Classroom Companion: Business

 
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Questions
1. What are the major benefits and challenges of a fully converged ICT 
infrastructure?
2. How will the cost of operating and managing ICT infrastructures change due 
to convergence?
 
Chapter 3 ·
Convergence of Technologies and Services

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3. Is it possible for the Internet to accommodate all kinds of services offered on 
current dedicated networks?
4. How will Starlink alter the competition in the telecommunications market?
 
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Answers
1. The major benefit is that there will be fewer networks to build, maintain, and 
operate. The network will offer many new services and combine them in new 
ways that will support new applications. The major challenge is competition 
since it will be easier to build new networks.
2. Managing and operation of the network will probably be cheaper and more 
efficient.
3. The Internet offers best-effort services. This makes it difficult to guaranty 
quality- of- service objectives related to resilience, latency, timing accuracy and 
jitter, loss of information, and priority. Therefore, it may not be possible to 
support certain applications (e.g., distress operations) in a proper way, hence 
requiring dedicated networks.
4. Starlink will, because of global coverage, compete with all other telecommuni-
cations operators worldwide. They will also offer communications to areas 
which are not accessible to other telecommunications operators.
 
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Exercise
List some of the new benefits 5G systems will offer. Search the Internet (e.g., 
Wikipedia) to find out more about 5G systems.
 
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Answers
This is some of the benefits:
5
Offer wide-band wireless services in the range of 400 megabits per second to 2 or 
more gigabits per second (depending on cell size and frequencies).
5
Better utilization of the frequency spectrum (less overhead and more efficient 
access technologies).
5
Better mix of radio cell sizes (from a few meters to several kilometers).
5
Offer edge computing, thereby reducing the latency for certain applications, e.g., 
for applications on the Internet of Things. Edge computing means that software 
and storage are brought close to the user, e.g., located in the base station.
5
New methods for orchestrating services consisting of multiple applications (net-
work slicing).
5
Capable of connecting millions of devices to the same base station (e.g., sensor 
networks).
5
Convergence of cellular mobile networks and Wi-Fi and other local area net-
work technologies.
References
Godwin, R.. (2002, October 3). Teledesic backs away from satellite. ZD Net.
Telecommunications services in the Nordic and Baltic countries in 2018. (2019, December 14). Report 
received from NKOM (Norwegian Communications Authority).
References

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 
Switzerland AG 2021
H. Øverby, J. A. Audestad, Introduction to Digital Economics, 
Classroom Companion: Business,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78237-5_4
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