N-GEN Communications Web-based Seminars ©NGCS

Seminar - An Overview of Communications Technologies

Module 1 - An Overview of the Communications Industry                                                                Slide 5 of 26  _________________                                                                                  __________

                                              Industry Landscape

                                        Carriers Networks Overbuilt

                                        Traffic did not Grow as Anticipated 

                                        Dot-Com Bubble Burst

                                        Industry Still Looking For Killer Applications

_________________                                                                                  __________

In the mid 90s Internet applications took off. The telephone companies in anticipation of traffic growth deployed optical fiber in the plant. The equipment manufacturers worked on increasing the fiber and copper information carrying capabilities. The Web market collapsed and left telco with idle network capacity. That translated into reduced capital investment in the plant which hurt the equipment manufacturers.

                                                 
                                               Dot-Com Bubble Burst

North American Telecoms have a glut of the fiber and the technology (WDM, DWDM) to consolidate traffic over a single fiber. Internet traffic is growing slowly and not as fast as it was anticipated by the carriers. Therefore Bell Canada and Telus are investing less capital in the networks. This is hurting equipment manufactures like Nortel. Nortel reduced their workforce from 90,000 to 45,000 and sold some of their business. 

The Web companies have disappeared from the map. These companies were providing most of the traffic to the networks in the late 1990s. Consumers have not embraced e-Commerce due to security concerns. The large corporations have set up their own intranets and extranets to conduct e-business.

Many new applications like Music Over the Internet, Web Conferencing, Picture phone over the Internet, Interactive video games, Wireless Internet and business-to-business e-Commerce are on the horizon.