Those interested in watching industry activity towards the dumbing down of the network and the migration of control to the edges, might find interesting the following, excerpted from the May 17 issue of Inter@ctive Week which can be further reviewed at:
zdnet.com
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Soft Switches To Open Nets
By Carol Wilson
May 20, 1999 2:21 PM ET
A new consortium, launched by emerging network operators and equipment
manufacturing heavyweights, is setting out to redefine the relationship
between the public switched telephone network and the Internet, and pave
the way for a single seamless network.
The International Softswitch Consortium plans to begin work May 25 to
define protocols and interfaces between open platform network elements
being developed to replace today's massive circuit switches, much as
open platform client-server computer networks once replaced massive
mainframe computers.
These new networks are being built first by emerging carriers.
The long-term goal is to create an Internet Protocol (IP)-based network that
is open to applications development for voice, data and video services,
and thus accelerate development of new applications.
"Today's voice-over-IP services are like the early competitors to AT&T --
they require special codes and [personal identification] numbers to
essentially dial around the network," said Jim Crowe, chairman and chief
executive of Level 3 Communications (www.l3.com), one of the driving
forces behind the consortium. "We want to fully integrate these networks
so that customers can just pick up their phones and dial, just as they do
today with long-distance equal access."
A critical part of that integration is to create distributed switch
architectures, where the features and functionality that enable
applications exist on servers or other devices, separate from the core
switching process. The circuit switches that power today's voice services
are closed systems -- meaning the software that adds features must
come from the same equipment vendor that provided the hardware.
Equipment vendors including Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies and
Nortel Networks -- all founding members of the consortium -- are
developing distributed switches, but the protocols and interfaces that tie
the pieces of a network together are not yet defined.
The Softswitch Consortium will take what has been defined to date, said
Ike Elliott, senior director of voice and access network engineering at
Level 3, including four basic protocols: the H.323 standard for
voice-over-IP, the Media Gateway Control Protocol, the Session Initiation
Protocol and the Real-Time Transport Protocol.
"Now we start to look upward to Application Programming Interfaces that
enable external applications to control this infrastructure," Elliott said.
The consortium is being driven by emerging carriers, such as Enron
Communications, Level 3, NorthPoint Communications and Rhythms
NetConnections, all of which are building new competitive networks. But
those new networks must be able to interconnect with the public networks
seamlessly.
Membership in the consortium is still open.
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The front cover of the hardcopy issue contains an intro to the above, which sets the stage for the article (I couldn't find the cover story on the website). I think the article over-emphasizes the voice-related objectives and understates the real non-specific information transfer objectives of the consortium, but one can easily sense where things are going from it.
Apologies for my ignorance in not seeing or finding it, if this was already posted here.
Steve |
