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Managing Telecommunications Chapter 6 Information Systems Management In Practice 6E McNurlin & Sprague PowerPoints prepared by Michael Matthew isiting Lecturer, GACC, Macquarie University – Sydney Austral

Managing Telecommunications Chapter 6 Information Systems Management In Practice 6E McNurlin & Sprague PowerPoints prepared by Michael Matthew Visiting

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Managing Telecommunications

Chapter 6

Information Systems Management In Practice 6E

McNurlin & Sprague

PowerPoints prepared by Michael MatthewVisiting Lecturer, GACC, Macquarie University – Sydney Australia

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

6-2

Chapter 6

• Telecommunications is the flow of information among individuals, work groups, departments, customer sites, regional offices, between enterprises, and with the outside world

• The Internet has also opened up a “cyberspace” where people can be in a virtual world, where organizations can conduct business, and in fact, a place where organizational processes exist. This is providing the foundation for the e-business economy, as just about everything about telecom is shifting

• This lecture / chapter devotes itself heavily to this evolving telecommunications scene, utilizing case examples from ICG Communications, National Semiconductor, Toronto Pearson International Airport, BMW, Louisville Metro Sewer District, American Greetings and Keebler

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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Today’s Lecture• Introduction

• The Evolving Telecommunications Scene– A New Telecommunications Infrastructure is Being Built

• The Telecom Industry is Being Transformed– The Internet is the Network Of Choice– Digital Convergence Has Become a Reality– The OSI Reference Model Underlies Today’s Networks– The Rate of Change is Accelerating– The Optical Era Will Provide Bandwidth Abundance– The Wireless Century Begins– Messaging is a Killer App– Coming: An Internet of Things

• The Role of the IS Department

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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Introduction

• Telecommunications = electronically sending data in any form from one place to another between– People– Machines, or– Objects

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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Introduction cont.

• Generally, IS departments have been responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the information highway in the same way that governments are responsible for building and maintaining streets, roads, and freeways

• Once built, the network, with its nodes and links, provides infrastructure for the flow of information and messages

• Telecom is the basis for the way people and companies work today – It provides the infrastructure for moving information and

messages

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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The Evolving Telecommunications Scene

• Even with the recent ‘downturn’ (correction?) in some countries – the changes in Telecom are coming fast and furiously. Here are some major changes taking place:

• A New Telecommunications Infrastructure is Being Built:– The oldest part of the telecommunications

infrastructure is the telephone network• This global network was built on twisted-pair copper wires

and was intended for voice communications• It uses analog technology, which although appropriate for

delivering high-quality voice, is inefficient for data transmission

– Dedicated circuit (switching)

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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The Evolving Telecommunications Scene cont.

• A New Telecommunications Infrastructure is Being Built cont.: – The basic traffic-handling mechanism had to change for data– Today, the new telecommunications infrastructure is being

built around the world aimed at transmitting data, and consists of:

• Wired - fiber optic links• Wireless – radio signals

– Both use packet switching, where messages are divided into packets, each with an address header, and each packet is sent separately

• No circuit is created; each packet may take a different path through the network

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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The Evolving Telecommunications Scene cont.

– Packets from any number of senders and of any type, whether e-mails, music downloads, voice conversations, or video clips, can be intermixed on a network segment –

– Making these next generation networks able to handle much more traffic and a great variety of traffic

– This architecture allows new kinds of services to be deployed much more rapidly

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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The Evolving Telecommunications Scene cont.

– The Internet can handle all kinds of intelligent user devices, including:

– Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones– Personal digital assistants (PDAs)– Gaming consoles, and – All manner of wireless devices

– The global telecom infrastructure is changing from a focus on voice to a focus on data

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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The Telecommunications Industry is Being Transformed

• The telecom structure of old was originally provided by (often Government owned) monopolies

– Only ones with the $ to support set up costs– Public infrastructure

• Gradually, the telecom industry has been deregulated

• The telecom industry is becoming like the computing industry in that each year brings ‘predictable’ (and ‘huge’) improvements

– Performance– Capacity

• Bandwidth on fiber is now doubling capacity every four months

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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The Telecommunications Industry is Being Transformed cont.

• ‘Last Mile’ problems:– Who ‘owns’ the ‘last mile’

• In the 1990s, the ‘monopolies’ began encountering competition for “the last mile”

– Bottleneck issues (hose to straw)• Visualize the world’s networks as huge fire hoses because

they use fiber optic cables that can transmit at a whopping speed of a terabit (1012 bits per second)

• 1,000,000,000,000

– Then visualize the twisted pair phone line coming into your home or business as a straw, only operating at speeds of 56 kbps (104)

• 10,000

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• This competitive local exchange carrier provides voice and data services in 25 metropolitan areas in the United States

• It was formed in 1984 to provide local telephone service in Denver. It expanded to provide long distance, buying up companies with fiber routes

• It later focused on being an Internet backbone provider, serving ISPs

• When the dot-com bubble burst, ICG filed for bankruptcy, but moved out of bankruptcy in late 2002

• ‘Similar’ things have happened in other countries

ICG COMMUNICATIONSCase example: Changes in the Telecom Industry

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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The Internet is the Network of Choice

• What has surprised most people is the Internet’s surprisingly fast uptake for business use

• As did the fast plummet of the dot-com and telecommunications industries

• In the late 1990s, the Internet caught most IS departments by surprise, not to mention the hardware and software vendors who serve the corporate IS community

• The Internet actually began in the 1960s when it was called ARPANET, mainly used for electronic mail

• By 1993, it was still mainly a worldwide network for scientists and academics, text only - no graphics

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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The Internet is the Network of Choice cont.

• That all changed in 1994 when the World Wide Web was invented (By Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva.)

• This graphical “layer” of the Net made it much more user friendly:– Web sites had addresses specified by their universal resource

locator (URL)– Its multimedia Web pages were formatted using hypertext markup

language (HTML)– All the Web sites could be accessed via an easy-to-use browser

on a PC– At first populated by computer geeks’ homepages, business (and

‘normal’ people’s) use of the Web skyrocketed by the late 1990s

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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The Internet is the Network of Choice cont.

• The Internet has done for telecom what the IBM PC did for computing: brought it “to the masses”

• In 1981, when the IBM PC was introduced, its

architecture was open– An entire industry developed around this open

architecture. The same is happening with the Internet because it provides the same kind of openness

– Like the PC, this openness yields the most powerful solutions and the most competitive prices

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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The Internet is the Network of Choice cont.

• The Internet has three attributes that make it important to corporations:– Ubiquity – Reliability, and – Scalability

• Today, the protocols underlying the Internet have become the protocols of choice in corporate networks, for internal communications as well as communications with the outside world

• The norm is now end-to-end Internet protocol (IP) networks

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• The Internet will be the heart of XYZ’s corporate operation. So the CTO will create:

An intranet for use by employees

An extranet for use by suppliers and some large customers, and of course,

The Internet as the all-important central public network

XYZ COMPANYCase example: Network Options

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• Serving remote users: XYZ has 4 choices of communications wiring:

– twisted pair (standard phone line)

– coaxial cable (like cable TV)

– fibre optic (glass fibre that carries signals via light pulses) and

– wireless

• Modems can be:

– standard telephone modems (56kbps) – no longer really a viable option due to size of files (PowerPoints etc,)

– digital subscriber line (DSL) modems at 1.2 mbps 20 times faster, or

– cable modems at 10mbps or 200 times faster

XYZ COMPANYCase example: Network Options cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• Serving local users: In the office, all the computers and telephones will be connected directly to an always-on LAN. The various LANs in XYZ’s offices will use hubs, switches and routers to route traffic

• The CTO will likely choose Fast Ethernet Protocol for his IP-based LAN. It has speeds of 100 mpbs (10^8)

• Communicating Between Offices: XYZ employees need to communicate between sites, so they need some sort of wide area network. As expected, the CTO has choices here as well

– Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is high speed - up to 622 mbps

– A fairly new option for XYZ to link several offices in a city, or link floors within a building, is a Gigabit Ethernet which operates at speeds of one gbps (10^9 bits per second)

• The CTO is definitely going to base all his decisions on being Internet protocol centric

XYZ COMPANYCase example: Network Options cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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Extranets

• Not long after creating intranets, businesses realized they could extend the intranet concept into an extranet– A special part of the intranet for use by trading

partners, customers, and suppliers for electronic commerce

• The notion caught on and extranets have become an important component of B2B e-commerce

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• National Semiconductor designs and manufactures semiconductor products

– To gain market share and move into new markets, it created an intranet that the sales force could access and keep up-to-date on products and order products

– It also created the “National Advisor” to electronically send news, sales reports, and customer information to the sales force and its management

– National also created an extranet for distributors and channel partners, and a Web site for design engineers.

• The Web site is replicated around the globe, with maintenance outsourced to a company with data centres around the globe, which provides hosting and other Internet infrastructure services

NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTORCase example: Extranet

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• National’s Web site now supports 1 million design engineers around the globe, who download more than 10,000 data books a day, in about two seconds each

• The company only needs to replicate its site once; the hosting company takes care of global coverage

NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTORCase example: Extranet cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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Digital Convergence Has Become a Reality

• Digital convergence is the intertwining of various forms of media – voice, data and video

• Convergence is now occurring because IP has become the network protocol of choice– When all forms of media can be digitized, put into

packets and sent over an IP network, they can be managed and manipulated digitally and integrated in highly imaginative ways

• IP telephony and video telephony have been the ‘last frontiers’ of convergence – and now they are a reality

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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Digital Convergence Has Become a RealityIP Telephony

• The use of Internet to transmit voice to replace their telephone system– Few companies have given up their telephone networks for

a VoIP network, but as the cost differential continues, more will switch

– Became ‘hot’ in 2004. Previously the voice quality wasn’t there

– Can be managed electronically from e.g. one’s PC = possibility of ad hoc conferencing

• Rather than analog, the IP phone generates a digital signal– Routed over the LAN like any other data in packets either:

1. To another IP phone on the LAN2. Through the company’s WAN to a distant IP phone on another

of the company’s LANs, or3. Through an IP voice gateway to the PSTN to a standard

telephone

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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Digital Convergence Has Become a RealityVideo Telephony

• Similar story to IP Telephony• Not video conferencing via a PBX, but rather

video over IP– With the appropriate IP infrastructure, video

telephony can be, say, launched from an instant-messaging conversation• IP phones with cameras also facilitate it, phone to

phone

• Heaps of new converged products are now flooding the market now that high quality voice has become IP based– Watch this space!

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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TORONTO PEARSON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORTCase study: Digital convergence via IP

• Canada’s busiest airport• Network is common use because its infrastructure is

shared by all the airport tenants– Each tenant has a private LAN for its own voice, data and

video applications• VPN = private and secure• Yet = can be (authorised) accessed from anywhere – wired or

wireless– Each gate can be used by any airline– Baggage tracking integrated with passenger reconciliation

• Numerous benefits:– Reduced network operations costs– Consolidated network support– Increased terminal operational efficiency– Increased capacity

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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Digital Convergence Has Become a RealityThe Battle Begins

• Setting up a collision among three massive industries

1. $1.1 trillion computer industry• Led by the U.S.

2. $225 billion consumer electronics industry• Asian roots and new aggressive Chinese companies

3. $2.2 trillion telecommunications industry• Leading wireless players in Europe and Asia• Data networking leaders in Silicon Valley

• The Internet and its protocols are taking over!!!!– To understand the complexity of telecommunications, we

now look at the underlying framework for the Internet: the OSI Reference Model

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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OSI Reference Model

• The worldwide telephone system has been so effective in connecting people because it has been based on common standards worldwide– Today’s packet-switching networks are also following

some standards in most cases– The underpinning of these standards is the OSI

Reference Model.

• We now live in an “open systems” world, and the most important architecture in the Telecom world is the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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OSI Reference Model cont.

• Analogy of mailing a letter: - see Figure 6-2

– Control information (address and type of delivery) on the envelope - determines the services provided by the next lower layer and addressing information for next lower layer

– When a layer receives a “message” from the next higher layer, it

performs the requested services and “wraps” the message in its own layer of control information

– It passes the “bundle” to the layer directly below it. On the receiving end, a layer receiving a bundle from a lower layer unwraps the outermost layer of control information, interprets the information, and acts on it

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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OSI Reference Model: The Seven Layers

• 7 - Application Layer: contains the protocols embedded in the applications used, e.g., HTTP (hyper-text transfer protocol), which anyone who has surfed the Web has used to locate a Web site

• The rest = read the text but many people are of the opinion: “who cares”? – provided it works – But just in case it doesn’t, the ‘techies’ need to know!!!

• Major area of outsourcing and use of external consultants

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• Although no one seems to know for sure, many people speculate that data traffic surpassed voice traffic either in 1999 or 2000

• In 1995, exactly 32 doublings of computer power had occurred since the invention of the digital computer after World War II

– Chess example

• E-mail outnumbered postal mail for the first time in 1995

– Unfortunately now = many are Spam (junk)– Looking for a solution!!

The Rate of Change is Accelerating

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• The number of PC sales overtook the number of TV sales in late 1995

• Such changes will only accelerate– Everyone in business must become

comfortable with technology to cope with this brand new world of ever-increasing technological change

The Rate of Change is Accelerating cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• Decline in cost of key factors: – During the industrial era = horsepower– Since the 1960s = semiconductors– Now = bandwidth

• We are now approaching another “historic cliff of cost” in a new factor of production: bandwidth

– “If you thought the price of computing dropped rapidly in the last decade, just wait until you see what happens with communications bandwidth”

• Fiber optic technology is just as important as microchip technology. 40 million miles of fiber optic cable have been laid around the world, in the USA at a rate of 4,000 miles per day

The Optical Era Will Provide Bandwidth Abundance

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• Half of the cable is dark, that is, it is not used. And the other half is used to just one-millionth of its potential, because every 25 miles it must be converted to electronic pulses to amplify and regenerate the signal

• The capacity of each thread is 1,000 times the switching speed of transistors

– As a result, using all-optical amplifiers (recently invented), we could send all the telephone calls in the United States on the peak moment of Mother’s Day on one fiber thread

• What about Fathers’ Day????

The Optical Era Will Provide Bandwidth Abundance cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• Downloading a digital movie, such as The Matrix:

– Takes 7 hours using a cable modem– 1 hour over the Ethernet– Four seconds on an optical connection

• Over the next decade, bandwidth will expand ten times as fast as computer power and completely transform the economy

The Optical Era Will Provide Bandwidth Abundance cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• The goal of wireless is to do everything we can do on wired networks, but without the wire

• Wireless communications have been with us for some time

– Mobile (cell) phones, pagers, VSATs, infrared networks, wireless LANs etc.

• We are just on the cusp of an up-tick in wireless use for all types of networks

The 20th century was the Wireline Century, the 21st will be the Wireless Century

The Wireless Century Begins

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• Some frequencies of the radio spectrum are licensed by governments for specific purposes; others are not

• Devices that tap unlicensed frequencies are cheaper = no big $ licensing fees

– BUT = possibility of collision between signals

The Wireless Century Begins cont.

Licensed Versus Unlicensed Frequencies

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs)– Provide high-speed connections between devices that are up to 30

feet apart

• Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs)– Provide access to corporate computers in office buildings, retail

stores, or hospitals or access to Internet “hot spots” where people congregate

• Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (WMANs)– Provide connections in cities and campuses at distances up to 30

miles

• Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWANs)– Provide broadband wireless connections over thousands of miles

The Wireless Century Begins cont.

Wireless technologies for networks that cover different distances

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• A plant in South Carolina has more than 30 suppliers nearby

– Real-time delivery of data to the suppliers is key to efficiency

– Suppliers especially needed accurate inventory data of the components they supply to BMW, so they know when to make just-in-time deliveries to the plant

BMWCase Example: Wireless LANs

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• To gather inventory data for SAP to track parts, scanner terminals in the factory transmit the data from the barcode readers (as parts move through the assembly process) to SAP via a wireless network that covers the entire 2-million-square-foot plant

• The system uses RF technology• A number of suppliers have followed suit

BMWCase Example: Wireless LANs cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• The only two wireless technologies are infrared light and radio airwaves– Figure 6-5 shows the bandwidth spectrum, which illustrates

where the different technologies lie– Cell (mobile) phones use radio transmitters and receivers

Call is passed from one cell to another – fades out of one and into another

– Much of the bandwidths and radio waves are regulated by governments

• In the main, GSM has become the mobile telephony standard for all but the Americas – Unlike the computing industry, a number of leading global

telecom manufacturers are outside the United States. NTT is in Japan, Ericsson and Nokia are in Scandinavia

The Wireless Century Begins cont. Wireless Long Distance

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• The first cell phones used analog technology and circuit switching, now called first-generation (1G) wireless

• 2G cellular. 2G, which predominates today, uses digital technology, though it is still circuit switched– It aims at digital telephony, not data transmission, but

2G phones can carry data– 2G can use a laptop with a wireless modem to

communicate Not always the most ‘reliable’

– 2G can carry messages using short messaging service (SMS)

The Wireless Century Begins cont. Wireless Long Distance cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

6-49

LOUISVILLE METRO SEWER DISTRICTCase Example – 2G mobile telephony

• When Louisville encountered big storms, sewer repair workers had to return to headquarters to get assignment details and look up customer records – a process that slowed their response to the flooding

• Now they have laptops and wireless modems• As customers call in for emergency repairs, operators at

the sewer district’s headquarters enter the orders into a database that work crews can immediately access from the field– They can view neighborhood maps, locate broken water mains

and pipes, and check out the most likely areas of damage, potentially saving entire neighborhoods from flooding

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• 2.5G cellular is extending the life of 2G digital technologies– Essentially adds data capacity to a 2G network– The problem with adoption has been pricing

• The goals of 3G are to provide WANs for PCs and multimedia, allowing bandwidth on demand.– CDMA (code division multiple access) is the universal standard

for 3G– It faces the same pricing issues at 2.5G – perhaps worse

Court battles over the “leased” spectrum Costs to deploy not seen as tenable in many circumstances Hutchinson (UK) making a play in this area in Australia and

elsewhere with ‘3’ (big brother of ‘Orange’)– Sponsors of Australian Cricket Team

The Wireless Century Begins cont. Wireless Long Distance cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• New entrants are looking for 3G alternatives– One is mobile broadband IP, which could actually provide 4G

services (the user paying for different kinds of services)– Wireless mesh networks

• Links are radio signals not wires• More flexible but uses a lot of battery power

– VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) technology is taking off in some countries because it is seen as the best technology for providing stationary wireless broadband

• Provided by DSL, coaxial cable and T carriers

• Heaps to be made and lost– Watch the battles– Ask your friends who are always up with the ‘latest and greatest’

The Wireless Century Begins cont. Wireless Long Distance cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• American Greetings, a leader in exploiting the Internet, is extending its Internet presence to cell phones using WAP to garner a wireless presence

• The company was one of the first with a Website — it sends reminders to subscribers, and often finds itself overwhelmed on holidays such as Mother’s Day

• It also forms “side door” alliances with retailers’ Websites

• And now, subscribers can order cards from their cell phone. The company reasons that when people have idle time, besides checking e-mail or playing a game using their cell phone, they

also might want to send an animated funny card to someone

AMERICAN GREETINGSCase Example: Extending Internet to Cell phones

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• Security is a major issue today

• Eavesdroppers need special equipment• Radio scrambling and spread-spectrum

technologies add security, encryption protects data, and eventually , 802.11i will provide a framework for security

• Requires eternal vigilance– Note: the network is often not the main problem

Is Wireless Secure?

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• Although a lot of attention is focussed on all the new wireless services, a troubling question has not yet been answered: Are these transmissions safe for humans?

• It is quite possible that there could soon be a backlash against wireless devices, similar to protests against genetically modified organisms– Already = heaps of debate (informed and otherwise) in this area

Is Wireless Safe?

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• What has proven true with data communication technologies over and over again is that the killer application is messaging– Original purpose of Internet– Email– E.g. BlackBerry messaging service– SMS in the ‘rest of the world’ (outside the U.S.)

• Instant Messaging = Considered by many to be the ‘killer app.’ of wireless– Not just for teenagers e.g. U.S. Navy (9/11)

Messaging Is a Killer App

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• The key attribute of Instant Messaging (IM) is that it provides presence, which means that a person on your buddy list can see when you are using a computer or phone and therefore knows you are “present” and available to receive an IM

• Newer technologies will allow messaging to become even more personal– Photo messaging– Video messaging– Video phones

Messaging Is a Killer App cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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KEEBLERCase example: Instant Messaging (IM)

• September 2002 – this cookie and cracker company launched Recipe-Buddie on its Web site

– “She” is an instant-messenger bot that converses with people who IM her• She only talks about recipes using her database

• Very successful

• Three lessons learnt:1. Users really like to converse with bots2. Scripting is just like writing a novel – needs to be done by

just a couple of people working closely together3. Others, besides the original scripters, should be able to

add their own content e.g. answers to FAQs

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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Coming: An Internet of Things

• Wireless communications = not just for people– A machine-to-machine Internet is coming

• Likely to use Wi-Fi as one wireless communication protocol

• RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)– Like the barcode = involves small tags affixed to

objects that provide information about the object• Discussed in detail in Chapter 11

• Communication systems = a mix of wired and wireless = one of the many challenges for CIOs

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• This long discussion of telecommunications gives just a glimpse into its complexity as well as its increasing importance

• What is the IS department’s role?

• IS has three roles: – create the telecom architecture – run it, and – stay close to the forefront of the field

• Sound familiar?

The Role of the IS Department

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• The key challenge in network design is connectivity

• Connectivity means allowing users to communicate up, down, across, and out of an organization

• The goal is not a single, coherent network,

but rather finding a means to interface many dissimilar networks, so that users think they have one network

– Like we do with the telephone, Internet etc.

The Role of the IS Department cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• A truly interoperable network would allow PCs, laptops, and handheld devices to interoperate with servers running Linux and Windows and mainframes running MVS and communicating over IP networks

– This interoperability is the goal of architecture and is the main job of the IS department

• The second job of the IS department is to operate the network

– Many companies are outsourcing (part of) this work

• The third job of IS is to stay current with the technology

The Role of the IS Department cont.

©2006 Barbara C. McNurlin. Published by Pearson Education.

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• The Telecom world is big and getting bigger by the day. It is complex, and getting more complex every day

– Don’t worry – there’s plenty of help available!

• The business world of old has depended on communications, of course, but not to the extent of the ‘New Economy’

• The first generation of the Internet economy has been wired. The second is unwired

• Today telecom is all about connecting and the number of possible connections is about to explode worldwide

Conclusion