Chapter 1: Telecom Evolution and Future

1.1.Telephony Vs Telecommunications

Lectured By
Gizaw A.

n
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 Telecom
 Telecommunications is the science of communicating over a long
distance using telephone or radio technology.

 This involves using microelectronic (small semiconductor chip),

computer, and PC technologies to transmit, receive, and switch
voice, data, and video communications over different
transmission media, including copper, fiber, and electromagnetic
transmissions.

 Many forms of analog and digital transmission are employed in

telecommunications today.

 Analog communication is like a dimmer switch for light because

it has an almost unlimited number of brightness settings.
 Telephony is focused on voice communications.

 Telecommunications has evolved into much more.

 The telephone network was originally designed to carry human

voice and not digital information such as data, music, or video.

 It supported telephony (voice communications), but not

telecommunications (data, image, and video).

 Scary thought: any person born today will not know a world
without PCs and Internet to serve them.

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 Telephony
 Telephony is traditional voice communications. It is communications
facilitated by the telephones we have all come to know and love.

 The drawback is that a wire, or more accurately, a channel must connect

the phones for the duration of the call. All telephones and telephone
subscribers share the facilities of the telephone network.

 This means that we can’t all talk at the same time because the telephone
network is not designed to handle such a large load of telephone calls.

 Everyone hearing the fast busy signal because of the call overload. Then
we might think that phone network was down because of some strange
Y2K bug, when it was really brought down by an overload of unnecessary
calls.
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 The name telephony is used by the telephone industry to describe their
business. Because they were voice network providers.

 As the use of communications networks changed, the telephone

industry incorporated more than just voice communications; they
began carrying data, and video. Further they moved away from the
traditional wired approach to delivering services to some new wireless
delivery systems.

 To better fit the new business model, the telephone industry used
telecommunications to describe their business. Today, the telephone
industry uses telecommunications to describe the transmission of
voice, video, image, and data across today’s telephone infrastructure.
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 Convergence Implications
 Convergence occurs because data, voice, video and other

information is encoded as a stream of 1’s and 0’s, making them

digital communications.

 Today, it is being implemented in a wearable computer-

communications appliance on our belt.

 Example: Dialpad.com, Voice over IP (VoIP), Cisco’s VoIP

router/gateways, Cable Modems

 The business that synergistically provides voice, video and

Internet services as a single package – dominate. 6

 1.2.Short History and Evolution of Telecom Technologies

 For the current dynamic telecom world, two guidelines have clearly
emerged. The success of wireless technologies and the convergence
between the telecom and the Internet Infrastructures.

 Pervasive, ubiquitous, and always-connected environment fully

supporting information/service sharing based on community belonging.

 Telecommunications: Connecting the world.

 “I’ll give you a call”. As easy as that.

 50 yrs ago no body would have pronounced it.

 The telephone industry was restricted to a minority of people in the so

called developed world and it was barely existent in most parts of the
world. 7
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 ITU reported the penetration of telephones in the various countries of the world on a yearly
basis (for the last 50 yrs).

 The USA progressed from < 20% to close to 50% of the population and almost 100% of
households.

 Europe has been lagging behind but has been a close follower, with higher penetration in
Nordic countries and less in the Mediterranean region, till 1980s.

 From that moment on, huge focused investment took place in many southern European
countries and that filled the gap with the North.

 By 1990s it was difficult to find a household without a phone in Europe, North America,
Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.

 For the other parts of the world, 1990, it was a quite different story.

 Cambodia and a Centro African Countries had few percentage points of penetration, well
below 10%.

 A significant number of countries were around 10% and others between 10% and 20%.

 At that time, being below 30% was meant to be “out of reach” for most people. 8
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 According to ITU (1990) progressing from 1% penetration to 10% would take a country close to 19

yrs, 14 yrs to move from 10% to 20% and just 8 yrs to reach 30% from 20%. This figure have a big

impact on the distance between poor and rich countries.

 The distance between poor and rich countries in the 1990s was not only measured by the penetration

factor but also by the quality of the telecom infrastructures (service available).

 The general rule was that pervasive infrastructures, like those to be found in Europe and North

America, were also providing much better quality.

 They usually were the result of a continuous investment, the operation costs (OPEX) could be split

over millions of users, together leading to better resources and maintenance.

 Poor countries had outdated infrastructures, poorly maintained equipment (also because of technical

skill shortage) and even new investment were submerged by the existing low grade equipment (a

network is as good as its worst component).

 It is therefore obvious that in the beginning of the 1990s the ITU and UNs in their various agencies

were trying to address the issue of bettering telecom infrastructures in developing countries by rising
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awareness at political level.
 1.3.The Future of Telecoms
 Some points about the telecoms industry at the moment

 It is on an unsustainable path, and faces in the following key

transformations in order to become sustainable.

 1. Externally, it has to restructure in order to integrate with a

world of distributed computing services.

 2. Internally, it requires a shift from a craft-based approach to

network design and operations, to a much stronger science-

based form of engineering.

 3. At the interface between the external and internal, telecoms

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 Most interesting dynamics and changes in the telecoms
industry during recent years

 The rise of new players controlling devices (Apple), cloud

resources (Amazon), user information flows (Google),
component technologies (Qualcomm, ARM) and their impact
on the telecoms supply chain.

 The decline in relative power of the old network equipment

vendors, who are no longer able to “lead” the ICT industry as
they once did.

 The implosion of the highest-margin voice and SMS revenues

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in many markets from OTT arbitrage.
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 The emergence of vast new markets in Asia, Africa and South
America.
 Broadband has not yet really fulfilled its promise.
 The number of digital services being delivered to the home is
still below what we might have hoped for. The level of
teleworking, e-health, distance education etc. still has much
growth potential.
 Cloud services remain immature.
 The industry has not, in aggregate, found a way to cover its
costs of capital for a very, very long time. This has to change.
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 Mobile, social and cloud change the future of telecom

 The world is embracing a shared infrastructure. A few years

ago, the market was in a heated debate on companies’ and
consumer’s willingness to use the cloud. Today, firms of all
sizes are using the cloud for storage, processing power and
even Software as a service markets.

 Services will become people-centric, but device and network

agnostic. We’re moving from a world of one device per person
to multiple devices per person. We are moving from a world of
one wired connection per home to numerous wireless
connections – and possibly some wired as well.
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 Services, not just devices, will be mobile. Mobility will take
on a new meaning as content and services become portable.
Individuals will use a combination of cloud storage, SaaS, cloud
media and remote desktop access to store, retrieve and consume
content while on the go.
 Services will be contextual and relevant. This is a huge
departure from where we are today.

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 There are many challenges the telecom industry faces. To meet these challenges, the
full participation of all stakeholders, including government, consumers and network
operators, will be essential.

 The transition to IP networks, and the policy modernization that will accompany it,
represent the largest telecom changes since the ’96 Act. It’s going to be an exciting
several years.

 1.4.Balanced Tele-computing

 Enterprise networks support a combination of telecommunications, data

communications (WANs), and LANs.

 Enterprise networks are large networks that allow everyone in a business or

government organization to communicate with one another from every facility on
the planet 24 hours a day.
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 TCP/IP (software products conforming to standard international
communications procedures that run the Internet) networks
transformed enterprise networks with a worldwide addressing
mechanism. Today’s PC LAN-based enterprise networks also
conform to international standard addressing specified by the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

 The big change in the 1990s was that any PC could get to any data
on any server (provided the user was authorized) through an
addressing scheme that was structured like an organization chart
(NetWare Directory Services—NDS—Novell) or telephone
directory (Domain Name Services—DNS—UNIX).
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 The Domain Name Service (DNS) approach is used in the
Internet and will become the dominant approach for
connecting users with the information they seek in all
networks. This is evidenced by Microsoft Windows 2000
moving to DNS addressing for enterprise networks. Enterprise
networks using different addressing schemes are connected via
Internet gateways.

 The implication here is that everyone on the planet connected

to the Internet at any location can access any information on
any computer planet wide (provided they are authorized).
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 Tele-computing is the convergence of voice, data, and LAN communications

with PC technologies. This convergence delivers to the office or home PC data,

image, voice, and video information. Tele-computing makes desktop, mobile,

hand-held and wearable PCs universal communication appliances.

 Balanced tele-computing extends this concept by simply matching computer-

communications tools to job functions (see Figure).

 Balanced tele-computing becomes even more difficult as we move into the

future because our tele-computing choices are forever growing. What is a good

combination of computer and communications technologies today may not be

the most effective combination tomorrow. So, balancing technology to meet

information and communications needs becomes an interesting problem.

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 When you think of balancing technologies to meet user needs,

effective (not necessarily cheap) solutions seem more obvious.
In the home, balanced tele-computing is matching the PC tools
and communications services to the information and
entertainment needs of the household. The focus is on

 providing the computer-communications tools and services

that help people in their work and improve their personal lives.

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 How networks are built and how they work are much less important

here than what they do for us. The driving force behind networks is

how they make everyone more productive. This is what I call

balanced tele-computing—matching the computer and

communications capabilities to the work functions performed by an

employee. The goal is to increase the employee’s productivity.

 This goal is accomplished by balancing the computing done at the

desktop (or in the wearable computer) with the available

communications/transmission capacities and computing done in the

supporting servers.
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Analog and Digital Communications
OSI Model
 Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) is a
standard reference model for communications
between two end users in a network.
 7 Layers
7. Application Layer
All
6. Presentation Layer People
5. Session Layer Seem
4. Transport Layer To
3. Network Layer
Need
Data
2. Data Link Layer
Processing
1. Physical Layer
Tasks involved in sending letter
 LAYER 7 – The APPLICATION
Layer
• The top layer of the OSI model
• Provides a set of interfaces for sending and
receiving applications to gain access to and
use network services, such as: networked file
transfer, message handling and database query
processing
 LAYER 6 – The PRESENTATION Layer
• Manages data-format information for networked
communications (the network’s translator)
• For outgoing messages, it converts data into a generic format
for network transmission; for incoming messages, it converts data
from the generic network format to a format that the receiving
application can understand
• This layer is also responsible for certain protocol conversions,
data encryption/decryption, or data compression/decompression
• A special software facility called a “redirector” operates at this
layer to determine if a request is network related on not and
forward network-related requests to an appropriate network
resource
• The presentation layer is responsible for translation,
compression, and encryption.
 LAYER 5 – The SESSION Layer

• Enables two networked resources to hold ongoing

communications (called a session) across a network
• Applications on either end of the session are able to ex
hange data for the duration of the session
• This layer is:
• Responsible for initiating, maintaining and terminating
sessions
• Responsible for security and access control to session
information (via session participant identification)
• Responsible for synchronization services, and for
checkpoint services
• The session layer is responsible for dialog
control and synchronization.
LAYER 4 – The TRANSPORT Layer

• Manages the transmission of data across a network

• Manages the flow of data between parties by
segmenting long data streams into smaller data chunks
(based on allowed “packet” size for a given
transmission medium)
• Reassembles chunks into their original sequence at
the receiving end
• Provides acknowledgements of successful
transmissions and requests resends for packets which
arrive with errors
• The transport layer is responsible for the delivery
of a message from one process to another.
 LAYER 3 – The NETWORK Layer

• Responsible for deciding how to route

transmissions between computers
• This layer also handles the decisions
needed to get data from one point to the next
point along a network path
• This layer also handles packet switching
and network congestion control
• The network layer is responsible for the
delivery of individual packets from
• the source host to the destination host.
 LAYER 2 – The DATA LINK Layer

• Handles special data frames (packets) between

the Network layer and the Physical layer
• At the receiving end, this layer packages raw
data from the physical layer into data frames for
delivery to the Network layer
• At the sending end this layer handles
conversion of data into raw formats that can be
handled by the Physical Layer
• The data link layer is responsible for moving
frames from one hop (node) to the next.
 LAYER 1 – The PHYSICAL Layer

• Converts bits into electronic signals for outgoing messages

• Converts electronic signals into bits for incoming messages
• This layer manages the interface between the the computer and
the network medium (coax, twisted pair, etc.)
• This layer tells the driver software for the MAU (media
attachment unit, ex. network interface cards (NICs, modems, etc.))
what needs to be sent across the medium
• The bottom layer of the OSI model
•
• The physical layer is responsible for movements of
• individual bits from one hop (node) to the next.
 Remember
• A convenient aid for remembering the OSI
layer names is to use the first letter of each
word in the phrase:
• All People Seem To Need Data Processing