BT Sphere Magazine wrote an article about Dr Mehmet Unsoy as an executive profile in Sep 2000. This article is not only a good testimonial for Dr. Unsoy but also reflects some o
f his evangilizing vision about the future of Mobile Internet, stated back in year 2000!.
Few people can talk about the second Internet revolution with the authority of Dr Mehmet Unsoy. As a young graduate in Canada in the 1970’s he played an important role in the birth of the Internet. So when Mehmet says “I think it’s more exciting the second time, “ he speaks from considerable experience.
Mehmet is poised to play an even greater role in the next chapter of the Internet, which is being driven by the explosive growth in mobile technology. As chief wireless architect with BT Wireless, Mehmet’s task is to create the network infrastructure to harness mobile and Internet technologies. It is a truly global role that encompasses BT Cellnet in the UK and BT Wireless ventures in numerous countries around the world “We want to build an architecture that is at the forefront of the industry and position our technological leadership as a competitive edge. And we want to make this sustainable as opposed to a one off,” said Mehmet.
Industry Wide Effort
Common standards and architecture will be the key, he believes. “To achieve this on a global scale we need consistent architecture, platforms and look & feel, which means limiting duplication and rolling things out once and not ten times.”
Dr Unsoy is striving to ensure these common standards prevail not just across BT but the entire global mobile industry. He took this message to the industry at recent IP summits held in Paris and San Francisco last year.
“It has to be an industry wide effort. We want common standards to be in place as early as possible across devices, services, networks and systems. They all need to be lined up to launch wireless Internet services and portals, bringing everything together to offer a set of compelling applications for future users.”
It’s in the area of applications that common standards will be critical, according to Mehmet. Application developers will need to feel confident that they can interface with the networks, otherwise their innovations may never come to fruition, he believes. The creation of a common set of application programming interfaces, APIs, is therefore paramount. “You have to have open standard interfaces so that people feel comfortable to develop applications for mobile Internet users.”
Flood gates
This is particularly important as Mehmet believes that 90 per cent of the applications that will drive the take up of mobile Internet have yet to be invented. “Through our work, we hope to be able to open the flood gates for people to innovate and offer all sorts of new and exciting services to users, whether it’s e-commerce or mobile office applications, MP3 music, video or travel applications.”
The architecture that Mehmet is developing will take BT and the industry towards the 2001 launch of third generation (3G) mobile services and beyond. Dr Unsoy is already looking towards 2002/2003 and the roll out of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) – a major signaling sy
stem for Internet Protocol (IP) based services. SIP will enable high quality services such as multimedia applications to be offered over mobile networks using IP.
Mehmet is also mindful that future developments will not be limited to people-to-people communications.
Uniquely placed
“Microprocessors are populating our lives, whether it is in our cars, our kitchens or our offices. 3G and the infrastructure we are developing will enable communications between all sorts of devices and as a result of this, applications will mushroom.”
Mehmet is excited by these future developments and believes he is uniquely placed to make an important contribution to them.
His role at BT is the culmination of more than 25 years experience in data and IP communications. He helped build the first public packet data network, Datapac, in Canada during the late 1970’s and was director of data network product development at Bell Northern Research for 10 years.
Prior to joining BT in February 2000, he had spent more than eight years developing and refining next generation wireline and wireless Internet technologies at Nortel Networks. During this time, he was responsible for data and broadband products across Japan, China, Korea and Australia, including the launch of mobile Internet services in the Asia Pacific region. Yet he sees his role at BT as one of the most exciting and challenging to date.
Explosive growth
“I moved because I wanted to be right in the middle of the wireless Internet revolution. I believe the most exciting and interesting part of this new paradigm shift is taking place around the mobile operators. I explicitly chose BT to be at the center of this revolution.”
Mehmet was born in Turkey, where he graduated in electronic engineering, before heading to Canada for post graduate studies. It was during his time at Canada’s University of Waterloo that Dr Unsoy played a part in the launch of the Internet. His influential PhD research was on congestion control and routing for Arpanet – the predecessor to today’s World Wide Web. “We were trying to define architecture, a framework that could grow and enable data communications between computers and that is what we are facing right now, we are preparing for the same explosive growth.”
Hindsight
The only difference today is the benefit of hindsight. “At the time it was exciting, but I didn’t realize how big it was going to become. I was simply carrying out a research project for the American military as part of Arpanet.”
This time around, Mehmet is acutely aware of the potential – and the importance of getting things right. “Now we know that the whole world’s economy depends on Internet and the whole society is going to depend on mobility. This time it’s far more critical, challenging and exciting.”
Source: BT Sphere Magazine, 2000