Man in the white suit

“CHANGE IS HARD,” said my friend Dave as 2001 wound down. “Yes, but not changing is harder,” I replied as Dick Clark proved us both wrong on the TV screen behind us. Our Dorian Gray with a beat, Dick has been measuring time and whether or not you can dance to it for half a century now.

As we face the new year, the Test Center’s dominant theme is disruptive technology. The very term trembles with the double-edged sword of unsettling innovation — winners and losers, peer-to-peer vs. client/server, wired or wireless. As we’re poised at the cusp of the transition from Industrial Age to Information Age, it’s instructive to recall an elegant comedy from 50 years ago, The Man in the White Suit.

In the British film directed by Alexander Mackendrick, Alec Guinness portrays a young engineer who invents an indestructible fabric (and white suit) that resists wear and tear. Spurred on by the beautiful daughter of a textile factory owner, Guinness attracts the support — and then the enmity — of both management and labor as the owners struggle to hold on to their profits and the workers their jobs.

To some, the film remains as wry and fresh as it was in 1951; to others, it’s a prophetic warning of the dangers of technology. As the Guinness character’s landlady puts it, “Why can’t you scientists leave things alone? What’s to become of my bit of washing when there’s no washing to do?”

Combine my favorite disruptive technologies — Web services, p-to-p, 802.11 — and you’ve got the breeding ground for a man in a white suit. The 802.11 technology, or Wi-Fi as the faithful call it, is the fabric: a short-range wireless solution that competes with microwave ovens for an unregulated spectrum of bandwidth.

Too small a space to attract the hungry maw of the Federal Communications Commission, the Wi-Fi domain gains its power by linking small neighborhoods into an aggregated WAN. Bootstrapping DSL and cable modem access to the Net, cybercollectives have sprung up from rooftop to rooftop, offering 802.11b’s 11Mb on-ramps for laptops, PDAs, and iPaqs.

The cost of Wi-Fi has dropped precipitously as the standard has been baked into low-cost PC cards and access points. I’m writing this column from an IBM ThinkPad T23 with built-in 802.11 some 300 feet from a Linksys access point ($179) attached to a DSL broadband connection.

Microsoft seeded the broadband market at the desktop level by investing in Comcast and then in AT&T. Even with its growing cash reserves, Microsoft was, and remains, unable to buy a controlling interest in a major carrier. Instead, the strategy has been to bankroll the buildout of two-way cable broadband and force the Baby Bells to the table with DSL services.

With the recent consolidation of AT&T and Comcast, Microsoft owns 6 percent of the combined company and, more important, keeps AOL Time Warner at bay. But even with a credible competitor to DSL and pressure from satellite acquisitions such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.’s proposed buyout of DirecTV, Microsoft still has little leverage in the battle with the carriers and their cell phone allies led by Nokia.

That may be why Microsoft has embedded Wi-Fi, remote control, and VPN support in Windows XP and Pocket PC 2002. While Nokia is struggling with the slow adoption of 3G (third-generation) services in the United States, 802.11 wireless users are connecting at four times the promised 3G speeds and up to 200 times modem rates. EarthLink Chairman Sky Dayton has launched Boingo to aggregate some 750 Wi-Fi locations around the country — hotels, airports, and coffee shops — plus software to sniff out free ad hoc networks already running in cities such as Seattle and San Francisco.

And then there’s Masood Garahi and MeshNetworks, a self-forming, self-healing ad hoc peer-to-peer wireless routing technology offering voice, video, and data at speeds as fast as 6Mbps. The technology started as a Department of Defense and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative. “The military [wanted to] parachute two or three thousand soldiers in the middle of nowhere and have them instantaneously form an ad hoc peer-to-peer network and communicate,” Garahi says.

Five years of development and $27 million later, MeshNetworks has software that can turn any 802.11 PC card into a mobile base station, and wireless routers that can be distributed on light poles, billboards, and rooftops to guarantee initial coverage while the peer population grows. The company plans a centimeter-square chip that would embed 802.11 and MeshNetworks’ routing algorithms inside devices for approximately $35 per chip.

Now comes the disruptive part: “If you have enough cars on the highway then each car acts as a base station,” Garahi says. “Just imagine if we were to put one of these radios on every [Ford] Taurus. Within a year’s production, you have more base stations than all the cellular companies have combined in the United States to feed these units.”

For all the promise and opportunity of these new technologies, we should be wary of pitfalls along the way to the new pervasive paradise. At the end of the movie, the white suit disintegrates due to a flaw in the formula. As our hero stands before a dissipating mob of workers and employers clad only in his underwear, he checks his notes and appears to discover an error in his calculations. With a knowing “I see!” the man in the white suit walks away toward the future with a spring in his step.