Transcript lecture 14x

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
 Coming:

is a Killer App
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…
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Designers in an office building a mile from the construction 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
The Evolving Telecommunications Scene
...

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
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
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
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).
Current Situation…

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.
Hong Leong Investment bank
ICG COMMUNICATIONS
Case 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…
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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-touse 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,
 Scalability
and
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

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
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 COMPANY
Case 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 COMPANY
Case 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 COMPANY
Case 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 COMPANY
Case 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 COMPANY
Case 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 SEMICONDUCTOR
Case 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 SEMICONDUCTOR
Case 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 SEMICONDUCTOR
Case 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
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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