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Technology Stocks : Newbridge Networks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fumble who wrote (17143)	2/17/2000 2:31:00 PM
From: fumble	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18016

OK, while we are all waiting for the water to boil.. Check out "The IP Syndrome" by Jozef Lubacz, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland This article is along the lines of Arno Penzias' comments last fall about the questionability of pure IP in core networks. Cisco had better look seriously at NN's ATM capability before its house of cards begins to tip. The article is in the Feb issue of IEEE Communications Magazine and is free on the Internet at comsoc.org Some excerpts (taken out of context of course..) "Consider the following rhetoric: The development of the information infrastructure leads to the development of an information society, which will be a next major step in the evolution of civilization. The Internet has demonstrated the way the information infrastructure can and should evolve. Thus, the Internet is the driving force toward a new era in civilization. This kind of extremely simplistic reasoning is being repeated over and over again by mass media, businesses, and politicians. In effect, the Internet is becoming a fetish rather than just a technological solution; the center of a new ideology. In the context of information and communication technology the new ideology manifests itself with symptoms the author has chosen to refer to as "IP-ism" or the "IP syndrome" (although not literally in the psychiatric sense). In short, IP technology (its derivatives, modifications, etc.) is regarded as a panacea for the development of a future global and universal information infrastructure ("everything over IP, IP over everything"). Let us take a closer look at some symptoms and potential implications of the IP syndrome. The regulated and technology-driven development pattern of telecommunications has rightly been criticized: the disappointing pace of the dissemination of integrates services digital network (ISDN) and broadband ISDN (B-ISDN) services/applications, despite considerable conceptual and technological achievements, resulted to a large extent from neglecting the demand for services and applications -- the focal point was "how" instead of "for what" and "for whom." The Internet entered the underdeveloped space of services and applications so effectively and with such an impetus that it is quite hard to escape the impression that, indeed, a king's road toward a universal information infrastructure was found. The birth of IP-ism is thus understandable." And later on --- "IP-ism leads to ideas like IP over dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM), with the omission of synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) and ATM systems. The idea is tempting since it eliminates two network layers and leverages the troublesome interworking of SDH, ATM, and IP. If realized, however, some important network functions performed by SDH and ATM will have to be provided within IP networks; in general, it is the decomposition of high-capacity channels into hierarchically ordered subchannels. It is an illusion that large networks can be built without well defined decomposition principles and techniques. Constructing large and complex networks that are effectively managed in terms of quality, reliability, functionality, profitability, growth, and so on is first an art of structural and functional decomposition. IP over DWDM networks risk lacking structural and functional clarity ("all in one") if the development of the idea is not guided by a reference architecture for network resources and capacity management. So far such an architecture has not been established; instead, IP network developers seem to believe that all problems can be handled with a smart communication protocol (e.g., DiffServ, IntServ). " And - near the end --- "In spite of the problems indicated here, IP-ism is flourishing. The unquestionable success of the Internet has raised such emotions and hopes for the future that even slight skepticism concerning the technological and economic rationality of IP-ism is considered defeatism. Obvious problems with introducing, say, voice over IP (VoIP) with reasonable quality on a large scale do not seem to disturb the enthusiasm. The stock value of IP-related businesses is a good measure of the optimism."