TORONTO – On the day his Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie had his NHL franchise bid rejected, RIM president and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis was waxing nostalgic about the company’s humble beginnings 25 years ago, during a keynote address at the Canadian Telecom Summit on Monday.
Founded in 1984 when Lazaridis was still a university student, RIM recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of its Blackberry device (and then about eight hours later, unveiled the latest BlackBerry, the Tour)
“What seems to really register with me is this industry has been around for quite a while,” Lazaridis said. “We’ve been focused on this for so long, that sometimes we forget our humble beginnings.”
He pointed out that wireless data, in many ways, happened first in Canada, although today we hear mostly about wireless data technologies implemented in other parts of the world, especially the European adoption of GSM.
“But what you have to understand is I was 27 years old in Canada when the very first wireless data systems were installed by this pioneering, renegade organization called Rogers Cantel. Do you remember that organization by any chance?” Lazaridis asked his audience, rhetorically.
Back in 1988, when these very first wireless data systems based on cellular technology were being installed at Rogers, they were running 8 Kbps (8,000 bytes), Lazaridis said. “Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?” Lazaridis joked. “But here’s the important part – the value was there, even back then.”
Lazaridis was told by the Rogers executives that if he and his team could get the Ericsson wireless data equipment up and running, using product documentation written in Swedish, then he would get a contract with Rogers.
“And this is really how it happened. We pulled out the manuals, the manuals were half-English, half-Swedish. We got everything working, and we realized this is the future,” Lazaridis said.
“Think of it. Back in 1988, we were students in university. We were using e-mail. We were working with digital system processing, networking, the beginnings of the Internet….and we saw the future. The future was happening here in Canada,” Lazaridis said.
To illustrate how far the wireless data industry has advanced in the last 20 years, Lazaridis offered up some recent statistics from various research firms. According to the Yankee Group, 41% of consumers say they will purchase a smart phone as their next mobile device. And in fact, IDC research shows that the proportion of smart phones in North America, as a percentage of all North American cell phones, will double in size from 2008 to 2013.
Lazaridis quoted ABI Research figures that predict the smart phone market will grow from about 10% of the total handset market in 2007 to 31% of the market in 2013. Finally, Cisco Systems is predicting that mobile data traffic will grow from one petabyte per month to one exabyte (a quintillion bytes) per month in half the time it took fixed data traffic to do so.
The challenge going forward is wireless network capacity was designed to scale for voice and messaging growth, but there will come a time when that capacity won’t be able to meet the growing demand for data applications, such as streaming video over wireless, Lazaridis warned.
“Data grows into the available capacity. It has an insatiable need for capacity,” Lazaridis said. “Wireless data grows exponentially, and because of that there is a point in our future where that usage is going to exceed our ability to keep up with the demand. That’s something that we really need to think about as an industry.”
When asked how this impending wireless network bottleneck can be addressed, Lazaridis said it’s a “law of physics” issue.
“There’s only so much signal capacity left within certain spectrum, within a certain power capability,” Lazaridis said. “So we should have more cells, running at lower power or higher power, depending on how we want to do this. And we need to have more spectrum.”
He said these are great engineering challenges that are exciting to work on, but it’s an issue that needs to be addressed collectively by the wireless industry.
