Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Introduction

• The evolution of ICT has followed three parallel timelines:
  • Innovation of technologies from simple telephone and telegraph systems to the Internet.
  • Convergence of services where telephone and telegraph networks are replaced by the Internet.
  • Evolution of the telecommunications business from monopoly to competitive markets.
• The digital economy started with the invention of the transistor in 1947.
  • The transistor was more densely packed, cheaper, used less energy, easier to handle, and more reliable than vacuum tubes.
• In 2019, approximately 23 billion devices with microchip CPUs were connected to the Internet.
  • The number of connections increases by 10% per year (doubling time of 7 years).
  • Forecast for 2025 is more than 40 billion devices connected to the Internet (Cisco Visual Networking Index, 2019).

The Transistor

• A semiconductor device used to switch and amplify electronic signals.
• Replaced vacuum tube technology.
• Enabled production of cheap, low-power, and small electronic devices.
• Basis for almost all ICT devices.
• Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for the field-effect transistor in 1925, but it was impossible to build at that time due to the lack of high-quality semiconductor materials.
• First practical implementation was done at Bell Labs, USA, by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley in 1947.
  • They invented the first point-contact transistor and patented it the year after.
  • They received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for their “research on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect”.
• The transistor radio was the first commercial device designed using transistors (1954).
• Early uses included pocket calculators, hearing aids, telecommunication switching equipment, and personal computers and mobile phones.
• Today, transistors are mostly used as building blocks for integrated circuits.
• In 2014, more than $10^{18}$ transistors were produced.
  • More than $100$ million transistors for each human being on Earth.
• From 1960 to 2018, altogether $1.3 ") × 10^{22}$ transistors have been manufactured (Laws, 2018).
• The size of a single transistor has continually gotten smaller since its inception in the 1950s, following Moore’s law.
  • Intel 4004 microprocessor (1971) had 2300 transistors, each with a size of $10,000$ nanometers.
  • The 22-core Xeon Broadwell-E5 microprocessor (2016) has $7,200,000,000$ transistors each with a size of $14$ nanometers (Wikipedia, 2020).
• More transistors generally mean more computing power.
• Whether the size of transistors can be further reduced in the future according to Moore’s law is an open issue.
• Quantum effects, heating, and thermal noise may limit the minimum size of a transistor.

Timeline for the ICT Evolution

• Figure 2.1 shows the timeline for innovations essential for the development of the digital economy.
• Technologies are categorized as hardware, mobile/wireless, or software/services.
• Prior to 1993, telecommunications technology and information technology developed along two different paths:
  • Telecommunications:
    • An old technology branch going back to the first electronic telegraph systems developed in the early nineteenth century.
    • The predecessor of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) was established in 1865 to standardize telegraph technology.
    • Development was primarily associated with digital transmission and switching of telephone services and simple data services until 1993.
  • Information Technology:
    • A much younger science with roots in the 1950s when the first transistorized computers were designed.
    • Consists of computer architecture, processing platforms, data storage, algorithms, and programming developed at universities, research organizations, and in the computer industry.
• In 1993, the two fields merged into a single technology known as information and communication technology (ICT).
  • The event that led to this transformation was the commercialization of the World Wide Web in 1993.
  • Since 1993, information technology cannot exist without telecommunications and vice versa.
• The World Wide Web is enabled by:
  • Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for addressing information packages.
  • Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for communication with web pages.
  • Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for formatting and writing web pages.
• Mosaic (1993) was the first graphical web browser.

The ARPANET

• A project with the major goal of building and demonstrating a data communication network based on packet switching.
• The first communication network to implement the TCP/IP protocols.
• Funded by the US Department of Defense and launched in 1966.
• Packet switching was a novel technology at that time.
• Key advantages of packet switching over circuit switching were efficient resource sharing and resilience against node and link failures.
• In 1969, the ARPANET project built an experimental packet-switched network connecting a few computer sites.
• The first international connection in the ARPANET was to Norway via a satellite link in 1973.
• ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet.
• The ARPANET was decommissioned and replaced by NSFNET in 1990 and became the first part of the current Internet.
• The early Internet was mainly used at universities and research establishments.
• The WWW technology had been invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN already in 1989.
• The Internet is a global system for interconnected computer networks based on technologies and protocols such as Ethernet (1974) and TCP/IP (1974).
• The TCP/IP protocol suite was developed and tested as a part of the ARPANET project financed by the US Department of Defense but is now the worldwide open standard for data transmission on the Internet.
• Optical fibers were invented in 1965.
  • A single optical fiber can carry several hundred terabytes of data per second.
    • An optical cable can accommodate all traffic generated on the Internet today.
• One of the first “killer applications” of the Internet was e-mail, which was standardized in 1982 with the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
• The first commercially available microprocessor was the Intel 4004, released in 1971.
• The personal computer (PC) was developed in the early 1970s but reached the mass market in 1977 with the release of Apple II and Commodore PET.
• The Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) was released in 1981.
• The first laptop available for the mass market was the Toshiba T1100, released in 1985.
• In 2018, more than 160 million laptops were sold, compared to over 1.5 billion smartphones.
• The Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT), released in 1981, was the world’s first automatic cellular mobile telephony system.
• The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM)—supporting voice, messaging, and data services—pioneered digital radio communication (1991).
• High-speed data was introduced in 3G mobile systems (2003).
• The broadband technology was developed further in the 4G mobile systems launched in 2009.
• The latest mobile technology, 5G, was used at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea and is now being rolled out on a large scale (2020).
• 5G will support the Internet of Things (IoT).

Family Tree of Mobile Networks

• First generation (from 1981):
  • NMT (Nordic countries), TACS (UK), Radiocom2000 (France), and C-Netz (Germany) offering only analogue telephony.
  • These systems supported primitive roaming capabilities, though the method used in NMT became the basis for the more sophisticated roaming capabilities of GSM.
• Second generation (1991):
  • GSM offering digital telephony, data communication at speeds up to 10 kilobits per second (kbps), and short message service (SMS) over signaling channels.
  • GSM was designed for automatic international roaming and non-disruptive handover.
• Third generation (2001):
  • 3G (or UMTS) is a dual system offering packet radio services at a 128 kbps (initially) for Internet services and GSM services for telephony and SMS.
  • The architecture consists of two separate network architectures for data and telephony but using the same radio interface based on spread spectrum technologies.
  • 3G is an extension of both the Internet and the telephone network.
• Fourth generation (2009):
  • 4G is an extension of the Internet offering only packet radio services including voice over IP (VoIP), narrowband data, broadband data, and streaming services over a dynamic mix of narrowband and wideband data channels.
  • Interconnection with the fixed telephone network is via conversion units at the interface between the telephone network and the 4G network.
• Fifth generation (2018):
  • 5G is based on 4G but offers new features such as very high data rates, edge computing (cloud computing close to the mobile user, e.g., in the base station, to reduce latency), network slicing (allowing independent providers to operate simultaneously over the same infrastructure offering complex services to the same user), and connection of millions of remote sensors and other devices.
  • 5G will be one of the basic technologies of the Internet of Things.
• Intermediate technologies exist between the generations such as GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) offering packet radio with increased data rates over GSM and HSPA (high-speed data access) for increased data rates over 3G.
• Bluetooth (1997) interconnects devices over very short distances.
• Wi-Fi (1997) offers local network access using packet radio.
• Android (2007) and iPhone (2007) transformed smartphones into advanced computers also supporting the app ecosystems
• Google (1998) enables users to search the World Wide Web for information.
• The initial business of Netflix (1998) was DVD rental and sales by mail.
• Amazon.com (1997) launched a successful e-commerce website.
• Internet services such as Wikipedia (2001), Skype (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), Dropbox (2007), and Spotify (2008) emerged.
• Bitcoin (2009) emerged with the idea of disrupting the banking system by offering a cryptocurrency.
• Snapchat (2011) sought to fill gaps in the social media market by enabling private sharing of pictures and videos on mobile devices.

Factors Constraining Evolution

• Digital services cannot exist without ICT.
• Innovations in computer networking and wireless technologies give rise to new services.
• Some basic technologies still in use include TCP/IP, HTTP, Ethernet, and GSM, now more than 25 years old.
• Communication technologies are evolving slowly due to the huge investments required for implementing them.
• It may take more than 10 years before a technology is taken into use after it is specified and ready for the market.
• IPv6 was ready for implementation in 1996, but in 2016, more than 95% of Internet traffic was still carried on IPv4 networks.
• Both the development time and adaptation time for many app-based digital services are very short.
• One important requirement is backward compatibility.
• The reliability of the infrastructure is also a concern.
• ICT and electric power production are the two most critical infrastructures of society.
• All activities of modern society involve computation, sharing, and storage of data and are vulnerable to cyberattacks.
• Innovations in ICT will continue to impact the digital economy.
• Technologies such as machine learning, robotics, smart factories, smart cities, and 3D printing show great potential.

Cryptocurrencies

• A type of digital currency that uses cryptography to secure transactions and generate new units.
• Transactions in cryptocurrencies are performed without any centralized authority.
• Cryptocurrency uses blockchain technology.
• Bitcoin (2009) was the first decentralized cryptocurrency.
• Bitcoin has the potential to become a true global digital currency.
• However, the price of Bitcoin has been extremely volatile compared to other currencies.
• The current value of 1 Bitcoin is about $60,000$ USD (April 2021), rising from about $7000$ USD in April 2020.
• The popularity of Bitcoin has also spurred the creation of many other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, and IOTA.
• There are currently more than 3400 different cryptocurrencies in various stages of development.

Internet of Things

• Interactions between humans and between humans and machines are traditionally the core elements in the evolution of telecommunications technology.
• Autonomous communication between machines not involving humans has become increasingly important.
• Cisco has estimated that there will be almost 30 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2022.
  • About 50% of these devices will be IoT devices and 25% will be smartphones.
  • IoT devices will only generate 6% of the global Internet traffic.
• The applications of IoT devices are commonly divided into five categories: consumer, commercial, industrial, infrastructure, and military.
• One consequence is that IP version 6 must be built out on a large scale to provide enough addressing space for the new applications.
• The 5G mobile network is already designed for this evolution, and it is assumed that 5G will play an important role in the evolution of IoT.
• Consumer applications include smart home applications, elder care, and medical supervision managed by the users.
• Commercial applications include smart health care, building and home automation, and smart transport systems.
• Industrial applications facilitate the evolution of existing industrial automation using big data, AI, robotics, and autonomous interactions between devices.
• Infrastructure applications are management and control of infrastructures.
• Military applications include technologies for surveillance, reconnaissance, and battlefield operations.
• Several technologies support IoT networking.
• There are several concerns regarding IoT, the most important of which are related to privacy, security, and safety.
• The term Internet of Things was coined by Kevin Ashton at Procter & Gamble in 1999.
• There are several obstacles slowing the evolution of IoT: lack of killer applications; unclear business propositions and usability; lack of standards and interoperability; security, safety, and privacy concerns; and, perhaps the most important, IoT not fitting easily into traditional public or industrial governance structures.

Conclusions

• The evolution of the digital economy is intimately connected to several technological innovations.
• The evolution started by the invention of the transistor in 1947.
• The Internet offered a simple, cheap, and effective communications platform for data communication.
• The World Wide Web created the real killer applications (commercialized in 1993).
• The evolution of data communication over digital mobile cellular networks started with GSM in 1991.
• With the Internet of Things, ICT has entered new and enormous fields of applications.