The Observer, March 25, 2005
Volume XXXVII, Issue 22
Lecture reveals family tree of telecommunications
Studying at Case can lead to great things, as Dr. Farokh Khatibi proved in his presentation on the evolution of telecommunications last Friday in Nord Hall.
Khatibi is a three-time Case degree holder in electrical engineering and applied physics. He joined a small company entitled Qualcomm in 1990, which has developed into a leading research organisation during his employment time there. He helped define, design, build and update the technology behind cell phones and helped increase the technology available to the public. Due to the fact that he started a research project that led to Qualcomm's commercial packet-based infrastructure, the technology of cell phones has improved at rates people never expected.
Khatibi's lecture explained the reasons behind why the market for cell phones has grown enormously over the past 10 years and spent a large portion talking about how the technology has improved because of customer and culture needs. He concluded by suggesting what to expect in the near future, and compared this to the capabilities of technology just a few years ago.
He began by explaining the process of a gradual demand for cell phones. He first discussed the "first stage" 1G technology. "The main purpose of this development was the mobility of phones," Khatibi said. "These first cell phones were not very powerful, using three watts."
He said that researchers saw a market for the product and developed roaming technology. "This is where you can go anywhere around America and Europe and make a call. This was a very big selling point," Khatibi said. He pointed out that this was successful because "after this, everyone wanted a cell phone."
Khatibi then discussed how there was an increasing demand for capacity and quality: "People want one object with access to a lot of services." Therefore, Qualcomm began using Cell Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology, which Khatibi described as "getting us all on the same frequency." He named this "2G technology: digital." The emphasis was on this radical new use of CDMA, producing a speed of up to 2 megabytes per second and allowing the cell to be used in many different places. This was ideal for people travelling frequently on business trips, for example.
The "early thesis was to separate voice and data," Khatibi said. "Therefore, you could connect to the Internet and get data, but you could not make a phone call from the same phone. We thought this was the most efficient and fast use of power." Customers, however, wanted a combination of voice and data, and so the two domains were combined.
"We have enabled the technology that allows voice and data to carry each other," Khatibi said. "There is a new area of network evolution, based on an IP network." The concept is that a group of servers are calculated on to the cell phone, which allows quick Internet access any time. "This was a time when the surge in cell phone sales increased dramatically," Khatibi noted.
After CDMA technology became a commodity, camera phones became the next development, as capabilities in graphics, camera, video, and LCD resolution soared. Khatibi made a comparison with color display: "It is amazing how things evolve. The use of color display was thought to be stupid at first, and now nearly every phone has one. Now video telephoning is a radical new concept. It seems ridiculous to me, but within a few years it will become normal."
In order to emphasize the rates of evolution, Khatibi said: "a mobile phone processor today compares to a desktop PC of the 1990s. Cellular technology is only lagging by five or six years." In the near future, he predicted, we can expect many developments in the evolution of telecommunication. Soon, your cell phone will have the capability to know your schedule, and automatically connect with traffic news to tell you whether you can get to an appointment on time.
"We are developing bigger monitors on smaller phones so television channels can be accessed. I will be able to ask my phone questions like, 'Which is the best restaurant in this area?' It will perform this task and I will receive the answer fast."
