In its long history, “Bell Labs research as an organization has never written a book.” Now, as its president Marcus K. Weldon states, the time seemed right to write this book: “We are at the nexus of a human technological revolution that will be different than any prior era, as it will simultaneously be both global and local, with innovation occurring everywhere.” This credo of a different kind of human technological revolution is the recurring theme of the book, and most of its 14 chapters try to prove this conviction by intelligently extrapolating figures from the past into the future. Notes on the page margins repeat the section’s bottom line in large letters and help readers quickly grasp the gist of each chapter.

Bell Labs has its roots in telephony, and therefore not surprisingly the major focus of this book is networks and how networks will connect users in new ways, as summarized in the first chapter: they will connect “everything and everyone with the goal of automating much of life,” using what the book calls “augmented intelligence,” situated somewhere between the perfect knowledge approach of artificial intelligence (AI) and the no-knowledge-but-only-correlation approach of big data.

The future of the enterprise, so the prediction in chapter 2, will be a challenging one: the enterprise must be able to radically transform in order to survive, because entire industry segments can be transformed rapidly.

With respect to future network security threats, chapter 3 sees a possible solution in the distributed cloud that “will allow the network to ... adapt to threats in order to confuse, redirect, block and contain the attacker before ... damage [can be] done.”

The cloud will be an enabler of many future developments, and according to chapter 5 the cloud will change as well, away from the centralized cloud and more toward decentralized clouds placed close to end users for high performance and dynamic operation.

Two chapters follow on access technologies: wireless and broadband. The content of these two chapters is rather technical compared to other chapters, but it is still readable for noncommunication engineers. It is argued that future wireless access systems will need to be more flexible and allow for “both synchronous and asynchronous transmission modes, as well as symbol periods that are dynamically tuned to different [kinds] of applications” in the Internet of Things (IoT) that connects all kinds of devices.

For the enterprise local area network (LAN), chapter 8 sees a convergence of multiple radio technologies, Wi-Fi with cellular access, that will be coordinated in order to abstract “the access technology so that devices [will be] connected to the enterprise wireless network, rather than [to] individual access points or cells.”

Chapter 9 predicts a unified communications paradigm that will allow communication with anyone and anything. We will be “always connected and ... communicate with any system, device, or person.” In order to control communication with machines, natural language processing will be a central focus for future research.

Big data, the collection “of datasets too large for conventional data analysis tools,” will not grow indefinitely since “the value of data does not grow proportionally with the size of the data.” A single bit, that contradicts an expected result, so the argument in chapter 10, “might be highly valuable as the effective trigger for a decision,” and is thus significantly “more important than the number of [collected] data bits.”

Chapter 11 discusses the Internet of Things (IoT) and its “dramatic effect on the volume, variety, and rate of data processing as billions of devices sense and push information.” According to the book, “As video sensing [takes] hold, the volume of data will increase by several orders of magnitude.”

The following chapter then shows how IoT will make society enter an “era of life automation that follows naturally from the prior eras of electromechanical automation.”

Chapter 13 is concerned with the future of network operations. Service providers will have to deal with many legacy systems and networks, and each will have to be maintained and integrated with each new additional system. This will create a complexity problem.

The last chapter admits that optimizing communications networks’ energy consumption will be a huge undertaking. The author is confident that it will be possible to reduce the net energy consumption by up to 98 percent.

Due to its nature--the prediction of future developments --the book remains often rather vague. But its strong point is that unlike other books that often present science-fiction-type fantasies that try to fascinate more than educate, all predictions made here are backed by large collections of past and current figures. This book is probably the best guide currently available for all decision makers in the communications industry.

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