Thomas,
Yours is an interesting perspective, and one that is both gaining in popularity each day, in certain camps, while being pushed back with a vengeance, in others:
"You seem to be heading down a treacherous and slippery slope. Why do you think that the deployment of more (proprietary) intelligence into the core of the network is the way to "improve" the infrastructure? It seems to me that the more proprietary stuff you jam into the core of the network the less useful the network will become (as among the key drivers today are ubiquity and openness). Of course it is tempting for the equipment suppliers to move toward more proprietary equipment and protocols to build up and protect their own market position, but this is a real peril for the Internet.
One of the reasons, as I see it, that suppliers would move towards not only proprietary designs, but legacy ones as well, is to curry favor from traditional carriers who would have transitions appear as non-disrputive as possible. And for good reasons, where those carriers are concerned. But their gains usually work at cross purposes to those of innovation, as we've found out time over time, and again.
I posted something along similar lines to your post yesterday in one of my tomes on the ATHM thread, concerning future uptake of VoIP on always on cable and dsl access platforms. I offer the following excerpt from that piece for contrast, and to elicit additional comments from you and others on this board.
Regards, Frank Coluccio
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from: Message 9474987
Excerpt begins:
They will be dependent on internetworking protocols now being deployed by upstarts, at first, such as the ITSPs (Internet Telephony Service Providers) and the CLECs, and then the cellular/pcs carriers, and finally the ILECs, themselves. Fortunately, the ILECs' participation in VoIP at the IP level is not considered a requirement in order for others to experience the benefits of a head start.
These services will initially amount to nothing short of major disruptions for many of today's traditional carriers. It's actually resulting in the traditionals having to modify their own plans, some of them drastically, and changing their spending habits, as well. But in their attempt to preserve their dominance, they will wield their weight at the standards committee levels, in order for them to retain their dominant status, over time. Here's how that works.
What the incumbents will do is introduce enough structural emulation of the legacy model directly into the new model. Many of the rules of the trade that are used to their advantage today through regulated revenue justifications will be preserved, and the old regs will thereby be ushered forward, along with the new technology. In other words, to the extent possible, they will work to preserve the old model through its emulation with new software. Hardware elements will take on a new form in the way of coded objects, in other words, and it's a matter of tracing the dotted lines from that point out.
This is what they will do with VoIP. And if you owned BEL or any other ILEC, you wouldn't have it any other way.
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There is another school of thought at play here, called Internet Telephony - which is fundamentally different in approach to that of VoIP. We'll talk about that some other time. Suffice it to say that Internet Telephony is a pure Internet protocol-driven technology, where VoIP is almost entirely based on emulating the intelligence that now resides in the PSTN. Right now, however, it appears that VoIP is winning out in the standards bodies, not surprisingly, so we'll focus on that one for the time being.
----excerpt ends
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