Communications technology and its impact by 2010

communications technology over a 14-year period is a prescription for erroneous calls, but in the interest of generating controversy and thought, I will have a try. Before I attempt to do so, it is necessary to explore the current short-term changes in technology and usage that will impact the directions of the future. The demands for increased bandwidths to the home and office has been motivated by several facts. The material offered on the WorldWide Web is largely graphical, thus straining the limited speeds of analog line modems and even ISDN beyond comfort. The increase in telecommuting by the small business operator and the employees of many large companies has also increased and will continue to increase the demands for persistent high-speed access to the facilities of the Internet. This, combined with a major battle starting for the consumer's communication dollars (between the cable and telephone industries), has caused the development, and soon the installation, of high-speed access to the communications infrastruc-ture—telephone and data via cable modem and digital subscriber line (DSL) technology. In the TV cable modem case, speeds in the neighborhood of 10Mbps downstream (to the consumer) and from 64Kbps to several megabits per second back from the user are being developed, tried, and offered. In the DSL case, the aim is to provide, on top of the normal voice copper line, data rates of 6Mbps in the asymmetric case (like the cable modem) to possibly the same speed in each direction. In the case of cable modems, the telephone industry sees these as the first step to the voice bypass business for the cable operators. The cable industry clearly sees DSL as the way of offering TV to the home by the telephone companies. In each case, the companies view the data traffic as a side issue to the established business of voice or TV. I speak as if data is a different animal from the voice and video traffic. The Internet technology has shown that it is feasible to carry voice, video, and two-way telephony on the Internet structure via a number of experiments and corporate startups. While the current Internet protocols do not properly handle the demands for predictable bandwidth and latency demanded by these services the next generation Inter-net protocol—IPNG—will address these issues. Combined with the widespread deployment of ATM technology in the communications infrastructure, IPNG will allow the proper servicing of this type …