Week 2:Technology Infrastructure: The internet and the World Wide Web

This week seminar the professor started with presentation of the starhub study case. From the discussion we all mentioned that starhub should dominate the market. Why is it so? because telecommunication it a business with high start up cost and low variable cost. The cost of serving 1 million customers doesn't much from serving twice as many customers.

Definitely Starhub has to keep up to date with the current technology to gain market share. One of the professor ideas was to give information about the traffic by locating the position of the customers. If many people stay in their position, the service provider will send information to the customers who are going to that particular road. In that way, the customer can avoid traffic jam.

After 3 groups presentation the case study, the professor go on with the technology infrastructure. It starts with the origin of internet. Actually internet was first invented for military purposes of the U.S. department of defense. Then subsequently internet is available for public usage. For the past 2 decades internet has experienced an excellent growth(exponentially from 1991 - 2002). In 2003 and 2004 internet only grow linearly.click here

We may have always heard of the term TCP/IP, but I don't really know what is that. Well, TCP/IP is the heart of the internet. Why is that? let me explain, the data of the internet is sent in the form of little package. TCP controls the assembly and disassembly of the data. Of course IP can never be separated from TCP, IP is the address of the computer to receive the package sent. Currently IP addressing is using the internet protocol version 4 (IPv4), but soon the will be no more address to assign to internet users since the number of internet users are increasing. So they have improve the IP addressing to version 6(IPv6) which use 128 bit number bigger than version 4 which is only 32 bit. An interesting matter of this improvement is that why it isn't version 5? The explanation is like this when version 5 come out, version 4 can still be used. To change to newer version is not an easy task and isn't cheap. So none has changed to version 5.

I've also learnt something about the new technology in handphone that has connection with the wireless ethernet. The increasing use of wireless ethernet create the possibility of mesh routing. What is mesh routing? Directly transmits Wi-Fi packets through hundreds, or even thousands, of short-range transceivers acting as routers. The idea is like this, when every single household has wireless ethernet wherever we go we can receive the wireless signal from our handphone. In short wherever we go, we are connected to the internet. By using the internet connection people can send sms, call, without having to pay. In that case, can this technology be considered as disruptive technology? what will happen to the telecom service provider? will they survive?