Trensd in Telecommunication

Trends in Telecommunications

Abstract
Internet became the dominant design of the networking for information and communication technology
(ICT) industries in the late 1990's. The emergence of Internet has changed the competitive environment in
the ICT area. The industry consolidation following the dominant design opens a process innovation period
where applications become IP-based. We call this the creation of All-IP environment with All-IP applications.
In the next 10 years the penetration of All-IP applications to corporate and consumer use will take place.


1. Introduction
Internet Protocol (IP) becomes the dominant design of networking after the
breakthrough of HTML-based Web and Browser-based user interfaces in the 1990's. The
emergence of IP-based services has changed the competitive environment of the ICT area
and new changes are taking place. The industry consolidation following the dominant
design takes approximately five years, after which the process innovation period of 5-10
years begins.
In the IP-services process innovation phase the new IP-products are taken into use
and new All-IP services emerge. This development restructures the network operator and
service provider industries. The key components of this development are new All-IP
middleware and service provisioning architectures, such as Web-Services, Open Mobile
Architecture and OMG CORBA.
It may be possible that the emerging middleware innovations enable new service
provisioning models, such that resource sharing between firms and service providers. As
the GRID architecture has been developed in CERN to enable the sharing of processing
capacity and mass memory resources between organizations, similarly WLAN, 3G and 4G
base stations could be shared between firms and operators in some form of service and
provider based Virtual Private Networks.
In this paper we study some major trends in All-IP application and service
development.

2. ICT Trends
In Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) the relative size of IT and
Telecom industries has continued to grow (Figure 1) [2,4].
International Workshop NGNT 2
Figure 1: ICT turnover from 1995 to 2002
This growth is partly characterized by the increase of personal computing and
personal applications and partly by telecommunications. In telecommunications the
transition from simple connectivity services to mobile, data and content delivery services
over networks is proceeding. This transition may be divided into three waves.
The first wave (1994-2000) has been characterised by global services over the
existing infrastructure and growth in mobile and value-added services. Furthermore, the
Internet Protocol (IP) became the basic protocol for data and new services. This wave
opened also the growth of Internet telephony.
The second wave (2000-2006) will bring multimedia services with cost effective
broadband access available. Although the price bubble in mobile telephony has not burst
yet, the saturation of narrowband mobile will happen during this period. The broadband
wireless technology will be available in the form of third generation mobile and WLAN, and
the emergence of the fourth generation mobile can also be seen. Broadband wireless is
expected to become available after 2002. This is also the period when Web type user
interfaces and applications will be available in personal computers, mobile terminals and
television sets.
During the third wave (2006-2015) optical infrastructure in joint use will provide
common facilities for telecom services and digital media contents over the IP-based
networks. Optical routing and switching will be controlled directly by applications and
contents. Further, application and content service providers with ”self-assembled”
applications and content on demand over the networks may become the future digital
distribution channels. These channels will manage the pricing, branding and consumer
access to services.