by Patty Pitts
Imagine living in a world where your hand-held phone is never out of range. Imagine CD quality sound from a standard car FM radio which can also send a digital message crawling across a dashboard display screen to give you a preview of the news headlines before they're broadcast.
Dr. Eric Manning (Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering) speaks confidently of a not-so-distant future where this kind of technology is widely available. The agency behind much of the research supporting this technology is Canada's Communications Research Centre (CRC), which recently appointed Manning to its board of directors for a three-year term. Each year the CRC spends about $60 million on telecommunications research.
Funded mostly through tax dollars, the new-look CRC is the result of a 1980s federal initiative to develop alternatives to federal government research laboratories that often ³tended to find solutions where there were no problems,² says Manning. ³There was no bottom line. The labs and the equipment were aging. There was a disproportionate amount of research money being spent in government labs instead of at universities and in private industry.²
The Conservative government of the day recommended that the federal labs become more business-like and be permitted to solicit contracts outside the government. The CRC was the first federal lab to become free-standing a year ago. While still primarily funded through the Department of Industry, the CRC has its own budget and its own chief executive officer and board of directors.
While Manning would like to see the Centre have more industrial clients and more connections with the country's universities, he agrees with the philosophy behind the establishment of the CRC which, currently, does support the research of faculty members in many universities.
CRC initiatives include advancing the technology of digital FM radio and digital television. The sound quality will be vastly superior to the current analog system and, in the case of television, the picture quality will be superb. While the Japanese experiment with high definition television (HDTV) never achieved its predicted wide market success, Manning thinks a joint European/Canadian/American version will fare better.
³The CRC is the Canadian representative on this initiative,² he says. ³It's better HDTV technology and whoever ultimately creates the standards for the technology may reap the financial rewards.²
The CRC designed and built the Anik series of telecommunications satellites and new space-bound technology includes a radar-based satellite that can monitor the state of the earth's resources even during times of heavy cloud cover. Other technology is aimed at cellular phone users whose calls are currently limited by a network of transmitters that are seldom installed very far from urban centres. Phone calls of the future will be relayed by satellite and cell phone users will no longer need to miss a call because they are out of range of a transmitter.
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The Ring
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