Hi Ken, thanks. Re VoIP morphing, I tend to agree with your statement. There are presently no fewer than a half dozen methods on the boards right now that I know of, to craft next generation voice applications. And there are untold proprietary schemes, each aspiring to become the next solution, which are in hidden pockets of ingenuity around the world, that I am not even aware of. Some of those schemes depend on, and inflict, high levels of control in their constructs, and some are simply free form in nature hoping to take advantage of the freedoms of movement to be found in the coming ether.
VoIP and other Internet-based solutions for voice - and to a more limited extent, fax - and some ATM-based solutions as well, I might add, have enjoyed some forms of bandwidth optimization that have existed for a long time, but have never been utilized fully in the past.
For example, compression has been with us for eons now. Why haven't the traditionls used it in voice more extensively in the past to cut down on bandwidth requirements, increasing yield, and so on?
There's no dearth of rationalizations for this, but the end result would have been to open up more space on the cloud which is counter intuitive to those who would squeeze and control supply. At least, that is one view of the matter.
Maybe a part of the reason has been that the calculus used to support depreciation and other fiduciary considerations whicc favor controlled construction of new route and central office facilities, and not innovation geared to optimizing those which exist already.
And to a great extent, work hardening in the cranial cavity has had a large part in these decisions, as well, by decision makers whose only point of reference historically has been skewed by the frame works that they grew up with since the time they were splicers helpers. That wasn't meant to be humorous, nor disparaging, only an honest and forthright observation. However, things are changing here in that respect, but the motivational issues (or lack thereof) remain, to a great extent.
[While I'm on that topic, I want to be fair and I need to tell the other side. I should add that there is no shortage of brain trust potential in those organizations, and some of the best of it is to be found in the lower echelons of activity, where the tires hit the road. But innovation and promoting new ideas are not what utitilies and other public trusts are all about. Thus, many of the suggestions and inputs for in house improvements that would otherwise materialize for the betterment of all, usually fall on deaf ears.]
Another optimization factor which I believe will affect the fate of I-voice, for lack of a better unifying term that could be applied here, is the use of UDP packets instead of those which are under the control of TCP. Which, incidentally, is the way most of the present I-voice packaging takes place for transport.
By sending out non-deterministic packets in bulk, hoping only that the majority of them reach their target (as in UDP)... as opposed to waiting for acknowledgments and error corrections to take place (TCP), greater economies are reached in a more viable manner than the means which have been used before.
In severely bandwidth-constrained environments, this still doesn't work too well, however, but with the proliferation of greater amounts of bandwidth in access platforms and on the larger cloud, its future in my opinion is clearly one of expansion and mass deployment.
For normal conversational modes, many vendors have introduced on the fly conversion capabilities, facilitating the adaptation of a client to a long list of otherwise competing compression, directory, signaling and other (adminstrative) protocols.
This tends to neutralize the effects of not invented here proprietary distinctions, to a great extent, between competing vendor platforms (in theory, at least), for this stratum of voice applications which are designed to replace the POTS regime.
Will this acceptance of diversity present a problem in other respects down the road?
I tend to think not, except that it adds a lot of baggage to the mix, and one must ultimately ask, where does it all end? At some point certain protocols will survive a shakeout of sorts, Darwinian factors being what they are, rendering those which don't cut it, stranded. But I digress...
QoS and ToS functionality are going to be essential for the majority of VPNs and Extranets as they begin to proliferate, to address the second part of your message. Commerce isn't going to wait for the fiber sphere to materialize, as was the implied message in my upstream post, whose purpose was merely to report on some of my current observations and to stimulate discussion... I'm still waiting for what I thought would be an onslaught of replies, challenging my assault of IP in the optical domain. [shields are still up]
So we'll see an uptake in utilization of these measures going forward, even if they are only rendered transitional ones as we look back upon them in the future. Or maybe not. Just some more issues for planners to be considering at this point, as they map out their networks during long term strategic planning sessions. Come to think of it, what's the use?
Nowadays in many organization, even the largest ones, long term planning simply means making adequate provisions of bandwidth for users to exploit over the next three to six months.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
