The rise and rise of Peter Cochrane

Dr Cochrane was also involved in another monumental initiative around this period - BT's decision to link London, Paris and New York by direct fiber cable in 1980. "We had no fibers, no lasers, no ICs, no detectors...nothing. It was like the JFK decision to put a man on the moon."

BT finished the link in about four years. Cochrane, who was an engineer on the bench, group manager and section manager on the project, said: "We had 1GHz chips when PCs where only running at 6MHz."

When he became BT research director in 1991, he got another plum assignment - to build an ecology or life form inside a computer which would be self-replicating, a similar exercise to that of Cyberdyne Systems from the Terminator films. Later, his team shipped software to MCI which doubled the capacity of the MCI network and "only involved the cost of the software".

In 2000, Cochrane embarked on the first of his entrepreneurial ideas and started Concept Labs because, as he says, "software development was one unholy mess. The people in the industry at that time had little education in software development or systems thinking". Shortly thereafter, he was involved with US start-up Knowledge Vector, which extended automated decision making into the defence industry.

So how and why did he leave BT?

The impetus started, he said, when 3G was being mooted. "Up until that time, I would've put BT up against any organisation in the world. We had the best leadership and best organisation. A certain type of hubris set in; an arrogance that drove an entire industry to believe we were going to make a lot of money out of 3G. I was saying it would be a lot more difficult - it was simple - people were not going out to make more money to buy a mobile phone. This was one of several factors that were responsible for my leaving BT."

By 1999, Cochrane "saw the dot-com debacle coming". "The whole telecoms industry lost touch with reality and was going forward with plans that didn't make any economic or technical sense - the whole mobile and broadband strategy wouldn't hold water. Companies across the planet all decided to do the same thing: follow 3G."

He says 3G will keep "limping" in the future. "The license fees will never be recovered and that the replacement will be Wi-Fi everywhere. The competition will come thick and fast and the number of Wi-Fi and WiMax companies and devices will skyrocket - wholesale carnage and a big shake-out."

The problem with 3G, he says, is that no one is asking what the customer actually wants.

Today, Dr Cochrane is still the man at the helm of Concept Labs, is embarking on a business venture with wife Jane, and has a hectic schedule of speaking appointments on the future of technology.

Bill Robinson may be reached at: bill@relentlessmarketing.com