Krish Prabhu, President and Chief Executive Officer of AT&T Labs is more interested in building infrastructure for content providers rather than providing content himself. In a recent interview with eWorld , his first to an Indian publication since he took over this position earlier this year in the US, he answers questions on technology, bandwidth, and why India should possibly move over directly to 4G. Edited excerpts:

You left Bell Labs in 1984 and now you're back. During your absence, did Bell Labs do anything that made you wish that you were back there, spearheading that development?

I never felt that way. In 1984, Bell was deregulated and from 1984 to 2004, I was a part of the supplier industry, which was very vibrant. Those twenty years were very dynamic and AT&T was a prime customer for me, but I never felt that I should be back in AT&T at that time.

AT&T generates two patentable ideas every day. Can you mention some of the interesting things you are working on currently?

We are working on networking and these areas are complicated and technical. However, I can talk about a few things. We are working on speech recognition, which is very complicated. We are also working on data mining for fraud detection, which is akin to looking for the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack'.

Once upon a time, AT&T gave us operating systems like UNIX and programming languages like C, which changed the world. Is there anything that you are working on now, that will have a similar impact?

Only time will tell. I don't know if we are working on something that will catch fire. We are working on strings of data and a lot of work is going on in search technology. We have a lot of new techniques that will eventually stand out.

What do you think of 3G in India? Has it lived up to its potential? What do you think 4G will mean for the country?

We are currently in the middle of a 3G to 4G transition in the US. In two years, we will largely be on a 4G and 3G platform and we will not have much 2G, except perhaps for some machine-to-machine communication. As far as India is concerned, 3G may not solve the problem and the country may find that 4G is more efficient. Heavy users of data many use 4G, while voice and text users may use 2G. There is no room for 2G, 3G and 4G, so one has to be given up. 3G has a small base, so India can perhaps move on easily to 4G.

Connectivity in the US is worse than India. Why?

There are a few reasons. For one thing, we have a shortage of spectrum. Also, in urban areas, there are restrictions on where you can place towers. But over the next two to three years, things could get better with the 4G rollout because 4G's air interface for data is four times better than 2G.

From a technology perspective, what could the failure of the AT&T-Sprint merger mean to your company?

I'm not the right guy to answer this question. AT&T Labs is self-contained and well funded. We have over 3,000 engineers and scientists and we perform independent of the merger.

You had said that you would deliver LTE-Advance in the US in 2013. How is it progressing?

The standards are there, but standards are just one thing. We have to ensure that investments in earlier technologies don't get jeopardised. The markets determine such things more than us technologists.

At Tellabs, you were responsible for acquisitions. Are you going to do the same for AT&T?

I am not responsible for acquisitions at AT&T. But we work with a lot of startups, which are at the cutting edge of technology and sometimes, we acquire companies if we feel that we should have the technology and own it too. In such cases, AT&T Labs helps AT&T to assess and decide if the technology has legs.

Right now, cloud, mobility and video are the major drivers for broadband. What is AT&T Labs doing about these challenges?

The thing about the cloud is that you need instantaneous responses. For example, if you are in a car and using an application which tells you whether to turn to the left or right, such a system cannot be late by even five seconds because you may miss the turn. We are also working on ways to make the experience richer for people. Text, voice and video - in this order, convey more information to people. You could look at intelligent systems as the fourth leg of this system. For example, if you travel from Bangalore to Mysore and stop at Maddur for breakfast, your mobile phone knows that you are there - the question is, can we use this knowledge to make your experience richer? We need an intelligent system to do this. An intelligent system integrates everything, is instantaneous in its response, and evolves as you go.

>balaji.n@thehindu.co.in

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