Well said, Fun. I'd like to comment from another direction on
a couple of things, if I may.
In the late Eighties, I used to hand new consultants a stack of
T1E1 and ITU/ANSI/IEEE standards, told them that this was what
they were going to go to school for, get briefed in advance, and
when you come out of this in another six months, when the
training was over, you will have a firm grasp of all of the
hierarchical constructs which make up telephony and data
transmission in both the WAN and the LAN.
Optical broadband was still in the offing, still struggling
between Syntran and SONET, TCP/IP was something that
was still at war with OSI, and Frame Relay was very likely an
aberration resulting from someone's triste with X.25.
About four or five years ago, I began to back off on the high
priority given to T1/T3 and ATM (whose purveyors still
thought that it had a chance in the LAN), stating that a good
background would be required in all of the above, but you'd
better get a good footing in IP at this time. At that time my
position was "One Never Knows" if this www thing is going
to blow over... or take over. Suddenly, the IETF RFCs had
equal weighting with the ANSI and ITU scriptures.
More recently, and in recognition of the fact that there are
only so many hours in a day, days in a year... I've taken the
position that new hires and graduates entering our field should
demonstrate less proficiency with the detail of the protocol
primitives of the PSTN and other DS-0- dependent services,
unless they were going to specialize in those areas, and
concentrate the bulk of their time on IP and ATM. A
horse-pill dose of photonics wouldn't hurt, either.
I think that this generally parallels the directions of the market
as well, while at the same time lending more credence now
(on my part) than ever before, that IP will at least provide an
alternative foundation, if not supplantation at some point in the
future, to the established techs we've grown to know and
lo(a)v(th)[e].
From a practical perspective, I agree with your assessment
that there is a huge market potential at this time for devices
that perform arbitration and reconciliation between the prolific
number of legacy protocols out there and IP and other
emerging ones. Nothing but opportunities there for another
eon, at least. I fully agree.
Now, if I can only extricate myself from the position I put
myself in with Dave Logan regarding edge routing, while
I was trying to lure my cyber-mentor Curtis into a debate! I'm
thinking... I'm thinking... [Dave, later. ]
Regards, Frank Coluccio
ps - I just read jach's reply to you while editing, and his was my
first take also, but I think I know where you were coming from there,
in that the DLC can also be used as a breakout for services other than
voice. A la 303? Correct?
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