Overview of Communications History
Networks are now a core component of our business and personal lives. Today, businesses that
may hobble along with the loss of telephone service can be rendered nonfunctional by the loss of
their data network infrastructure. Understandably, corporations spend a great deal of time and
money nursing this critical resource.
How and why did this dependency occur? Simply because networks provide a means to amplify
all the historical communication mechanisms. Nearly 50,000 years of speech, at least 3500 years
of written communication, and many thousands of years of creating images all can be captured
and communicated through a network to anywhere on the planet.
In the 1980s, fiber optics improved the distance, cost, and reliability issues; CB radio taught us
about peer-to-peer communication and self-regulation without a centralized communications
infrastructure provider. The needs of the military led to the development of network technologies
that were resilient to attack, which also meant that they were resilient to other types of failure.
Today's optical switching and multiplexing again demonstrate that to take the next leap in
capability, scalability, and reliability, businesses and individuals cannot afford to cling to tried-and-
true techniques.
Data communications grew from the need to connect islands of users on LANs to mainframes
(IBM's Systems Network Architecture [SNA] and Digital's DECnet) and then to each other. As
time passed, these services were required over wide geographical areas. Then came the need
for administrative control, as well as media and protocol conversion. Routers began to become
key components of a network in the 1980s, which was within the same time that Asynchronous
Transfer Mode (ATM) cell switching was being developed as the technology for the deployment of
worldwide networks supporting multimedia communications.
The designers of ATM were constrained by the need to support the traditional voice network. This
is not surprising, however, for at that time voice revenues exceeded other forms of
communications infrastructures. If new applications were to develop, many people thought they
were likely to take the form of video, either for communication or entertainment.
Very few people predicted the coming of the Internet. After all, it was not real-time voice or video
that stole the show, but the ubiquity of home personal computers coupled with a few applications.
These included the simple one-to-one or one-to-many communication applications, such as e-
mail and chat groups, and the powerful Web browsers and Internet search engines that turned
the Internet into a virtual world in which people could journey, learn, teach, and share. Users did
not need megabits per second to enter this world: 32 Kbps was happiness, 64 Kbps was bliss,
and 128 Kbps was heaven.
The increases in desktop computing power and in peer-to-peer applications had a fundamental
impact on network architectures. Modern network architectures expect intelligence and self-
regulation at the user workstation, and they provide a network infrastructure that maintains only
the intelligence sufficient to support packet forwarding. This contrasts significantly with the
approach of connecting simple terminal devices to intelligent mainframes using a complex
networking device that is used by many proprietary solutions, notably IBM's SNA.
NOTE
Some schools of thought suggest that networks will become more intelligent—and the user
stations less so. They believe bandwidth will be cheaper than local storage or CPUs, so
computational resources are better kept in a central shared facility. Web-TV and voice-messaging
services are examples of this philosophy at work.
The impact of technological development, and the changing needs of businesses, consumers, In the 1980s, fiber optics improved the distance, cost, and reliability issues; CB radio taught us about peer-to-peer communication and self-regulation without a centralized communications infrastructure provider. The needs of the military led to the development of network technologies that were resilient to attack, which also meant that they were resilient to other types of failure. Today's optical switching and multiplexing again demonstrate that to take the next leap in capability, scalability, and reliability, businesses and individuals cannot afford to cling to tried-and- true techniques.
Data communications grew from the need to connect islands of users on LANs to mainframes (IBM's Systems Network Architecture [SNA] and Digital's DECnet) and then to each other. As time passed, these services were required over wide geographical areas. Then came the need for administrative control, as well as media and protocol conversion. Routers began to becomekey components of a network in the 1980s, which was within the same time that Asynchronous. Transfer Mode (ATM) cell switching was being developed as the technology for the deployment of worldwide networks supporting multimedia communications.
The designers of ATM were constrained by the need to support the traditional voice network. This is not surprising, however, for at that time voice revenues exceeded other forms of communications infrastructures. If new applications were to develop, many people thought they were likely to take the form of video, either for communication or entertainment.
Very few people predicted the coming of the Internet. After all, it was not real-time voice or video that stole the show, but the ubiquity of home personal computers coupledwith a few applications. These included the simple one-to-one or one-to-many communication applications, such as e- mail and chat groups, and the powerful Webbrowsers and Internet search engines that turned the Internet into a virtual world in which people could journey, learn, teach, and share. Users did not need megabitsper second to enter this world: 32 Kbps was happiness, 64 Kbps was bliss, and 128 Kbps was heaven.
The increases in desktop computing power and in peer-to-peer applications had a fundamental impact on network architectures. Modern network architectures expect intelligence and self- regulation at the user workstation, and they provide a network infrastructure that maintains only the intelligence sufficient to support packet forwarding. This contrasts significantly with the approach of connecting simple terminal devices to intelligent mainframes using a complex networking device that is used by many proprietary solutions, notably IBM's SNA.
NOTE
Some schools of thought suggest that networks will become more intelligent—and the user stations less so. They believe bandwidth will be cheaper than local storage or CPUs, so computational resources are better kept in a central shared facility. Web-TV and voice-messaging services are examples of this philosophy at work.
The impact of technological development, and the changing needs of businesses, consumers, and society in general, is clear. Data networking is growing at 25 percent per year, traditional voice is increasing by only 6 percent, and the Internet is doubling every few months. (The term traditional voice is used because the Internet now carries voice, and in the last year or so several providers have announced their intent to supply voice over IP services.)
The revenue to be gained from carrying data packets is close to, or perhaps even exceeds, that of carrying traditional telephone voice circuits. Voice is rapidly becoming just another variation on the data-networking theme—just packets for another application.
Ultimately, competition drives design and development, whether it be the telegraph versus the telephone, or traditional telephony versus Internet telephony. Providers attempt to gain a commercial advantage over their competitors by adopting new technologies that will provide a service that is either cheaper, better, or more flexible. Naturally, a network that is well designed, planned, and implemented will be in a position to take on new technologies.
and society in general, is clear. Data networking is growing at 25 percent per year, traditional
voice is increasing by only 6 percent, and the Internet is doubling every few months. (The term
traditional voice is used because the Internet now carries voice, and in the last year or so several
providers have announced their intent to supply voice over IP services.)
The revenue to be gained from carrying data packets is close to, or perhaps even exceeds, that
of carrying traditional telephone voice circuits. Voice is rapidly becoming just another variation on
the data-networking theme—just packets for another application.
Ultimately, competition drives design and development, whether it be the telegraph versus the
telephone, or traditional telephony versus Internet telephony. Providers attempt to gain a
commercial advantage over their competitors by adopting new technologies that will provide a
service that is either cheaper, better, or more flexible. Naturally, a network that is well designed,
planned, and implemented will be in a position to take on new technologies.
may hobble along with the loss of telephone service can be rendered nonfunctional by the loss of
their data network infrastructure. Understandably, corporations spend a great deal of time and
money nursing this critical resource.
How and why did this dependency occur? Simply because networks provide a means to amplify
all the historical communication mechanisms. Nearly 50,000 years of speech, at least 3500 years
of written communication, and many thousands of years of creating images all can be captured
and communicated through a network to anywhere on the planet.
In the 1980s, fiber optics improved the distance, cost, and reliability issues; CB radio taught us
about peer-to-peer communication and self-regulation without a centralized communications
infrastructure provider. The needs of the military led to the development of network technologies
that were resilient to attack, which also meant that they were resilient to other types of failure.
Today's optical switching and multiplexing again demonstrate that to take the next leap in
capability, scalability, and reliability, businesses and individuals cannot afford to cling to tried-and-
true techniques.
Data communications grew from the need to connect islands of users on LANs to mainframes
(IBM's Systems Network Architecture [SNA] and Digital's DECnet) and then to each other. As
time passed, these services were required over wide geographical areas. Then came the need
for administrative control, as well as media and protocol conversion. Routers began to become
key components of a network in the 1980s, which was within the same time that Asynchronous
Transfer Mode (ATM) cell switching was being developed as the technology for the deployment of
worldwide networks supporting multimedia communications.
The designers of ATM were constrained by the need to support the traditional voice network. This
is not surprising, however, for at that time voice revenues exceeded other forms of
communications infrastructures. If new applications were to develop, many people thought they
were likely to take the form of video, either for communication or entertainment.
Very few people predicted the coming of the Internet. After all, it was not real-time voice or video
that stole the show, but the ubiquity of home personal computers coupled with a few applications.
These included the simple one-to-one or one-to-many communication applications, such as e-
mail and chat groups, and the powerful Web browsers and Internet search engines that turned
the Internet into a virtual world in which people could journey, learn, teach, and share. Users did
not need megabits per second to enter this world: 32 Kbps was happiness, 64 Kbps was bliss,
and 128 Kbps was heaven.
The increases in desktop computing power and in peer-to-peer applications had a fundamental
impact on network architectures. Modern network architectures expect intelligence and self-
regulation at the user workstation, and they provide a network infrastructure that maintains only
the intelligence sufficient to support packet forwarding. This contrasts significantly with the
approach of connecting simple terminal devices to intelligent mainframes using a complex
networking device that is used by many proprietary solutions, notably IBM's SNA.
NOTE
Some schools of thought suggest that networks will become more intelligent—and the user
stations less so. They believe bandwidth will be cheaper than local storage or CPUs, so
computational resources are better kept in a central shared facility. Web-TV and voice-messaging
services are examples of this philosophy at work.
The impact of technological development, and the changing needs of businesses, consumers, In the 1980s, fiber optics improved the distance, cost, and reliability issues; CB radio taught us about peer-to-peer communication and self-regulation without a centralized communications infrastructure provider. The needs of the military led to the development of network technologies that were resilient to attack, which also meant that they were resilient to other types of failure. Today's optical switching and multiplexing again demonstrate that to take the next leap in capability, scalability, and reliability, businesses and individuals cannot afford to cling to tried-and- true techniques.
Data communications grew from the need to connect islands of users on LANs to mainframes (IBM's Systems Network Architecture [SNA] and Digital's DECnet) and then to each other. As time passed, these services were required over wide geographical areas. Then came the need for administrative control, as well as media and protocol conversion. Routers began to becomekey components of a network in the 1980s, which was within the same time that Asynchronous. Transfer Mode (ATM) cell switching was being developed as the technology for the deployment of worldwide networks supporting multimedia communications.
The designers of ATM were constrained by the need to support the traditional voice network. This is not surprising, however, for at that time voice revenues exceeded other forms of communications infrastructures. If new applications were to develop, many people thought they were likely to take the form of video, either for communication or entertainment.
Very few people predicted the coming of the Internet. After all, it was not real-time voice or video that stole the show, but the ubiquity of home personal computers coupledwith a few applications. These included the simple one-to-one or one-to-many communication applications, such as e- mail and chat groups, and the powerful Webbrowsers and Internet search engines that turned the Internet into a virtual world in which people could journey, learn, teach, and share. Users did not need megabitsper second to enter this world: 32 Kbps was happiness, 64 Kbps was bliss, and 128 Kbps was heaven.
The increases in desktop computing power and in peer-to-peer applications had a fundamental impact on network architectures. Modern network architectures expect intelligence and self- regulation at the user workstation, and they provide a network infrastructure that maintains only the intelligence sufficient to support packet forwarding. This contrasts significantly with the approach of connecting simple terminal devices to intelligent mainframes using a complex networking device that is used by many proprietary solutions, notably IBM's SNA.
NOTE
Some schools of thought suggest that networks will become more intelligent—and the user stations less so. They believe bandwidth will be cheaper than local storage or CPUs, so computational resources are better kept in a central shared facility. Web-TV and voice-messaging services are examples of this philosophy at work.
The impact of technological development, and the changing needs of businesses, consumers, and society in general, is clear. Data networking is growing at 25 percent per year, traditional voice is increasing by only 6 percent, and the Internet is doubling every few months. (The term traditional voice is used because the Internet now carries voice, and in the last year or so several providers have announced their intent to supply voice over IP services.)
The revenue to be gained from carrying data packets is close to, or perhaps even exceeds, that of carrying traditional telephone voice circuits. Voice is rapidly becoming just another variation on the data-networking theme—just packets for another application.
Ultimately, competition drives design and development, whether it be the telegraph versus the telephone, or traditional telephony versus Internet telephony. Providers attempt to gain a commercial advantage over their competitors by adopting new technologies that will provide a service that is either cheaper, better, or more flexible. Naturally, a network that is well designed, planned, and implemented will be in a position to take on new technologies.
and society in general, is clear. Data networking is growing at 25 percent per year, traditional
voice is increasing by only 6 percent, and the Internet is doubling every few months. (The term
traditional voice is used because the Internet now carries voice, and in the last year or so several
providers have announced their intent to supply voice over IP services.)
The revenue to be gained from carrying data packets is close to, or perhaps even exceeds, that
of carrying traditional telephone voice circuits. Voice is rapidly becoming just another variation on
the data-networking theme—just packets for another application.
Ultimately, competition drives design and development, whether it be the telegraph versus the
telephone, or traditional telephony versus Internet telephony. Providers attempt to gain a
commercial advantage over their competitors by adopting new technologies that will provide a
service that is either cheaper, better, or more flexible. Naturally, a network that is well designed,
planned, and implemented will be in a position to take on new technologies.
