The ITU and Emerging Trends in
Telecommunications
he internet’s continuing rapid
expansion contributes to exponential changes in the communications industries, particularly
with respect to the number of businesses that maintain a web presence, the number of people
using the web, the value of e-commerce transacted on the web, and the amount of marketing
dollars spent on the web. Both the internet and corporate intranets have quickly become
significant global media in their own
right, allowing content publishers to deliver
information and programming in interactive ways to a narrow audience not possible utilizing
traditional broadcast television and print media. The International Telecommunications
Union’s Radio Communications Study Groups have devoted much time and effort toward tracking
these emerging trends, going so far as to draft a Vision Framework and Overall Objectives
of the Future Development of IMT-2000 and of Systems Beyond IMT-2000. According to the
ITU’s vision statement,
by 2011 there will be 1700
million terrestrial subscribers worldwide. It is the envisaged that, by 2020, the
whole population of the world could have access to a mobile phone. The number of
portable handsets will also exceed the number of PCs connected to the Internet, and mobile
terminals will be the major man-machine interface of the future.
The ITU also predicts that user
needs to access multimedia data services will become the major market influence of wireless
systems.
The majority of traffic is
changing from speech-oriented to multimedia communications with a corresponding change in
technology from predominantly circuit switched to packet switched delivery. This
change from second generation technology to IMT-2000 provides the user with the ability to
receive more efficient multimedia services, including e‑mail, file transfers, messaging and
distribution services. These multimedia services can be symmetrical and asymmetrical,
real-time and non real-time. For example, external market studies have predicted that
in Europe in the year 2011 more than 90 million mobile subscribers will use mobile
multimedia services, generating about 60 % of the traffic in terms of transmitted bits. In
Japan, as one of the mobile multimedia services, mobile web browsing services have become
popular in around 2000. The number of mobile web browsing service users
was 48.5 million (72% of mobile subscribers) at the end of 2001 and is still growing. Other
communication relationships will
also emerge in addition to person to person, such as machine to
machine, machine to person and person to machine.
ITU also believes that
user expectations are also
continuously increasing with regard to the variety of services and applications, many of
which are expected to be highly bandwidth consuming resulting in higher data rate
requirements for the future. … In particular, users will expect a dynamic, continuing stream
of new applications, capabilities and services. The user will also expect ubiquity and
diversity of services which in some instances may have varying economic impact. Versatile
communication systems with customized and ubiquitous services based on diverse individual
needs will require flexibility in the technology in order to satisfy these demands
simultaneously.
ITU predicts “integration of
services and convergence of service delivery mechanisms” from what it calls a “service
perspective.”
ITU identifies three integration
trends with respect to convergence delivery mechanisms: connectivity, content, and commerce,
but also suggests that the outworking of these three trends
will result in new service
delivery dynamics and a new paradigm in telecommunications where
value added services such as those which are location dependent will provide enormous
benefits to both the end users and the service providers.
Accordingly, ITU concludes that
wireless radio interfaces would need to be able to carry around 30 Mb/s by 2005. ITU’s basic
analysis of emerging trends in wireless telecommunications can be summarized by the
following succinct observations:
In the future wireless service
provision will be characterized by global mobile access (terminal and personal mobility),
high quality of services (full coverage, intelligible, no drop and no/lower call blocking
and latency), and easy and simple access to multimedia services for voice, data, message,
video, world-wide web, GPS, etc. via one user terminal. End-to-end secured services will be
fully coordinated, via access control, authentication including use of biometric sensors
and/or smart card and mutual authentication, data integrity and encryption. User added
encryption feature for higher level of security will be part of the system. … The satellite
and terrestrial components may operate in conjunction with one another to facilitate global
coverage. The possibility to use a common terminal worldwide and to roam globally is
desirable.
