F

Internet

TV

ixed phone Mobile phone

Seven years ago Now

In seven years

When you have finished, compare your answers with your partner.

TECH TUTORIAL 3G,

New generations of mobile phone standards, allowing mobile network operators to offer advanced services Ethernet

Avery high bandwidth data networking technology used by companies in LANs and increasingly WANs GSM = Global System for mobile communications A worldwide standard for mobile phones making phones from one operator compatible with a different operator in another country MPLS = Multi-Protocol Label Switching A data networking protocol and service that can carry different kinds of traffic-voice, data, video etc.

Open source

Software that is made available to developers and users, licensed to encourage re-use without charge.

SaaS = Software as a Service Wi-Fi

A technology providing wireless transmission of data over a short range (for example, in a house or office)

Wi-Max

A technology providing wireless transmission of high speed data over a large area (for example, a city)

Read the magazine article about trends in Telecoms and IT. Match the industry leader to their area of expertise.

a software b telecoms c hardware

1. Peter Wilson

2. Jenny Lane

3. SanjayRavi

State of play

To celebrate our 10"’ anniversary, we invited industry leaders to share their thoughts about the changing world of Telecoms and IT. To find out what they think, read on...

Peter Wilson

The world is now plugged in, and countries are connected up using a mixture of terrestrial networks, undersea cables, satellite and micro­wave communications, Wi-Max and Wi-Fi, GSM and 3G. The move from packet-based services to the internet protocol means everyone expects to communicate voice, data and video from anywhere to anywhere, globally. The availability of wide area data services such as MPLS and Ethernet havespread all over the world, allowing companies to manage and communicate with their operations wherever they may be.

A reason for this has been the fall in bandwidth costs, and broadband is getting cheaper and cheaper. Services can now deliver tens or even hundreds of megabits of bandwidth into individual homes for much less money than a 64 Kb line that a whole factory might have used to run its operation only a few years ago.

Jenny Lane

In 1965 Gordon Moore stated that the number of transistors on a chip would double about every two years. And that has more or less remained true since then. As we write, a single chip can hold about 1 billion transistors each making

3. Billion binary calculations per second.

There has’ been a huge increase in the volume of data and data storage capacity required for this; secondly, there has been a significant decrease in the size and power consumption of hardware and finally manufacturing costs are falling significantly. The result is that there are more and more powerful computers in our lives, and even handheld devices can store gigabytes of data holding thousands of MP3 music files or hundreds of films.

Sanjay Ravi

The internet is changing the way we access, buy and use applications. We go online and download the software we want onto our computer, like any other digital product. Increasingly we don’t even have the software on our hardware, but visit an internet site and use that application as a service. The use of this Software as a Service (SaaS) model means that we may not need such powerful computers in the future.

We have seen the impact of off­shoring and the rise of India as the world centre of software development and application management. We are also seeing some of the smartest applications and services coming out of people's bedrooms; more and more experts are producing Open source software, which is becoming more and more popular, creating a real threat to the big corporations.