He works for a company whose only credo for survival is being paranoid "" and keeping several steps ahead of the competition. This is one reason Kevin C. Kahn, Intel Fellow and director Communications Infrastructure Lab at Oregon USA, hardly gets time to indulge in his favourite pastimes: scuba diving, a hobby he picked up recently, or flying single- engine aircraft. Working for Intel gives you no free time, he guffaws.
However, he doesn't seem to be missing much. For though his head is buried in the nitty gritty of the most complex computing and communications technologies, it is almost like a hobby to him. Kahn has a simple credo where technology is concerned: how easy is it to use? he asks.
One of the especially problematic areas being the Internet. As millions of users hook up to this labyrinth of computer networks, it is becoming more difficult for the common person to connect to it easily. One of the areas that his lab concentrates on is developing communications technologies and capabilities for the Internet that will make access easier.
According to Kahn, A better way to use the networks of today would be to match the resources of the network (like capacity to handle traffic and availability) to the users' requirements, he says. The digital subscriber loop (DSL) technologies that Kahn's team is working with aims to achieve just that.