To: X Y Zebra who wrote (8008 ) 5/30/1999 5:21:00 PM From: David C. Burns Respond to
Message 9857415 Will you be moving toward one solution? Or are you going to be ecumenical? The short answer is that we're going to be ecumenical, at any instant in time choosing the best way to implement the network. But I'll also say that our design point is IP. Are you satisfied with the progress they're making on multiprotocol label switching? Yeah. I'm on an advisory committee for the federal government, for President Clinton, and we've spent the last couple of years looking at the state of the art and where the Internet goes and what the technology base is for getting it there and so on. Somewhat of a surprise to me was the sort of consensus on this committee. They're academics and competitors and so on-Vint Cerf is on it-and they believe that the industry does not have the technology that you'd like to have to move confidently into the next century. We think we know how to do it, but there's going to be a fair amount of invention over the next five or 10 years as all the carriers evolve their networks. What people constantly say is, "Oh, not a problem; we can do that very easily." A lot of the new entrants in the telecom business are acting as though everything that's needed to implement 21st-century networks is sort of sitting on the shelf and they've just pieced it all together in interesting ways and so forth. It's nonsense, frankly. We're confident we can do it, but there's a huge amount of work to be done."
