7/98 Cook report on IP over WDM. [Info on Pluris, Juniper and Avici]
cookreport.com
Optical IP Backbone Revolution
Emerges Canarie Runs IP Over WDM
Eliminating SONET and ATM --
Expects Cost Savings of Greater Than
95%
Avici Terabit Packet Switch Capable of Oc-1536 --
Plummeting Costs Mean Creation of "Inexpensive"
New Carriers Able to Out Perform Old Giants pp. 1 -
6
A technology cost tsunami is about to break. When the flood
recedes, expect the landscape to be drastically different. An interview with Bill St. Arnaud of Canarie explains the optical backbone
network project for which he has just received funding. Using either gigabit Ethernet framing or SONET framing but no ATM and no
SONET equipment, it will move TCP/IP packets directly over Wave
Division Multiplexing. This will gain back a 25% overhead in
bandwidth eaten-up by the suddenly archaic transport technologies.
But far more important is that the SONET and ATM equipment
rendered obsolete may represent a saving of more than 95% of the
cost of delivering bandwidth. Bandwitdh that cost more than $5000 a
month to deliver in January 1998 may cost the new players as little as
$50 a month to deliver before the end of next year. Of course 'cost'
does not equate to price.
St. Arnaud points out that he can take an off- the-shelf Cisco GSR
12000 gigabit router a get it to route TCP/IP over WDM. While the
network will require no technology breakthroughs, it will require
technology integration and work on some of the routing protocols to
function with maximum efficiency. It will be used for beta- testing
technology from Pluris, Juniper and Avici which on May fifth
announced a breath taking device that puts lasers and router in the
same box and can reach an amazing OC-1536 (160 gigabits per
second) over a single strand of fiber.
Economic implications for the telcos are profound. Some folk expect
legacy SONET networks to run parallel to the new optical networks
for sometime. Others say the problems that will be raised for the
incumbent LECs and IXCs will be so serious (as evidenced by some
of Qwest's recent creative deals) that they will have no choice but to
begin to cannibalize their legacy networks as quickly as possible.
Given that they could quickly find themselves with operating and
depreciation costs that are up to ten times higher than the next
generation telco's (Qwest, Level 3, etc.), they may be in a serious
position rather quickly. Look for them to hold on to the local loop to
keep from drowning. The bottom line, as Jack Waters Engineering
VP at Level 3 told us in an interview on May 2, is that Level 3
resulted last year when founder James Crowe realized that it was
possible to invest between a billion and ten billion dollars and build a
state-of-the-art telecommunications company that would have cost
$100 billion to build in the early 90's.
Some of the implications near term for the public internet are
interesting. As the backbone "x" interview at the end of this issue
shows, the big five have private interconnects locked up and open
peering at the public exchanges is essentially worthless. (Verio
probably the sixth, seventh or eight largest backbone can't get private
peering with UUNET.) Therefore those not in the top five get
increasing squeezed in costs to the point where they effectively have
to become customers of the top five.
Now enter Qwest and Level 3 with national and international fiber
nets of their own and the ability to offer almost unlimited backbone
capacity to major corporations and second tier NSP backbones. If
the pricing is right, they should fill their backbones quickly turning
from a large intranet into a shadow internet. They must still buy
connectivity to the public internet controlled by the big five in order to
be viable. Their low cost of operation should enable them to pay
whatever prices are necessary. Furthermore it will be possible to
measure customer traffic flow into and out of the public Internet and
charge a price differential for that traffic. If the connection price
charged to begin with is low enough, customers should not mind
paying the differential and the next generation backbones should very
quickly become magnets that attract business that would otherwise
go to the big five. The key indicator to watch in coming months will
be Qwest's and then Level 3's pricing.
Internet Telephony for the Stupid
Network Small Canadian Company
Produces Device to Connect Phones To
IP Nets
Explains an Architectural Mindset & Standards
Framework By Means Of Which IP Telephony Can
Replace PSTN, pp. 7 - 15
Francois Menard wants to completely redesign the telephone
network in a way such that voice inside IP packets with replace the
PSTN. He offers users an inexpensive hardware device that functions
as a bridge between an ordinary telephone and an IP carrying
Ethernet, or cable modem service. While his device will interface with
a PC, he seeks to have it function independently of a PC by moving
the intelligence of the phone company central office switches to the
edge of the network. His phone adapter will have enough intelligence
in it to function as a client and will interact with server software
located inside of the domain of the service provider. As he puts it, the
phone adapter contains that extra small amount of computing power
that must be deployed in the end-user's home "if we are to succeed in
introducing new services to the network without going to the expense
and complexity of employing telephone switches inside the network
to achieve them. We are taking the network intelligence that is
prominent the central office switches and moving it to the edge where
signaling and call initiation will all be done inside the telephone."
He sees this happening in the context of the general demand for faster
Internet access. This demand is forcing the telcos and the cable
companies to make architectural changes to the networks that will
render them capable of providing Internet telephony as an unintended
by product. The ability to plug telephone lines into this architecture is
a welcome, but almost inadvertent, dividend of the architecture itself.
The key to all of this is to be able to apply very low cost telephone
appliances to the opportunity. The phone adapter that Mediatrix
makes is one such appliance.
He sees the future as one, not of IP telephony toll by pass, achieved
by IP based detours around parts of the PSTN, but as one where
connectionless IP based networks replace the phone companies
circuit switched networks. The new world is one where everything
becomes part of a data network and where you cannot expect to
open data packets to ascertain whether they are voice or video or
ASCII text. You can no longer think about charging according to the
kind of data the packet contains. Doing that would be totally
inefficient. Therefore you have to focus both on charges for quality of
service delivered and new telephony services that can be delivered
by intelligence under the users' control at the edges of a big, fat, fast,
stupid IP network. By making a device that enables an ordinary
phone to reach another ordinary phone via a simple cheap bridge to
an IP enabled telephone network or cable TV network, he hopes to
encourage both industries to adapt his bridge out of fear of loosing
customers to the side which offers services that the first cannot.
Within 12 months he wants to turn his bridge into an IP telephony
chip. That he believes will cause the dominoes to begin to fall. In his
words: "Once we have an IP telephony chip, then adding IP
telephony will not involve a significant cost for anything that speaks
IP. At that point the only unanswered question becomes what your
dominant home local area network technology will be. Regardless of
the answer, you will begin to be able to put new wall-plate,
data-speaking jacks all over your house. Either you will do it with the
telephone wiring or you will decide to call your local cable vendor."
Finally in talking about standards development, he explains H.323 as
the protocol favorite of Intel and Microsoft. H.323 is big and
bloated. It is so complex (originating in past from Intel's work on
ISDN a few years ago) that companies smaller that Intel and
Microsoft have trouble dealing with it. He contrasts H.323 with SIP a
smaller and lighter protocol under development at Lucent and
elsewhere. When SIP is finished at the end of 1998 he predicts that it
will triumph over H.323. H. 323 is a way to standardize a protocol,
while SIP is a way to standardize a generic means of conveying
session initiations on the Internet. SIP is layered. If you want to do
more things you simply add another protocol on top SIP. With the H.
323, if you want new features, you need to build them the inside the
ASN.1 structure which is in turn inside of H. 323.
As long as you have the PSTN in the picture -- you will have a
problem with Internet Telephony. Gateways are merely a means of
interfacing the PSTN with Internet Telephony.
Effort Ramps Up to Map Phone
Numbers to DNS Viable Protocol
Mapping Sought to Enable IP Telephony
to Transparently Cross Provider
Boundaries, pp. 16 - 20
An effort is afoot to find a way to map phone numbers from the
PSTN to DNS or some naming system that would enable Internet
telephone calls to go transparently across provider boundaries and
into the PSTN. Discussion with Richard Shockey and the new IPTel
mail list.
Peering: Backbone X Gives Most
Candid Look Yet
Private Peering Unobtainable -- Public Exchange Full
Peering Rendered Worthless by Bandwith Bottleneck
Between Exchanges & Big Backbones pp. 21 - 22, 24
On the condition of anonymity, a backbone has given us the most
detailed summary of the actually operation of peering we have yet
seen. It is likely that the peering agreements between the big five and
30 or so smaller backbones at the public exchanges won't have to be
abrogated by the big five. The reason is that, as traffic growth at
places like MAE East has doubled in the last year, the big five have
not increased the capacity of the pipes from their backbones to the
exchanges. These pipes have turned into bottle necks that render the
exchanges increasing worthless as a means of interconnection to the
big five.
The smaller backbones are being offered variations of peering.
Backbone "x" describes "paid peering," and "non shared peering" as
way stages set up between the increasingly worthless free peering at
public exchanges and fully shared privately interconnected peering.
What this means is that the second tier backbones have essentially
three choices: maintain increasingly non viable public exchange
peering with the big five. Find the money to become paid customers
of the big five or switch to Qwest and Level 3 if acceptable pricing
and transit is available. An irony is that because of non disclosure
agreements it is very difficult to know how a second tier backbone's
status is changing since the backbone itself is happy to keep the non
disclosure in effect. Doing otherwise would be to let the public know
its status had been diminished. We vetted our draft with two other
backbones which told us they found it accurate. |
