Always-on Society – Facts and Forecasts
Boom in Broadband Technologies
New technologies open up new perspectives. In the future, people will be able to work at home with all the amenities they have at the office, for example, and managers will be able to monitor robots on production lines from their desks. And those are only two examples from the always-on society. These applications require broadband connections—in other words, transmission capacities of more than 200 kbit/s, as are offered by the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), cable modems or satellite links.
The number of broadband users worldwide has risen from 100,000 in 1996 to 98.8 million at the end of 2003, and this trend is set to continue. In a report entitled Broadband Worldwide 2004, market researchers at the New York-based company eMarketer Inc. predict that about 246 million private and commercial customers will be using broadband access by 2007. The U.S. and Japan are the largest broadband markets today, with 27.6 million and 12.1 million customers respectively (Status: August 2003). DSL is the global leader: By the end of 2004 the number of DSL users is expected to rise to 86.5 million, increasing to 156.7 million by 2007. Second place is occupied by the cable modem, which has many users in the U.S., Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands; though only in the U.S. do modem users outnumber DSL customers. In Japan there were already 1.14 million high-speed fiber-to-the-home connections in March 2004—double the number for 2003.
Increasingly, complex data services can also be used on the move. Although Third Generation (3G) networks are establishing themselves more slowly than expected, technologies such as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) are on the increase. Forrester Research expects that GPRS will be standard for cell phones in Europe as early as 2005 and will be used by about 72 % of cell phone owners. By 2008, 60 % of all cell phone users are expected to be using mobile Internet services regularly. "From a technical viewpoint, the future looks rosy. But the operators have to ask themselves which services work best via cell phone," says Michelle de Lussanet, a Senior Analyst at Forrester in Amsterdam. "Consumer behavior is not changing as fast as the range of possible applications." She expects that by 2008 about 28 % of all mobile devices will correspond to the 3G standard and smooth the way for services such as video via cell phone.
Companies are also seeing an increasing number of advantages in the always-on society. For example, production data can now be evaluated in real time, and that makes it possible to reduce stock inventories and track orders more effectively. Data exchange also enables applications including remote maintenance of plants and machines. Ethernet, the IT standard for offices, is gaining in importance as a transmission medium. And the Industrial Ethernet variant, which has been modified to meet the needs of industrial companies, is being increasingly used in production instead of proprietary solutions. Among other things, this makes it easier to transmit data between production sites and administrative offices.
Most Ethernet versions support the TCP/IP Internet protocol, so production plants can also be accessed via the Internet. "In a factory that’s networked using Ethernet, nearly every worker can observe all the machines operating in a production line," explains Harry Forbes, an analyst at the ARC Advisory Group, which is based in Massachusetts. Although reality still hasn’t quite caught up with this scenario, ARC predicts that by 2007 about 6.06 million Industrial Ethernet nodes will be in use, compared to only 287,000 in 2002. Siemens alone has installed about 550,000 Industrial Ethernet nodes in its automation systems, says Günter Baumann, Marketing Services Manager in the Automation and Drives Group at Siemens.
But Ethernet still isn’t adequate for time-critical tasks. One example is motion control applications, where integration of a machine’s different drives is controlled with software (see ? WLAN and Ethernet). Here, the drives must exchange data rapidly and at precisely defined time intervals. For this task, industrial Ethernet must display "deterministic behavior." But Ethernet-based reaction times are still 20 to 50 times slower than motion control requires—and they’re not deterministic, says Baumann. In the future, additional protocols like Isochronous Real-time Ethernet (IRT) will make Industrial Ethernet real-time-capable. Siemens is planning to introduce the first IRT products in late 2004.
Mary Lisbeth D’Amico