Multimedia systems and increased research collaboration will be constitute two major axes for building the telecommunications society, said experts last week at the celebration of the Centre National d’Etudes des Telecommunications’ half-century anniversary. Created to provide the French government with the technology for re-building its war-ravaged telecommunications network, CNET has evolved from a three-room quasi-lab in the central Paris telephone office in 1945 to a $500m a year research giant. During that time, it has been instrumental in creating France’s biggest telecommunications technological landmarks. Some of its most notable dates include the debut of trans-Atlantic satellite communication in 1962, the world’s first demonstration of time division telephone switching, the world’s first viewdata network in 1979, the submission of the original Asynchronous Transfer Mode patent in 1982, and the first Integrated Services Digital Network connection in 1987.

Switching

Switching, for example, was one area in which CNET made a difference, said Louis-Joseph Libois, honorary managing director of CNET in his opening reminiscences. In the beginning of the 1960s, French industry was nowhere near being among the leaders, particularly in switching, but CNET was a major driving force in changing that, he said. But now Alcatel is number one in switching in the world. Today, France Telecom is also one of the few, if not the only, European operator to spend 4% of its budget on research and development, and CNET is the vehicle. With eight centres scattered around France, it employs 4,500 researchers, of which approximately 3,800 are engineers. In creating planet telecommunications over the next five years, CNET is tar geting its research and development at all of the telecommunications industry’s hot buttons. They include Asynchronous Transfer Mode, multimedia services, whether they be revamped personal computer versions of Minitel or interactive cable television systems, high-bandwidth-high-resolution networks, mobile telecommunicationss and intelligent agents for filtering information from mobile and fixed on-line network services. CNET celebrated its birthday by showing off an advance in Asychronous Transfer Mode, a technology that it pioneered. It demonstrated France Telecom’s first Asynchronous Transfer link with Germany to Deutsche Telekom AG’s CNET equivalent FTZ in Darmstadt. Jean-Francois Arrivet, president and chairman of Transpac SA, France Telecom’s data switching subsidiary, later told Computergram that he was enormously satisfied with the 140Mbps fibre optic point-to-point connection. The digital image, even though it was on the oversized screen, was excellent, much better than we’ve had in the past, he said. In on-line systems, Michel Feneyrol, director of CNET, told Computergram that CNET is working to upgrade Minitel services, notably for the mail-order, medical services, tourism and encyclopaedic and educational sectors.

Between 25% and 30% of the services we have now will be interested in having images added and in a more sophisticated, multimedia version of their service, he said. Services using fixed images will appear on personal computers between now and 2000, while services with moving images on personal computers or televisions will appear by the turn of the century, he added. CNET and France Telecom believe their strengths lie in developing new on-line services and systems for billing and network access, which they have perfected in 10 years of operating the Minitel network. Overall, Feneyrol noted that it’s probably in software where we will put the most research and development, because we see productivity with software engineering tools growing much more slowly than, say the capacity of fibre optics. Faced with the spectre of increased competition and, quite possibly, scarcer resources, Marcel Roulet, president of France Telecom, emphasised the need for co-operation in some of CNET’s research. The increased research effort to which we are committed requires

considerable finances, and also the mobilisation of specialists, researchers and engineers with specialisations ever more extensive. No one is capable of facing that alone; thus scientific co-operation is indispensable, he said. Roulet acknowledged that scientific collaboration has been characteristic of CNET’s activities as far back as the first transatlantic satellite communication, which was achieved in collaboration with AT&T Corp. He added, nonetheless, that the operator wants to see synergies between CNET and the national and international scientific community to continue to develop as efficiently as possible. Ample room for co-operation still exists, said Mihaly Antal, director of the European Institute for Research and Strategic Studies in Telecommunications, Eurescom, in Heidelberg, which is sponsored by 24 Euro-operators. Until the mid-1980s, little trans-European research was done by Euro-operators, who historically spent between 1.5% and 2.0% of their revenues on research and development, he said. Then the European Union began sponsoring research programmes such as RACE and others, which led, in part, to Eurescom. Today, he said, trans-European research is the norm, adding that potential areas for increased co-operation include service management, terminal interfaces and interconnections, optical transport, software for the rapid deployment of services and the improvement of user interfaces.

Intelligent agents

Research and development collaboration is not restricted to Europe, however. France Telecom demonstrated the initial results of its collaboration with General Magic Inc on the use of intelligent agents to improve the efficiency of user interfaces for telematic services. Our strategy, with General Magic is to add the nomadic, mobile dimension to Teletel, Jacques Guichard, associate director at CNET in charge of multimedia. We want to use the intelligent agents technology to refine the use of telematics; such as executing a mail-order purchase only when the vendor is offering a discount, for example. You can’t do that now with Teletel. The first market experiments with applications using intelligent agents are scheduled for next year, he said. The applications, which use personal intelligent communicators from Sony Corp and Motorola Inc, are being developed by France Telecom, General Magic and Philips PACE. Gateways enable the communicators to interrogate existing Teletel databases, such as those of the national railway and the highway authority. Many of the CNET’s development projects are currently being exhibited as part of the 50th anniversary celebration, at the Science City in Parc de la Villette, Paris until May 28.