Large-Scale IP Network Solutions (CCIE Professional Development)

Overview of Communications History

Networks are now a core component of our business and personal lives. Today, businesses that may hobble along with the loss of telephone service can be rendered nonfunctional by the loss of their data network infrastructure. Understandably, corporations spend a great deal of time and money nursing this critical resource.

How and why did this dependency occur? Simply because networks provide a means to amplify all the historical communication mechanisms. Nearly 50,000 years of speech, at least 3500 years of written communication, and many thousands of years of creating images all can be captured and communicated through a network to anywhere on the planet.

In the 1980s, fiber optics improved the distance, cost, ...