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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (8345)	9/5/2000 9:34:18 AM
From: justone	Respond to of 12823

Frank: Thanks for mentioning the internet telephony articles (ref: internettelephony.com "The Neural Network"). A very good and readable set of articles, a nice mix of technical and business, and a nice balance of opinions. Some comments. "The Neural Network" as a title is off course absurd (they do need colorful article teaser titles, but really); however it does highlight the real point of the debate. "Where should multimedia processing intelligence be'. Of course, just as the debate between bad old circuit switching and wonderful new packet switching is a bit a red herring (optical circuit switching is winning, as Gilder likes to point out), so is the debate about 'intelligence' often misdirected as a battle between bad old embedded switches and nice new open computers. You need to do a bunch of functions in telephony. You can have everything in one large bundle, or distributed in a million little bundles- the debate should be: 1) who controls the interface 2) who manages the network components. It is the trade off between 1&2 that drive the network architecture. The old network had simple user control (on hook, off hook, dial tone, digits, etc.) and you couldn't do much with it, but big and complex operations management, all done for you by someone else so you never had to worry about it. The new network will move control to the user with things like XML, but the network must still be managed somehow. The article "Intelligence a la carte", notes this in the concluding paragraphs. The articles do not do a good job of describing AIN vs. IN. Basically, AIN is a very complex set of (failed) public application interface definitions describing how an 'abstract' telephone application should work. IN is a set of very successful public application interface definitions that describe very specifically how 800, mobility, LNP, credit cards and caller-id work. Note that the successful protocols were tied to successful applications (what a surprise!). Clearly, I am skeptical that the folks who failed with AIN before, will succeed with AIN over IP. My prediction is the network will follow the standards- a standard interface will go into and out of a box. This is why SIP is more important to VOIP than XML- although there is no reason you couldn't make telecom protocols as a domain area of XML. If you sat down and did so you would end up with something very like the SS7 TCAP and ISUP libraries for the existing PSTN and mobile networks. Whoever you do you must define the application, and then the application protocols at the application level: just leaving interface definition open will mean the control stays in the switch. So what does this mean? Until the SIP standard is further down the road, and it defines specific applications in some detail, and the operation management is well defined for the new network, embedded switches will still rule using SS7 interfaces for those well known IN applications. I'm not sure that the user interface will look like, but it will probably use use plain old telephony (POTS) signaling and some sort of xml presentation along side of it. I know that service providers have vowed not to buy any circuit switches- but they don't have much choice, for a while. As investors, then, we can expect that successful companies will sell the successful applications- as I noted before, this seems to be in the area of providing existing call features (dial tone, 800, credit card, caller name, etc.) with multi-line VOIP access over cable, DSL, or wireless. The fun features and total user control and voice features as a web page accessed by your browser must wait a few years. But they will come. justone opinion