BELL LABS FUTURE X DAYS, DUBLIN: The “fundamental values” of the future digital world are “time and trust”, Marcus Weldon, president of Bell Labs, proclaimed this week.

“To trust this new digital reality, you need security and privacy to be protected. Technologies have to allow us to have a digital existence with privacy and trust, and securing our data. And if that’s possible, we will allow this new set of technologies to automate our lives and save us time. The network is going to save you time, that’s the story,” he said.

Unsurprisingly Weldon, who is also CTO of Bell Lab’s parent Alcatel-Lucent, highlighted the importance of the network in this evolution. “We need to connect web services to end devices, to my mobile device when I am interacting digitally, or my 3D printer. And between those things needs to be a kick-arse network. In the middle of this, the network is forming the digital fabric of the future.”

“We’ve always got to have a technology that is ten times better than the previous technology. We’ve got to do it at a lower cost per bit, because there’s not infinite money to spend on this network. And it’s not all about headline speed: it’s about making the network feel as if it has infinite capacity,” he observed.

The executive also noted that there are four key positions in the “digital reality”: cloud, connectivity, content and control (where the automation element sits).

“You’ll see the future of our industry in these four. You can map Google into this: Google is a content company in YouTube, it is in control in terms of connected car and so on, Project Loon and Google Fibre are connectivity, and it’s clearly a cloud hosting provider,” he said.

“Service providers, interestingly, were in connectivity, and a little bit in control in terms of communications platforms. Now, increasingly they are moving into cloud and some even are moving into content. You see these worlds are merging around these value paradigms,” Weldon continued.

“All of them are aspiring to get to the top, which is the control paradigm, because that’s the one that saves you time. That’s where the highest value is. The other three have value, but ultimately control is at the top because value percolates up to this layer. That’s why the network saving you time is fundamentally important, because that’s where the new value is,” he observed.