It is widely believed that the world is entering the Information Age, and telecommunication companies must make critical investments decisions based on how much information customers will want to move in the future, Understanding and preparing for the range of possible customers demand scenarios is vital for long-term success in an increasingly competitive market. However, detailed forecasts are impossible to make since the market is as yet undefined. Scenario modelling is useful in developing the understanding telcos need to achieve success. We have developed a system dynamics model to investigate the effects of different business and technological drivers on the demand for future telecommunications services, using the software tool iThink. Drivers include the number of people teleworking and increasing computing powers. These interact to produce usage dynamics for generic services covering conversation, messaging and data transfer, which are then used to calculate resulting network traffic. Our results suggest that the key uncertainties are the rate of improvement in general IT sophistications, and the extent of teleworking. High growth in both of these produces rapid growth in peak traffic, whilst low teleworking delays that growth. Slower improvement in IT sophistication severely limits growth, since increasing computing power could stimulate large volumes of traffic. Small increases in the use of video applications also produce significant traffic growth, and these factors combine to give large uncertainties. The behavior of this system is discussed with reference to individual business sectors, demonstrating system dynamics as a useful approach for investigating telecoms supply-demand systems.

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Date created

• 1994

Type

• Document

Processing Activity

• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

License

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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fe35db792b573af835d96e6eba4759cd

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c060552994c1527f70693734935660f1

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Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

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Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives