The ride will be bumpy, but our “insatiable” appetite for always-on telecommunication, entertainment and mobile chatting will ensure that we get there.
That destination is the so-called “next-generation network”, or NGN. In his keynote at Communic Asia 2004 yesterday, Prof Lawrence Wong, executive director of the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore, told conference attendees that despite technical challenges ahead, NGN is imminent because the demand for NGN business applications is already here.
What is NGN? The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) defines NGN as a “packet-based network able to provide services including telecommunication services and able to make use of multiple broadband, QoS-enabled transport technologies and in which service-related functions are independent from underlying transport-related technologies.
“It offers unrestricted access by users to different service providers. It supports generalized mobility which will allow consistent and ubiquitous provision of services to users,” wrote ITU in its official Web site.
Prof Wong has a better, and more layman definition—simply that NGN enables applications that today’s text-messaging generation will demand in order to be entertained, and communicate with each other, using their cool mobile phones and devices. “These applications are related to mobility, and will be always-on,” he said.
NGN enablers
Growing business appetite aside, NGN is imminent also because the technologies that will smooth the transition to a converged voice and data platform are here.
Prof Wong singled out 3G and WiFi as key NGN ingredients. In particular, the merging of both technologies will be important in helping to create a reliable voice and data delivery platform. For telecom companies, he said that the crux of melding voice with data will centre around adopting the right packet switching techniques.
Another NGN ingredient is the upcoming Internet Protocol IPv6, which offers a larger IP addressing space (it has a 128 bits addressing) compared to the current standard, IPv4 (32 bits). Effectively, IPv6 increases the supply of unique IP addresses from 4 billion to over 35 trillion.
Despite the skepticism that surrounds IPv6, in particular the unlikelihood of demand for unique IP addresses exceeding 4 billion in the near future, Prof Wong is convinced that trillions of unique IP addresses will be needed soon.
“There will eventually be many, many more devices than the 6 billion people that are on earth today,” he said. “Today, a lot of our pricing and IT model is based on human-to-human communications, but with the developments that we are seeing with wireless connectivity, peer networking and home entertainment, the demand for IP addresses is going to be really huge.”
“What we will see, is the emergence of both human-to-device and device-to-device communications.”
Next stop: Next-generation network
By Ong Boon Kiat, ZDNet Asia
Friday, June 18, 2004 08:36 PM
Friday, June 18, 2004 08:36 PM
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