Texts 5-6

Text 5. Next Generation Network

Intense competition is expected in the information networking arena over the next 5-10 years. As the competition increases, it will be essential for companies to position themselves appropriately to take advantage of their core competencies and to prepare for the emerging telecommunications environment. In this competitive environment, mergers, alliances, and the onslaught of new entrants into the market have service providers struggling to find innovative ways to retain and/or attract the most lucrative subscribers. Today’s service providers are striving to differentiate themselves within this expanding competitive landscape by searching for ways to brand and bundle new services, achieve operational cost reductions, and strategically position themselves in relation to their competition. As Figure 1 illustrates, the top 15% of today’s residential subscribers in the US are said to account for about 95% of carrier profits! Thus, many service providers are looking to Next Generation Network (NGN) services as a means to attract and/or retain the most lucrative customers.

While this paper is not intended to describe NGNs in detail, it may be helpful to provide a brief, high-level definition of what an NGN is to help set the stage for the remainder of the paper. For this paper, an NGN can be thought of as a packet-based network where the packet switching and transport elements (e.g., routers, switches, and gateways) are logically and physically separated from the service/call control intelligence. This control intelligence is used to support all types of services over the packet-based transport network, including everything from basic voice telephony services to data, video, multimedia, advanced broadband, and management applications, which can be thought of as just another type of service that NGNs support.

From a user’s perspective, today’s networks have come a long way in fulfilling their purpose of enabling people and their machines to communicate at a distance. However, a key critical success factor (among many) is focused telecommunications industry attention on NGN service concepts and how these concepts can be realized in an NGN environment, from the edges to the core of the network. This focus is lacking today, with most of the attention on specific NGN technology issues. For example, what type of access will be supported? How will the backbone transport network be designed? How will operations and management be handled in this new environment? Although these are all critical questions, we believe the most important issues to be addressed relate to NGN services and how they can be realized in an NGN environment. Common industry understanding of an NGN services vision will help crystallize the requirements for each of the technology issues, as well as identify areas where industry cooperation is needed.

Text 6. Smart cards.

A smart looks like a credit card but contains a microprocessor and memory chip. Then inserted into a reader, it transfers data to and from a central computer, and it can store some basic financial records. It is more secure than a magnetic-stripe card and can be programmed to self-destruct it the wrong password is entered too many times.

In France, where the smart card was invented, you can buy telephone debit cards at most cafes and newsstands. You insert the card into a slot in the phone, wait for a tone, and dial the number. The time of your call is automatically calculated on the chip inside the card and deducted from the balance. The French also use smart cards as bank cards, and come people carry their medical histories on them. 

The United States has been slow to embrace smart cards because of the prevalence of conventional magnetic-stripe credit cards. Moreover, the United States has large installed base of credit-cards readers and phone lines are scarcer, and merchants cannot as easily check over the phone with a centralized credit database. In these situations, stored value smart cards, sometimes called “electronic purses”, make sense because they carry their own spending limits. Thus write the Americans have been in the pilot-project stage, the Europeans, in transcending their own antiquated phone systems, have gone all out with smart cards-which, as one observer suggests, says a lot about the wacky ways in which technology spreads these days.

 

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