ABSTRACT
With the advent of optical fiber technology, the telecommunication services not only improved immensely in quality but also became much more affordable. In fact, the cost of making a long-distance call today is a very small fraction of the cost 30 years back. In India, until a few decades ago, it was cheaper to travel to the intended long-distance destination by train and come back, as compared with making a telephone call to the place lasting for 10 minutes. As the affordability improved, the demand increased, which further boosted the volume of production of equipment and cables, making them cheaper again. Thus, the demand and cost have been driving each other for the benefit of the public. The demand was further boosted by the data traffic growth, which had been phenomenal in the last 10 years or so. Data-centric applications such as LANs, Internet banking, online ticket booking of railways and airlines, corporate WANs and VPNs, etc. multiplied the demand of data traffic, manyfold. The most important factor, however, in the growth of the data traffic, which projected a demand for convergence of voice and data traffic, was the transport of voice and video services as data such as VOIP, streaming video, triple play, video conferencing, etc. Data traffic had thus been getting increasingly important over the years. The scenario finally led to the demand of convergence of data and voice services and a transportation backbone that is more data-friendly rather than being voice-friendly.
