Technological advancements in the world of communications, have always been welcomed with strict evaluations of how they will change the way something was accomplished previously and how well will the new technologies accomplish those goals. There are government agencies, non-profit groups, technical societies and manufacturer forums which take good care of this evaluation and ensure that only good advancements are accepted and the bad ones are rejected. They take almost all the aspects into consideration, but they forget (deliberately, in some cases) one big aspect – how will the new technology put the existing technology’s infrastructure (as in wires, amplifiers, branch exchanges, trunk offices, circuit switching nodes in wired communications and signaling towers, repeaters and signal switching nodes in wireless communications) into use. In some cases, a new technology standard specification would give an annotation at the end, saying that the existing infrastructure can be used with the new technology, but it will never reveal the difference that would result in the performance when using an entirely new infrastructure versus using the older one and hence the manufacturers and service providers sought to building a new infrastructure from the scratch.
But you cannot blame anyone for this, can you? These agencies strive to promote new technologies and they tend to do it in a way that ensures that new technologies do sprang up. Moreover, the new technologies when given an entirely new infrastructure, have almost always offered greater benefits that what they would have offered if they were used by making modifications to the old infrastructure. Since the profits which the manufacturers and service providers incepted they would get with new infrastructure, were always higher than the profit which making use of the existing infrastructure could have resulted in, the manufacturers and service providers never really bothered about the old infrastructure. They just formulated policies that would suggest that as long as the old technology is in some us, they are ought to maintain the infrastructure which was built to support it, but the policy never states what would be done when the old technology gets completely phased out.
Though there have been a handful of examples where the old infrastructure was put to some excellent use- e.g. the infrastructure for AMPS was reused to implement DAMPS. The X.25 communication backbone which was initially meant for some conventional communication and not carrying Internet payload, was later on modified to be used as an efficient carrier of Internet payload.(In fact it is still used as a communication backbone in some regions). But the number of such examples falls pretty short of the number of examples where the existing infrastructure was left to rot or was removed to put the newer one in place.
Its not that the old communication infrastructure causes any considerable loss to the environment or add to some other issue, but it’s just that we ignore the possibility of putting it to some good use. A set of standalone transmission towers cannot cause a lot of harm to the environment, can they? (Of course, ignoring the possibility of the tower growing too old and falling on a person passing from the nearby). Nor can the bundles of copper wires cause a lot of harm to the environment. So one might ask as to what is the point in caring about the old communication infrastructure. Why shouldn’t we leave it as it is and move on to build one for the new technology? If the masters of the domain have been thinking in the same way, then why should we take a different stand on this? The experts of the domains, the manufacturers and the service providers have set this trend, because they lacked insight. They have a lot of insight, when it comes to implementing the new technologies in the optimal manner and ensuring that the overall operation is robust and flexible, but they lack insight when it comes to doing something unanticipated with the existing infra.
The DAMPS and X.25 backbone examples that were provided at the beginning indicated a different class of reuse. They were instances when the new technology could be implemented by making slight modifications to the existing infrastructure. Though such examples are motivating, but they are very rare in the present context. If you are switching from conventional copper cable telephony to optic fiber-based communication, then there is no way in which you could use the old infra in implementing the new technology. You have to build the new infrastructure from the scratch. But what we forget here is that we can do plenty of innovational things with the existing infrastructure. The conventional copper cable-based systems are about to become obsolete. The infrastructure used by such communication was humongous and this system was undoubtedly, very reliable. Some wireless communication technologies like the DAMPS, PHS are also near becoming obsolete. So what all things can we do with them? A few proposals follow.
One proposal is that the existing copper cable communication be modified slightly and the cables which were once used to connect telephones to branch offices would be made to connect utility meters to the respective billing offices. This will obviously mean that for those houses that did not have a copper cable connection before, the corporation will have to provide one. One might argue that the data transfer rate on copper media is limited to 56Kbps, but the utility meters would send and receive much lesser data than this. Instead of providing a separate system for meter readings, the existing system can be put to very effective use. This would eliminate the job of meter reading personnel. But apart from this benefit, this system can also detect thefts, which result in major losses to the power generating corporations.
The second proposal is to use the existing copper cable infra to act as a signaling system in the modern communication technologies. GSM, GPRS and most of the modern communication protocols need a separate signaling system for optimal performance. Although, a portion of the overall infra can be used to function as the signaling system, but by making use of a separate signaling system, we can minimize noise and can ensure a higher quality service with reduced risk of network failures. Some GSM service providers, who owned copper cable – communication systems before coming into cellular technology, have indeed used this concept and have reaped in lots of benefits by doing so.
The third proposal is to provide a super secure communication by making use of any existing and obsolete transmission media. Since the early days of the science of network security, it has been realized that the most secure communication system is one in which two channels are used for overall transmission. One channel is used to carry encrypted data and the other channel is used to carry the security information. Since the amount of security information is pretty less when compared to actual data, the obsolete low data rate channels can be used with relative ease. At the beginning of the Internet era, the proposal of having a separate channel for transmitting security related information would have been considered to be a joke. But now, when we can use some obsolete transmission system to act as the second channel, we certainly consider the implementation of this proposal. This will undoubtedly mean some changes in the communication architecture and equipment, but by switching to the two-channel system, in an intelligent way, one can confine the changes to the terminal offices and the network gateways, which are easy to change than to change all network nodes or intermediate network switches. The best part is that the Internet protocols form part of a layered architecture and hence we can make changes on one layer and leave the other layers unchanged. Though the implementation of this proposal can solve many of the network security information that we have been facing off late, but the wide implementation also poses some practical challenges and problems that can be solved only when there is an equal commitment from everybody involved in the scene.
A fourth proposal is to provide the existing and obsolete infrastructure to some Cable TV company. The Cable TV companies have been making use of coaxial cables to reduce interference and the WAN concept to transmit cable signals to the homes of the subscribers. They chose this setup so that they can have overhead transmission than having underground transmission. But if these companies are provided with some old digital wireless communication infrastructure, then these companies can provide the same services with better quality and lesser clutter. Though the customers will have to spend more for the new terminal equipment, but the return which they get fro their investment is worth it. The cable companies on the other hand can provide extra services as they will now have a high bandwidth channel at their disposal. Moreover the maintenance required in normal cable TV networks will not be required in the new system. Since such companies operate in very small areas, so just one or two transmission towers may suffice, in most of the cases. This system will be somewhat similar to the DTH system. Though this system will not provide as much clarity and as many services as the DTH, but the cost of connection to this setup will be pretty less than cost of a DTH connection.
Apart from these proposals, many more interesting and innovative proposals have been made by various research groups, but the question of feasibility in implementation had restricted some of these proposals from spreading. Anyways, no matter how many proposals we make and how good be the credibility of those proposals be, the final decision always remains at the mercy of the corporation which owns the dead network. It also depends on the willingness of the other corporation (the power generation corporation in the first proposal, for example) to replace its old way of doing things by this new and effective way. Hence, even if the corporation which owned the communication facility wants to use the existing infrastructure, it may never be able to do so because there was no one who came to ask for the services of the old network. Moreover, the type of reuse which a network can be put into differs for the type of network in question. Copper cable- based communication will obviously be less useful than some digital wireless network like DAMPS.
At the end, it is your own network so it is upon you as to whether you would use it, sell it or let it rot in the open. So the owners of the network infrastructure have the ultimate decision making power. They should allow new ideas to come up from the experts. They should check the credibility and practicality of mass scale implementation of these ideas. By making use of something that was rendered unusable- that’s how we build a smarter planet.
