee, he says, is pushing "to create an environment where Irish entrepreneurs have an environment to capitalise, literally, on their ideas for information technology". That, he says, has always been the Silicon Valley model, where venture capital is almost ludicrously accessible in the bid to fund the elusive "next big thing". Without an entrepreneurial hothouse environment, one can infer, infrastructure would not have been spurred to keep pace.

Tech companies have long had difficulties in finding capital investment in Europe, partly because Europe treats bankruptcy harshly ("it's practically a badge of honour in Silicon Valley", notes Dr Cerf) and partly because capital generally comes from banks, which are far more conservative in their lending strategies than the Valley's financially promiscuous VCs (the abbreviation-loving US term for a venture capitalist).

Dr Cerf sees the committee's involvement in pushing for telecommunications development as "a pump-priming action more than anything else", but he noted that he thinks Ireland now has "a good, strong, technically-conscious set of people who are going to make things happen".

We'll see and soon. The Government and industry must make profound decisions at Internet-oriented speed in, at most, the next six months. Decisions which are complex, challenging, and, require enormous vision. That's why it's so significant that the advisory committee carries heavyweights such as Dr Cerf it is, in essence, a public declaration of intent.

The Department of Public Enterprise has set up a Website for the Telecommunications Advisory Committee http://act.iol.ie

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish- times.ie