Analysis of the market for access to broadband telecommunications in the year 2000

This article presents a case study of the application of the Delphi Method to forecasting the market for broadband telecommunications in the year 2000. Specifically, we analyse demand for a customer premises switch, which takes traffic from subscriber premises networks (e.g. LANs, PBXs, and video systems) and aggregates it in order to be transported over a wide area broadband telecommunications network. This product is an ATM premises switch, which has only recently become commercially available and therefore has negligible history of subscriber demand, so that forecasts cannot be made by extrapolation. In order to assess the market for such a product, a quantitative analysis of subscriber demand during the latter half of the 1990s was performed. This article describes that analysis based upon evaluating market demand from seven different viewpoints. In order to ensure consistency between these approaches, a methodology based upon the Delphi Method was applied to the problem. Results were obtained for the market in the whole of North America with a focussed case study of the Toronto urban core. This article broadens the applicability of the Delphi method to situations in which individual ‘experts’ on each viewpoint are unavailable.