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Technology Stocks : George Gilder - Forbes ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (1602)	5/23/1999 12:36:00 AM
From: SDR-SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5853

Hi Frank: Sorry for the delayed response, but I have spent a very unenjoyable day dealing with MSFT's gift of intermittent and unexplainable WIN95 computer instability - hopefully with at least temporary success. My reason for posting the Inter@ctive Week article was less to defend the specific approaches that the new Consortium will come up with (which undoubtedly will be highly oriented to their own interests), but more to indicate that voice network operators are being pulled (kicking and screaming, no doubt) into the taking of actions that, even within their own areas of self-interest, will serve to create a more generalized central network with the application and control of "features" and "service types" at the edges. The front page intro to the story, which was not available in the electronic edition states: "The drive to create a public network that can deliver Internet Protocol services quickly and cost-effectively has spawned a consortium intent on opening up the next generation of network switches. ... Its goal: to define an open interface into the switch of the future, which will not be the host to features and services ... Instead, the "soft switch" will be connected via the still-to-be-defined interface to media gateways and gatekeepers ..." Although the immediate future implementations will be transitionary and IP-oriented and will not in themselves result in the true "dumb network", it appears to me that the move to "softer switches" is at least a small evolutionary step toward the GG network concept in which the central network doesn't know what the data that it carries is, and in which the service-specific functions and features take place at the network input and output "edges". Steve