macker,
jwk was right. Thanks for an excellent post. It showed plenty of vision, IMO.
When I first saw that it would be of interest to me on several different levels, I commissioned my thirteen year old daughter to cut and paste it, insert caps, and break it down into visually appealing paragraphs. jwk was right about that, too. The upshot of all this contracting on my part is that you now owe me five dollars, payable in posts each time the fish don't bite, and I'll pick up the extra two-hour allotment of time on AOL's chat line that my daughter negotiated out of me... for bringing your vision into focus.
Every now and again we need to be told things like:
>>people on this thread have thrown out growth numbers and potential for telephony and its like, but noone really knows for sure because the applications and all it will affect is not entirely known yet,<<
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Agreed. The numbers are usually wrong, to begin with, regardless of whether they came from a Big 4 <?> accounting firm, or one of our favorite trade magazine gurus.
We can be certain about the direction, but we don't have a collective clue about the magnitude, and probably never will. How many electrons flow in the world's electrical power companies transmission systems? This is the kind of analogy I once used when I tried to derive a surreal number on another forum. Of course, there are many more electrons than telecomm messages, but it emphasized my point.
With the assistance of experts and a select group of bandwidth aficionados from around the globe, we set out to calculate the total national bandwidth, in all of its active, standby and other status forms, in a thread by the same name: TNB.
While TNB was an extremely interesting exercise that lasted for about a year and a half (at about the same time that the first real crests of Internet flows started taking form in '95-'96), it proved to be absolutely futile in the end.
Each time we came to agreement on the assumptions and ground rules for calculating this beast, new products and service capabilities, particularly fiber related SONET/SDH and WDM, were introduced both in the WAN and in the LAN, sometimes in rapid fire succession, that blew all of our assumptions into the wind, like so many ether bunnies.
The entire realm of electronic communications is fast becoming dispersed/distributed/diffused, and tracking its form and growth through the use of conventional metrics will be near impossible, and absolutely impractical. Much like electrons in the electrical domain. Only more so. Even today's Internet Weather Stations cannot accurately tell you how much traffic is traversing the 'Net, because they don't keep track of retries and the renegades who bypass the NAPs.
The numbers you referred to, and similar ones as I've mentioned, are always good to give me at least a smile, and a great excuse for me to send an email or two to some unsuspecting author or editor.
This is why I feel you are correct, actually right on, when you state:
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>>... not just billions but trillions. so to say that telephony will be like ibm was for pc's is maybe even underestimated because it required an initial purchase and constant upgrades. telephony on the other hand will be constantly upgraded..<<
Amen.
This reminds me of those classical stories many of us grew up reading about and seeing on TV (most recently on 'Biographies'), about how Edison's inventions were pooh poohed at first, as were Bell's and others, and how little credit they were given in the early days. Indeed, they were ridiculed and ostracized by industry's staunchest legacists of the day, who, for the best of reasons, felt threatened by them. How many electrons did I hear someone say?
Having said that, there were some other interesting points that you brought up having to do with international partnering, and who is allowed to do business with whom. This is a particularly interesting area for me because I cut my teeth on international radiotelephone, satellites and underseas cables at a time when international direct distance dialing (IDDD) to overseas destinations was still a novelty.
As a plant coordinator I was 'placed' in charge of converting most of South America and the tropics, many parts of the Middle East, and a fair number of European cities to IDDD (excluding Warsaw, East Berlin and Moscow for some 'strange' reason), so this whole subject is like Yogi Berra's "deja vu all over again," for me.
Your depiction of the politics of this situation is not so crystal clear-cut as you would have it appear. This is a highly sensitive area that deserves careful handling going forward, and not rushing to any conclusions about what the fabric of relationships and influences will be over the next couple of years. The spirit of the Internet and the policies you cited with regard to some of the business strategies seem, to this consultant, to be on different ends of the spectrum.
I wouldn't preclude any peering and traffic hand-off arrangements with anyone, in other words. Governments have a funny way of placing electronic and other trade sanctions on one another in the regions of the world you mentioned, from within and beyond, IMHO. But this, too, will be less amenable to being tracked going into the future, with the diffusion of the telecomm environment that I alluded to (above) taking place. But still...
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Unlike Brooke, I'm kinda glad your fishing trip turned out to be a bummer today. Otherwise we'd have missed out on the fruits of your thoughts.
Regards,
Frank Coluccio |
