Classification and Assessment of Telecommunication Services in Broad-Band Networks

Communication systems have become a fundamental utility for many facets of private and public life. Increasing system capabilities and advances in technology stimulate expectations of the public for new telecommunication services. Quite a variety of new services have been proposed which will have to be analyzed as to their utility, customer acceptance, and feasibility of implementation. In this paper an analytical approach is selected to assess these services by defining their communication structure and arranging them into classes corresponding to information flow, mode of information exchange, and communication pattern. Services requiring considerable technical expenditures and having a significant impact on future network configurations are pointed out. These services reqmre subscriber-individual and broad-band communication channels. For selected classes of services, a conceptual implementation in three types of networks is presented. It is recommended that several new services be implemented by using facilities of the existing public telecommunication network.