Internet II is coming...

Thu Oct 10 01:17:54 UTC 1996

>From:  Sean Doran[SMTP:smd at cesium.clock.org]
>Sent:  Wednesday, October 09, 1996 5:11 PM
>
>WRT your list, I don't think that either videoconferencing
>or connectivity to the PSTN is a particularly interesting thing
>to do with the Internet, in that I don't see either as being
>a fundamentally important Internet application.

I think that any and all services my customers want are at least 
interesting, if not extremely important.  I also think it is very 
interesting to leverage those customers' local loop circuit investments by 
providing as many services over the same infrastructure as possible.

>Various people, including a Sprint Canada reseller, will tell
>you that ALGs exist that convert various voice-over-Internet
>things into signals that can be dealt with by PBXes and other
>telephony equipment.   There are at least two SS7<->IP gateways
>in development with what appears to be short times-to-market ahead.
>
>One of these is being built along the lines of what PNO like an
>RBOC or a PTT or a cable company might want to deploy in their
>own facilities.
>
>These are neat hacks which will do fun things to international
>and national long-distance tariffs worldwide, in that you may
>suddenly have two QOSes for voice: one which is a side-effect
>of IP connectivity and which is of iffy-to-tolerable-to-good
>quality, and one which has metered, often distance-and-time-of-day-
>sensitive charging and a generally predicatably very-good-to-excellent
>quality.

And I have in fact seen a demonstration of "Internet Phone" over a cable 
modem, through a gateway, and into the PSTN.  I would of course like my 
customers to have access to _both_ levels of quality, and all of it through 
the same infrastructure.  I'm one of the evil, greedy, money grubbing 
capitalists who, while willing to invest millions of dollars in network 
infrastructure, want to sell its use in a variety of ways.

>We're now down to 155Mbps medium speed to the desktop.
>I imagine that we can avoid arguing about the small details
>of cell tax and the like, and start looking at Gbps ethernet
>and other forthcoming LAN issues.   They really are LAN issues;
>the Internet vs global ATM really isn't a factor here, nor is
>really IP vs ATM on a protocol-to-protocol basis.

I accepted your 'today' challenge, but agree about the LAN orientation.  I 
don't agree that there must be a "vs" between IP and ATM, cell taxes and 
the impact of either infinite or perpetually constricted bandwidth 
notwithstanding.

>| Oh, and by the way, given that the local loop provider has OC-48 SONET
>| provisioned to this particular location, we could just as easily have
>| provisioned the connection to our backbone at OC12 as opposed to OC3. 
 Did
>| I miss the Cisco announcement of an OC12 IP-SONET card?
>
>You may wish to discuss an NDA presentation on the forthcoming
>generation of routers from each of Cisco, Juniper and Bay Networks.

Again, my post was based upon your assertion that this could be done today. 
 I sincerely hope that a new generation of routers is forthcoming asap that 
can match ATM speeds.

>So, just to clarify things, I don't discount ATM as a technology
>entirely, I just think that its time as something between IP and
>SONET for big-I Internet applications (other than *maybe* for
>customer aggregation and the like), is ticking away...

Time will tell, and meanwhile, there is ample room for a variety of network 
architectures and business models.  Clearly the arguments on both sides 
have resulted in new technology which falls somewhere in between.  This can 
only be A Healthy Thing (TM).
--
Jim Browning