Hello RocketMan,
I had to jump in ... ;-)
> Frank, do you really think that the Cisco/Bay expertise/prowess is
> what will lead us into the next generation of large-bandwidth
> near-real-time delivery of global audio and video?
This is almost like thinking that Microsoft is laying the foundation for future operating system development! ;-) From my perspective these companies have benefited from the explosive growth of bandwidth on LANs and WANs ... but they have not had to deal with many of the issues that we are about to see with requirements for COS or QOS.
> Even with ISDN, cable, xDSL, and all the alphabet soup you throw at
> the problem the basic clog at the access choke points may just grow
> to the point where the system collapses. It's one thing to wait
> forever for a web page to load, quite another for a non-internet
> user to have to wait while his voice packets get there, with no
> assurance they will even arrive.
This seems to be the biggest point that most people are missing today. Someone asked several posts back about the rollout of xDSL technologies ... I found that U.S. West is offering xDSL in Utah, but that they are only offering 256kbs service for Internet connectivity ... not the "MegaBits" that they are talking about in the naming of the service.
I believe that there is no single silver bullet ... we are going to see many types of services for different types of data ... circuit switched solutions, packet switched solutions, and object switched solutions ... all operating in parallel.
> I'm wondering if the answer may be not be in larger and larger
> centralized networks and switches, but in decentralized
> terabyte-sized caching systems fed by satellite or fiber
> systems. along the SkyCache model.
This *is* the foundation of "object routing" ... one of the types of networks that will be created side-by-side with packet routed networks.
> Not pushing SkyCache, as there are competing systems out there, and
> maybe Cisco and Bay are pursuing the same paradigm, but just
> wondering how we will eventually address the clogging problem,
> especially with the projected growth of VoIP traffic. Even if the
> caching systems have too much time delay for voice or video, they
> may relieve the major congestion, allowing better delivery of
> time-sensitive traffic.
This is the key! The correct solution for the type of traffic. Many types of objects are completely cacheable and hierarchical caching (object routing) allows these objects to be removed from the packet switched network when end-to-end communications is not required. A user simply wants a current copy of an object (web page, GIF, JPG, Java Class, etc.) and doesn't care where it comes from.
> Your thoughts?
I believe that this area of hierarchical caching is going to take off. And there are numerous ways to optimize the cache infrastructure by preloading caches with various objects based on analyzing access patterns. Also, besides satellite feeding of caches, I have been looking into terrestrial radio systems for broadcasting data in a metropolitan area for preloading corporate and smaller ISP caches ...
This is a way to relieve the network of unnecessary, repetitive traffic.
Scott C. Lemon |
