Emile,
Glad to see you back. I have never thought that Fibre Channel was a likely candidate for telco use, since they are so heavily invested in ATM. The one thing that could change my mind is if some of the major telcos started hosting web sites and/or server farms at or near their central office. The growing demand for storage, and a fast way of connecting to it might bottleneck the telcos sufficiently for them to take a serious look at Fibre Channel to deal with the server/storage clustering issue. High speed customer interconnects like ADSL will certainly contribute to the bandwidth bottleneck at the telco, but for the most part, they just hand the traffic off to someone else for processing. In the future, they could aggregate all the ADSL traffic into a server/storage cluster for processing by their own web servers, treating it as an intranet, complete with caching proxy servers, thus saving precious bandwidth on the internet itself. I see this as a huge, untapped market for the telcos, but it will take a true visionary to make it a profitable venture. That seems to me to be the most likely scenario, although I still consider it unlikely.
You know, this is a better idea than I first thought. By setting up an intranet firewall and proxy/cache at the telco CO, performance would be excellent and security would be an added bonus. I used to work for a small telco, and the general manager (who is still there) would jump at the chance to implement something like this. Too many ideas, too little time. <g>
Craig |
