Excerpts: Supercomm IEC
(6-2-2003)
”With the workforce becoming increasingly mobile, businesses are looking for ways to link people in the field to critical company data so they can respond more quickly to their customers, suppliers and partners.
“Those are the things that people will pay for – mobility, security, reliability, new services, and greater efficiency. And, where possible, they want to get all of that by building on their existing communications systems investments.
“It’s a trend that cuts across both public and private networks. And that’s where service providers can play an important role.”
- - -
“As we talk about where will growth come in telecom during the coming years, I think it's also important to bear in mind that this industry is still in various – including early – stages of a long-range fundamental shift in at least three key areas.
“The first is the continuing move to the all-optical network. This change has been underway for some time. Significant investments have already been made, and continue to be made – obviously interrupted by industry conditions. But it’s clear that there is great potential in all-optical communications.
“The second long-term trend is the packetization of networks. Once again, just a few years ago, there were enthusiastic pundits predicting that the Internet would replace circuit networks momentarily. But the challenges turned out to be more considerable than anticipated in that simple view.
“This industry understands well how to engineer, control and monitor networks in the time division-multiplexing world… a traditionally voice world where we all benefit from a whole array of tools developed over the years to help with the job. As packetization proceeds, networks are going to be multi-service frame relay, ATM, IP, voice-over-IP and potentially streaming video. The rules about how you deploy, measure, model and monitor -- essentially how you do traffic engineering -- are not as well understood. There's still a lot more work to be done.
“The third fundamental trend, as I referenced earlier, is that despite the fact that we’ve been talking about it for over two years, we are still in the relatively early days of providing high-speed data services over both wireless and wireline networks. Over the past two years, Lucent has been saying that these high-speed data services, starting with enterprise networks and applications, would drive the industry back to a growth profile.
“We have especially pressed the case for mobile high-speed data services. Among the three fundamental trends, this one does seem to be a bit more immediate, and there seems to be growing agreement among both our customers and our competitors that we are right about its potential to help return the industry to growth. We also believe that the convergence of wireline and wireless networks can enable exciting new services.”
Like what you're reading? Let's talk. Contact Curtis Wilson at i&p.
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