Hi Jim,
>>>I tried to Copy and Paste a few parts of this article, but found I can't highlight even a word, maybe a new trend?
I timed myself. Took 20 min for me to print the document to a GIF file, then I cropped out the extrainous garbage before I sent it to my OCR software. Minor editings before I cut and pasted here. I get mad myself when sites start doing stuff like that. (But I guess you cant blame them).
;-)
Eric
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Internet 2002: The future of communications
By Tom Steined-Threlkeld
Inter~ctive Week Online
August 3119986:02 AM PT
With packet networks becoming multimedia highways, public communications stand to be transformed in short order
Four years is not a lot of time. Of course, in August1994, U.S. Vice President Al Gore was talking about an information superhighway and many experts were figuring that cable television networks would be its foundation. The big news was that Prodigy Inc. was going to provide access to its online content via the World Wide Web. Monica Lewinsky was a total unknown.
Way back then, there were only 3,000 Web sites in the world, 3.2 million host computers and 30 million Internet users. Now, there are 2.5 million sites, 36.7 million hosts and 134 million users.
In that time, the use of Net technologies has removed all doubt as to what basic communications protocols will be used to tie together the rapidly increasing multitudes of computer systems and networks around the world. The Internet protocols now are the lingua franca of interconnected computing. The only question that remains: Will Internet Protocol (IP) become the lingua franca of all electronic communications?
"The time has come. In fact, irs long overdue," says Leonard Kleinrock, the University of California at Los Angeles professor who, in 1961, published the first paper on the notion of sending information in packets of digital data. The U.S. Department of Defense's Arpanet, which went on to become the Internet, came to life in Kleinrocs UCLA laboratory in 1969.
Kleinroks comment came shortly after Sprint Corp. announced it was switching its entire local and long-distance network to the kind of packet technology that is behind the Internet. And while KIeinrock may be evoking a bit of the pride of authorship, almost any large communications company worth its cross-connects is scrambling to convince investors that it is on track to become a leader in Internet-based communications in short order. How otherwise to dispel, for instance, stockholder chagrin at the seemingly lackluster merger of GTE Corp with Bell Atlantic Corp?
Make it clear that one of the driving forces behind the $65 billion merger was the 1997 acquisition of BBN Corp. for $600 million, which made GTE Internetworking a leading player in the era of packet communications.
In fact, as August 1998 draws to a close, the idea that, in the next four years, the Net will have established itself as the primary means of exchanging not just numerical data, text and Web graphics, but also sounds, sights and voice conversations themselves, is no longer some technology wonk's spirit-induced "vision." That public communications in the year 2002 will be synonymous with the Internet, at this juncture, seems more realistic than strained.
Multimedia growth
Driven by growth of the Internet, data traftic is growing 10 times as fast as voice traffic. Indeed, Worldcom Inc.'s Uunet Technologies Inc. subsidiary sees no relenting in 1,000-percent-per-year growth in data traftic on its network. This has led John Sidgmore, its chief executive ofticer, to conclude that, in another six or seven years, conventional voice traffic on traditional telephone networks will account for a scant 1 percent of all communications.
That kind of growth is possible not just because the number of worldwide Internet users keeps escalating, but because uses for the Net are becoming more complex. In a word: multimedia. Video and audio files occupy much more space on a packet network than do text and numbers the main constituents of today's electronic mail. But five-minute movies soon may become routine attachments to Email, each eating up tens of millions of bytes of space.
"People need bandwidth and demand bandwidth and will be willing to pay for bandwidth," says David Isenberg, the AT&T researcher who authored "Rise of the Stupid Network," a critique of telephone company efforts to create so-called "intelligent" networks.
"I don't see [the growth in data traffic] letting up," says John Curran, chief technical officer at GTE Internetworking . "I see it accelerating."
While traditional telephone companies, such as Bell Atlantic or SBC Communications Inc., seem to spend most of their strategic capital on merging with other traditional telephone companies, new clean-sheet communications companies with tens of billions of dollars in available funding are building high-capacity networks.
These networks will not set up and tear down exclusive circuits to carry calls; instead, they will send all traffic as packets of data, from voice to video, from spreadsheet to text document. They will use IP as the basic form of creating packets, even if some choose to convert IP packets to fixed-size packets to take advantage of a more proven packet-switching technology - such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) - in the interim for moving data in public communications networks.
In what seems like a sudden strike to a series of local and long-distance networks that have developed over the last century to handle one type of data - voice - the Internet now has become more than just a medium for allowing easier, more graphical communication between individuals and offices. It has become the driver for a sea change in how communications networks themselves are structured.
Just as the long-playing record and the 45 RPM single were replaced by the compact disc, digital technology now will replace analog sound wave technology throughout telephone networks, not just on long-haul lines. Digital technology promises greater efficiency and lower cost.
Economics 101
In the end, the Internet - if it becomes the public Net - will win on the basis of simple economics.
Sprint, for instance, figures it will save 70 percent over circuit switching with its packet-switching Integrated On-demand Network. This will allow it to radically reduce its charges. Companies - ranging from IP network gear giant Cisco Systems Inc. to Microsoft Corp., with its CTO, Nathan Myhrvold - openly talk about how, in the packet-switching era, voice communications will be free. The theory: The cost of moving a bit will drop so low that companies can sell packages of data services that will include handling voice calls - for less than what companies now pay for their voice services alone.
Packet switching is more efficient than circuit switching, because packets can be used to fill up all available communications capacity; circuits remain open for the duration of telephone calls, regardless of whether anyone is speaking or if any data is being sent.
But it's not just a matter of sharing available capacity that gives packet switching a commanding leg up over circuit switching. There's the matter of the switches themselves.
With circuit switching, the pace of technological change is impressive. So called "stored program switches" - such as the Lucent Technologies Inc. SESS or the Northern Telecom Inc. DMS-double their performance for the same cost every 80 months, says Peter J. Sevcik, an associate at Northeast Consulting Resources Inc., located in Boston. More advanced ATM switches double performance in half that time.
I P routers, however, double performance every 20 months, and frame relay switches double every 10 months. When calculated in terms of the number of bits per second per dollar that can be moved, packet switches now beat circuit switches - and the gap will widen.
Then, there's the software that runs routers and other packet network switches. Programs that run conventional circuit switches have been developed largely in-house by telecom switch vendors, with input from their service provider customers. But, in the age of IP, the ability to write applications, utilities and other programs for communications networks is wide open. Anyone with a better idea can produce a product to improve communications performance.
"IP brings thousands of entrepreneurs supported by billions of dollars in the marketplace to bear on the problems of communications. It breaks it down, breaks communications down a piece at a time," says James Crowe, CEO of Level 3 Communications Inc.
That should help packet-switched networking based on the Internet protocols overcome its biggest technical obstacle: the fact that circuit switching offers higher quality and more reliable connections for time-sensitive communications -particularly for voice calls. Telephone companies know how to run systems that serve millions of people and businesses simultaneously, with few failures, says Bill O'shea, data gear chief at Lucent.
"They know how to keep the system up," Kleinrock says. "The data guys are just beginning to think of this now."
That's why many of the IP networks may actually, for a few years, run on ATM switches. With ATM switches, carriers not only can guarantee quality, reliability and security, but they also can keep track of who is carrying packets for whom and settle up bills later.
"There are a lot of things that we haven't comprehended yet," Bell Communications Research Chairman Emeritus George Heilmeier says about how to make packet switching work as well as circuit switching.
Settlement procedures and quality assurance are still to come in IP-only networking. A new version of the basic Internet protocols will add mechanisms that can guarantee higher levels of service for traffic that requires it. In the interim companies such as Level 3 are working, with the current version of IP, on protocols that get around the problems. Indeed, the quality of a long-distance call on Owest Communications International Inc.'s long-distance packet network is so high that Baby Bells such as Ameritech Corp. are trying to resell it.
In the face of this shift from circuit economics to silicon economics, there may be method in the Bell telephone companies' urge to merge their local telephone assets, after all. As this era of end-to-end packet networks emerges, the one choke point remains the last mile. For more than a decade, long-distance networks have been digital, sending data along glass fibers as pulses of light. But local networks still rely on sound waves to get to homes and offices on the tips of their copper lines. As long as copper remains the first and last connection to the Net, local phone companies will control access to customers and will be hard to bypass, even in the packet era.
At present, competing local phone companies have largely focused on picking off high-margin communications in metropolitan areas where there are high concentrations of corporate customers. Then, it is economically feasible to lay down fiber to reach them or, in some cases, provide "wireless fiber," as WinStar Communications Inc. does in New York and other major markets.
Planning for the future
Local phone companies don't plan to stand still, however, as wired and wireless alternatives pick off prime customers.
SBC, for instance, says it is planning for its local networks to be based on I P packets with an ATM switching "fabric" by the year 2002. In addition, it plans to focus on providing data services to businesses between now and then. It has spent $3 billion in the past four years getting ready and will spend another $150 million to $200 million per year over the next three years.
Still, a circuit-switching company such as SBC will be hard-pressed to abandon services it provides on networks that, because of depreciation schedules driven by monopoly regulation, are not yet all paid for. Besides, they can command premium prices with these services. Currently, a Ti high-speed connection
- which can transmit data at 1.5 megabits per second - can cost a business $300 or $400 per month or more.
"Will there be a pell-mell rush for IP in the local net by SBC? Probably not," says Probe Research Chief Operating Officer Allan Tumolillo.
SBC Executive Vice President for Corporate Planning Michael Turner says that 98 percent of the companys revenue today comes from circuit-switched voice communications, and he figures that even when data becomes more than half of his company's traffic, it still will account for less than half its revenue.
The revenue disparity could slow down carriers in deploying high-speed digital access technologies. Why provide 1 .5-Mbps access through Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line technology at $90 per month if businesses start dropping T1 lines they'd been paying three or four times as much for?
Or, why push virtual private networks if the end result is that customers must abandon better-paying dedicated circuits for cheaper IP-based temporary circuits? Only the threat of losing the customer's business altogether.
Indeed, as the year 2002 draws near, the idea of end-to-end packet networks that don't involve local phone companies at all will be imminent, if not already in place. Level 3 and Qwest, both based in Denver, plan to have complete local and long-distance, packet-based networks in operation nationwide over the next three years. These networks can be higher-quality than the public Internet because they are under one company's control. And because they use Internet technologies, they can communicate easily with the public Internet.
And they may be ideally situated as well, in the effort to find ways to bypass incumbent phone companies' local phone networks. Denver just happens to be where the cable television industry is based, providing easy, face-to-face communications with the companies that have the highest-capacity local communications networks already in place.
Adding momentum to the move to packets will be an answer to the last-mile quandary that actually involves sending local calls nearly 1,000 miles into the sky and back down again. Close to launch is the Internet-in-the-Sky network of Bill Gates and cellular pioneer Craig McCaw. And while Teledesic LLC supposedly is targeting rural customers unserved by competing metropolitan carriers, many communications experts expect the company's business plans to avoid offering universal service for all kinds of packet communications, including voice.
"That makes the magic date 2002. That's when the wireless alternatives enter the fray," says Larry Vanston, president of Technology Futures Inc., an Austin, Texas-based forecasting and consulting company.
But by that supposedly magic date, if packet switching is indeed going to supplant circuit switching and the Internet is to be its embodiment, the technology must learn to deal with hundreds of millions of long-distance phone calls and billions of local phone calls every day. Plus, it will have to move streams of audio, video and other types of data at speeds that will tax routers moving trillions of bits of information per second.
The idea that the Internet in the year 2002 will be the successor to today's public communications network is no slam dunk. "The Internet hasn't really dealt with that kind of thing, yet," Tumolillo says.
But, if usage keeps accelerating, it will have to learn fast.
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