Telecommunications : from certainty to chaos

The telecom sector is going through a period of chaos because it has opened up to competition and technological changes. Technical constraints have disappeared as, for example, old cables are being replaced by fibre optics which have an enormous capacity and can substitute satellites for long-distance transmissions. Infrastructures are now redundant since 99 % of their potential is currently unused. The network is now making way for a plethora of services having been freed from the inertia of its heavy material, and is becoming "virtual" on a worldwide scale. The flexibility of software allows one to innovate in very short periods of time, and the client is becoming part of the process once again. This upheaval is forcing a number of traditional activities to adapt or disappear while opening up the way for a certain degree of creativity whose limits are not easy to identify.