Hi John,
I've recently read - and used, myself - a different analogy to describe the evolving network, substituting the railroad model with that of the nation's local, state and interstate highways. Aviation and seagoing models, aided by navigation (network surveillance, discovery and roaming capabilities), offer other possibilities for analogy that are perhaps more appropriate for some forms of wireless and Internet communications.
One article that I recently read put this into perspective very nicely, but I can't find it at the moment, so I'll paraphrase it to some degree and add my own two cents, below.
"One reason the railroad analogy may not apply is because this equipment (except perhaps for the fiber itself) may be obsolete in a few years, vs. perhaps never for a railroad line."
One reason that the railroad analogy may only apply in a temporal way, with respect to certain parts of surviving telecommunications networks (and it certainly still does in many parts), is because "the network" is no longer homogeneously static, or as rigid in nature, as it once was. In the sense that railroad cars are of a fixed size and use a fixed wheel base, and passengers (the payloads within railroad passenger cars) are forced to go where their trains take them based on the inflexible nature of railroad track, or based on where the railroad's schedule dictates.
In the evolving networks of today, in contrast - despite the perceived movement to all-IP at Layer 3 - are increasingly heterogeneous in nature at the lower layers of transport, similar to the diversity that exists in the nation's highway systems that have been designed for automobiles and other vehicles at all levels of regionality and purpose.
In this model the individual behind the wheel chooses the size of the car they drive, within a broad set of paramters. Likewise, it is the individual who is free to choose the on-ramps and off-ramps they take, whether pre-planned or extemporaneously.
The highway metaphor is made even more morph-able when you add wireless capabilities in the mix, making their features incomparably more dynamic than the vectors that are achievable in the railroad metaphor. Consider someone driving an auto travelling east to west, while speaking real time with someone who is travelling west to east, or with someone sitting on a beach on the other side of the globe. The railroad metaphor, from a functionality perspective, offers no parallel to these dynamics, although the consequences that they suffered due to the eventual proliferation of highway usage, is self-evident. And this only exacerbated what had already been regarded as a glut of too many tracks going from and to the same places.
Not only is there roaming wireless involved in the above example, but there are wireless base station technologies, SS7 (and ever-higher levels of IP telephony as we go along), and back-end optical transmission responsible for backhauling voice and data over fiber-based networks - and all of the underlying software dependencies that these disparate processes imply.
My point here being that there are higher levels of flexibility now available in the highway metaphor than there ever was in the more static conditions imposed by the railroad metaphor. And most of these have a tendency to stimulate the others, when you think about it, although some suffer at the growth of others in some situations. Like the decreasing utilization of wireline local loops due to the dramatic uptake of cellular/pcs in residential and other spaces.
"One question I have is how quickly does this communications equipment become obsolete? I am referring to fiber optic components, lasers, switches, routers, etc."
The hardware and software that make up these systems I suspect would continue to function with varying levels of maintenance for decades. But aging and wear are no longer the causes of obsolescence in telecom, as it may have been once. What makes the equipment obsolete depends on other externalities, such as the state of competition and innovation which relates directly to the number and level of disruptions introduced to force incumbents to do "change-outs" of what they have in place.
We saw this to some degree two or three years ago, when the incumbents felt they needed to hedge against potential threats from innovations being introduced by CLECs and BLECs, not to mention the larger ISPs and ITSPs (Internet Telephony Service Providers), themselves. Some evidence of this could be seen by some ILECs undergoing accelerated talks with VoIP vendors, adopting early versions of their platforms, sooner than they might have, otherwise. And still there were other others preparing themselves to offer Gigabit Ethernet services.
Witness, in the latter GbE example, the inclusion of several of the larger ILECs in the Metro Ethernet Forum. In more recent months I think that these ILECs will simply use their former inclusion as a form or placeholder, while quietly putting on the brakes, "just in case." I say this because many of the upstarts who threatened their SONET and Class 5 switching models (and still do, in a way, but to a far lesser degree) are now gone, or hanging on by a thin thread.
Would these ILECs migrate to GbE in any event? Probably, but not at the same pace that they appeared to be doing so while the Fiber CLECs were still ostensibly healthy.
We'll see what they do now, going forward. If they "do" proceed with it, it'll probably be because the larger Interexchange Carriers (AT&T, WCOM, etc.) are now going after this space in a more aggressive fashion, thus leveraging their acquired (larger) CLECs, such as Teleport, MFS, and so on.
So, in response to your question, it can be seen from the these two examples - notably VoIP and GbE, but the same argument can be applied to wdm, wireless and elsewhere - that the relative obsolescence of certain SONET and circuit switching platforms is dependent on where competition goes. When competition increases, obsolescence is accelerated. When competition is crushed, then the life expectancies of extant platforms get a shot in the arm, further extending legacy and returning the incumbents to business as usual, introducing innovations only when needed. Albeit, the die in some cases has already been cast, meaning that there is no turning back in some respects, where "hedging" strategies have reached the point of no return. We've seen this done by some incumbents who have acquired certain so called next-gen systems for competitive advantage, only to store those systems in inventory until times get better, or not at all - if they age beyond their respective shelf lives.
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Well, I guess that's enough plagiarism and ad lib for one Sunday afternoon ;)
FAC |
