11This chapter provides a short overview of the topics that are discussed in more
detail in Chapters 4–20.
The Internet challenges and transforms the more than one-trillion-dollar-
per-year business of telecommunications. A renaissance in communications is
taking place on the Internet. At its source are new communication protocols
that would be impractical on the centralized control systems of ITU-T type net-
works used in telecommunications. Internet communications can benefit from
the IP soft state and connectionless nature of the Net, and at the application
layer of the IP protocol stack from its associated addressing and data repre-
sentations. Users and Internet service providers (ISPs) are reaping the benefit
from standards that allow interoperability with all connected parties on a
global scale. The end-to-end (e2e) nature of the Internet avoids the friction of
having intermediaries between the communicating parties, and also avoids
the breaking of applications and security by intermediaries in the network.
While it is not possible to forecast technology and services, it is already
apparent that the Internet and web technology have created an unprecedented
toolkit for new applications. However, these new applications are hard to pre-
dict, just as presence and instant messaging were not predicted in the telecom
world. What can be shown, however, are some of the capabilities of the tech-
nology that are presently well understood in already established services.
New Internet communication services may create new revenue opportunities
for Internet service providers and their suppliers of applications.