PUT YOUR MONEY ON DSL, SAYS CISCO'S CEO:
<<Cisco's Chambers describes 'next wave' of wired economy
By John Rendleman, PC Week Online
June 10, 1999 12:38 PM ET
ATLANTA -- With businesses already starting to reap the benefits of high-speed data
and Internet services, the next group poised to leap into the wired digital economy will
be consumers, according to Cisco Systems Inc. President and CEO John Chambers.
In the adoption of networking technologies, especially IP-based services, "the next
wave will be consumer, [and] for the home you're talking about how do you get
bandwidth there at a reasonable price," Chambers said in a keynote speech here
Wednesday night at the Supercomm '99 show.
In future network architectures, the dominant network application protocol will be IP,
with an underlying transport layer of ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) technology or
pure optical transport of IP directly across optical circuits, Chambers said.
"It's going to be an IP/ATM world," he predicted. "Circuit switched is dead, and it's just
a matter of how quickly convergence takes over" in various parts of the world.
With advances in network technology, bandwidth at the core optical transport layer will
become a commodity, with value-added services residing at the switching layer and an
all-IP protocol at the user layer, Chambers said.
Put your money on DSL
As to whether DSL (digital subscriber line), wireless or cable TV networks will become
the access networks of choice, "many people say cable will win, but I don't buy that at
all," said Chambers, who predicted DSL will prevail, followed possibly by emerging
wireless data services.
Easing into a familiar theme, Chambers said the growth of the Internet and other
high-speed networking services will also cause a fundamental shift in the nation's
economy as corporations learn that conventional competitive advantages such as
physical size and number of workers no longer carry as much weight.
"The key message I'm sharing with you is that you must build a network infrastructure to
allow you to share information internally and externally," he said. "Unless you're giving
your employees access to information or your customers access to information, you're
not [helping them] make decisions."
As examples of Cisco's own adoption of a networked approach to business, Chambers
said the San Jose, Calif., company now conducts 80 percent of its customer support
using Web-based applications and expects within a couple of years to be conducting
$30 billion to $40 billion a year in business-to-business e-commerce.
Chambers also demonstrated the Cisco Communications System Ethernet-based
phone, which the company is now adopting internally. The technology, obtained through
Cisco's acquisition last year of Selsius Systems Inc., enables the phone to be plugged
into a standard Ethernet jack and automatically configured using a consistent telephone
extension number.
The phones are also tied in with an intranet application that uses Cisco directory
technology to let a user click on an extension to dial another user via a Web browser. In
addition, the phones are connected to an internal unified messaging application that
provides a graphical interface to users' voice- and e-mail.>> |
