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To: David Phaneuf who wrote (6398)	6/17/1999 11:07:00 AM
From: Mark Oliver	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10081

Here's a sort of related Q&A with BT's CTO. Mark You've described some paradigm shifts. How will we get there from here? I think there are some very interesting models. Take satellite broadcasting in the U.K. They don't provide the set-top box. You do. But the set-top box is subsidized. You get it at less than cost. This is like the laser jet printer. You buy a laser jet printer for $150, but the ink refills cost you $80 a shot. They get you on the refills and the paper. In my model, the PC or laptop becomes a $300 commodity item. You'd get everything for almost free, then they'd get you later on the service, the advertising, the stuff you buy later. This is happening with phone service in the United States. You could pay not to listen to individual advertisements on your phone. Or you could pay a monthly fee to switch all the ads off on your phone. Then everybody could have a phone, but if they wanted it for free, they'd have to listen to the ads. The battle is for the eyes and ears. and Once you segregate the machine traffic from the voice traffic, can't you start using the old contention schemes that telephone companies use to predict how much traffic will be on their networks at any given time so they can deploy resources? Yes, you can. So I think it's going to work. But if it were all human beings, it'd be a hell of a scrap, wouldn't it? Because what you're going to have to do is overprovide capacity to just make sure that you and I don't get any delay 99 percent of the time when we talk. For person-to-machine communication, is speech recognition ready for that yet? I think it's getting pretty damn good. teledotcom.com