Terminals for Broad-band Office Communications

The influence of broad-band communication networks on the evolution of office communication terminals is considered. Three trends are predicted: the evolution of presently existing dedicated terminals towards higher speed and more sophisticated functionality; the push of multifunctional workstations allowing simultaneous operation in several modes of communication, such as voice, data, text, facsimile, and graphics; the occurrence of new communication services relating to video and CAD/CAM applications. A more detailed description of these trends is given, and some first experimental steps already done are described. The emphasis in this paper is on application aspects rather than on interfaces, protocols, coding methods, etc.