Role of Multimedia in the Telecom Environment for the 21st Century

Telecommunications in the 20th century has consisted primarily of a combination of circuit-switched voice, fax and data and, more recently, packet-switched data and voice.  The 20th century networks have supported multiple formats and data rates, using mainly electronic switching with SONET rings for multiplexing to high data rates, and high-speed restoration.  The telecom landscape is changing radically and rapidly in virtually every dimension and the telecom network of the 21st century will be radically different from the network of today.  All traffic will be packet-switched through a single format IP-network, with an optical backbone (running at rates in excess of 8 Tb/s), with optical switching, and optical restoration.

Along with the changes in the physical network will come changes in the ways in which we:

• access the network (from narrowband to broadband pipes),
• the devices we attach to the network (from telephones and computers to multipurpose universal communicators),
• the operations associated with running the network (from people-oriented to automated via web or computer voice interactions), and
• the services that run on the network (from simple voice and data services to a panoply of multimedia communication services including messaging, find, help, sell, entertain, control, store, and community services). 

Each of these changes will precipitate a range of new technology that will be required to build and maintain the network of the 21st century.

In this talk we give predictions as to the major trends in each area of telecommunications of the 21st century, ranging from the architecture of the new network to the multimedia services that we perceive will be running on the network.  Multimedia demos of some basic services will be included in the presentation.