WorldITShow Smart era with converged communications

By Lee Byeong-gi

Today we can start thinking of or talking about a smart era, or smart society, owing to the communications and content platforms, as well as the smart devices and smart services emerging on those platforms, which are made available by the converged communications.

Converged Communications refers to a convergence of the three fundamental building components — communications, broadcasting and Internet — on the foundation of an Internet Protocol (IP) platform. Though those three components initially started independently in different times for different purposes, they encountered, interacted, competed, and finally began to come together as converged communications.

This digital convergence process went through technological transformation and strong competition among different technologies in wire-line as well as wireless areas. Internet, with its distinctive “weed-like” characters, made a winning play throughout the digital convergence process and survived fierce competitions, thereby becoming the communications platform in converged communications.

In the initial stage of communications convergence, there occurred “the first Digital World War (DWW1)” which was conducted on the “wire-line battlefield” between a group of companies supporting traditional circuit-mode technology, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and another group of companies supporting the newly emerging packet-mode technology, Internet or IP, which ended up with a victory for the Internet group. After a decade or so, there followed “the second Digital World War (DWW2) on the “wireless battlefield” between a group of companies supporting circuit-based LTE (Long-Term Evolution) technology and another group of companies supporting Internet-based Mobile WiMAX technology.

This war is still on-going but has become meaningless as the former changed its technology base to Internet Protocol. It signifies that Internet technology scored a victory again, thereby concluding two decades-long transformation process of communications technology, and finally establishing IP as the common communications platform of converged communications.

Based on the maturity of mobile networks and the emergence of smartphones and open content markets (for example, application stores), the digital convergence process has shifted gear to encompass a diverse set of communications, including computing, broadcasting, media, OS platform, software, content, applications, and even print media and advertising, therefore expanding the coverage of converged communications much broader. It has invited new players to the converged communications field, such as Apple and Google, who have brought in new OS platforms, such as OS-X and Android, and new business models, such as AppStore-centric business and advertising-mediated business.

In this diversified environment there followed another dimension of competition among different groups of eco-systems, or eco-clusters, resulted in “the third Digital World War (DWW3)” among different eco-clusters on the “content battlefield”.

The platform and eco-cluster based competition, or DWW3, stimulates inventing various new smart devices and offering new smart services, as tools of competitions and cohesive eco-clustering, which will eventually lead to forming a smart society and opening a smart era.

The smart society would be composed of real space and cyberspace, which are tightly coupled together like the two sides of a coin.

Real space represents the physical world of materials, whereas cyberspace represents the ubiquitous world of information.

As infrastructure is needed to support real space, such as housing, clothing, food production, transportation, energy, water, sewerage, so is infrastructure needed to support cyberspace, such as, storage, computing/processing and communications facility, network, sensors, displays, applications/content.

In order to build the necessary infrastructure for cyberspace, development of enabling technologies and deployment of a ubiquitous network is a prerequisite, which requires a large amount of investment.

The smart society in the smart era, according to the above reasoning, would be a fully connected society equipped with cyberspace infrastructure needed for ubiquitous computing and communications. Then what would the smart life in a smart society be like?

It may be a life that utilizes broad knowledge/content base in the most convenient form without being limited by time, place, and devices for work and for pleasure, would yield an enhanced quality of life. People living a smart life would carry a simple personalized device, like a “Genie”, and use simple words to get all information and communication services, through it, and reach out to people. People do not need to care about the technology behind, Mobile WiMAX, LTE, WiFi, or whatever, and need no skillful operation of communicating and computing devices.

Technology, networks and devices should be matured enough to hide behind the scenes and help people in an invisible manner. Smart life should be a plain relaxing life as if living in an old time in a rural area.

In reality it may be a long way to go until we truly reach the smart era. There are many issues to solve to build a smart society, which includes technology, traffic, spectrum, revenue, privacy and security among others.

Without technology development, we cannot dream of realizing a smart society. Even with technology, if we do not construct a ubiquitous mobile network, a smart society would never happen. But those require a huge amount of investment.

Lee Byeong-gi is a professor at Seoul National University. He served as a commissioner of the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) and is currently serving as president of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc).