More and more companies are "small businesses" or acting as if they were, so we make no apologies for focusing on the needs of this sector.

A Small or Medium Enterprise - SME to use the official European Commission term - has been defined by the EU as an enterprise having less than 500 staff. There are current discussions about changing this definition, for example restricting it to less than 250 staff and by imposing limits on turnover. But by any similar definition of "small", in many European countries the majority of enterprises are small businesses. Furthermore many modern companies are beginning to dissociate themselves into small business-size groupings, indeed often in the range of 100 to 150 staff. Thus it may be said that small businesses are in many ways the enterprises of the future.

Of course, small businesses vary widely. Many experts say that it is impossible to characterise such a wide sector. Some small businesses are rapidly growing and will one day become macro-enterprises, perhaps global enterprises. Other small businesses are happy to stay the size they are. Some are rural-based, not just farms and hotels, but perhaps small industries - such as potteries - or professional groups that favour the country life. Many small businesses are urban, of course.

The rate of return per employee varies widely also among small businesses, from groups of high-powered management consultants to small family farms.

Yet however wide their differences, small businesses are all enterprises and have to make their way in an increasingly complex and rapidly-changing business environment.

How can we characterise the current business environment? There are several features:

Much recent thinking has been done by management consultants on the appropriate organisation of a company to cope with the business environment. In each part of a company one can use information technology and telecommunications in one or more ways.

It is convenient to divide a company's method of operations into four areas, characterised by the type of stakeholder involved:

In this section we shall focus on the communication technologies that are both widely available at the present time and relevant to all sizes of business. These include:

There will be a short section on each of these. At the end there is a brief section on some value-added services that use the others as a base.

We know that many of you are experienced network managers, but it is because your experiences are so diverse that we propose this introductory section.

It is often forgotten that before there was telephony there was the telegraph. Telex sent text messages in a digital code. In the mid 20th century, the telex service (and some variants of that in the US) replaced the telegraph. In the 1960s and 1970s telex became quite popular in business with over 1 million subscribers world-wide. There were attempts to upgrade telex to a new teletex service but by this time facsimile and electronic mail were becoming widely used and so telex remained in its original form. Telex is not much used now, yet it is still useful for communication with less developed countries and it has specific legal validity for communication (similar to that for letter post) under several legal jurisdictions.

The easiest way to describe the value of telex in business is to think of it as a fast way of sending printed business communications. In other words, it is an early form of electronic mail.

The telephone was invented in the later part of the 19th century. Like many inventions, neither its inventor nor the early adopters had good ideas of what it could really be used for. However, from these small beginnings, the telephone has spread so that in developed countries every business and most homes have access to a telephone. There are now over 600 million telephone subscribers in the world.

Recent developments in mobile phones and satellite systems have meant that it is possible to make a phone call from anywhere in the world, including in the middle of deserts and mountains, and on ships, trains and aircraft. The problem is that mobile and satellite telephony is still too expensive for widespread use. Much research and development effort is going in to reducing the cost of mobile and satellite telephony to a level that business (at least) can afford to use it. A target price of £1 per minute for a world-wide call is sometimes quoted as the type of target to attain for business use across the world. (Of course, this is still very expensive for home use, especially in less developed countries.)

Facsimile is a technique for transmitting copies of paper documents (text and images) over the telephone network. It is often said to be a technology which should not need to exist, if electronic mail had become more popular earlier. Nowadays facsimile is a universally accepted medium, even in those organisations well used to electronic mail.

The key advantage of facsimile is that it works with no modification to the user's telephone system whereas the electronic mail systems of the past needed complex modems and computer hardware in order to function; and yet could still not send a hand-written note.

Facsimile technology is becoming cheaper and cheaper, with many machines available for just a few hundred pounds. A recent feature in fax machines is plain paper output - this is popular because no one likes the glossy paper used in most faxes, which for example fades in the sunlight.

Recent developments have stretched the useful life of facsimile even more since most modems now have facsimile capability and many electronic mail systems now allow users to send faxes as well as regular electronic mail.

Mobile telephones have been around in Europe for over 20 years but it is only in the last few years that the costs and the user-friendliness of the equipment has been sufficiently good to attract a mass market. There have in the past been various incompatible national standards of mobile phones, most based on analogue technology; but one of the major success stories in Europe has been the creation and marketing of the GSM technology. GSM, which is an abbreviation for Group Special Mobile, is a mobile phone technology based on digital techniques which has become a standard in Europe and in many countries beyond Europe (with the notable exception of North America and some countries dependent on North America for their technology).

With a GSM mobile phone, a business person can travel all around Europe and yet still keep in touch with home base and customers. SMEs have been particularly interested in mobile phones as they tend to have less of the panoply of secretarial and administrative staff and so rely more on individuals to manage their own communications.

"Internet" is one of the most over-used buzz-words in the last two years. Also, the impression is often given by journalists that before Internet there was nothing. In fact, as many of you are aware, Internet is "merely" the latest phase in the development of data communications - but not quite "merely" because this time (unlike previous times) the concept broke through to the mass market.

For over 30 years it has been possible to send digital data over the telephone network. The device to achieve that is known as a modem - short for modulator/demodulator. (Indeed, every facsimile machine includes a special kind of modem.) The modem translates the digital data into suitable wave forms on the analogue network, and vice versa. A very simple modem (and you can still buy them, in antique shops) translates each bit of data into a tone, a frequency, with one frequency corresponding to a binary 1, and another frequency corresponding to binary 0. However, modems have grown up far beyond such simple devices.

In the early days of modems, it was possible only to transmit only 110 bit/s of data over the telephone network. This represented about 10 characters per second of telex traffic and already seemed quite fast to those people used to the original speed of telex. Developments over the next 10 years took modem speeds up to 1200 bit/s. In recent years speeds have leapt up again to 28000 bit/s. At that speed one is running into some fundamental limits of modem technology and the telephone networks, and further increases in speed are likely to be quite small, with current top speed of widely deployed modems around the 34000 bit/s and 56000 bit/s. (Also the motivation for increasing modem speed is decreasing now that ISDN is replacing the telephone network - see below.)

Although there are many possible uses of modems (such as in facsimile machines) the main use of modems has in recent years turned out to be to link personal computers over the telephone network into networks of "server" computers. These "server" computers, which used to be large computers of the type called "mainframes" or "minicomputers" in the past, are used for two main purposes - storing large volumes of data (so-called "databases") and for running electronic mail services.

Many organisations run server computers. Many of them want users to connect to them - their staff, their customers, and (if universities) their students, like you. But rather than each organisation have to provide modems connected to its own server computers, a new kind of organisation, the network provider, grew up to provide this service.

A network provider supplies a service comprising many modems, usually a group in each town, and a network linking these modems to the server computers. Then, when a user wants to connect to a server computer, he just dials the modem number in the nearest town and is then seamlessly linked to the server computer of his choice. Apart from making it easy, the network provider also makes it cheap, as instead of paying a long-distance call the user normally has to pay just a local call (to the nearest town).

Before the Internet was widespread, the PTTs in Europe operated as network providers - they deployed so-called X.25 or packet switched networks which performed this purpose. In recent years, the Internet, first deployed in the US, became popular in universities around the world and has now entered service for the general public and business sector. Although X.25 services still exist, the majority of new services are Internet-based; and most of the European PTTs now offer Internet service; as do many other telecom operators.

As we said above, the two main services on Internet are database and electronic mail:

ISDN stands for Integrated Services Digital Network. It is a digital enhancement of the analogue telephone service which is planned to replace the current analogue service over the next decade.

ISDN has several advantages over analogue telephony:

In addition to the basic services described above, many other services are available. These are often called "value-added" services since they add value to one of the basic services described. For example, electronic mail and database access are value-added services on top of Internet.

Some other value-added services are described below.

At the moment there is a great deal of research and development going on, much of it in the EU's ACTS Programme, to develop the next generation of "telephone" services after ISDN. But despite all the work "behind the scenes", users, including especially business users, are asking: "What exactly will be offered to me and what will it cost?"

The next step is called broadband services. The term "broadband" is rather vague, but we shall assume that it means services whose speed ranges from 2 Mbit/s (2 megabits per second) to far more than that. The way to remember 2 Mbit/s is to think of it as the rate needed to deliver a television channel to your premises using modern digital television technology. Trials have shown that speeds lower than 2 Mbit/s will not deliver television that viewers will want to look at. Of course it is not necessary to use the 2 Mbit/s for television; other users include voice telephony, listening to hi-fi radio, videoconferencing and high-speed Internet access, all of which you could happily do simultaneously within the 2 Mbit/s "pipe". In a business context, the whole of your branch office could be simultaneously accessing the Internet down this sort of capacity.

That will be the kind of thing you can do with broadband. What we can't yet predict is what the tariff will be. In the US, there are predictions that the tariff for such a circuit will have to be reasonably similar to that for a telephone circuit to attract users.

In the 1960s, in the early days of the EU and a very different political climate, it was assumed that broadband services would be provided by laying fibre optic cable to every home. This is now seen as an unrealistic approach. There are two main ways being pursued to deliver broadband, and which one you will get will depend on where you live.

The next generation of mobile phone, that is, the one beyond GSM, is being worked on by many researchers in Europe and beyond. This is called UMTS, which is also the name of the task force that is specifying it.

UMTS will provide high-quality services using lightweight handsets. Telephony will doubtless be the most popular service, but the UMTS concept extends to providing a full data service up to 2 Mbit/s.

It is likely that Internet access (for multi-media email and for WWW access) and videoconferencing will also be popular services on UMTS, if the tariffs are affordable. (Market research has indicated that, half of all calls would involve a mobile terminal if the quality and cost of service were comparable to the analogue telephone network.)

In the EU, there are 150 million fixed telephone connections and 25 million mobile phone connections; in twenty years time, these figures are expected to increase to around 180 million fixed telephone and 250 million mobile terminals. Note that by that time it will be more common to have a mobile terminal.

In addition to UMTS, other companies are providing fixed telephone service but using wireless methods. There is also work on using wireless methods for digital television, including using GSM or possibly UMTS for a return channel to provide an interactive television service (but over the air, not on cable).

The main use of satellite technology with which the average member of the public is familiar is the use of satellites to broadcast television channels. Most such broadcasts use analogue TV technology but, as elsewhere, digital technology is being introduced. This will allow many more channels than are currently available on satellite TV, which in turn is many more than are available on terrestrial networks including on most cable systems. A direct-broadcast digital TV satellite can broadcast over 100 channels.

This technology may be of some interest to business users since it will allow many more specialist "narrowcasting" channels to be introduced, including, perhaps, a "Small Business" channel.

But more interesting to many businesses will be the use of satellite networks for two-way data communications. This has been widespread in the US for 10 years but is only now spreading to Europe. The technology is normally called VSAT - Very Small Aperture Terminals. A VSAT network can operate essentially as an "Internet in the Sky". This can provide low-cost data communications essentially insulated from the usual problems of terrestrial networks - including congestion and the security risk from having other organisations share the network.

We do not think that many small businesses will install their own VSAT networks. However, many large organisations, for example in the car industry, are installing VSAT networks to link to their dealers - the dealers are normally autonomous small businesses but linked into a supplier network. Similar examples can be found in the hotel and the supermarket industry sectors.

Up to now the operational VSAT networks have been narrowband, operating at around ISDN speeds, but several research projects are developing broadband VSAT networks. These will allow a range of applications including "video on demand in the sky" for marketing and sales.

1 How do I do more with less? Networking is supposed to be an enabling technology and I am supposed to ensure that the network anticipates business needs, but the Board gives me less money each year for it. Help!

2 How do I link in all the teleworkers, outworkers and assorted consultants that are taking over a larger and larger percentage of company activity?

3 How do I keep my LAN performance ahead of the demands from users, especially now that some of them have discovered multimedia?

4 How do I get a return on investment from the technology I deploy when each year it seems that last year's technology is obsolete?

5 How do I keep abreast of all the network service suppliers? In the old days, if I wanted a leased line from London to Sheffield, I phoned up BT and if I did not like the price, I did without; but now there are many suppliers of leased lines, and many other kinds of network links that are "sort of" like leased lines but are not the same.

6 What plans can I actually make for putting in a corporate-wide broadband network across all our sites? All I seem to get from suppliers is promises.

7 I keep reading that satellite services in the US are transforming the bottom line for many distribution-based companies, but I can't seem to understand why it is not happening in Europe.

8 I keep hearing from the Board that I should be "putting in an Intranet" (I wish the Chairman had not met that hot-shot from Microsoft!) but meanwhile many of our customer systems depend on some ageing mainframes and X.25 networks to outstations. How do I get from (a) to (b)?

9 My users are moaning about their modems, even the 56k ones. Should I "bet the farm" on ISDN or should I wait for the "next big thing". And what is that?

10 The Press is full of stories about cable TV being the alternate infrastructure, and all my continental friends seem to live in wired cities (real soon now, anyway) - yet 70% of our employees are not even on cable, and I know of only one person with a cable modem that works. When will cable "come good"?