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Fixed and Mobile Broadband Evolution

The telecommunication world has demonstrated its power to digitalize the life in the past years, providing all services and applications from the physical world to the cyber (or otherwise called digital) world. When we talk about the digital world, digitalization, etc., we mean the open Internet, which exists parallel to our physical world. So the open Internet is the main “platform” for all the services we enjoy today in our work and life and society in general.

When did the growth of the Internet begin? For the world as a whole, the growth of the Internet began in the 1990s and continues at the same pace until today [1–3]. Nowadays, Internet technologies are the main network technologies in telecommunication networks, including fixed and mobile.

What was crucial for Internet/IP to become what it is today, a major networking technology in today’s telecommunications world? Well, it is due to the design of Internet Protocol (IP, as a protocol) to be flexible to accommodate different underlying transport technologies (e.g. Ethernet, Wi-Fi, mobile access networks, optical transport networks, and satellite networks) and all the various applications and services running over the top (therefore called Over The Top – OTT services/applications).

1.1 Evolution of Fixed and Mobile Telecommunications

The evolution of telecommunications started with fixed access networks dedicated to telephony at the end of the 19th century, which continued through most of the 20th century. Telecommunications include all technologies that are available at the given time for transfer of different types of information, such as audio (e.g. voice, or in other words, telephony), video (e.g. television at the beginning and many new video services at the present time), and data (everything else that is not included as audio or video as media, such as various types of services, e.g. email and Web). What technologies existed in the 19th century? Well, that was electricity, so different types of information could be transmitted on distance by using electric signals (e.g. DC – direct current electric signals).

1.1.1 Initial Telecommunication Technologies

What is the first telecommunication service? Well, it’s telegraphy, which is a type of data service, because telegrams were messages transmitted by electrical signals over long-distance wires. Telegraphy predates telephony, which was invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. Working telegraphy began in the early 19th century, with the first commercial electric telegraph service opened in London in 1839 with a system created by Charles Wheatstone [4]. In the United States, Samuel Morse created the well-known Morse code in 1844 for use in telegraphy. At the same time in 1843, Alexander Bain patented in the United Kingdom the first image transmission system, which is considered a precursor to the fax services that were used later in the 20th century for business communications. Thus, the first telecommunication service was actually telegraphy, which belongs to data services. With the advent of telegraphy came national and international telegraph services, and international traffic raised the issues of politics, language, and economics, which are also issues nowadays that telecommunications must constantly deal with in parallel with all the technological changes over time. For example, a telegram (that is, a message transmitted through a telegraphic system) written in one language (e.g. English) needed to be translated into the recipient’s language (e.g. German, Italian, Spanish, and French). It refers to the content of the message. However, the correct transmission of messages from country A to country B required the same approach to encoding and decoding messages adopted by both countries. Also, the financial part, such as who will pay for sending a telegram (sender, receiver, or partly both parties) was also an issue that needed to be resolved at the national and especially the international level.

The telegraph connected major cities in many different countries around the world in a short period of time. The first submarine cable was used in 1850 to connect France and Great Britain, while the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858 to connect North America to Europe. All that imposed the need for international agreements between governments, i.e. administrations, and the need to process standardization in telecommunications (at that time telecommunications was basically just telegraphy). This led to the founding of the International Telegraph Union (ITU) in 1865. Later the ITU got the name International Telecommunication Union where the word “telegraphy” was changed to “telecommunication,” considering that telephony appeared in 1876 and television was demonstrated for the first time in 1925 in London [4].

But before television, wireless telecommunications began with the invention of the wireless telegraph, invented in 1895 by Guglielmo Marconi in Bologna [5]. The wireless, that is radio telegraphy, was analogous to wire telegraphy used earlier in the 19th century. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company was later formed to provide World Wide Wireless (the initial WWW about a century before the emergence of the WWW as well-known web services).

Radio broadcasting and television were the next telecommunication services, after telegraphy as the first and telephony as the second. So, after the data service (telegraphy) and audio service (telephony) appeared radio broadcasting (as an audio-based service) and television (TV) as a multimedia service, consisting of video with accompanying audio. However, the spread of radio broadcasting was in the first half of the 20th century and TV broadcasting (initially also based on radio) in the second half.

Telecommunications originally used so-called analog signals obtained by modulating electrical signals in copper cables or radio signals (for radio/wireless communication) with audio, video, or information data and transmitting such a signal from a transmitter at one end to a receiver at the other. However, it required separate networks for different types of signals, such as separate telephone networks, separate radio broadcast networks, separate TV broadcast networks/equipment, and separate data networks. With the transition of legacy telecom world to Internet technologies it became possible for all services and applications to be provided over the same broadband IP-based networks and services (as shown in Figure 1.1). That provided the possibility to have one broadband network (with fixed and mobile access) for all existing and future services.

Figure 1.1 Convergence of legacy telecommunication to IP-based networks and services.

1.1.2 Digital Telecommunication World

The driver for the convergence of different types of information into one network was digitalization of signals and systems, driven by the introduction of computer science and informatics into the telecommunications world gradually from the 1960s. By digitizing naturally analog signals, all signals are represented as a series of digits. In the world of telecommunications, it is an unwritten rule that the simplest solution that gets the job done is often the best solution. Thus, although different digital systems can be defined (with a digital base of 2 digits, 3 digits, 4 digits, and so on), the usual approach to encoding information is with the binary system, which consists of two digits, one (1) and zero (0). The simplicity lies in the fact that when a given signal representing a binary 1 or a binary 0 (with noise added to the transmission path) is received, a single threshold is required to decide at the receiver’s end whether the digit sent in the given time interval was a binary “1” or “0.”

With the transformation of telecom networks from analog to digital since the 1970s and 1980s, it became possible to use the same network for different types of information or media (i.e. audio, video, multimedia, and data). However, different types of media and different services also required different capacity (expressed in bits per second) and different performances by the networks (in terms of end-to-end delay and losses). At that time, it was evident that video requires the most bandwidth (i.e. bitrates), which directly was related to television and its transition from analog to digital. On the other side, voice services (without accompanying video) require much less bitrate than video (e.g. TV).

1.1.2.1 Circuit Switching

Originally, digital telecommunications networks followed the same approach as analog networks before them, that is, they used an allocation of a fixed (i.e. dedicated) amount of bandwidth per flow (for example, a voice call in a given direction) called circuit switching. In fixed digital telephony, the dedicated circuit switching channel was 64 kbit/s in each direction over the telecommunications networks it traversed. The allocation of dedicated bandwidth (e.g. a time slot on a given frequency in a wired or wireless medium) was based on the high synchronization in the network required to multiplex different input streams into larger aggregated streams. Multiplexing is the technique of placing many signals over a single transmission medium (for example, copper, fiber optics, or radio). In general, there are two basic multiplexing schemes used in all digital...