Technology Forecasting and Strategic Planning

During the weeks before the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, there were many meetings of the National Security Council. The story made the rounds of the staff and later appeared in print about one of the meetings that took place just before the situation was made public. General Curtis LeMay, a high-ranking Air Force officer previously in attendance, was missing. One of the President’s aides was concerned and asked, ‘‘Where’s General LeMay?’’ The President ignored the aide and continued with his opening remarks, but after a minute or so, believing the General’s presence to be critically important, the aide persisted with an interruption: ‘‘Excuse me, Mr. President, General LeMay isn’t here, shouldn’t we wait for him?’’ At this point Kennedy is said to have stopped, removed his glasses, looked straight at the aide, and said, ‘‘No. We don’t want him here. We’re here to decide whether or not we want to bomb Cuba. If we decide we want to bomb Cuba, we’ll put Curtis in the lead airplane, but we don’t want him helping us make that decision.’’ This story is sometimes used to illustrate the difference between strategy and tactics. The strategy involved deciding what to do. However it’s likely the act of excluding the General was a tactic aimed a keeping minds open and forcing a war council to consider one or more alternatives and forge a strategy or two to get the missiles removed from the Caribbean island.

In the late 1960s, the Radio Corporation of America changed its corporate name to simply RCA and went on an acquisition spree buying Cornet Carpets, Banquet Foods, and Hertz Enterprises. Many saw this jokingly as changing the meaning of the company name to ‘‘rugs, chickens, and automobiles.’’ Later, after struggling for several years to compete with IBM in mainframe computer design and manufacturing, the company decided to exit the business. After the decision was finally made and formally announced, an observer noted, ‘‘Strategic planning at RCA consisted solely of deciding what to do after lunch.’’

CONTEXT OF TECHNOLOGY FORECASTING AND STRATEGIC PLANNING

Why should something like technology forecasting and long-range strategic planning be part of communications (cost) management? Because communications is the lifeblood of any organization, and if the blood gets clogged, slows down, or stops, the organization will cease to exist. Technological forecasting and long-range planning assures that communications capabilities and facilities continue to change and evolve to meet the needs of a growing organization operating in an environment subject to change brought on by competitive pressure and regulatory and technological change.

Technology forecasting and strategic planning should be considered in the broader context of the organization’s mission and objectives. It should deal with all fundamental requirements of the organization, such as revenue producing products and/or services structure, human and capital resources, physical facilities, and utilities. This chapter introduces the concept of long-range strategic business planning, explains how to do communications technology and long-range planning, and its use in the overall plan.

Long-Range Strategic Planning

Does your organization have a long-range business plan, also called long-range strategic plan, or simply just a strategic plan? Have you seen it? If the answer to both questions is yes, consider your good fortune in the sense that most companies don’t have a long-range plan, let alone a technology plan. Much like the story about RCA, they worry about what to after lunch, eventually getting bought up, or taken over by another organization. Others take forever to get an annual budget prepared and agreed to by their banks and other lenders whose primary interest is that they receive each month’s interest payment on the money the company owes, not on the company’s product and service revenue, gross margin, and net income.

If your organization does not have a long-range plan, regardless of the nature and character of the annual business plan or operating budget, you are in a good position to learn while doing something valuable. If your colleagues and management do not appreciate the effort, you will be in a position to benefit your next employer when your current organization experiences its premature demise. The best place to start is with your organization’s annual business plan and budget, 

CIRCUIT SWITCHING | Network Technology And Methodology

Circuit switching and routing is the basis for all domestic and international telephone or voice grade, dial-up traffic. The circuit switching function is distributed between end-office switching systems and network switching systems. End office switching systems may be a private branch exchange (PBX) physically located on subscriber premises, or a partition in the telephone company’s nearest office, commonly referred to as centrex service. Network switching systems include the local serving central office and any other systems facilitating a path for a telephone call. Nowadays, these systems range in size from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of ports capable of handling millions of calls per hour.

Circuit switching in functional terms is nothing more than connection of one transmit-receive pair on one side of a switch to a transmit-receive pair on another port on the same path or route, or a different path or route, sometimes called the other side of the switch. Tandem switches are nothing more than transit points that link up network or inter-network transmission facilities. For example, each of the 200+ local access and transport areas (LATA) in the United States has a minimum of one tandem switch, which acts as the transit point between the access and transport networks used by long distance carriers to carry calls from one LATA to another.

Voice grade dial-up service is almost all digital in the United States. However, many analog switches remain in other parts of the world. Where digital switches provide the service, integrated services digital network (ISDN) services—really an access method, not a service—is available. In highly populated areas of many countries, digital subscriber line (DSL) access is available and growing.

Transmission bandwidth available in circuit switched facilities varies from below 64 Kbs (rarely more than 49 Kbs) to 1.536 Mbs. The limitation in analog service is a matter of the ability of a modem to talk to another modem over a local telephone loop. Of course, it doesn’t much matter to voice grade service. After all most, if not all, telephone equipment is bandwidth limited to around 3.5 kHz, which fits easily into 8-kHz sampled PCM.

ISDN and DSL access provide higher capabilities though. ISDN Access is either 144 Kbs, called basic rate interface (BRI), or1.544 Mbs, called primary rate interface (PRI). BRI is channelized into three channels, two bearer or B channels at 64 Kbs, and one delta or data or D channel (16 Kbs) used for signaling and control purposes. PRI access is facilitated with T1 transmission facilities and is channelized into 23 to 64 Kbs B channels and 1 to 64 Kbs D channel. It should be emphasized that the previous explanation is purely in terms of technical capability. Leveraging the bandwidth into variable amounts and getting charged for it on a case-by-case, service-by-service basis is an entirely different matter.

For example, ISDN-based Internet access never achieved large usage because the equipment used by ISPs and their users was limited to BRI rates—64 Kbs at best. And because the ISPs are not the telephone company and have no capability, such as a big digital circuit switch, and have no funds available to buy a big digital circuit switch and therefore no interest in competing with the telephone company, they only offer Internet access service. From the telephone company viewpoint, they simply are prevented from being in the data services—Internet access, or Internet service provider (ISP) business—by current FCC rules and legislation. The telephone company can only sell POTS, ISDN, or private line service. It cannot offer any type of switching other than these services. Some of the independent non–regional Bell operating telephone companies have purchased and operate ATM equipment, but basically they are quite limited in the service they can provide using these or other non-voice service, frame relay, and IP-based switching and routing systems.

DSL access varies according to several factors, the main one of which is the distance between the subscriber premises equipment and nearest central office or wire center. Conceptually and technically, DSL access is intended to be capable of multiple service types such as voice and data. However, implementation reality has driven most service providers to offer only Internet access without any voice service initially. It remains to be seen how long this is likely to continue. The classical telephone companies don’t want to cannibalize their bread and butter—lucrative voice services—and they desperately want to tap into new revenue streams of their up and coming competitors—cable modems and DSL-capable ISPs. Therefore, initial DSL service is limited to Internet access. As the Internet matures—achieves a grade and quality of service capable of supporting voice-over IP—this situation will change. Who knows when, but someday in the future it may be possible to call up the telephone company and ask them to discontinue POTS.

Keep in mind that the main purpose of the switching function is to share use of the transmission function. Also, keep in mind the fact that change in the network is more a direct result of economic pressure than technological or regulatory forces.

BASIC NETWORK ELEMENTS AND FUNCTIONS | Network Technology And Methodology

Communication network architecture (yes, including the Internet) includes six critical functional elements, or capabilities: clocking, multiplexing, routing, signaling, switching, and transmission.

Clocks control basic timing in digital networks. Digital networks simply wouldn’t work without accurate, consistent, long-term, stable clocking and timing mechanisms. The basic clocking scheme used to maintain timing and synchronization in networks is not much different than it was when first conceived in the 1950s, except it’s significantly more accurate and much less expensive, especially at the higher levels of accuracy and precision.

Multiplexing enables two or more signals to share time and/or bandwidth of a common facility. Multiplexing gains greater use of a limited resource. Multiplexing was a key characteristic of early analog telephone systems. Analog multiplexing shares frequency spectrum instead of time. Multiplexing can be active or passive. Active multiplexing involves electronic circuitry, while passive multiplexing, sometimes referred to as combining and filtering, requires no power supply, and attenuates the signals being combined.

Demultiplexing simply reverses the multiplex process. The multiplexing techniques used in classical T-carrier networks are active at the bit level. Timing differences between signals generated by disparate clocks running within frequency tolerance specification limits, along with a variation in propagation delay of the transmission path require the use of bit stuffing techniques to avoid clock slips and errors in transmission.

Routing in its broadest context applies to multiple ways to get from here to there, or connect point A to point B. A router or routing switcher in a broadcast facility is a drastically different beast than a router that can pass Internet packets from one port to another. Routing telephone calls and configuring private line connections play an important part in the global communications network today and are likely to remain so well into the future.

Signaling is the mechanism whereby customers, subscribers, and users (through equipment) communicate with the network to setup and tear down a connection, or configure it for initial use, or reconfigure it for different use (i.e., change the default service configuration). Signaling is also a process whereby network elements communicate with each other in response to commands from users for service, or the owner for changes in configuration or service capability. Successful signaling depends on a logical addressing or numbering scheme whereby all the elements in and outside the network carry a unique identification label.

Switching has been around since someone had a hunch that telephone service could take a cue from the railroads and get more use from fewer telephone lines by installing a switching point somewhere in the service area. From automatic switch-over when a transmission backbone segment fails, to provisioning private lease lines, to telephone service, data communications, audio and video conferencing, content creation, distribution, and delivery, modern communications networks simply wouldn’t do what they do so well without it. Switching concepts include circuit switching, cell switching, and packet switching.

Transmission is the act of propagating energy or moving information from point A to point B. In the context of communications networking, the term includes sending and receiving. If the heart of the network is the clocking system, transmission is analogous to the arteries and capillaries carrying oxygen from the lungs to the brain and other important organs. Modern communications network transmission seems to have started when someone figured out that a direct current voltage applied to one end of a pair of wires could be detected at the other end as long as the conductive characteristics of the path are intact. Without the underlying transmission facilities, today’s IP would be of no more value than Samuel B. Morse’s telegraph code without a baseband electrical signal transmission facility. Successful transmission requires a viable medium. Electrical transmission works well on copper wire. Radio transmission moves easily through free space, where electrical current doesn’t travel well. Light waves move through transparent glass, but opaque objects block them.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND SUMMARY | Network Technology And Methodology

Between around 1960 and 1980, the public switched telephone network underwent rapid and dramatic change from developments in solid-state digital technology. Initially, the diode and transistor were single function devices, but it didn’t take long for them to be packaged into containers and branded integrated circuits. Computers—large, slow data processing machines and systems—were not immune to the same technological turmoil. Consequently, computers and their terminals migrated across the scientific landscape into office territory. Connections between the computers changed significantly as Teletype machine controllers turned into timeshare terminals. Someone figured out a way to convert the digital signal between the timeshare terminal and the computer from digital to analog, and reverse the process at the other end; devices made with modulator and demodulator techniques extended acronym territory with the term MODEM. All of a sudden the analog telephone network could connect timeshare terminals and computers as well as the Teletype network could. Originally, telephone networks were analog. Modems allowed telephone networks to be used to support computer communications.

As this initial impact from transistors and integrated circuit electronics enabled faster and faster computers, it had a similar effect on network technology. Bell Labs started working on digital transmission technology in the 1960s. The objective was to double voice channel capacity of a single trunk line from 12 simultaneous conversations to 24. This technology had tremendous value in large cities where the potential return was superior compared to digging up the street and burying more conduit.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the long distance switching and transmission network underwent a conversion from analog to digital. Mini-computers replaced many mainframes; mainframes became faster and computer traffic grew. Data communications became full-time jobs for communications-savvy engineers and technicians.

A significant computer standard, developed in the late 1970s, remains in wide use today. The open systems interconnect (OSI) stack defines a hardware section beneath a software section in a total of seven layers, bottom to top. The OSI stack makes a good framework for communications networks, including the Internet. Figure 1 shows the two-section, seven-layer stack with a brief explanation about what it represents and how it is applied. 

Figure 4-1: OSI Stack: Hardware and Software Sections

When the OSI stack was introduced, computers were just beginning to change from stand-alone islands into distributed processing systems connected by data networks. The basic idea behind the stack concept is that each layer interfaces and interacts or communicates with the one immediately above and below, except, of course, the bottom and top layers for obvious reasons. If each layer successfully accomplishes its functions, then the system it’s applied to should operate top to bottom. Attempts to map Internet and Telecom functions or processes to the stack are made from time to time, but in isolated ways such as a reference to layer 2 switching,or layer 3 routing, or even layer 2/3 switching or routing. These references seem to be more of a way to characterize a particular switching or routing function in terms of the OSI stack, rather than applying the OSI stack to communications networks in general. Furthermore, it would seem to be useful in analyzing and structuring or designing networks capable of carrying disparate, converged traffic types on a common access or transport facility.

SATELLITE SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY

A background summary on communications wouldn’t be complete without including satellite systems and technology, another unique segment of the field. The global satellite system today has evolved over more than 40 years. Satellite services are grouped into fixed satellite service (FSS) and broadcast satellite service (BSS) by the ITU. The more common informal reference for the BSS is DBS, meaning direct broadcast service. In addition to communications, satellite systems and technology provide vital weather information, mapping, location information through the global positioning system, plus many valuable services to the military.

The current DBS system is conceptually very similar to one ArthurC. Clarke described in an article written in the fall of 1945 for Wireless World. In this article, he foresaw 24-hour manned satellites being used to distribute television programs. Despite a repeated version of the concept in another publication, The Exploration of Space written in the early 1950s, the idea never gained much interest or attention.

John Pierce of AT&T Bell Labs is credited with being the first to take serious technical and financial interest in the idea. Pierce elaborated on the basic idea to the extent that the space-based platforms would perform much like a mirror and be located in medium and 24-hour orbits. He estimated the capacity of the satellite to be equivalent to 1000 simultaneous telephone calls and comparing it to the first trans-Atlantic telephone cable with a capacity of 36 simultaneous calls, arrived at a conclusion that it would cost 36 million dollars and be worth a billion.

AT&T caught the FCC by surprise in 1960 when it requested permission to launch an experimental satellite. At the time, the commission and other parts of the government simply weren’t equipped with policy and rules covering satellite communications. RCA was awarded a contract to build a medium-orbit satellite in mid-1961. Around the same time, Hughes was awarded a contract to build a high orbit, 24-hour satellite. By 1964, four medium-orbit and two high-orbit satellites had operated successfully. The Communications Satellite Act of 1962 formed the basis for Communications Satellite Corporation with an initial capitalization of 200 million dollars to build a system of several dozen medium-orbit satellites. Ultimately, COMSAT decided to build satellites for the higher geosynchronous orbit, the first of which was launched from Cape Canaveral in April 1965.

A key early broadcast event was televising part of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. At the same time the United States was gaining this initial expertise and capability, other countries had been involved from the beginning. American companies built COMSAT’s initial satellites and launch vehicles. AT&T negotiated with Foreign PTT organizations to build earth stations and began tests and experiments aimed at providing telephone service. By the time COMSAT’s first satellite was launched and ready for service, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Brazil, and Japan had operational earth stations. In August 1964, agreements were signed to create the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat).

By 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, half a billion people watched the event all over the globe through Intelsat transmission facilities. The last facilities making up the first global network were placed in service over the Indian Ocean just days before the moon landing occurred on July 20, 1969.

ABC proposed a domestic satellite system to distribute television signals in 1965, but it never gained traction. In 1972, ANIK was placed in service by Telesat Canada to serve the vast regions of the country. RCA and Western Union both launched the first domestic satellites in 1974 and 1975. AT&T launched its first domestic satellite in 1976. Satellites were intended to provide voice and data service; however, television quickly became a major user. By the end of 1976, 120 transponders were in service, each capable of 1500 telephone conversations or one TV program. Movie channels and super stations were made available to cable head ends, driving the growth in cable TV demand. During this same period, the major radio and television networks began using satellites to distribute programming to their affiliates. Satellite distribution would prove far more reliable and less expensive than terrestrial networks.

Arthur Clark’s vision of watching television from a satellite would be realized in the fall of 1994 when Hughes, RCA, and Hubbard Broadcasting launched the DirecTV transmission system. The first serious competition for cable got off the ground. A few years later, Echostar would launch its Dish Network.

A key component of satellite technology, the traveling-wave tube (TWT) was invented in England and perfected at Bell Labs. It is used to generate the signal transmitted from the ground to the satellite and back from the satellite-to-ground station receivers. Achieving adequate power level for the signal to be received by the satellite and re-transmitted back to earth required very large (100-foot diameter) dish antennas in the early uplink transmission systems. Early TWT power output levels were only approximately 1 W, but they have grown to more than 300 W. Uplink antennas approaching one tenth the size of early versions now cost around 30,000. Receiving antennas that are the size of a large pizza now enable reception of several hundred TV programs and data links to millions of businesses requiring credit card authorizations and accurate inventory tracking.

When COMSAT launched its first satellite in 1965, it provided almost 10 times the capacity of the submarine telephone cables for almost one tenth the price. Telephone service on a satellite facility suffers from the long path it must travel. In the early days, the availability of the service was its key selling point. Satellite telephone service is still the service to and between many countries today. The first fiber cable, TAT-8, was laid in the Atlantic Ocean in the mid-1980s and provided competition. Satellites are still competitive in many applications, especially point-to-multipoint service such as DBS and network distribution to affiliates.

High Speed Packet Switching Technology

High-speed backbone networks are networks that provide rapid variable data rate (dynamic bandwidth) transport between switching centers. Traditional switching systems have been limited to low-speed fixed bandwidth connections.

High-speed switching systems are telecommunications infrastructures composed of circuits and equipment capable of near-instantaneous connection of end points at near-perfect efficiency and required data transmission throughput.

High-speed packet switching technology allows multiple communication channels to share the resources of a data communication network. This allows the same network to integrate voice, data, and video signals. In addition to the rapid switching of packets, packet switches are designed to handle different types of packets in different ways. Packet switches receive incoming packets, update the address information of the packets with their new destination address, temporarily store the packets until the next path and channel becomes available, and then transfers the packet to the appropriate communication line (Path) and channel (time slot or portion of a time slot).

Figure 1 shows a high-speed data packet switching system. This diagram shows that several high-speed data transmission lines are providing packet to the packet switch. The packet switch uses a routing table to search for the incoming address and then it replaces the address with the new packet destination address (the next switch or end point). The data packet is then stored in buffer memory where it waits for availability of its destination path and channel. This diagram also shows how the packet switch manages excessive network switch activity. As the packet switch gets busy (receives more data than it can process), the buffer memory begins to fill. As the buffer memory nears exhaustion, packets within the memory will be reviewed for priority and low-level priority data packets will be discarded.


Figure 1: High-Speed Packet Switching