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Center for Information & Communications
Technology Research |
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(CICTR) |
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Dept. of Electrical Engineering |
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The Pennsylvania State University |
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University Park, PA . 16802 |
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Next five years will mark the start of a
Multimedia Age, freeing
people from; |
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constraints of time and place and from limits on
the form of the information they
send and receive. |
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Homes will be wired and equipped for ‘Tele-work’, ‘distance-learning’ and
an unimaginable range of
‘entertainment’ options. |
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People will work for "virtual
corporations" made up of "virtual workgroups" including consultants,
suppliers and customers who operate globally using “virtual travel” for most face-to-face meetings. |
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In sum, we will become a "virtual society”. |
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What will make this possible ? |
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One network of many choices ... a vast and comprehensive multimedia
... based on broadband transmission and switching of voice, data and
video. |
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Separate private voice and data networks
replaced by a single multimedia network with seamless connectivity. |
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The new network will deliver voice, "video
dial-tone" and advanced data services as cost-effectively and as
easily as telephone service is delivered today. |
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It will fundamentally alter how we live and work
in a Global Society. |
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Yet, even as this network enables daring new
concepts to take hold, it
allows cherished old ones to return: |
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Doctors will again make "house-calls". |
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More people will work at home than at any
time since the end of the Agrarian
Age. |
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Around the year 2005, we'll begin to see: |
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The Virtual Corporation |
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The Wired Home |
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The Virtual Hospital |
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The Virtual Campus |
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The Virtual Corporation |
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Organizational hierarchies will flatten,
workgroups will flourish and the use of contract workers and consultants
will accelerate. |
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“Virtual corporation” will become a reality
as “virtual Project teams” composed of corporate employees, suppliers,
consultants and even consumers redefine hierarchies in organizations. |
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The Wired Home |
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Access to 500+ cable television channels and
thousands of Internet sites and a warehouse of on-demand videos will make
the home a multimedia theater. |
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The work-at-home movement will create new
flexibility and opportunities.
Employers will be open to new arrangements to save on real estate costs and
attract talented workers.
Furthermore, studies will show "tele-workers" are as productive
as their counterparts in a central office. |
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The Wired Home -- Cont’d |
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Computer-assisted learning and training in the
home will supplement the role played by traditional educational
institutions. |
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Families and telecommuters will increasingly use
communications technology to overcome a lost sense of community.
Videoconference "chat lines" will become an alternative to
e-mail. |
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The Virtual Hospital |
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Health-care providers will re-engineer to
deliver services more effectively, lower-administrative-costs and optimize
laboratory and hospital resources. |
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Patient registration will be done remotely and
the processing of bills and insurance forms will be done faster using
standardized electronic forms. |
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The Virtual Hospital -- Cont’d |
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Rural
hospitals will use videoconferencing and high-resolution visual
communications technology for remote consulting and for training health
care professionals. |
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Remote
diagnosis and videoconferencing will enable "house-calls" for
some basic health services and follow-up visits or to reach areas
without decent health care. |
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The Virtual Campus |
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Traditional public and private educational
institutions will use information technology to "re-engineer"
themselves in even more dramatic fashion than the major corporations that
reinvented themselves in the 1990s. |
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"Lifetime learning" will be enabled by
new technologies, including video training and access to the Internet and
on-line services from the home or office. Universities will form alliances
based on distance learning to offer specialized joint degrees, drawing on
the strengths of their faculties. |
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As easy to use as the ‘telephone’ is today's
standard for user friendly products. In a Multimedia Age, that standard may
even be surpassed, as, a revolution
in human interface technologies makes interaction with multimedia systems
almost as intuitive and comfortable as talking to another person. |
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The mouse, keyboard and traditional telephone
will be gone, or used as supplements to a system that interacts with the
individual in a more natural way. |
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Today's automated voice response systems, voice
recognition systems, handwriting recognition systems and real-time
interactive video systems will advance, delivering human-like
responsiveness. Other technologies such as personal agents and "expert
systems" software will rapidly mature into systems that can ‘learn as
they go’. |
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Publishing will be transformed because people
will have all the convenience of today's portable newspapers, magazines and
books in the form of wireless computing display screens, capable of
downloading virtually any newspaper or magazine in the world. |
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Travel will be transformed as today's ‘infant’ video conferencing systems grow
into wall-size 3-D Displays that can meld
a conference room in Boston
with another room in San Francisco, creating a virtual conference
center where teams of people can
spend a day or a week together as if they were in the same room. |
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Breakthroughs in ‘holographic’ and ‘virtual
reality’ technologies will bring complete integration of individuals from
multiple locations around the world into single virtual meeting rooms. |
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In such a meeting, only the firmness of a
person's handshake will make it possible to know whether the individual is
really in the same room or not. |
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“We’re just getting started. The market is going
to be huge. People talk about the window of opportunity; the window is the
next 20 or 30 years” |
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Wireless communications technologies are
currently experiencing explosive growth and promise to dramatically alter
the telecommunications landscape over the next decade. |
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As the term "wireless" enters its
second century, it is experiencing a renaissance of rare proportions. |
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Some projections show the number of wireless
subscribers as high as several hundred millions in first decade of new
millennium. |
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Trends in Wireless Communications point to the
merger of multiple services into integrated multimedia technologies. |
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The most widely used wireless service is mobile
voice. The first U.S. standard, AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service), was
based on analog technologies. At the end of 1995, there were in excess of
30 million cell phone subscribers. This number has increased,
substantially. |
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However,
the quality of this service (both sound quality and reliability) is not as
good as wire-line standards. |
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Digital standards have greatly improved the
Quality-of Service, but arriving at a consensus on the best multiple access
technology (e.g., TDMA, CDMA) delayed the widespread use of digital
standards in the United States. |
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More
efficient use of spectrum via compression. |
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Increased reliability using error correction coding. |
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Superior encryption to ensure privacy. |
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Digitized information are well suited for the integration of |
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multiple services. |
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Wireless voice is of particular interest to
developing countries that presently have little wire-line infrastructure.
Installation of a wireless infrastructure should be much less expensive
than wire-line. However, the Quality-of- Service must be comparable to
wire-line to be satisfactory as a nation’s primary telephone system. This
is presently not the case in cellular systems in use in industrialized
countries. |
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One approach to achieving global wireless
telephone service is the use of constellations of low-earth-orbit
satellites. The low orbits permit communication with relatively small
hand-held telephones, and the satellites connect with an earth-based
gateway to the wire-line network. At present, the FCC has licensed few
systems, e.g., Globalstar and Odyssey. |
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Major players like SBC and Verizon are competing
to provide complete communications services including video and wireless
personal communications services. Other potential competitors include cable
companies and consortia of computer and entertainment companies. The final
structure and nature of these emerging integrated service providers is not
yet clear. |
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"Survival of the fastest”; global economy
will dictate the use of the most advanced information technology to develop
and manufacture products and provide service support. |
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Notes
