• Introduction
• Programme
• Speaker Profiles
• *** Slides ***

Andy Hopper

Andy Hopper is the Professor of Communications Engineering at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

He has pursued both academic and industrial careers in parallel. In his academic career he has worked in the Departments of Computer Science and of Engineering at Cambridge. His current research interests include networking, pervasive computing and mobile systems. Over the last decade he has given over 100 keynote speeches and research lectures. In 1999 he gave the Royal Society Clifford Paterson Lecture entitled 'Sentient Computing'.

In his industrial career he has been a founding director of ten companies. These have included Acorn Computers and Virata Corporation, with both companies becoming dominant in their marketplaces and floating on stock markets. Until 2002 he was Managing Director of AT&T Laboratories Cambridge having started the laboratory as Olivetti Research in 1986. This research laboratory worked with a number of multinational sponsors and pioneered many new technologies in the information and communications fields.

Combining academic and industrial interests over many years made it possible for him to develop new methods of commercialising highly speculative research by forging partnerships between large multinational companies, medium sized companies, venture capital funded start-up and spin-out companies, and university researchers.

Hopper received the BSc degree from the University of Wales in 1974 and the PhD degree from the University of Cambridge in 1978. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institution of Electrical Engineers.

Tim Fowler

Radiant Networks are global pioneers of a new approach to building networks that can span the final mile between fibre networks and customers buildings. This area is the most difficult part of delivering new broadband services to customers business and home locations. Radiant has developed a "MESH" wireless network and in doing so has developed a new methodology for planning and engineering such networks. This presentation will introduce MESH access networks, the benefits that they deliver, and the issues that then face operators who wish to deploy broadband services.

Tim Fowler is the Head of Product Management at Radiant Networks, based in Cambridge, England. He obtained his MEng in Electronic Engineering from Loughborough University of Technology in 1989. During this period, he also worked for Philips Telecom on software development projects within the infrastructure division. Tim worked for six years managing product development projects, mostly in mobile infrastructure. In 1995, Tim moved to become the product manager for Philips Telecom's control systems products, and was later promoted to become product group manager for all mobile products.

Tim joined Radiant Networks in 2000 as head of product management, and in that time he has worked with operators in Europe, Japan and North America to understand, promote and define Radiant's MESH product offering. His team are responsible for both product definition and customer solution design.

Richard Davies

The concepts of DSP and software based radio have been around for a long time, but over the last 2 decades they have moved progressively from research through professional and military products, to consumer products. At current silicon geometries, it is now commercially attractive to use software radio techniques in low cost, high volume wireless products. The economic and technical trade offs will be explored, along with some of the practical challenges in implementing highly integrated software radio chips.

Richard is a Senior Consultant in the Radio Communications Group at CCL. He has worked in wireless communications for 25 years. Before joining CCL, he worked at the RSRE communications research establishment. At CCL he has been responsible for a wide range of radio projects, and is currently working on integrated software radio chips as well as high specification professional radios.

James Collier

James was an Associate Director of ADL/CCL. He joined CCL in 1984 and he was responsible for technology development together with maintaining and enhancing CCL's expertise in IC design, silicon micro engineering, sensor physics and mathematical modelling. James was chief engineer and project leader on all of CCL's ground-breaking radio systems on CMOS developments.

Richard Black

Richard Black is a researcher at Microsoft's European research centre in Cambridge, England. He obtained his B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge in 1990 and his Ph.D. addressing issues in operating systems and networking interaction in 1995. After a further three years at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory as a research associate and research fellow he moved in 1997 to a lectureship at the University of Glasgow Department of Computing Science. He returned to Cambridge in January 2000, to join the Microsoft Research laboratory.

Andy Rhodes and Paul Bearpark

Bluetooth has become a ubiquitous technology so it is now time to start thinking about its evolution and the next generation. There are now some 200 qualified end user products and with predicted volumes will come considerably lower component costs. These economies of scale can now be exploited for some unique 'non-Bluetooth' applications. The hardware and software components developed for Bluetooth may be extended into short-range wireless devices and longer range point-to-point and telemetry systems without incurring the time and expense of the qualifications process. The competitive advantage of Bluetooth is interoperability, but there are applications for which interoperability is unnecessary or even undesirable.

The real potential for Bluetooth exists in products employing other communications technologies as part of a system solution. Seamless integration between multimode devices, such as GPRS and Bluetooth, 3G and Bluetooth, and DSL and Bluetooth, will be key to this. For network operators and terminal manufacturers alike it is important that devices employing multiple communications technologies work effectively together and are easy to use, as recognised by the GSM-A.

Looking further ahead, how may Bluetooth evolve? Are there any potentially disruptive technologies being developed that could displace it or compete for market share, or will the barriers to entry be simply too great? Congestion in the 2.4 GHz band may eventually provide the impetus for a technology change but equipment may need to be backwards compatible.

This presentation will provide details of some of these short-range wireless technologies. We shall also introduce a technology (known as Intrasonics) that has the capability to provide a level of interaction between broadcast media and Bluetooth devices.

Andy Rhodes is an RF engineer with nearly 20 years experience of RF and microwave product and system design and development for a wide range of applications and industries. Paul Bearpark is an RF engineer with 12 years experience of radio product design, development and implementation for a wide variety of applications, including low power radio systems and Bluetooth.

Manuel Segovia Martinez

TTPCom is a world leading independent supplier of technology for digital wireless communications. Our teams are developing EDGE and 3G technologies and we have a clear roadmap for mobile internet access.

Manuel Segovia has been involved in the development of the physical layer for EGPRS at TTPCom. In this lecture he aims to explain from first hand experience the technical difficulties of EGPRS, and at the same time advocate for the use of this technology.

Manuel Segovia obtained his B.Sc in Electronics and Communications from the Technological Institute of Monterrey in 1995, his M.Sc in Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing from the University of Surrey in 1998 and his PhD in Medical Image Processing also from the University of Surrey in 2001.

Neville Hawkins

Invisible Networks is implementing broadband networks covering the villages around Cambridge using 2.4 GHz WiFi Wireless LAN technology. This lecture describes the technical solution and the business model.

Mr. Hawkins is a Member of the IEE, with a background in radio network design for major cellular operators since 1986. He has worked at BT Labs and Cellnet, followed by various consultancy companies, before founding Invisible Networks with Richard Nuttall in 2001.