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IT'S NOT YOUR PARENT'S PHONE |
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A Survey of Changing Patterns
in Canadian Consumer Communications |
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August
2003 - IGB Grant +1 514 849 3508
& Brian Sharwood +1
416 413 9381
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KEY HIGHLIGHTS: |
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- The telecommunications world is undergoing a radical change – a
change that is, for the most part, hidden from users of communications
services. The change is the shift from the telecommunications network
of ‘the past’, a network based on circuits established between
users through a complex matrix of switching gear that girds the planet,
to an internetbased ether, where communications are broken apart into
constituent parts and then dynamically routed through the most efficient
path using a system called Internet Protocol (IP). The new network will
offer consumers new services; it will allow users to blend voice, data
and images in ways of which they have not yet dreamed.
- The new network isn’t a telephone
network, a cable network, a wireless network – it is, simply,
a network. Your particular access to that network may be through one
or more gateways – but the particular gateway is no longer important.
It is access itself that is key.
- The IP world is already here – this
isn’t a remote future, or even merely imminent. How we relate
to communications, who we buy our services from, and, indeed, what
services we buy are changing.
- There are issues though – the structure
of the industry, and the structure of industry-regulation, has yet
to grapple with the changes that engineers and physics have wrought.
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