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To: djane who wrote (47052)	5/17/1998 7:03:00 PM
From: djane	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

5/15/98 America's Network article. ATM is the carrier's silver bullet [Nice article for ASND/NN] americasnetwork.com Hard to beat. ATM is the carrier's silver bullet. Robert Rosenberg, May 15, 1998 Data communications will vastly exceed the voice market in terms of bit bandwidth on the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Most carriers will be forced to use asynchronous transfer mode (ATM)-based networks to handle the complexity of mixing of data and voice sources and merging them onto a protocol that can be expanded to higher speeds. ATM gives carriers the ability to handle the flood without having to revamp their entire network in the interim, and ATM is the only protocol that has these characteristics. Gigabit Ethernet and frame relay are not ready to deal with the total traffic growth. The explosion in ATM traffic is not going to come from corporations or individuals ordering ATM service directly. Growth will come from the carriers themselves. Crossover of voice and data traffic on the PSTN and the continuing extraordinary rise in data traffic has been confirmed for between 1999 and 2000. Overall growth in demand for data communication will come from numerous sources including Web-based information downloading, e-mail and file transfer. But with the advent of higher speed access technologies, services such as streaming audio, streaming video, audio conferencing and video conferencing will represent substantial demand for Internet services. This will force carriers to adopt ATM, as it gives them a way to readily merge their existing frame relay traffic, systems network architecture traffic and Internet traffic onto a single network that also carries their voice traffic. What does such a migration mean for the voice network infrastructure? We believe it is rapidly approaching obsolescence. Within three years, it will be more cost-effective to start converting voice traffic to ATM than to continue maintaining separate networks. Since ATM has the added capability to only send cells when speech is taking place, this will further reduce the total voice demand on the network, leading to the elimination of the separate long-haul voice network during the next decade. Our analysis flies in the face of the conventional view that the existing networks will continue to be used and ATM will handle the growth. However, ATM networks will be vastly cheaper to operate than equivalent circuit-switched networks. Newer long-haul carriers with high-capacity fiber and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) gear can handle voice traffic at dramatically less cost than toll carriers which have to recoup investments in digital voice switches. The best example is Qwest Communications (Denver), which is building a nationwide network and has no substantial investment in toll switches. Look for the toll carriers to start writing off their network infrastructure (particularly toll switches and transmission crossconnects) within two years to stay competitive. With this growing ubiquity of ATM networks comes the opportunity for carriers to sell ATM services to corporate clients and lower level carriers such as Internet service providers (ISPs). This could cause the market for frame relay to reach its peak within two years. By the time this occurs, this added traffic will be a small part of the total demand on the ATM networks. Hence, carriers should be able to handle any rapid increases in demand, and yet offer these services at very competitive rates. The cost of bandwidth will drop precipitously over the next few years as competitive carriers' carriers light up their new fiber networks. The advantages of ATM networks are hard to beat. The big issue is that all future networks, be they ATM or other formats, will have dramatically lower cost structures. Much confusion about the future of networks is fomented by those who want to retain the status quo. But old network approaches are obsolete, and assumptions about investments are likely to be short-lived. Governments will have to find new ways to accomplish their social engineering objectives because the ubiquity of new services will not support artificial pricing structures like the present telephone tariffs. Traditional pricing approaches will wither, but what will replace them is unclear. Robert Rosenberg is president of The Insight Research Corp. (Parsippany, N.J.), which provides comparative market research and competitive analysis. Information on Insight's recent work in OSSs can be found at www.insight-corp.com. May 15, 1998 table of contents Copyright 1998 Advanstar Communications. Please send any technical comments or questions to the America's Network webmaster.

To: djane who wrote (47052)	5/17/1998 7:12:00 PM
From: djane	Respond to of 61433

Fascinating Chambers speech americasnetwork.com Mozart, money & Mom Annie Lindstrom, May 15, 1998 Name three things the Internet can give you. (See the headline of this column for answer.) Cisco Systems president and CEO John Chambers steers clear of any talk about frame relay reliability. Instead, at Andersen Consulting's Global Communications Forum last month, Chambers chose to sermonize about how the Internet is changing the world (and enhancing Cisco's bottom line). But first, he demonstrated his enthusiasm by staging a few parlor tricks. Jim Grubb, Chambers' technical advisor, tried to place three phone calls to his boss from a cellular phone, an Internet phone and a regular telephone; the audience had to decide which was which. It didn't quite work. The cell phone couldn't summon a signal from the nearest cell (we later learned that the cell was filled to capacity). The audience was divided over which call was placed over the Internet phone. The demo proved that your Mom definitely will recognize your voice when you call her on an Internet phone. The second trick involved a grand piano, linked via an MIDI interface to a PC, which in turn was connected to the Mozart home page. Grubb selected Symphony No. 40 in G Minor from the MIDI archives, hit Enter, and the piano began to play. It wasn't like Kittyhawk, but watching an Internet piano play Mozart for a roomful of telecom execs seemed to mark a moment in history that I'll someday recall by saying, "I was there." Chambers predicted that the Internet's impact on society and business will dwarf that of the mainframe computer, mini-computer or PC. He went on to claim that by implementing six Web-based apps last year, Cisco saved $360 million and reaped a 18% productivity gain. "We saved more money than our nearest competitor spent on research and development," he quipped. Cisco saved $125 million alone by letting its customers access the company via the Internet. Indeed, the Internet is generating revenue for Cisco. Chambers pooh-poohed the 'experts' claims that electronic commerce will be only a $250 million market by 2001-much too conservative, he said. Cisco itself will be doing $20 billion in e-commerce by then, he noted. Yankee Group's Howard Anderson drove the point home, by saying that the Internet will deliver 195 billion e-mails in 1998-eclipsing the 190 billion pieces of first-class mail delivered by the USPS. This I believe-after four days out I'll probably be facing at least 200 of them when I return to the office. May 15, 1998 table of contents Copyright 1998 Advanstar Communications. Please send any technical comments or questions to the America's Network webmaster.