Broadband - The New World of Telecommunications

By:Dr Zoran Miljanic
We live in a time where dramatic changes are occurring in the telecommunication world. In fact, we can hardly remember a life without a mobile telephone. Every year brings an array of new multimedia communications gadgets. We may not know what they are used for, but it will be hard to resist buying them, even though we may need instructions from our kids on how to use them. Some of these toys may even change our lives, and in a few years we may not even remember how we had ever lived without them in the first place.

Let’s look back only ten years, and ask ourselves how many communication services and gadgets, which we use quite often today, we imagined ahead of time. Could we imagine that photos of every corner of the world would be up on the web or that we would be able to see 360 degree views of many streets and buildings before we go there? Could we imagine iPods and MP3 players in our cars? Or that “texting” would soon mean writing and sending SMS messages at the speed we are talking. We can only judge our ability to predict the next ten years based on how well we could see the future back then.

We are fortunate today to witness the realization of the two long term dreams in telecommunications: convergence of computers and communications and the consolidation of voice and data telecommunication infrastructure networks into a single one. Both will bring enormous benefits to the end users and enable new applications that can we can hardly imagine now. Computers and Communication convergence term (C&C) was coined a long time back (in 1977) by Japanese giant NEC, which started promoting the idea of exploring the commonality between the two seemingly different worlds: one, computing, static and self contained, and the other, communications, dynamic and interactive.

As we know today in the internet era, most communication traffic is generated and consumed by the computers. Even when we are using telephony communications today, the computers are carrying and processing our voice. In many cases we may not be aware of that since the small computer may be hidden in the VoIP phone or ATA (Analog Telephony Adapter) devices. Having the intelligence of computers everywhere in the network, mostly at the user’s desks, and the ability to programme them to communicate is the most powerful enabler of modern times.

The other phenomena, common infrastructure for voice and data, will dramatically lower the cost of communication and make it affordable to the large majority of populations in developing countries. How else would something like YouTube appear and succeed: in only two years it went from no value, to a multibillion dollar company responsible for generating 30% of worldwide internet traffic. The media impact could become even more astounding, though more difficult to measure.

This is now the Broadband Era. In the old world of communications, the traffic was controlled by huge, incredibly complex, centralized switching systems. It would take months or years to create new service features. In the broadband era, every computer connected on the internet can provide communication services. The small Swedish company, Skype, created a telephone-like application which uses the computers of all registered users for call routing, and managed to sign up more than 30 million users in less than two years from the start without having a single telephone switching device. This is very strong evidence of a trend that is here to stay: in the broadband era it will be easier and easier to create telecommunication services and they will only get cheaper. The autocracy of the telecommunication central office computers is replaced by democracy of computers. As late professor Michael Dertouzos from MIT has recognized 10 years ago in his epochal book “What Will Be”, the key condition for this new democracy is to have the infrastructure in place.

Infrastructure of theinformation marketplace
The goal of the infrastructure in any system is to enable it to function as a whole, while protecting the interest of every individual component. In the mature branches of the economy, transportation or Plain Old Telephone System (POTS), the infrastructure is in place, it is well understood and adopted by all participants. For instance, POTS infrastructure would guarantee certain quality, availability and always has its standards. The service use is also simple and easily understood. The customers know what they were paying for, they get what they expect, and they know how to use it. We can see the similar properties in other large system infrastructures: transportation and electrical power distribution for instance.

The infrastructure of the new system, like broadband, also needs to have these basic properties in order to be widely adopted: high availability, quality of service guaranties, simple use and affordability. If we look back in the development of mobile telephones, we will see that it was successful only when it satisfied these basic properties of infrastructure. One may argue that the quality of the mobile connection is not the same as in the fixed telephone, but nobody complains – it is what is expected by the users and promised by the providers and thus the system functions very well.
This broadband infrastructure, or broadly, information marketplace, also has a lot of rules and regulations, but some of them are from the computer autocracy era in communications.

The world, in which everyone with a computer connected to the internet can potentially become a service provider and offer services for sale or free, requires new rules and dynamic coordination of these rules to guarantee stability and widespread use of this infrastructure. Regulation also needs to move ahead with the development of the technology and customer base.

One of the services that illustrates the complexity and importance of the infrastructure is VoIP, or internet telephony. The most often considered aspect is call tariff: should it be treated like any other internet traffic or like POTS telephony call. Economically and technically it is somewhere in between the two. The developed regions have fairly well established regulation for this service, while developing countries are adopting the policies depending on what region they are aligning themselves with.

The regulation also needs to go together with the infrastructure development. VoIP can be offered by cable (DOCSIS), xDSL, and WISP (wireless) internet providers. The quality of service, and, very importantly, dependence of the quality of service of users present in the system, varies widely among these technologies, and regulation needs to take these specifics into account.

The infrastructure of the new services will be even more complex. Video on Demand (VOD), IPTV (Internet television), managed communication services for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), and the variety of new services for business and consumer markets will require user education, and protection of the rights of the content providers .

The enterprises inthe Broadband Era
The broadband infrastructure is the backbone of modern enterprise operations. The internal, private networks are becoming more and more complex. The access from the public networks needs to be well controlled to protect corporate assets while still offering high performance external connectivity. The internal networks need to support new services like VoIP and video broadcast or on demand. Multi branch corporations, like banks and retail chains for instance, are using the public network resources for inter-branch connectivity and require providers to implement such things as very high availability and information protection.

The enterprise needs for wireless networks have recently prompted the changes in 802.11 (WiFi) standards to enhance the security.
On the other hand however, some corporations, especially large enterprise systems like transportation or energy distribution, have yet another arrangement in place. Having developed large network capacity for their own use, they can become the public service broadband provider themselves. The internal broadband network can than be developed and positioned as a direct revenue generator rather than only an enabler and supporter for the primary business.

Unleashing the potential
The broadband era is still in the infancy stage, and it is hard to imagine the road ahead. However, we can safely say that the potentials are going to be huge and innovative solutions and business models could reap large benefits to those that create them and those that use them.

Broadband especially brings a lot of hope for the developing regions where the high cost of the traditional telecommunication infrastructure has given a rise of the notion of this so-called impenetrable “digital divide”. The ever decreasing cost of the broadband infrastructure industry, driven by the wide spread adoption of Ethernet and wireless technologies, has given, for the first time in history, the opportunity of full connectivity even for the poorest countries in the world. Thus, given the internet potential for education and productivity improvement, we have every reason to believe that overcoming the digital divide will get us much closer to bridging the other divides between the developed and developing countries, and create a wonderful new world in which people will be able to travel as fast and free as the information these days.