Grace,
I enjoyed reading your uplink post. Several times, in fact. While doing so I was able to recall and relate, in almost identical terms, to the challenges you face concerning the digital displacement of some otherwise manual tasks in your particular business. Of course, in my case the situation is a little bit different from yours, since I am usually on the side of digital creep, and not the one doing the resisting, but it happens here, just the same.
We've had some rather ingenious platforms which we'd created in the past obviated by the encroachment of superior software widgetry, and these have had similar momentarily-daunting effects on our outlook, as well. What to do?
You learn to recognize what they are, try to gain an appreciation of their trajectory, you adjust and adapt, adopt them if necessary, and you proceed. Or.. else.
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re: "jump through a lot of technological hoops"
Some of the hoops that the ILECs and IXCs have been jumping through for the past fifteen years have been:
- 1+ dialing and dialaround capabilities, allowing their competitors to usurp their own switches, databases, back-office provisions, and lines;
- 800 number portability;
- local number portability (LNP) through the creation of new software platforms that allow you to change carriers while maintaining your original telephone number;
- opening up of billing systems and other erstwhile proprietary resources to competitors in the form of "electronic bonding" systems between the incumbents and their newly arrived competitors;
- extending E911 links to their own cellular/PCN networks with locator capabilities, while extending these same services to competing carriers who are newly arrived and still not fully out of the box yet;
- opening up of the central office real estate for colocation purposes;
- more recently, opening up of the individual copper pair for spectrum sharing.
The above are only a sampling of the more obvious forms of hoop jumping. There are more which fall into esoteric areas that I will not bore you with.
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"Making it work may in fact reduce the quality of the connection and provide needless complexity to something that is already complex enough already."
For many years this was the Bell System's patented reply for why they prevented MCI and others onto their network. They cited the need to keep the network free from "harmful influences." Network Harm was the mantra of the Seventies and Early Eighties until the modified final judgement was enacted. And of course, we've all been better off since the divestiture which took place at that time, and the networks have not been harmed in the ways in which the previous landlords warned that they would.
Granted, there would be, in fact, a great deal of merit to your suggested outcome of greater complexity and degraded service levels if the new connections were done by way of seat of the pants. But no serious player, especially someone in the class of AOL or MSPG, would allow themselves to "again" fall victim [as they found themselves two years ago when they were entirely unprepared for the dialup onslaught] in a slipshod exercise that was not engineered properly. The question then becomes, "Who, specifically, is responsible for coming up with this level of assurance through proper engineering?"
IMO, the MSOs and their partner in CableLabs had better learn how to jump through some hoops. That is, if the exclusivity reprieves don't hold up. And if they do hold up, like someone else has already suggested here, by the time 2001-2002 rolls by, maybe many of the new MSO platforms will have already evolved to the point where this is not a problem any longer. But I wouldn't bet on it. Some of the systems they are now replacing have been in place for over thirty five years, and even accounting for Internet time, the ones they are now putting in are intended to last at least another eight.
We wont see many of these recently rebuilt or overlaid systems redesigned again without extensive pressures being applied from the outside. At least not anytime soon.
And at the present time I'd have to agree with you re: the complexities and the potential for service degradation, but for the reasons I've stated here all along: The existing HFC/D design is too restrictive as it now stands, and as I've also already suggested, I suspect that on some level this design was done, by design this way. It was only intended for a single platform provider, and one can read into that anything they choose.
"All this rigging would be understandable if it improved the experience for the final customer or user. In fact it seems these hoops seem to have more to do with preserving what might very well be an (dare I say) obsolete business plan, what we refer to as an ISP."
I don't want to go into the semantics of what an ISP is again, except to remind that there are ISPs (which are essential to the theme of the Internet), there are OLSPs, or on line service providers (an arcane term once used to describe AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy), there are portals (Oi! don't start me on portals!), there are ASPs, there are colos, etc. Of these, the ISP, in its purest form, must be preserved. I'm not saying that they shouldn't undergo evolution, but they must be preserved in principle.
ATHM is not among this class entirely. In fact, ATHM to some extent antithesizes the ISP concept on several levels, when you think about it, purely from the standpoint of their proprietary nature in some fundamental ways. Their backbone, for example, is not a universally shared resource as other SPs' backbones are.. a more or less (in the absence of a rule book) required quality for entitling one to be called an ISP.
So, what you might have meant to say is that ATHM doesn't want to yield ground to ISPs, one of which they are not, for the sake of preserving their own proprietary format. Could be?
OA tries to present itself as largely about giving the customer a better experience by giving them a choice in ISPs on the cable internet. What becomes apparent on closer examination is that it is largely about preserving the existing business model of the ISP."
Well said, and so be it. Without such a model we would cease to enjoy having the 'net at our fingertips virtually free of charge, as we now have it. Is some initial pain in getting there too excessive a price to pay?
The fundamental gains which have been made on the 'net for the past thirty years have come about through experimentation, innovations and consensus. These qualities, perhaps, are the primary elements which have been lacking in the cable industry for a long time and not the fundamental soundness of moving forward with OA.
Would it be a momentary price to pay? Sure it would be, to some extent, but I would submit that the eventual benefits, even short term, would well be worth such a price. How? In many still unknown ways. How do I know? Because anytime you open up new avenues of use, newer and more innovative things are always tried --especially when you open up competition to multiple players who need to differentiate themselves on the same medium-- and new ways of exploiting those capabilities are found.
To reiterate, ATHM and RR do not maintain Internet ISP characteristics, through and through. They both exhibit proprietary traits. The danger here is that as the 'net advances through improvements which will be shared by all ISPs, the proprietary networks such as ATHM and other cable platforms may face mounting problems attempting to keep up with the progress of the 'net through RFC emulation, rather than through pure adoption of the new protocols. In other words, ATHM may find itself being the odd person out, struggling to stay abreast of still-untested ideas.
Of course, the opposite may also occur, in that many other service providers may also see the benefits of going proprietary. And in that case, we then face a whole slew of other problems, none of which are as simple as making today's proprietary nets conform to normal "ISP business practices."
"Can you give me one really good reason why these changes needed to implement OA are going to make my experience as an end user better or more efficient?"
The answer to this question would depend on whether you were asking it from the perspective of a student studying Network Architecture 101, or if you were an ATHM shareholder suffering from stock pits '99.
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If designed and engineered properly, making allowances once and for all for ample bandwidth taking advantage of the fiber resources which now exist to within meters of the home, the bandwidth to your home would most likely be increased substantially due to some of the deep fiber tricks that T and the others would need to implement in order to make the outside plant capable of such a set of [OA] capabilities. I remind you, I said if they did it properly.
Secondly, and this is in some ways related to the first reason above, it would very likely put an end to the on-again, off-again restrictions on certain forms of work-at-home and conversational modes of use that are now "frowned upon." At least for some period of time.
I don't see choice necessarily being the primary motivation here. You already have plenty of choice by accessing other services through ATHM.
In fact, I see a strange twist taking place here. Any ISP who would find the current HFC/D platform worthy of fighting for would probably be extremely chagrined to find out that in order to get that far the platform would need to be changed altogether.
A potential irony exists here which I think is noteworthy. And that is, with the exception of faster speeds, the aspiring ISP would no longer have access to the same set of subscriber-captivating features that they thought they would get on the existing cable systems as they stand today. I say this because opening up the loop would necessitate changing it considerably, IMO, and this would have a negating effect on some of the desired features (security, voip, multimedia, etc.) associated with being on the HFC/DOCSIS as it stands today. It would have to be changed in some material ways prior to their coming on board. Think about that, for a moment.
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So, in the end, what is it that the ISPs will be paying a fee for that they couldn't get for free simply by ATHM customers accessing their offerings through gateways? In due time I would think that I should be able to get my email address changed to that of an AOL or a MSPG (don't ask me why I'd want to, tho) even if I'm an ATHM subscriber at the physical media level. No?
Or, is the cable industry not up to jumping through this kind of local number portability (in this case, email address portability) hoop like the ILECs were 'asked' to do?
[Eric, I know.. I know.. but it's good for discussion.]
Comments and corrections welcome.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
