Interview with Professor William Webb

Professor William Webb was born in May 1967, in Hersham, near Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.  He is one of three children. His father was an engineer for Decca, working mostly on radar systems and his mother was a housewife and then a secretary in latter years.  He says of his childhood: “I didn’t feel like I was ever steered towards being an engineer but I grew up in a house where it was natural to fix and tinker with anything that was broken, and that I think became part of my psyche as well. … I think engineers tend to be more introvert, more interested in the way things work.  It’s less prevalent now, but in the past you had to fix because, there was nothing much else you could do.  Today you tend to just replace and so I think that ‘engineering’ mindset perhaps is missing a little from today’s generation.”

William’s first computer was a ZX Spectrum which he was given by his parents around the age of fourteen or fifteen. He adds: “I enjoyed programming a lot and it was one of my sources of income when I was doing my O Levels, I would dream up games, send them into magazines, and you’d typically get, £20 or something, if the game was published in the magazine. … Those sorts of computers were great to learn on because they had a very simple programming language and they sort of auto-corrected to some degree, so it was pretty straightforward to write code for them.”

William went to a state school and says that he leaned towards science related subjects quite early on with three of his O levels in science subjects. He studied for five A levels including maths, further maths, physics and electronics and statistics. He says: “It was a pretty mathematical set of exams but with an electronics bent starting to appear at that point in time.” He enjoyed his studies and applying maths in a practical way rather than pure theory, he adds: “Once it got to the very pure theoretical maths, I didn’t enjoy that, I didn’t get on well with it. I don’t try and conceptualise everything mathematically but if I ever hear of a problem, my first instinct is to get a bit of paper and write out the equation that the problem is, and then, and then try and solve it.”

Having gained good grades in both O and A levels, William went to Southampton University to study engineering, having turned down a place at Cambridge where courses were focused on general engineering with little electronics, he explains: “After much discussion with potential employers, I came to the conclusion that doing general engineering wasn’t the best way to get into electronics because you were left with only effectively six months of electronics at the end of it.  So that steered me towards Southampton which was thought to be at the time the top university for electronics in the UK.”  In 1989, William graduated with a B.Eng., First Class.

Having graduated, William was invited work with a company run by Professor Raymond Steele called Multiple Access Communications while he studied part-time for his PhD.  William says: “It seemed like a great idea to work with a very interesting character and to get a PhD and a job at the same time.”  The company employed just three people at that time, and they won a large contract to carry out research for BT just as William joined them. The research, into ways to transmit mobile data faster, formed the basis of William’s PhD.

Having completed his PhD, in 1993, William went to work for Smith System Engineering Limited, in Guildford. William says: “I moved essentially to try and gain more experience in a bigger environment. Smith’s was set up by Bruce Smith, a mathematician and academic, on the basis that if he assembled a group of what we might think of today as rocket scientists and then went out looking for difficult consulting problems and fired them at them, he could generate a lot of value. It was a very elitist consultancy.  A lot of its work originally had been defence related, but it was branching out into communication.”

 It was at Smith’s that William started to look at radio spectrum and the management of radio spectrum working as part of a team on a project commissioned by the then Radio Communications Agency (now Ofcom). William explains; “Jim Norton commissioned some consultancy to try and determine how much radio spectrum might be worth, and then determine how you might price it and sell it. We put together a team of economists and engineers, and I was the engineer, working with an economist and we produced a couple of pretty seminal pieces of work including one was called the economic value of spectrum. This showed for the first time that radio spectrum contributed at a minimum something like three per cent of GDP each year, which actually doesn’t sound too surprising now, when you think about all the things we use radio spectrum for, but back then, nobody had got any view of its value as such.  … Then we moved on to look at how you might use economics to price spectrum and that became spectrum auctions and so on. We’re now used to with spectrum being routinely sold by governments and all of the mix of what goes in there.”

After this project, William worked on related work across the globe including helping re-plan South Africa’s complete radio spectrum allocation as the country transitioned out of the apartheid era.  He also designed and implemented a modified version of the GSM phone system for railways, called GSM for railways which is still in use today. He adds: “They had some different requirements than people, for example, they like to be able to what’s called group calls where they might call all of the people working in an area. That’s a sort of walkie-talkie kind of thing but if you’re going to use a cellular phone system, that’s much more difficult to engineer. They also travel at high speeds and travel through the Channel Tunnel which had just been designed, so we needed a system that would allow trains to move through multiple countries and still all use the same radio system.”

In the early days of mobile phones, very little spectrum was available as it was mainly used by the military for which Government received no money. When it was pointed out that spectrum could be used by mobile phones, the Government started selling it off in auctions to mobile phone companies.

William says: “That’s not something I’m particularly proud of as such. What we actually said was not that you can make money out of it but it was a very valuable resource and therefore needed to be managed very carefully.  Not necessarily as a way of extracting money but as a way of making sure that the best use was made of the spectrum. At the time I did the work, the Government wasn’t charging anything for the spectrum and therefore, the economist friends said that governments should charge more. As we now look back on it, the key turning point was the 3G auctions that took place in 2000, when in the UK, I think something like £22 billion was spent by mobile phone companies. This was way above anyone’s expectations and that was the point I think where the likes of myself and the economists said, ‘Hang on, that’s too much.’ We’ve gone too far the other way in this process.  We’ve never seen anything quite so extreme as that; the latest auctions were more like two or three billion, so one-tenth. Even so I think there’s still some doubt as to whether that’s still too high, particularly if we’re looking for mobile phone companies to achieve societal benefits like more extensive coverage than we have at the moment.”

While William enjoys engineering, he also likes working on multidisciplinary projects. He studied for an MBA when he realised that he really enjoyed working on strategy. He says: “I love the projects where there’s a mix of economics, politics to some degree. I like the sort of bigger picture kind of politics, what’s the best thing for the country, how does that fit into the overall objectives of various governments and and ministers. I definitely like working in larger reams.” He says that three-quarters of what he does today involves working with a mix of economists, strategists and lawyers.

After spending four years at Smith’s Engineering, William moved to Netcom Consultants where he spent a year. The move was what he describes as “his first mistake” The company was involved with a new concept called wireless local loop and had invited William to run the project. William says: “When I got there, I discovered that it wasn’t anything like I expected. I wasn’t given the role that I thought I was going to be given and there was something very odd going on. I wasn’t quite sure what, but I didn’t like it.  Subsequently, after I had left, the CEO was indicted on fraud and sent to prison.  So, whilst I didn’t know that there was fraud happening, it just didn’t feel right. Almost immediately that I arrived there, I started trying to work out how I was going to get myself out of there but I didn’t want to leap straight into another bad job; I carefully, looked around for a little while and then moved to Motorola.”

William joined Motorola in 1998 and would stay with them until 2001. The family company had a history that started with radio in cars, had moved into chips, mobiles and was building mid-range computers, however, it had lost its way in later years.

William says: “I started off in the wireless local loop space but then moved to corporate strategy, where I was very lucky to be in a position where I was working somewhat closely with the CEO, but also had access to his father, the previous CEO.  … Working with them, it became apparent to me that Chris, the current CEO, would have never made it to CEO if it wasn’t for his family history.  He was a competent middle manager, but he wasn’t a CEO. He was essentially a rabbit in the headlights, he just didn’t know what to do. … I had plenty of ideas and concepts that I would push his way, but it was quite clear that, that not much was going to happen.  And then, when the dotcom bubble imploded, Motorola was particularly badly hit, I think everyone realised that, that it was a bit of a strategic mess at that point in time.  And it just fell apart after that.”

William became Director of Strategy and started to focus on Wi-Fi. Motorola had a history of starting off in a space, becoming a leader and then when it was commoditised, moving into the next big thing. He adds: “Looking at that history, it had done well with the cellular handset, but it was clear that it was starting to move on and it just seemed to me that adding in Wi-Fi, other systems, to make more complex communications systems, was a way that you could stay in that same broad space, but deliver a more leading-edge product, rather than being commoditised.” Unfortunately, the suggestion failed to gain approval. William adds: “I absolutely failed to really come up with anything that stuck at Motorola, but I think, so did everyone in Motorola, there was nothing during that period. It was a very interesting education in the ways of larger companies. … One thing I learnt was that you have to be persuasive and you have to understand the politics of the situation.  It’s not enough just to say, ‘here’s this great idea’.  That doesn’t help very often. That was a great learning from that time.”

In 2001, having decided to return to the UK, William took what he describes as a ‘holding position’ with PA Consulting. His arrival at PA coincided with the dotcom downturn, William says: “It was very hard to find any significant amount of consulting work when I was at PA, so I spent all of my time trying to sell consultancy rather than doing consultancy.  I’m not that good at selling consultancy and I didn’t enjoy that at all, so, when the head-hunters called with the Ofcom role, that seemed like a great step forward.”

In 2003, William joined Ofcom as Head of Research and Development, a role he expected to remain in for around four years, but he would eventually stay in for eight years.  He says: “Ofcom was an interesting ride, because, I joined it when it was formed. It was a new body, formed by merging five separate regulators together from radio spectrum and telecoms and other things. Interestingly, it wasn’t just the top people from all those bodies, 80 per cent of the senior management group were new to regulation, coming from outside, including the CEO.  So, it felt almost like a start-up at the time. We all came in with great new ideas about how we were going to change everything. We were going to ditch all the old regulation and come up with new ideas and all that kind of thing.  For the first three years we did that, we produced a whole raft of creative new ideas, new papers.  I wrote the spectrum strategy document which set the overarching way that spectrum was going to be managed.  Gradually, regulatory capture happened; gradually, the honeymoon period was over; gradually companies decided they could litigate more and more.” During this period Freedom of Information was introduced, William adds; “Suddenly, you felt much more risk-averse, because you knew that everything you had done could potentially be picked apart publicly.”

William left Ofcom in 2011.

Following his departure from Ofcom, William became Chief Technology Officer and founding director of Neul where he played a substantial role raising £10 million first round of fundraising.  He explains: “The idea of Neul was to build on this spectrum concept, a TV white space idea, and to mate that with an idea that was growing quite strongly at the time, which was called the Internet of Things.” The difficulty of the Internet of Things at that point was the lack of battery life on very low cost devices. Together with James Collier, William set out to tackle the problem by using new radio spectrum known as TV white space spectrum. He says: “If we could come up with a way of connecting these things that allows multi-year battery life, long range, low cost modules, that could be pretty revolutionary.  We could come up with the equivalent of Bluetooth for machines. James Collier, my co-founder, had been right at the heart of Bluetooth.  It seemed quite plausible that we would effectively do Bluetooth for machines.  It was really exciting.”

Over a period of two years, James and William filed seventeen patents. However, the project did not succeed because the TV white space spectrum was not made available by Ofcom, and the company was sold in 2014 to Huawei. 

In 2012, William established Webb Search Consultancy. He is the sole consultant and says that this sees him working in an associate model more often than not, where different projects require different skills and therefore different teams come together to work on them. He explains; “An awful lot of work is done by a collection of individuals coming together for a particular project, because that blend of individuals is just the right answer for that, and then fragmenting and working differently and then changing and coming together again.  It makes sense from an efficiency point of view, because you don’t end up employing lots of people whose skills are only needed periodically.  It works well for me; I think it’s an interesting new model.”

One project saw William research and write a major report for Ericsson on the barriers that make mobile network developments more difficult, such as local authority bureaucracy, health-related limits, and lack of international agreements.

He explains that there is an issue around the positioning of phone masts with planning permissions etc, often causing issues which in turn is preventing the growth and improvement of networks. He adds: “One of the projects I’m currently toying with requires good access to lamp posts. This has been well-known for many years, but in some respects lamp posts are perfect.  They’re nice tall masts, they’re regularly spaced, they’ve got power already supplied to the foot of them, and you can just bolt stuff to them in principle, then you’ve got a nice regular grid of transmitter systems.”  However, with lamp posts being owned by local authorities who are not interested in selling access to them, the issue of how to continue to build improved networks continues. He adds: “Those kinds of things are vastly more influential in the way that we use mobile radio systems in the future than new antenna systems, chips or anything like that.”

 Among his other projects, William also worked as for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and on a short study for Rolls Royce on possible strategies for the deployment of IoT.

As a manager, William says: “I only like to manage really competent people, people who think like I do, so broadly, engineering types.  I think I’m pretty good as manager of those kind of people because I’m prepared to give them a fair amount of flexibility, and because I can gel in my way of thinking with those people.” Many of the people William has managed through his career have remained in contact. He adds: “ I think I would be a terrible manager of people who are not engineering types.  I just don’t think I’ve got the social skills to do that particularly well and I’ve never really done that, and I never wanted to do that.”

William cites Professor Raymond Steele, a professor whose company he joined early in his career while studying for his PhD, as his first mentor. He says: “He was a maverick, but he was an interesting character. He was definitely somebody who was really useful, and he taught me a number of things such as how to write much better than I would have otherwise been able to do.  He taught me about the blend of different skills and disciplines and things like that.  He was hugely valuable.  I’ve had quite a few mentors during my time.  Another one that stands out is Sir David Brown, who was Chairman of Motorola in the UK and very influential in the IET, being President many years before I was.  I got an awful lot of guidance from him over the years.  When I look back I think to myself that mentors have probably been the most influential thing of all on my career.”

William says he joined the IET while he was studying for his PhD as it gave him a place to present academic work at conferences and through publications. He gained an interest and was invited to join firstly the publications board and then the main board, eventually becoming a Fellow and then President of the IET between 2014-15.

William also joined the American equivalent professional body, the IEEE when he moved to the US for work.

He says of his involvement with the IET: “Once I was on the board I became quite interested in what are these institutions for?  Wy are they still alive?  What are we doing with them? that became quite an interesting kind of challenge.”  During his year as President of the IET, William set out to “re-orient” the focus of the organisation so that it became a strong voice of engineering to help politicians, civil servants, and society as a whole, understand how engineering could help with societal challenges.

He explains: “It’s not about member benefit, it’s about engineering a better world. However, these are venerable institutions which are 150 years old or so.  You don’t change them around in one year, but you can move the dial a little.”

William also established the Weightless Special Interest Group. He explains: “Weightless was the technology that we came up with at Neul; a new wireless technology that would allow these Internet of Things devices to talk to each other.  What we realised very quickly was that in the world of wireless communications, the only things that are successful are standards.” He points to the fact that in wireless systems such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular and radio, they are all open systems and adds: “There are no systems that are just from one company; it would be too monopolistic.”

As a result, William set up a special interest group in the same was as Bluetooth had done.   He says: “We grew and gained a lot of members, a lot of interest, a lot of people contributed, we wrote standards, we published standards.”

Unfortunately, once Neul had its new CEO and its direction changed, the group found it harder to make headway. William continues: “I kept it alive for another six years.  One of the biggest disappointments for me is that we don’t yet have a good way of connecting Internet of Things devices.  We’re still nowhere near the situation that was envisaged back in 2010 where pretty much everything would be connected by now.  A lot of that is down to lacking in good radio standard. Weightless could do that but it never quite got the political backing or the backing from the key companies that was enough to move it over the edge. It’s another thing I learned; the need to have the backing of a number of big players, the Googles, the Apples and so on, even if they do nothing, you need to have their name to persuade others to take this leap of faith.”

William says: “The death of Moore’s law has been postulated forever almost and it still it hasn’t happened. What I see across, not just Moore’s law but many other similar kinds of laws, is a gentle plateauing. Instead of it growing as quickly as it used to, it’s still growing but at a slower and slower rate.  That does mean that we can’t look for the same kind of advances we had in the past. In the world of mobile communications for example, until recently we had been able to rely on technical efficiency improvements.  So given the same amount of radio spectrum, the same number of radio cells and all these other kind of things, we’ve been able to improve the amount of data we can send by tenfold in some cases, even 50-fold, by making use of improvements in technology.  We’re pretty much at an end to that now.  It’s always dangerous to say that, but we’re getting to a number of fundamental limits. Even if Moore’s law progressed you would have a handset that would get so hot you would need to hold it with oven gloves if they couldn’t find some other way of solving the battery problems. All these things mean that we have to look for different solutions.  The innovation we still see is huge, and to some degree it’s now artificial intelligence and things like that that can effectively do things that give the appearance of a lot more intelligence to a device without necessarily requiring a lot more computing power in that device.”

Metcalfe’s law states that if you double the size of a network, you don’t just double its value, it goes up exponentially. William adds: “Metcalfe’s law effectively says the more people you can connect to, the more useful everything is.  I think that’s true but there’s an economies of scale concept as well that underlies a lot of what we do now.”

He goes on to say that it can also lead to bad outcomes adding: “The reason why it’s hard to displace Facebook is because Metcalfe’s law says, the more people on Facebook, the more useful it is, and once you get to a certain point, it’s so useful it’s very hard to envisage anyone else being able to compete with it. Therefore, it drives us to monopolies as well.”

About artificial intelligence (AI), William says: “I think AI is massively over-hyped. It does some great things.” He goes on to describe that it is successful at closed problems such as learning a language where there is vast amounts of data for it to learn from, however, in more open problems, such as solving Brexit, there is no data for it to learn from and therefore it cannot help.   He adds: “This is why I don’t think it’s going to take over the world, but I think in its place, it can do some really useful stuff.  Coupled to the Internet of Things, for example, AI could help you work out how to optimise your farm system to maximise productivity and growth on that, that could be really valuable.  That’s not going to upset what humans do and humans don’t do. I’m not concerned about the singularities and machines suddenly becoming so clever they take over the world.  I think I’m probably more concerned about just, being too optimistic about AI and what it might do.”

William points to Neul, Weightless and the Internet of Things project as his biggest disappointment to date. He says: “I would have loved to be able to sit here today and say I was part of connecting all these machines and the fact that stuff happens nicely around us is inherent to that. That wasn’t one single mistake.  That was a whole combination of misjudgements. I guess I’d characterise my career as a series of, small errors that I learnt from. I can’t think of anything I really regret and look back and think that was a complete disaster.”

William has written sixteen books over the period of his career and he says, “I’m very proud of a book I published back in 2001, The Future of Wireless Communications, where actually I tried to set out some specific forecasts for 2010, 2015, 2020, with a list of bullet points of what’s going to happen in those times.  We’re in 2020 now, and it’s pretty close I think.”

He believes that economics has a lot to do with forecasting, understanding the value to society or the individual, adding: “A lot of forecasters can get too hooked up in the wonderful things that technology could do without actually asking ‘well is that of any real value to us?’”

In 2017, William was awarded the Albert Nelson lifetime achievement award and the IET Mountbatten Medal in 2018 for promotion of technology entrepreneurship.

He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng), a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), the Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (FIEEE).

William has been awarded several honorary degrees including: Doctor of Science, Southampton University, 2015 and at the University of Hertfordshire in 2019, Doctor of Technology, Anglia Ruskin University, 2015, Visiting Professor at Southampton University.

Interviewed by: Richard Sharpe on the 2nd March 2020 at BCS London

Transcribed by: Susan Hutton

Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley