When Jeff Jaffe talks about the shape of things to come, he's usually not thinking in terms of weeks or months. He's often talking in terms of decades -- or even longer. But that's his job as president of Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, a 77-year-old institution that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell recently called one of America's technological crown jewels. Hyperbole aside, the Labs have produced sundry seminal technology inventions such as the transistor, the laser and the Unix operating system. Jaffe has been at the helm of the laboratories for three years, taking over just as the telephone industry began to go into a prolonged financial tailspin. He's been battling the mysteries of networking on a tight budget ever since. Along with thousands of other telephone executives, Jaffe attended last week's Supercomm 2003, the largest telephone network equipment show every year, when he took time out to talk with CNET News.com about the future of broadband and telecommunications. Q: What's at the top of Bell Labs' project agenda these days?
A: The most exciting thing is probably securing high-speed wireless data. Here's an interesting problem. Let's assume that a service provider wants to provide new services for end users. If the package with which it's supposed to deal is encrypted and it cannot inspect what's inside, that's a problem. So we had IPsec (a wireless security standard that's short for "Internet protocol security"), and we've since developed an approach called IP SuperSEC. It's not the best name, but what can you do? That's not bad. What is IP SuperSEC?
It essentially is a standardized way of encrypting, to the edge of the network, that gives the service provider choices and access. We'd only use it once it's standardized. Security is not something that you do ad hoc. How long might it be before Lucent offers IP SuperSEC?
The standards process takes two years. It started two or three months ago, so it's fresh off the presses. The main supporters at this point are all the service providers. They are the ones that will really get the advantages. Why secure data on a cellphone network? Nobody's really using it right now.
I think it's a real worry. Most large companies are not going to allow you to access corporate data unless you're going through some virtual private network, firewall or something like that. At the consumer level or at a small company, protection isn't necessary. But a large company that has access to corporate databases does need security.