The term telecommunications is derived from "tele", meaning at a distance, and "communications", meaning exchanging of information. The history of electronic communications has thus far been applied to the exchange of spoken, visual, and or textual information between pairs of people, pairs of machines, and people and machines. The role of telecommunications has been to provide a medium for the exchange of the information, with the burden placed on the communicating people or machines to initiate the communication and to interpret or process the information being exchanged.
In this paper we attempt to predict some future trends in telecommunications, reaching into the next century. Such predictions are inevitably incomplete, inaccurate, or both. Nevertheless, it is a useful exercise to try to anticipate these trends, and more importantly the issues and problems that will arise in the future, as a way of focusing near-term research efforts and suggesting opportunities. One of our hypotheses about the future is that telecommunications networks will become much more active in initiating, controlling, and participating in the exchange of information.
Our approach will be to first review some particularly important past developments, and then to try to predict the future in two ways: First, by extrapolating present trends and activities, and second, by criticizing current trends and anticipating problems looming on the horizon.
The single most significant advance in telecommunications technology in the past few decades has been the rapid evolution from analog to digital representations of signals. While this evolution has been driven in part by the integrated circuit technologies, also significant is the "regenerative effect" of digital representations; that is, the ability to store, copy, and retransmit the representation with an arbitrarily small degradation. As a digital representation, written language and later printing were much earlier applications of the regenerative effect, and had a tremendous impact on civilization. Digital communications has succeeded in expanding the scope of the regenerative effect beyond written representations of language and data to all modalities of communication, including speech and images, with the minor penalty of an insignificantly small quantization degradation.
Digital representations have also had the practical benefit of allowing compression by redundancy removal (this is a side benefit of the regenerative effect since degradation of the compressed version has much more impact than degradation of the original). Compression has accelerated the application of digital representations, since it enables more efficient use of scarce resources such as radio spectrum.
Another significant impact of digital representations has been the abstraction of information representation. All digitally represented forms of information, consisting of a bit stream, look very similar from the perspective of storage and transmission. "Integrated networking" and "multimedia computing" are both based on this common abstract representation of all forms of information.
The replacement of human operators and the development of intelligent switch controllers has been particularly significant in reducing costs and enabling advanced features. While the initial efforts were simply to automate the setting up of calls, and operations and maintenance functions as well, the incorporation of computer technology into network control is a very important development for the future. Any network control functions that can be conceptualized and implemented in software can be realized. Later, we expect this will lead to an active participation of the network in the communications.
BY
In this paper we attempt to predict some future trends in telecommunications, reaching into the next century. Such predictions are inevitably incomplete, inaccurate, or both. Nevertheless, it is a useful exercise to try to anticipate these trends, and more importantly the issues and problems that will arise in the future, as a way of focusing near-term research efforts and suggesting opportunities. One of our hypotheses about the future is that telecommunications networks will become much more active in initiating, controlling, and participating in the exchange of information.
Our approach will be to first review some particularly important past developments, and then to try to predict the future in two ways: First, by extrapolating present trends and activities, and second, by criticizing current trends and anticipating problems looming on the horizon.
The single most significant advance in telecommunications technology in the past few decades has been the rapid evolution from analog to digital representations of signals. While this evolution has been driven in part by the integrated circuit technologies, also significant is the "regenerative effect" of digital representations; that is, the ability to store, copy, and retransmit the representation with an arbitrarily small degradation. As a digital representation, written language and later printing were much earlier applications of the regenerative effect, and had a tremendous impact on civilization. Digital communications has succeeded in expanding the scope of the regenerative effect beyond written representations of language and data to all modalities of communication, including speech and images, with the minor penalty of an insignificantly small quantization degradation.
Digital representations have also had the practical benefit of allowing compression by redundancy removal (this is a side benefit of the regenerative effect since degradation of the compressed version has much more impact than degradation of the original). Compression has accelerated the application of digital representations, since it enables more efficient use of scarce resources such as radio spectrum.
Another significant impact of digital representations has been the abstraction of information representation. All digitally represented forms of information, consisting of a bit stream, look very similar from the perspective of storage and transmission. "Integrated networking" and "multimedia computing" are both based on this common abstract representation of all forms of information.
The replacement of human operators and the development of intelligent switch controllers has been particularly significant in reducing costs and enabling advanced features. While the initial efforts were simply to automate the setting up of calls, and operations and maintenance functions as well, the incorporation of computer technology into network control is a very important development for the future. Any network control functions that can be conceptualized and implemented in software can be realized. Later, we expect this will lead to an active participation of the network in the communications.
BY
David G Messerschmitt |
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