A network strategy for survival

The telecom business is due for fundamental changes, concerning both technology and enterprise-but also concerning attitudes. This article discusses the merger between telecom and datacom, the business and technological trends-in order to outline future architecture for service and infrastructure. Our approach is that the causes of change are more fundamental than is normally conceived. Today the telecom community focuses on deregulation and competition, rather than observing that there will be different types of traffic dominating our networks -and businesses. We also tend to focus on broadband technology, rather than observing that the emerging services require online properties and a connectionless network. Our own attitude, to interpret new phenomena in telecommunications concepts, disables us from using new technology and understanding new business. An overall conclusion is, in sweeping terms, that our operations in the future will be dominated by datacom networks rather than telecom networks. This, in turn, requires a new scenario for interoperability and regulations-and calls for new business models. It is argued that the focus for regulations should be interoperability rather than infrastructure. Furthermore, a generic "hour-glass" architecture is sketched-assuming, for example, IP as the interoperability level separating the megabits per second market from the service market. The discussion in this article reflects one strand of strategic discourse on future networks within Telia and other European operators.