Luc, here is an article on NT from Financial Post:
paddle4.canoe.ca;
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Saturday, February 21, 1998
Beyond being there
What does a telecom think-tank see from its lofty perspective? Convergence, Internet 2, and a future in which working together means working miles apart
By ADAM GUTTERIDGE
Special Reports Writer The Financial Post
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- A doctor in Toronto examines a patient. Two specialists, one in Montreal, the other in Boston, assist. They do not merely provide advice, but also manipulate the CAT scan in San Diego.
The idea of a medical procedure distributed among specialists in different cities is part of the promise of "telepresence" on the Internet.
Telepresence is the phenomenon of people not in the same place working together as though they are. If transmission capacity, or bandwidth, is sufficiently large, enough data can be sent to enable the sender to operate a machine hundreds of miles away.
A consortium of 100 universities, government agencies, corporations and other institutions -- U.S. Internet 2 -- is trying to develop a national research testbed for the Internet. Once in place, Internet 2 will be able to transmit data at speeds 100 to 1,000 times faster than today. Eventually, it will be commercialized, and telepresence will become a reality.
Before this can happen, the Internet must evolve into a reliable, mass market voice and data communications medium with a resilient infrastructure. Today, it labors to cope with its triffid-like transformation from an arcane research network for the military into a mass market medium. And its rapid growth is placing an ever-increasing load on the venerable telecommunications network.
According to technology research company Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., growth in data traffic is spiralling upwards at a dizzying 300% a year, while voice traffic is proceeding at a stately 7%.
In the near future, the telecom network will be carrying more data traffic than voice traffic. Eventually, employees will do most faxing and some phone calling over the Internet, which will be open continuously on their desktop computers for a wide variety of business uses, and they will be able to make phone calls without having to get off the Net to free up the line.
This convergence of telecommunications and data communication poses challenges for telecom suppliers, such as Brampton, Ont.-based Northern Telecom Ltd., which has its main research operation for telecom switches in Research Triangle Park (RTP), a giant science complex near Raleigh and Durham, N.C.
Increasingly, telecom suppliers find themselves bumping elbows with companies that sell the data routers and hubs that make the Internet work -- companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., which also has operations in RTP.
These companies all want a piece of the commercial opportunity of the decade. For those such as Lucent Technologies Inc., Nortel and Cisco, integration of voice and data is a "$1-trillion opportunity," says Selby Wellman, senior vice-president of corporate marketing and GM Interworks Business Unit at Cisco RTP.
To benefit, both the telecom and computer industries need skills in each other's discipline. Analysts predict a wave of acquisitions as telecom suppliers, generally more established and better capitalized than their computer cousins, buy up datacom suppliers to acquire those skills.
Mergers have begun. Last fall, Jackson, Miss.-based WorldCom Inc. bought long-distance carrier MCI Communications Corp. for US$37 billion in the biggest takeover in U.S. history. In the next few years, many computer networking firms will have been bought up by telecoms, says Carl Howe, director of network strategies for Forrester Research. In isolated cases, the more strongly capitalized datacom suppliers will buy telecom equipment suppliers.
The view of the future from Nortel's switching research operation at RTP is uncertain. The company built its success on making the equipment that enables phone companies to switch voice traffic along telecom circuits to provide a continuous connection reserved for one caller's communication with another. As data traffic increases, the need for switches will diminish; unlike voice traffic, data is not switched across the network, but split up and sent in packets along a number of different routes, or routed, before being consolidated for delivery.
Over at Cisco's RTP operation, the future looks equally challenging. Phone companies allocate lines for data or voice transmission, according to consumer demand, which, as voice takes precedence, causes headaches for suppliers of datacom equipment. Crashes such as that of America Online occur when insufficient lines are allocated for data traffic. Data transmission is also restricted by a lack of capacity. Until new technologies come to market to expand that, the pressure is on to make the most of existing capacity, which is not used to its maximum.
The telecom network will have to be transformed to accommodate the rising volume of data traffic, says Cisco's Wellman. It will have to convert from a voice to a data architecture, because the former is far less efficient -- and more expensive -- than the latter.
At Nortel, researchers are studying what happens to telecom switches in an advanced Internet environment. It appears they will have to change dramatically. But even if the Internet is eventually open on many desktop computers during office hours and people are able to place calls through the Internet, switches will not go away, says Robert Wohlford, assistant vice-president at Network Marketing Switching Networks for Nortel. "You still have to have access points to the Internet. And not every point of access can go to the Internet.
"The use of Internet telephony will only accelerate if applications such as wanting to talk and see what you are working on at the same time become popular," he says. "The voice network will still be the most available network for the foreseeable future."
That is until Internet 2 and telepresence become reality.
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