A year 2003 conceptual model for the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

Abstract

To model the telecommunications infrastructure and its role and robustness to shocks, we must characterize the business and engineering of telecommunications systems in the year 2003 and beyond. By analogy to environmental systems modeling, we seek to develop a "conceptual model" for telecommunications.Here, the conceptual model is a list of high-level assumptions consistent with the economic and engineering architectures of telecommunications suppliers and customers, both today and in the near future. We describe the present engineering architectures of the most popular service offerings, and describe the supplier markets in some detail. We also develop a characterization of the customer base for telecommunications services and project its likely response to disruptions in service, base-lining such conjectures against observed behaviors during 9/11. 4 CaveatTelecommunications over the last 20 years has experienced more technology and market change than, say, aviation has in 40 years or the railroads in 100 years. Nuclear technologies over the last 30 years seem positively moribund compared to the rate of change in information technologies. Water resources and many other technologies have never experienced the same absolute amount or rate of change. Only computer technologies have experienced an equivalent rate of change in the last 50 years. Noting that, it is easy to find predictions from computer technology leaders in the 1960s and 1970s that seem quaint or laughable today. This should warn any modeler away from an uncritical reading of this or any other document that purports to accurately characterize future (and even present) states of such a fast-changing technology, much less customer response to these technologies. There are future equilibrium states, e.g., open-spectrum proposals, that may eventually lead to some maturation and relative stability in telecommunications, but how and when we will arrive at such states is more speculation than science. The seersucker hypothesis has not been disproved by this study, that hypothesis being that for every seer, there is a sucker.5

Simulating economic effects of disruptions in the telecommunications infrastructure.

“…The research and analysis discussed above are described in the report entitled A Year 2003 Conceptual Model for the U.S. Telecommunications Infrastructure [5]. For this initial version of CommAspen, we implemented a few of the agent behaviors, but by no means all.…”