Deregulation ⇒ Trends

replacing multiplexors with Routers/Switches/… << 1/10 circuit switched costs
Standard telco interfaces being replaced by datacom interfaces
New Alliances:
- telecom operators & vendors working with traditional data & data communications vendors
future developments building on VoIP
- Fax broadcast, Improved quality of service, Multipoint audio bridging, Text-to-speech conversion and Speech-to-Text conversion, Voice response systems, …
- Replacing the wireless voice network’s infrastructure with IP:

U. C. Berkeley’s ICEBERG: Internet-based core for CEllular networks BEyond the thiRd Generation

See the Univ. of California at Berkeley ICEBERG project report:

http://iceberg.cs.berkeley.edu/release/

⇒Telecom (only) operators have no future

⇒Telecom (only) companies have no future

Transcript

[slide52] So the trend from deregulation was, as I said, more new regulations, but the traditional multiplexers that were used were being replaced by routers and switches at much less than one-tenth of the cost. So the cost to extend an E1 from this building to another exchange with an E1 was ten times the price of doing it as if I had done it by an Ethernet. So these were very expensive. Standard telecom interfaces got replaced by datacom interfaces. Lots of new alliances between different companies, and people starting to say, hey, there's a project at UC Berkeley called Iceberg where they said, hey, we're building a cellular network. Why should we rent E1 lines to go from our base station into our central exchange? Why don't we connect them to the LAN and send it as data traffic? It'll be much cheaper. And, of course, they went ahead and did that. So I said a long time ago that basically telecom-only operators and companies have no future. They had to shift to integrate with datacom.