Interview with Professor Edwin Candy

Professor Edwin Candy was born in February 1944, in Melbourne, Australia. His father was a solicitor. He went to a private school in Melbourne from the age of six and he describes himself as an average student with a bent for scientific subjects and building things. He says: “I had a lot of fun there, did a lot of electronics, built the PA system, did all the stuff for the shows, lighting, sound, cinema and all that sort of stuff, which was about the height of electronics in those days.  It was a good grounding.”

 Ed left school at the age of sixteen and went to Swinburne Technical College and Taylors College part time to do the technical subjects and matriculation he needed to enter the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology to study for a Diploma of Communication Engineering.  He says of his academic experience: “My academic education is quite splintered.  I can’t say I’ve got a degree in this and that because I ended up doing stuff which was ahead of what I could learn. It sounds a bit arrogant, but it just happened to be that the industry was going so fast that the industrial experience was probably well ahead of what you could get academically.”

Ed joined Pye Proprietary Limited, the Australian subsidiary company of the Pye Group whilst studying in 1961. The company then offered him a Cadet Engineering position allowing him to study part time at the Institute of Technology.

He adds: “That was fantastic, because it meant I went into the labs, started designing products and radio systems. They were doing a lot of their own R&D.  One of the early projects I was involved with was the design of UHF ground-to-air transmitters in the 200 megacycle range; they were 200-watt UHF transmitters designed originally to talk to Mirage jet fighters for use in civil airports and purchased by the Department of Civil Aviation, because they didn’t want these fighters flying over and not being able to talk to them”.

Ed was also involved in a project designing sections of equipment for an early mobile telephone system for the New South Wales Government Railways.

In 1968, as the result of a contract to supply command and control systems for the developing offshore Bass Strait oil field, Ed was seconded for three months to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Maynard, Massachusetts, USA.  The company had launched a minicomputer, the PDP-8 series, the previous year. Ed says: “That whole project was a determining point in my career and so much of what went on after that came from that moment.  The computers we were using were the PDP-8/I modified for industrial applications.  … It was fabulous; DEC were located in this old 18 century woollen mill on the river in Maynard Massachusetts. We attended classes, on software architectures programming and system design., We got projects to build systems, and to build parts for computer-based systems.  At the end they gave us a little certificate!”

Following DEC Ed spent a further three months with ICC TRW a Houston Texas company specialising in command and control. This led visits to the Manned Space Centre in Houston as TRW were commercialising space technology.  He says: “The things I learnt and saw there became fundamental to my career. For example, they were using quadraphase modulation to maximise capacity on a radio carrier that had been developed for communication to the Moon. Very similar modulation schemes were adopted for 3G, thirty years later following the technology which I’d picked up in 1968 in Houston.”

After his six months secondment, Ed returned to Pye in Australia as an engineer for a number of years working on the development of bespoke Radio systems. The vastness of Australia meant that the engineering culture was very different to the culture of Pye in the UK. Engineers found themselves involved in projects from end to end; from design to implementation. He says: “In Australia you had to do the deep dive, as well as embracing the breadth. It forced you to encompass the entirety both depth and horizontal dimensions of complex projects. It was easier to take on executive positions later in my career because you had a feel for all of the parts of the picture.”

He continues: “I was reading a book, Radio Man, which was about the founder of Pye, C O Stanley.  He didn’t necessarily believe he had to have academics or fundamental research; he employed clever people and if they felt that they could make something out of this, then he let them go and do it.  In the engineering part, it was very free.  There was no policy saying what you could do and what you couldn’t do.  You found an opportunity, somebody would buy something from you, and if you could build it, you set about doing it. For example, we built one of the world’s first microprocessor-controlled mobile radios, the FM 900, which could be programmed to work on almost any radio system at the time” They were even used by the early British Telecom Radio phone service in the UK in the 70s.

In 1969 Pye was taken over by Philips, a Dutch company which led to a change in the culture with the introduction of more engineering and administration control. Ed adds: “It was good in terms of my career because I had benefited a lot from the maturity and the discipline of the Dutch. I have great respect for that company.”

In 1971 Ed became a Systems Product Manager/Business Manager responsible for radio systems for Pye in Australia.  He says: “I lead by respect and by engagement. I have always had an ability to look to the future and make judgements beyond where we are and can take those people with me and they generally enjoy, from what I hear, working in an area that’s probably at the front and has challenges, but needs great enthusiasm, experience and the ability to pursue opportunity.”

As part of his work in the seventies, Ed worked with the then new microprocessors, he explains: “We employed a number of graduates who had been studying microprocessor architecture and we produced a range of radio system products, all which were microprocessor controlled, switching systems, command and control systems. … We learnt some big lessons in the early days about software development and documentation of software. … We very much learnt how to build microprocessors on shared micro-processing common buses.  We developed ways of sharing assembled software between the same machines so that they could take over the responsibility for a task if one dropped out.  We probably didn’t sell a lot of them but there was a lot of fundamental microprocessor system design for high reliability applications.”

In 1981 Ed went to Philips in New Zealand for a twelve month secondment to help boost the business there, on his return to Australia, he was asked to move to Sydney. He explains: “In Australia Philips had a number of product divisions which were operating completely separately.  Data systems, radio systems, medical electronics, telephone communications systems, all separate but all addressing the same customers.” Ed was asked to join a group looking at a way to amalgamate the businesses to form Philips Professional Systems for Australia in order to benefit from scale.  As a result, in 1983 he became State Manager in New South Wales, based in Sydney.

In 1987, Ed took the role of International Systems Manager and moved to Philips Radio Communication Systems based in Cambridge in the UK. The role was to coordinate R/D across the world and led to the introduction of a number digital radio applied research projects across the company including a digital PMR research program which eventually contributed to TETRA the digital radio standard for police fire and ambulance radio command and control.

At the same time when GSM (2G mobile technology) was in its infancy, Ed was taking a longer-term view of the potential of mobile communications technology. He created a project to bring together a consortium of twenty-five companies and universities to submit to the EU run ‘Research into Advanced Communications in Europe’ (RACE) program for funding. He explains: “I got together with a research chap in Crawley, Rod Gibson and we sat down and said, ‘Look, now let’s try and project what’s likely to happen in technology terms.’  Could we really get a large amount of computing into a product which would allow it to do a lot more than just basic calls? We could see through Moore’s law that that could be feasible.  Could we miniaturise it?  Could we build a network, or design a network which had the capacity to provide service to everybody – not just business users, not just a narrow group, or a different one in each country, which would be universal?  We knew that if it was going to have this impact, it had to do more than basic voice calls.  It had to provide a 2 Mega bit channel to link people with their lives, on the basis that people want to talk and communicate to people and not places.  That’s the argument for mobile. People want to be able to manage their lives from a mobile position, rather than a fixed position.

Our vision was for a network that had the coverage and capacity to accommodate everyone. A system that would deliver 2Mbits to a small hand held affordable handset.  (This was the time when mobile phones were large expensive with limited network capacity limiting it to an expensive service for business users)

On the basis of that, we called the   proposition Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, UMTS.” Ultimately it became known as 3G the fundamental transition of mobile telephony voice service to an information and communication service with universal access to the Internet.   The submission was, after much wrangling, a success, winning funding by just two votes in favour in the final minutes from the assembled EU Member State representatives

Between 1989 and 1991, Ed was Technical Director at a Philips-Shell-Barclays Bank consortium, where he was involved in the embryonic Telepoint personal communication network called Rabbit which was eventually sold to Hutchinson. Although over taken by the wide area Personal Communication Networks, many of the consumer-friendly aspects and innovations of Rabbit were introduced into Hutchison’s Orange one of the original three PCN licensees to launch mobile services across the UK.

In 1992, Ed joined Orange as Technology Director. He says: “As Technology Director, I was looking at was how do we take part of the original vision with UMTS and deliver it with the basic 2G services.  I was appointed as Chairman of the PCN interest group in the GSMA (Industry mobile association) to amalgamate DCS 1800 into GSM, so that there was a single standard.

We started, in the Orange technology group, looking at how to deliver video over narrow band.  We looked at how to deliver data systems and define GPRS data standards, and the platforms needed for data services.  We did a project with Nokia for multimedia under RACE, the EU framework programme.  I was trying to set the scene so that both at the Board level and at an Engineering level, the guys always knew the emerging capabilities of mobile technology and where they were going.”

After the RACE programme finished, around 1995, and following an EU sponsored UMTS task force to determine UMTS next steps, Ed, set up the UMTS forum, he explains: “I proposed that we set up the UMTS Forum, which was an amalgamation of the industry actors.  This would create an industry body which wasn’t biased. (towards either operators, equipment manufacturers or component vendors in the development of the services) It had operators, manufacturers, regulators, quite important in getting spectrum allocated, the drafting of EU directives and starting to build the energy which would keep that project going.  Going from research to implementation is a fairly hairy business and many things fail, so that was quite an important initiative.”  (Shortly after the formation of UMTS Ed was appointed as a Visiting Professor at Strathclyde University in recognition of his contribution and vision towards mobile communications and subsequently invited to join the Court of the University as a lay member)

In 1996 Ed was appointed to the Board of Simoco Limited, a buy-out company who took over the Philips worldwide Radio interests based in Cambridge, as Group Development Director. He had a 400 strong digital R&D team primarily working on finishing off the TETRA digital mobile radio network and handset development project.

In 2000, having worked on both 2G, the UMTS and RACE projects, Ed returned to Hutchinson firstly as Technology Director and then Group Technology Director. Here he would go on to develop Hutchinson’s 3G network and work with engineering teams to launch 3 in the UK on time on the 3 March 2003.  3G led to the great explosion of applications in mobile telephony. He says: “We talk about generations.  First generation was really just trying to get sufficient coverage to provide a useful mobile telephony service; very expensive, limited capacity, but at least you could do it.  2G was really the arrival of consumer.  It meant that you could multiplex multiple channels onto single carrier so that you could get the volume of transactions and the capacity, and you could use digital technologies,  meaning  that functionality could be replicated  in volume leading to equipment at a lower cost, and reaching the point where you can start to get the prices of equipment down to where it’s affordable for everybody.  But my view, right from the very start with UMTS, we were going for a different world. Looking back to 1987 that was a really special moment. What we were doing was saying, I want to get to the place where we have information and video communication at our fingertips. Today we would call it mobilising the Internet.”

On the expectation of 5G, Ed says: “Such a lot is tied up in what’s been done, that it’s very easy to say the next one won’t be better. On the other hand, with the technology, you can say, well what can you do better?  But then you also have to ask, what do people need, how is it going to meet their needs?  I’m not so convinced about the business cases.  I think that there will be extra capacity and there will be extra capability.  Some of that is going to have to be met by a drastic increase in the density of sites in order to deliver the 5G, so I don’t think it’s all plain sailing yet.  Somebody once said that the odd generations have the most difficulty and the even ones are the ones that clean up the mess after the previous ones. We had analogue, then digital, then 3G. We went from business to consumer voice and then all of a sudden we change what the mobile phone does.  I always feel that 3G was such a fundamental change in what we were doing, what we could bring, and then the IT industry did the rest.  It provided the applications, the infrastructure.  The IT network is possibly now the world’s largest interconnection machine.  Only just recently has it passed the international telephone network as the biggest machine in the world.”  Mobile is now a fundamental part of this huge interconnection engine.

On the subject of whether we are entering a world of digital dystopia Ed says: “Put it another way, regulation and law always follow the event and governments do not react to future visions; they react to what they find, so in some respects, where we are at the moment is a bit of the Wild West.  There is opportunity for malfeasance, and there is opportunity for causing a lot of trouble.  With every benefit there’s always a limitation and one has to be careful not to remove the opportunity through fear.  I think we are in a place where governments need to change and work much harder in regulation control but at the same time avoiding the loss of freedom.”

Interviewed by: Richard Sharpe on the 6th March 2020 at BCS London

Transcribed by: Susan Hutton

Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley