The Internet revolution: reshaping business for the 21st century

Summary form only given. The age of digital convergence cannot be ignored by technology, service, and content provision companies, given the phenomenal growth of the Internet and its enormous potential in delivering services. While the interactive television and video on demand early pilot trials have not succeeded in the market, the explosive development of the Internet and the World Wide Web have clearly demonstrated that the Internet is the medium where the commercial and end users interests' converge. The fundamental limitation in the existing Internet model is the lack of network bandwidth for delivering synchronous media such as video and audio with the needed quality of service performance, which is fundamental for applications in the consumer and the business markets. The next generation of Internet will offer a new network architecture suitable for the provision of broadband multimedia services and applications, thus expanding the end users' WWW experience from the technological, content, and service provision point of view. The purpose of the article is to offer an entertaining overview of the latest development in building an integrated services Internet architecture, as well as of the current efforts of the telecommunications community to develop broadband networks based on ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) standards.