« Dear Bill, I now have a MAC | Main | VON Presentations »
March 06, 2008
A billion there vs. a Billion here
Sometimes the conversations you have with people are prophetic in nature. Talking to a friend who is doing a consulting gig with a vendor, we talked about the need for new infrastructure. Particularly to match how people are going to expect to see the Wireless Internet.
IMHO, You can call it Unified Communication, FMC or anything else but fundamentally its an issue of delivering data to an any to any world. And I am not expecting that peer to peer is the right answer for things that are still head end oriented in nature.
With att’s announcement that they planned for a $1B dollar build out of the International structure, I was delighted to see that statement. The issues with supporting the network needs of the future are somewhat more confusing than they were just 15 years ago.
Its no longer a simple matter of pipes and valves (as a cable operator friend used to say). Now we have the issues of caching, streaming, smart edges, and dumber pipes.
Its still about the Internet but the hour glass figure that converges on IP sometimes looks like the stacks are trying to widen the waist. For example, does an application need to know the QoS it gets before the service is set up? Or can a best effort network be the answer. Its trickier than you expect because the people I respect are in disharmony about these issues. And even at the IETF we have efforts being made to get some presession QoS metrics in the network routing table. It should be interesting to watch.
If you have a stake in the race for new services, it may be worth your while to listen to att at Spring VON.
Background:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120471665116813469.html?mod=index_to_businesses
Posted by carl at March 6, 2008 08:32 AM