Managing Telecommunications
Lecture 14
Telecommunications Telecommunications is the flow of information among
individuals, work groups, departments, customer sites, regional offices, between enterprises, and with the outside world
The Internet has also opened up a “cyberspace” where
people can be in a virtual world, where organizations can conduct business, and in fact, a place where organizational processes exist. This is providing the foundation for the e-business economy, as just about everything about telecom is shifting
Today’s Lecture
Introduction
The Evolving Telecommunications Scene A New Telecommunications Infrastructure is Being
Built The Telecom Industry is Being Transformed
The Internet is the Network Of Choice Digital Convergence Has Become a Reality The OSI Reference Model Underlies Today’s
Networks The Rate of Change is Accelerating
Today’s Lecture
The Optical Era Will Provide Bandwidth Abundance
The Wireless Century Begins
Messaging is a Killer App
Coming: An Internet of Things
The Role of the IS Department
Introduction
Telecommunications = electronically sending data in any form from one place to another between People Machines, or Objects
Introduction...
Generally, IS departments have been responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the information highway in the same way that governments are responsible for building and maintaining streets, roads, and freeways
Once built, the network, with its nodes and links, provides infrastructure for the flow of information and messages
Introduction…
In early 2000s Telecom became the basis for the way people and companies started working It provides the infrastructure for moving information
and messages South Korea’s largest telecommunications firm.
It is able to transmit data at a rate of 4 megabits per second, about four times faster than the typical cable modem deliver-ing high-speed Internet service to U.S. households.
Introduction...
The company uses radio sensors to track the movement of parts as they move from fabrication shop to the side of a drydock and then onto a ship under construction.
Workers on the ship use notebook computers or handheld mobile phones to access plans and engage in two-way video conversations with ship designers in the office, more than a mile away.
In Past
In the past, workers who were inside a vessel below ground or below sea level had to climb topside to use a phone or walkie-talkie when they had to talk to someone about a problem.
The new wireless network is connected to the electric lines in the ship, which convey digital data
HYUNDAI HEAVY INDUSTRIES CREATES A WIRELESS SHIPYARD to Wi-Fi wireless transmitters: placed around the hull during construction. Workers’ Internet phones, webcams, and PCs are linked to the Wi-Fi system, so workers can use Skype VoIP to call their colleagues on the surface.
Contin…
Designers in an office building a mile from the con-struction site use the webcams to investigate problems.
On the shipyard roads, 30 transporter trucks fitted to receivers connected to the wireless network update their location every 20 seconds to a control room.
This helps dispatchers to identify the location of transporters with orders for parts, shortening the trips each truck makes.
All of the day’s movements are finished by 6 P.M. instead of 8 P.M. By making operations more efficient and reducing labor costs, the wire-less technology is expected to save Hyundai Heavy $40 million annually.
The Korea Herald, March 30, 2010
Sources: Evan Ramstad, “High-Speed Wireless Transforms a Shipyard,” The Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2010 and “Hyundai Heavy Plans Wireless Shipyard,” The Korea Herald, March 30, 2010.
The Evolving Telecommunications Scene
Even with the recent ‘downturn’ (correction?) in some countries – the changes in Telecom are coming fast and furiously. Here are some major changes taking place:
A New Telecommunications Infrastructure is Being Built:
The oldest part of the telecommunications infrastructure is the telephone network
This global network was built on twisted-pair copper wires and was intended for voice communications
It uses analog technology, which although appropriate for delivering high-quality voice, is inefficient for data transmission
Dedicated circuit (switching)
The Evolving Telecommunications Scene ...
The Evolving Telecommunications Scene cont.
A New Telecommunications Infrastructure is Being Built cont.: The basic traffic-handling mechanism had to change
for data Today, the new telecommunications infrastructure is
being built around the world aimed at transmitting data, and consists of:
Wired - fiber optic links
Wireless – radio signals
The Evolving Telecommunications Scene cont.
Both use packet switching, where messages are divided into packets, each with an address header, and each packet is sent separately
No circuit is created; each packet may take a different path through the network
The Evolving Telecommunications Scene cont.
Packets from any number of senders and of any type, whether e-mails, music downloads, voice conversations, or video clips, can be intermixed on a network segment –
– Making these next generation networks able to handle much more traffic and a great variety of traffic
The Evolving Telecommunications Scene cont.
This architecture allows new kinds of services to be deployed much more rapidly
The Internet can handle all kinds of intelligent user devices, including:
– Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones– Personal digital assistants (PDAs)– Gaming consoles, and – All manner of wireless devices
The global telecom infrastructure is changing from a focus on voice to a focus on data
The Telecommunications Industry is Being Transformed
• The telecom structure of old was originally provided by (often Government owned) monopolies
Only ones with the $ to support set up costs
Public infrastructure
• Gradually, the telecom industry has been deregulated
The Telecommunications Industry is Being Transformed
• The telecom industry is becoming like the computing industry in that each year brings ‘predictable’ (and ‘huge’) improvements
Performance
Capacity
• Bandwidth on fiber is now doubling capacity every four months
The Telecommunications Industry is Being Transformed cont.
‘Last Mile’ problems:Who ‘owns’ the ‘last mile’
In the 1990s, the ‘monopolies’ began encountering competition for “the last mile”
Bottleneck issues (hose to straw) Visualize the world’s networks as huge fire
hoses because they use fiber optic cables that can transmit at a whopping speed of a terabit (1012 bits per second)
1,000,000,000,000
The Telecommunications Industry is Being Transformed cont.
Then visualize the twisted pair phone line coming into your home or business as a straw, only operating at speeds of 56 kbps (104)
10,000
Current Situation
The current wave of growth in mobile data services and traffic is driving connection and handset penetration ever higher.
As the long tail of emerging market users gets connected, the number of mobile connections is projected to surpass the global human population in 2014 (see Figure 1).
At the same time, global smartphone shipments are continuing to ramp up impressively (see Figure 2).
However, minutes of use (MoU) is flattening in some markets as consumers’ usage shifts toward data and away from traditional services such as voice,despite a rising proportion of packages offering unlimited minutes and text messages.
Current Situation…
Hong Leong Investment bank
ICG COMMUNICATIONSCase example: Changes in the Telecom
Industry
• This competitive local exchange carrier provides voice and data services in 25 metropolitan areas in the United States
Contin…
• It was formed in 1984 to provide local telephone service in Denver. It expanded to provide long distance, buying up companies with fiber routes
• It later focused on being an Internet backbone provider, serving ISPs
Contin…
• When the dot-com bubble burst, ICG filed for bankruptcy, but moved out of bankruptcy in late 2002
• ‘Similar’ things have happened in other countries
The Internet is the Network of Choice
What has surprised most people is the Internet’s surprisingly fast uptake for business use
As did the fast plummet of the dot-com and telecommunications industries
The Internet is the Network of Choice…
In the late 1990s, the Internet caught most IS departments by surprise, not to mention the hardware and software vendors who serve the corporate IS community
The Internet actually began in the 1960s when it was called ARPANET, mainly used for electronic mail
By 1993, it was still mainly a worldwide network for scientists and academics, text only - no graphics
The Internet is the Network of Choice cont.
That all changed in 1994 when the World Wide Web was invented (By Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva.)
This graphical “layer” of the Net made it much more user friendly:
Web sites had addresses specified by their universal resource locator (URL)
Its multimedia Web pages were formatted using hypertext markup language (HTML)
The Internet is the Network of Choice cont.
All the Web sites could be accessed via an easy-to-use browser on a PC
At first populated by computer geeks’ homepages, business (and ‘normal’ people’s) use of the Web skyrocketed by the late 1990s
The Internet has done for telecom what the IBM PC did for computing: brought it “to the masses”
The Internet is the Network of Choice cont.
In 1981, when the IBM PC was introduced, its architecture was open
An entire industry developed around this open architecture. The same is happening with the Internet because it provides the same kind of openness
Like the PC, this openness yields the most powerful solutions and the most competitive prices
The Internet is the Network of Choice cont.
The Internet has three attributes that make it important to corporations:
Ubiquity
Reliability, and
Scalability
The Internet is the Network of Choice cont.
Today, the protocols underlying the Internet have become the protocols of choice in corporate networks, for internal communications as well as communications with the outside world
The norm is now end-to-end Internet protocol (IP) networks
E-COMMERCE
The use of the Internet and the Web to transact business.
Formally, digitally enabled commercial transactions between and among organizations and individuals
Digitally enabled transactions include all transactions mediated by digital technology
XYZ COMPANYCase example: Network Options
• The Internet will be the heart of XYZ’s corporate operation. So the CTO will create:
- An intranet for use by employees
- An extranet for use by suppliers and some large customers, and of course,
- The Internet as the all-important central public network
XYZ COMPANYCase example: Network Options cont.
• Serving remote users: XYZ has 4 choices of communications wiring:
– twisted pair (standard phone line)
– coaxial cable (like cable TV)
– fibre optic (glass fibre that carries signals via light pulses) and
– wireless
XYZ COMPANYCase example: Network Options cont.
• Modems can be:
– standard telephone modems (56kbps) – no longer really a viable option due to size of files (PowerPoints etc,)
– digital subscriber line (DSL) modems at 1.2 mbps 20 times faster, or
– cable modems at 10mbps or 200 times faster
XYZ COMPANYCase example: Network Options cont.• Serving local users: In the office, all the computers
and telephones will be connected directly to an always-on LAN. The various LANs in XYZ’s offices will use hubs, switches and routers to route traffic
• The CTO will likely choose Fast Ethernet Protocol for his IP-based LAN. It has speeds of 100 mpbs (10^8)
• Communicating Between Offices: XYZ employees need to communicate between sites, so they need some sort of wide area network. As expected, the CTO has choices here as well
XYZ COMPANYCase example: Network Options cont.
– Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is high speed - up to 622 mbps
– A fairly new option for XYZ to link several offices in a city, or link floors within a building, is a Gigabit Ethernet which operates at speeds of one gbps (10^9 bits per second)
• The CTO is definitely going to base all his decisions on being Internet protocol centric
Extranets
Not long after creating intranets, businesses realized they could extend the intranet concept into an extranet
A special part of the intranet for use by trading partners, customers, and suppliers for electronic commerce
The notion caught on and extranets have become an important component of B2B e-commerce
NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTORCase example: Extranet
• National Semiconductor designs and manufactures semiconductor products
– To gain market share and move into new markets, it created an intranet that the sales force could access and keep up-to-date on products and order products .
– It also created the “National Advisor” to electronically send news, sales reports, and customer information to the sales force and its management
NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTORCase example: Extranet
National also created an extranet for distributors and channel partners, and a Web site for design engineers.
• The Web site is replicated around the globe, with maintenance outsourced to a company with data centres around the globe, which provides hosting and other Internet infrastructure services
NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTORCase example: Extranet cont.
• National’s Web site now supports 1 million design engineers around the globe, who download more than 10,000 data books a day, in about two seconds each
• The company only needs to replicate its site once; the hosting company takes care of global coverage
Summary
The Telecom world is big and getting bigger by the day. It is complex, and getting more complex every day
Don’t worry – there’s plenty of help available!
The first generation of the Internet economy has been wired. The second is unwired
Today telecom is all about connecting and the number of possible connections is about to explode worldwide