Central Office Switching Equipment Market Forecasting Methodology and Application to the U.S. Market (NOT PUBLISHED)

Switching equipment market forecasting is an important job in the increasingly competitive environment in the telecommunications world. Over the years, AT&T has evolved a methodology to handle this problem; it encompasses forecasting overall growth based on national economic forecasts, selecting sample exchanges in the network which possess different size, growth and traffic characteristics, assigning weights to these sample exchanges in order to represent the entire network, and finally using a computerized evaluation/optimization tool to consider alternative strategies for the modernization/growth of the network under practical resource and objective constraints. A most likely network evolution scenario can then be picked out of the many near-optimum solutions suggested by the computerized program.