It's just one more of these scifi seeming stories that what we thought was
logically inevitable (IP as the bottom turtle) is ACTUALLY HAPPENING...
Rohit
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Subject: IP: July COOK Report on Internet - optical internets & ip telephony
From: Gordon Cook <cook@cookreport.com>
OPTICAL IP BACKBONE REVOLUTION EMERGES
CANARIE RUNS IP OVER WDM ELIMINATING SONET & ATM -- EXPECTS COST
SAVINGS OF GREATER THAN 95% -- AVICI TERABIT PACKET SWITCH
CAPABLE OF OC-1536 -- PLUMMETING COSTS MEAN CREATION OF
"INEXPENSIVE" NEW CARRIERS ABLE TO OUT PERFORM OLD GIANTS
A technology cost tsunami is poised to break. When the flood
recedes, expect the landscape to be drastically different. An
interview with Bill St. Arnaud of Canarie explains the optical
backbone network project for which he has just received funding.
Using either gigabit Ethernet framing or SONET framing but no ATM
and no SONET equipment, it will move TCP/IP packets directly over
Wave Division Multiplexing. This will gain back a 25% overhead in
bandwidth eaten-up by the suddenly archaic transport technologies.
But far more important is that the SONET and ATM equipment
rendered obsolete may represent a saving of more than 95% of the
cost of delivering bandwidth. Bandwitdh that cost more than
$5000 a month to deliver in January 1998 may cost the new
players as little as $50 a month to deliver before the end of next
year.
St. Arnaud points out that he can take an off- the-shelf Cisco GSR
12000 gigabit router a get it to route TCP/IP over WDM. While the
network will require no technology breakthroughs, it will require
technology integration and work on some of the routing protocols
to function with maximum efficiency. It will be used for beta-
testing technology from Pluris, Juniper and Avici which on May
fifth announced a breath taking device that puts lasers and router
in the same box and can reach an amazing OC-1536 (160 gigabits
per second) over a single strand of fiber.
Economic implications for the telcos are profound. Some folk
expect legacy SONET networks to run parallel to the new optical
networks for sometime. Others say the problems that will be
raised for the incumbent LECs and IXCs will be so serious (as
evidenced by some of Qwest's recent creative deals) that they will
have no choice but to begin to cannibalize their legacy networks as
quickly as possible. Given that they could quickly find themselves
with operating and depreciation costs that are up to ten times
higher than the next generation telco's (Qwest, Level 3, etc.), they
may be in a serious position rather quickly. Look for them to hold
on to the local loop to keep from drowning. The bottom line, as
Jack Waters Engineering VP at Level 3 told us in an interview on
May 2, is that Level 3 resulted last year when founder James Crowe
realized that it was possible to invest between a billion and ten
billion dollars and build a state-of-the-art telecommunications
company that would have cost $100 billion to build in the early
90's.
Some of the implications near term for the public internet are
interesting. As the backbone "x" interview at the end of this issue
shows, the big five have private interconnects locked up and open
peering at the public exchanges is essentially worthless. (Verio
probably the sixth, seventh or eight largest backbone can't get
private peering with UUNET.) Therefore those not in the top five
get increasing squeezed in costs to the point where they
effectively have to become customers of the top five.
Now enter Qwest and Level 3 with national and international fiber
nets of their own and the ability to offer almost unlimited
backbone capacity to major corporations and second tier NSP
backbones. If the pricing is right, they should fill their backbones
quickly turning from a large intranet into a shadow internet. They
must still buy connectivity to the public internet controlled by the
big five in order to be viable. Their low cost of operation should
enable them to pay whatever prices are necessary. Furthermore it
will be possible to measure customer traffic flow into and out of
the public Internet and charge a price differential for that traffic.
If the connection price charged to begin with is low enough,
customers should not mind paying the differential and the next
generation backbones should very quickly become magnets that
attract business that would otherwise go to the big five. The key
indicator to watch in coming months will be Qwest's and then Level
3's pricing.
INTERNET TELEPHONY FOR THE STUPID NETWORK
SMALL CANADIAN COMPANY PRODUCES DEVICE TO CONNECT PHONES TO IP
NETS & EXPLAINS AN ARCHITECTURAL MINDSET & STANDARDS FRAMEWORK
BY MEANS OF WHICH IP TELEPHONY CAN REPLACE PSTN
Francois Menard wants to completely redesign the telephone network in a
way such that voice inside IP packets with replace the PSTN. He
offers users an inexpensive hardware device that functions as a
bridge between an ordinary telephone and an IP carrying Ethernet,
or cable modem service. While his device will interface with a PC,
he seeks to have it function independently of a PC by moving the
intelligence of the phone company central office switches to the
edge of the network. His phone adapter will have enough
intelligence in it to function as a client and will interact with
server software located inside of the domain of the service
provider. As he puts it, the phone adapter contains that extra small
amount of computing power that must be deployed in the end-user's
home if we are to succeed in introducing new services to the
network without going to the expense and complexity of employing
telephone switches inside the network to achieve them. We are
taking the network intelligence that is prominent the central
office switches and moving it to the edge where signaling and call
initiation will all be done inside the telephone.
He sees this happening in the context of the general demand for
faster Internet access. This demand is forcing the telcos and the
cable companies to make architectural changes to the networks
that will render them capable of providing Internet telephony as an
unintended by product. The ability to plug telephone lines into this
architecture is a welcome, but almost inadvertent, dividend of the
architecture itself. The key to all of this is to be able to apply very
low cost telephone appliances to the opportunity. The phone
adapter that Mediatrix makes is one such appliance.
He sees the future as one not of IP telephony toll by pass, achieved
by IP based detours around parts of the PSTN, but as one where
connectionless IP based networks replace the phone companies
circuit switched networks. The new world is one where everything
becomes part of a data network and where you cannot expect to
open data packets to ascertain whether they are voice or video or
ASCII text. You can no longer think about charging according to the
kind of data the packet contains. Doing that would be totally
inefficient. Therefore you have to focus both on charges for
quality of service delivered and new telephony services that can be
delivered by intelligence under the users control at the edges of a
big, fat, fast, stupid IP network. By making a device that enables
an ordinary phone to reach another ordinary phone via a simple
cheap bridge to an IP enabled telephone network or cable TV
network, he hopes to encourage both industries to adapt his bridge
out of fear of loosing customers to the side which offers services
that the first cannot.
Within 12 months he wants to turn his bridge into an IP telephony
chip. That he believes will cause the dominoes to begin to fall. In
his words: "Once we have an IP telephony chip, then adding IP
telephony will not involve a significant cost for anything that
speaks IP. At that point the only unanswered question becomes
what your dominant home local area network technology will be.
Regardless of the answer, you will begin to be able to put new
wall-plate, data-speaking jacks all over your house. Either you will
do it with the telephone wiring or you will decide to call your local
cable vendor."
Finally in talking about standards development, he explains H.323
as the protocol favorite of Intel and Microsoft. H.323 is big and
bloated. It is so complex (originating in past from Intel's work on
ISDN a few years ago) that companies smaller than Intel and
Microsoft have trouble dealing with it. He contrasts H.323 with
SIP a smaller and lighter protocol under development at Lucent and
elsewhere. When SIP is finished at the end of 1998, he predicts that
it will triumph over H.323. H.323 is a way to standardize a
protocol, while SIP is a way to standardize a generic means of
conveying session initiations on the Internet. SIP is layered. If you
want to do more things you simply add another protocol on top SIP.
With the H.323, if you want new features, you need to build then
the inside the ASN.1 structure which is in turn inside of H.323.
As long as you have the PSTN in the picture -- you will have a
problem with Internet Telephony. Gateways are merely a means of
interfacing the PSTN with Internet Telephony
EFFORT RAMPS UP TO MAP PHONE NUMBERS TO DNS
VIABLE PROTOCOL MAPPING SOUGHT TO ENABLE IP TELEPHONY TO
TRANSPARENTLY CROSS PROVIDER BOUNDARIES
An effort is afoot to find a way to map phone numbers from the
PSTN to DNS or some naming system that would enable Internet
telephone calls to go transparently across provider boundaries and
into the PSTN. Discussion with Richard Shockey and the new IPTel
mail list.
PEERING: BACKBONE X GIVES MOST CANDID LOOK YET
PRIVATE PEERING UNOBTAINABLE -- PUBLIC EXCHANGE FULL PEERING
RENDERED WORTHLESS BY BANDWITH BOTTLENECK BETWEEN EXCHANGE &
BIG BACKBONES
On the condition of anonymity, a backbone has given us the most
detailed summary of the actually operation of peering we have yet
seen. It is likely that the peering agreements between the big five
and 30 or so smaller backbones at the public exchanges won't have
to be abrogated by the big five. The reason is that, as traffic
growth at places like MAE East has doubled in the last year, the big
five have not increased the capacity of the pipes from their
backbones to the exchanges. These pipes have turned into bottle
necks that render the exchanges increasing worthless as a means
of interconnection to the big five.
The smaller backbones are being offered variations of peering.
Backbone "x" describes "paid peering," and "non shared peering" as
way stages set up between the increasingly worthless free peering
at public exchanges and fully shared privately interconnected
peering. What this means is that the second tier backbones have
essentially three choices: maintain increasingly non viable public
exchange peering with the big five. Find the money to become paid
customers of the big five or switch to Qwest and Level 3 if
acceptable pricing and transit is available. An irony is that
because of non disclosure agreements it is very difficult to know
how a second tier backbone's status is changing since the backbone
itself is happy to keep the non disclosure in effect. Doing
otherwise would be to let the public know its status had been
diminished. We vetted our draft with two other backbones which told
us they found it accurate.
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