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AT&T signals new era with new technology
The Journal Record
Amid this month's typically hectic flow of
headlines about the communications industry,
perhaps the most significant news of all got lost:
Frank Ianna, president of the [ AT&T Corp. ] 's
network unit, announced that by the end of this
year, the long-distance giant wanted to stop buying traditional telephone
switches for the core of its network.
Granted, Ianna's pronouncement earlier this month was not the lapel-grabbing
kind of news generated by a multibillion-dollar takeover or the latest hot
Internet stock. But it was a seminal moment for the communications industry
and in some ways for everyone who uses a phone.
As it halts decades of investing in the traditional gear that makes up most of
the global phone system, AT&T is retooling its network around a new
generation of technologies inspired partly by the Internet.
Sprint and [ MCI ] Worldcom, the other long-distance giants, are doing much
the same thing. But as the biggest communications company in the United
States, AT&T wields a proportionately larger influence in the market and with
technology suppliers.
So AT&T's announcement was perhaps the definitive sign that at least in the
long-distance business, the aging and increasingly crowded phone network
would be rejuvenated with younger, more efficient technologies. For
consumers, this evolution could lead to lower prices. And in the future, as the
new technologies expand from the core of the network to homes and
businesses, consumers could also benefit from new sorts of features and
services.
"As the functionality moves closer and closer to the customer, the bottom line
for the consumer is that clearly we will drive the economics down," said Neil
J. Grenfell, an engineering vice president at Sprint. "This can also help give the
customer more and more control and more and more integration."
This might mean, for instance, that a tourist or business traveler who wanted
to stay in touch could simply unplug the handset from the home or office
telephone and plug it into the base of any other telephone. The network would
recognize that the person had moved around the block or across the country,
and calls to the original number would ring in the new location.
Services like that are many years away and would require the local phone
companies to invest billions of dollars on top of the current spending by
long-distance carriers. And, of course, it would require consumers to buy
"intelligent" phones.
The reason the new advanced networks being planned by AT&T and others
are new and advanced is that they change the way networks behave at their
most basic level.
Since the invention of the telephone, almost every civilian communications
network has been based on the concept of circuits. If a network is a multilane
highway, then a system based on circuits, known as a circuit-switched
network, paints the lane lines of that highway solid: each conversation has its
own lane, or circuit. If two people are on the phone with each other and
neither of them is speaking, they still use the entire circuit just as if they are
screaming. The standard voice circuit sends and receives 64,000 bits of
information a second.
The main advantages of circuit switching are that it is reliable and relatively
simple to carry out. The main disadvantage is that it is extremely inefficient to
keep an entire lane open for every phone call, regardless of how much data --
in this case, conversation -- it is carrying.
The alternative that is being embraced by AT&T and the others is a sort of
mass-transit alternative called packet switching. On a packet highway, the
lane lines are dashed. Rather than consuming an entire lane, each
conversation gets broken up into millions of small pieces, or packets, that are
then mixed up with other conversations only to be reassembled into intelligible
communications at the other end.
The main advantage of packet switching, the technology used by the Internet
to move massive amounts of data around the globe, is that it is extremely
efficient. A conversation that takes up 64,000 bits a second on a
circuit-switched network might take up only a quarter of that, or 16,000 bits a
second, on a packet-switched system. That can allow carriers to lower their
costs and, potentially, the prices they charge consumers.
The problem is that sorting out all those packets and routing them to the right
place requires ingenuity, especially when the packets are carrying
conversations. A few extra seconds when loading a Web page may not mean
much, but consumers expect their phone calls to be perfect representations of
what they are saying -- with no delays or distortion.
(Copyright 1999)
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