Nils, Curtis,
Right On! The author should know what he's talking about, after all he's a magazine editor.
> Mr. Karlgaard is editor of Forbes ASAP.<
Anyway, I voted with my feet twenty-one years ago when I was advised that increases in efficiency were not in my job description. It may have taken half of that time to lose the remnants and the last of the vestiges of the helmet, but it is gone, I can assure you. I think that taking the devils role in this little undertaking here has led to some form of branding, perhaps? Forget that!
The reason I walked, incidentally, can be found in all of your erudite arguments and counter-references <clippings> in this little exercise of ours.
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Wow, Man! There's a lot of Bandwidth Capacity out there, and folks are really starting to use it up!
If I have to read one more report about Moore's Law and the multiples of traffic level increases per unit time, by newly enlightened individuals who work for magazines and newspapers, I think that I will _ _ _ _, and wind up getting very disenchanted with this whole affair.
It's all so obvious by this time, and we continue to read about it as though it were something that hit the morning headlines for the first time in the late edition. Why don't they change their script and start reporting about the uptake in color TV sales, or something equally revealing?
I am not a lover of the traditional carriers by any means, except for the fees that I enjoy for tackling them, but heck, it is so easy to bash them nowadays, just to stay on the in with folks.
We need a little more insightful coverage into why they are still relevant, and the things that the upstarts cannot fulfill right now, but must endure if they are truly going to bury the "dinosaurs" and pick up 'all' of the slack. Like Local Number Portability (jeesh, the incumbents can't even handle that one yet, and it's their databases!), electronic-bonding systems (EDI-like hot-links between the OSSs of the incumbents and those of the new competitors, what paltry ones they have at this point), residential installation and repair, Emergency-911 services, Lifeline Service for the deaf and disabled, and the ones provided under the auspices of the dreaded Universal Service Fund for the weak, the homeless and the poor. No snickering, now.
Once you get beyond these labels and the obvious identifiers, there are real systems and back office functions that support them in the background as well. Lots of them. Which of these would you do away with, and which would you prefer were picked up by the Barons and ISPs/ITSPs? It'll get to that, and it will all get sorted out over time, no doubt, but I don't see any recent IPOs knocking down any doors to take them over, yet.
Nils, w.r.t. traditional carrier attentiveness to current customer demand...
Enough already!... I need to have my fat pipes installed and priced more reasonably vis a vis all of this hype about septa-quadrupling and ten-thousand-folding of efficiencies in fiber and the core network elements. And the creation of a new OSI-Reference Model in the photonic sublayers of the fiber strand I keep getting exposed to. Yes, this stuff really works. But is it to mutual benefit of the customers as well as the service providers <and their stockholders>?
Why are my clients' plain-vanilla T-3s and OC-3s still priced the same way they were a year ago, or, in many cases, even increasing markedly in cost?
Why is it taking a client of mine six months to get a T-3 from Bergen County, NJ to Rochester, NY? <<watch what you say about this one, lest you force me into telling you who the newly anointed _real_ culprit is! Nah... I wouldn't do that here, anyway.>>
Because. Because there _is_ so much new bandwidth capacity. Threatening new bandwidth that suggests that with increasing supply, the costs/earnings will go down. Why aid the process, and kill the cash cow? After all,it is ROI that counts, not volumes to these guys. The general perceptions by end users is that you can now do more at higher line rates, and that costs for bandwidth will be coming down dramatically.
The reality is that there is a tremendous flood of new capacity in the ground, but not enough switch ports in inventory to keep up with it. Ports on OC-48s Muxes, on Digital Cross-connects/DACSs, on SONET backbone nodes [and associated Frame Relay and ATM concentrators (which are non-existent at the line rates many of my clients require)], and ports on ADMs.
In the pursuit of excellence and in the search for higher levels of quality, we learn to ask "why" to the ^nth times, or until the reasons are identified, drilled down, and eventually corrected.
But don't bet on it in this scenario. Shortage of inventory keeps prices high. Nufsed, I should think. Therefore, no constructive need to go down the list of whys. Another example of how even dumb devices in the interior or the network, the core, can cause obstruction instead of transparency. Did I bother to mention that this post was off topic? <smile>
Regards, Frank Coluccio
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