THE recent evolutions in communication technology changed society in
such a way that many people tend to state that we are experiencing a
fourth industrial evolution. After the invention of the steam engine in 1764, the
evolution to mass production in 1908 and the invention of automation around
1946, the advent of mass-communication changed economics drastically.
In 1970 , the telecommunications world consisted of voice-and characteroriented
communications to mainframe computers. Voice was ‘king’, and there
was little need for Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technologies. Then came millions
of personal computers, multimedia applications and eventually the Internet.
In the early 1980s, the number of computers (including microprocessors
in cars and appliances) exceeded the world population of humans, and in the
mid-1990s the minutes of usage for digital applications in the public network
exceeded voice. Broadband access meant business and the DSL technologies
finally found a market that justified heavy investments into the research and
development of a very complicated system for which in the end, cost would be
a major issue for the economic success or failure of a certain solution.