I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you during this, the
fifth annual SUNY Technology Conference. I think that the title of the conference
"The Three R's of Technology" is appropriate and I hope to touch
a little on each of the three R's before I'm done this afternoon. I believe
that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 offers hopes of great rewards but
not unless we face the realities of various risks in providing new services.
I hope to provide you with some insights and context for the Telecommunications
Act of 1996 by discussing our opportunities and problems as resource managers
and service providers at America's largest public university system.
First, however, a couple of cautionary notes.
One: As a former Senior Fellow of the Annenberg
Washington Program in Communications Policy and
a former policymaker at the FCC, I may have a different take on issues than you. Let me
share my basic assumption with you. When I talk about Telecommunications
I mean the notion of using wire and wireless services to communicate and
distribute information of all types. You should consider the implications
of this definition. You may agree or disagree with this definition, but
I don't believe this is an unusual definition.
Secondly, my remarks are not meant to be taken as prescriptions for the
future. I'm not advocating any of the specific services I discuss this afternoon.
Rather, I will question you about telecommunication services with regard
to our students. I prefer to think of this conference session as a time
where I can ask you to examine some of the issues I perceive as substantive
in our mission to serve the students of SUNY.
Lastly, we need to constantly remind ourselves that every thing we know
about telecommunications is probably already obsolete! That may sound like
a wild statement, so let me explain myself more fully. I wouldn't categorize
myself as either a technological determinist or an economic determinist.
But, I think that the evolutionary life cycle for technology is so short
and the rate of innovation so rapid today, that being a manager in the telecommunications
marketplace today is a bit like being the first pilot to test the space
shuttle. Often, we do not have an opportunity to adequately understand all
of the components creating or modeling change before new components are
added to the slipstream.
In this sense, I believe that we are operating a little within the realm
of chaos theory. It is not possible to grasp the nature of all of the changes
in telecommunications. Having said that let me also state that I think change
is a defining factor here. And we may not be able to see beyond the limits
of the horizon to see what's coming next.
I have another way of thinking about this. And it is an image that I prefer.
I like to think of myself as a real life Ian Malcolm. You may have recently
seen Ian as he saves San Diego from the killer Tyrannosaurs in Steven Spielberg's
Lost World and, of course, Ian Malcolm predicted the chaos of events that
occurred in Jurassic Park.
The telecommunications revolution is a bit like the Tyrannosaurs , loping
off parts of bodies of various telecommunications service providers and
companies, with no seemingly explainable reason for acting in a particular
way. Action and Reason appear to be polar opposites. As Nicholas Negropointe
points out, " There is a perceived polarity between technology and
the humanities, between science and art." I would like to add one more.
Within SUNY, there is a perceived polarity between service providers and
faculty. At the moment many faculty are teaching the same way that they
learned. The academy is using many of the same techniques for teaching that
it was using in the early 13th century when European universities began
springing up. So while there is this whole technological revolution occurring
here, there are relatively few SUNY faculty members in the audience to share
these developments with you.
So, having prefaced my remarks let me begin.
The first of the three R's at our technology conference is RISK.
The telecom world is a scary place. We face many risks related to technological
systems failure everyday. Inadequate planning for backing up systems or
lack of funding to create backups provide fertile soil for our nightmare
of the week. We face risks that security systems can be compromised. We
risk choosing the wrong systems suppliers, and delays in software upgrades.
The list seems daunting, and so we practice risk management to the best
of our ability by developing strategies for meeting these and other risks
head-on. We develop strategic plans for assessing our risks, providing timely
frames for technological conversions, and in-service conferences like this
one to discuss our problems as a group.
But, the risks I see as most serious are threefold and they are interrelated
to telecommunications technology and our mission at the University. First
we face the risk of ignoring telecommunications competition. This is a serious
risk and it will increase as the persuasiveness of PCS wireless communication
services increases.
Let me ask you to consider the following questions:
How many of you can identify the proportion of students who are using an
800 number service to gain access to one or more different long distance
providers for their calls? Is that a small or large percentage of campus
subscribers? Is that number trending down or up? How many students who own
personal computers are experimenting with Internet phone service? Do we
know whether long distance use on campus declines as e-mail usage increases?
Are we at risk of losing market share because we aren't adequately competing
with other service providers?
If you haven't considered these questions, you face numerous risks.
Number Two.
I believe in competition. I think that competition sparks innovations in
the marketplace. I think that true competition drives cost towards marginal
cost and lower cost often benefits the consumer.
So, let me ask you this question regarding the RISK of competition.
Do you think it would be possible for a telecommunications company to file
a suit in state court requiring SUNY to unbundle all telecommunication services
on state university campuses and make those services available to students
on a competitive basis? Would that be a good or bad thing for students if
competition was to occur?
During Q and A, I would like to hear your take on this issue, but I think
that we should remember that the name of the game in the Telcom Act of 1996 is competition. Now not all competition is good. It is
possible to 'cream skim' certain services and not improve the standard of
other services or lower the costs in services. As an example of this look
at the decline in the standard of call blocking since the Bell breakup.
The number of calls blocked since divestiture has risen ( in various parts
of the country) from an average of 1 blocked call in 100 before divestiture
to as many as 22 out of 100 today in some places. That percentage of failure
to connect is dangerous to the growth of Telcom services.
Number Three
I believe that college professors suffer from a lack of clear image. Many
people perceive college faculty to be unrealistic thinkers. Many feel we
are paid too much for spending too few hours in the class. Evidently the
governor believes this. Worse yet, faculty often reinforce this notion by
letting false impressions persist in the minds of their undergraduate students.
(Graduate students are more realistic in their assessment of faculty)
I maintain that these false impressions are nothing compared to the way
the telecommunications providers have failed to legitimize themselves and
their services as reputable and fair to the student body. Every day of every
week, I hear complaints from students about their phone bills being too
high, that customer service takes too long, that computer networks are down
and e-mail doesn't work, that printers don't work, that on-line services
aren't available, that there aren't sufficient terminals on campus. The
list goes on. Basically students are complaining about the fact that there
isn't enough choice on the campus.
Of course, these complaints are not unique to SUNY service providers. The
second Common
Carrier Scorecard recently released by the Federal Communications Commission
describes the substance of the 38,000 consumer telephone complaints and
over 25, 000 written letters of complaint that it received last year. Overwhelmingly
the complaints can be categorized as falling into one or more of the following
areas:
Not dealing with valid complaints quickly without passing the buck.
Not providing consumers with more information about their services
Not improving the quality of customer service programs
Not maintaining better billing and service records.
Let me state this as emphatically as I can. Students perceive telephone
systems and computer services providers on campus as amorphous, faceless
organizations who are generally unresponsive and uncaring. Now, I did not
say that students perceived individuals working within those organizations
as unresponsive and uncaring, but by and large students tend to believe
they are receiving overpriced and undervalued services on college campuses.
If we do not takes steps to rectify poor customer service or correct false
impressions, we face significant erosion of student support.
In some cases services are less than what they should be, but by and large
we have failed to treat students with respect as the important customers
that they are. Let me ask you this: If we called in J.D. Powers to assess
student opinion about the quality, cost and flexibility of telephone services
on campus (for example), would your service rank at the top? Some where
in the middle or at the bottom?
November's American Demographics magazine suggests that we need to pay particular attention
to the way students perceive the quality of service they receive. The number
one attribute of 'quality' among people of college age is 'how college and
how well something performs' according to a recent survey. So, maybe AT&T's
new commercials featuring teens using the a computer to morph a photograph
and net to send romantic messages isn't far off the mark for creating an
image of 'cool'. But, closer to home take a look at your billing, your advertising,
and your material explaining services. Are they cool? Maybe you're at risk
when you and your audience aren't really communicating well.
Also, if you haven't graded yourself by comparing your service and costs
to those in the outside world, you are facing increasing risks that your
services may be marginalized by outside technology in the near future.
The Second R of this conference is REWARD.
I think the potential for reward is tremendous in the telecommunications
field. The 1996 Act goes a long way to provide opportunities for those seeking
new revenue streams. So let simply ask you a few questions to see if you're
thinking about new potential revenues streams.
How many of you are offering a bundled service to students? For example,
do you offer paging and number forwarding along with regular services? Do
you offer discounts for calling circles to friends and families? Do you
have an on-line student directory search engine up and running for students
on the campus web? How are you currently using the Web for advertising and
marketing?
Rewards in telecommunications marketplace are possible if we consider what
services we need to have in place in the year 2000 and again in 2005 and
2010 right NOW. For example, I think the current set up for technology within
SUNY throws away precious bandwidth by marginalizing the value of computer
services not directly related to classes and research. This is a mistake.
A recent survey suggests that under 30's believe the Internet will surpass
television as the most pervasive mass media before the year 2010. Will SUNY
have enough bandwidth to service the predicted and latency demands of the
new IPNG protocol for full motion video, audio and other technologies our
students are going to demand? Are we going to charge for these services
or build usage rates into residence life fee schedules? The campuses that
settle these issues successfully will reap rewards under the Telecommunications
Act.
Writing in February's Communications
of the ACM, David J. Farber, the Alfred Moore
Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Pennsylvania states
that several technologies will come into their own during the next 15 years.
They include direct broadcast satellites, mobile communications spurred
by the deployment of personal communications systems, and the widespread
usage of multimode telephones.
So, let us start planning for the future now. Will you promise a student
that she can retain her telephone number for the entire time she's at your
school? Could she take that number home with her and get a specialized ring
from the campus number forwarded to her home number?
Will you tier your access charge rates based on gigabyte bandwidth and give
students the software to make free long distance or video phone calls to
any or all other SUNY campuses using Internet phone, CU-SEE-ME or some other technology? Will you form partnerships with
AT&T or SPRINT to offer wireless and portable phone/ computer access
anywhere on campus or at home, for commuting students? Have you develop
software so students could punch in an access code and form their own MUDDS
or MOOS for group projects or entertainment purposes when they get the urge?
Farber says that what is important is the challenge of facing a future in
which gigabit-speed networking will be considered slow. Attacking the new
bandwidth switching and speed problems will require the talents of people
from every area of the University, from computer scientists to telecommunications
specialist, from communications professors to sociologists. Rewards will
be there for people willing to experiment and willing to face incredible
new challenges.
The last R at our conference is Realities.
Reality is an interesting word. It suggest something firmly planted in the
present. Something based on tangibility . But in reality our expectations
are evolving very rapidly. NYU Professor Carl Hausman recently mentioned
to me that he found it interesting how the reality of the Net had changed
everything.
Five years ago whenever you mentioned the word 'network' to a liberal arts
student, she thought you were talking about a television network. Mention
the word network today and she'll think you're talking about the Internet.
Our realities are based on our expressions of the past and the future in
a relationship of our understanding about the present. Consider the following
three statements:
Telecommunications a now subset of computer science.
Computer science is now a subset of communications.
Communications are telecommunications transmissions.
Which of the previous statements are true? Or, are they all true and can
they co-exist within separate realities? Statement one could have been true
five years ago but today there may as many people who believe statement
two as there are who believe statement one.
Again, I don't want you to think that I'm hold up in my Virtual Ivory Tower
(VIT) worrying over meaningless semantic questions. Let put a different
cast on reality and use the examples described by Marjory
S. Blumenthal, Executive Director of the National
Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board.
A key issue for the future of Internet services is how much demand there
will be for high-bandwidth symmetrical communication, such as video conferencing
and on-line video. These applications are likely to be critical to the future
mission of the University.
Depending on who you are, your reality about what should be done can be
altogether different. Facility providers doubt that dorm and commuter consumers
will want to transmit much video or establish large scale commercial web
servers in the near future. We know that many of the experiments run by
the Bell operating companies to provide video on demand have failed. Similarly
interact cable demand has been slow and companies like TCI and Time-Warner
have pulled the plug on many experimental systems they were running. The
fact is that to date most of us who've read the literature are frustrated
by the lack of hard data on which to base engineering calculations.
On the other hand, some hardware people and software geeks who are used
to relatively rapid product launches, the customer related development process
and innovation applications are frustrated by facility providers' conservative
stance. Referring to the Internet they say that there has been growth in
the number of applications, number of users, and average amount of individual
use, which makes it clear that we need more capacity.
Which version of reality do you believe?
Even though uncertainty has caused service providers to be cautious, the
integration of telecommunications and the Internet must become an important
element in your vision of the future. New implementations of the substrata
will enhance the quality level of the application. At the moment, IP provides
the definition quality for the computer network. For the telephone network,
signaling system 7 is the equivalent engine.
Today you are looking at both the network technology substrata and the application
level simultaneously. How you perceive the interplay between the network
substrata, which you control and the application level of telecommunications,
which the customer controls defines your current reality.
I encourage you to think flexibly. Remember that a key feature of the Internet
is the way it can leverage the capabilities of various computers to be more
that the sum of its parts. And the findings of the National Research Council
appears to substantiate that significance. In their report The Unpredictable
Certainty: Information Infrastructure Through 2000 they say: "The Web
appears to provide what PC owners have always wanted: the capability to
point, click, and get what they want no matter where it is."
I urge you to adopt the reality that telecommunications service will be
pivotal technologies on college campuses for the next decade. SUNY must
be at the forefront of this technology if it is to compete for the best
students in the coming years. Thank you very much.
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copyright 1997 by Fritz Messere all rights are reserved