t byfield on 24 Feb 2001 15:00:17 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] [cook@cookreport.com: Light, IP and Gigabit Ethernet] |
ex-nettimer gordon cook suggested that this might be of interest to some people on the list, and indeed it should be: back when dogs r00led the earth, there was some 'mapping the power' noise, an impossibly complex subject then, and even moreso now. sadly, what the abstract below doesn't talk about in any detail is the emphasis on 'condominium' models of collective/community owner- ship of fiberoptic networks in canada's 'canarie' project--quite distinct from the 'market-based' obsessions of the US, which so far have served primarily to perpetuate the hegemony of the big telcos (the 'baby bells' and their competitors arising from some 'liberalizations' of the 70s and 80s--sprint, MCI/Worldcom, etc.). there's a strong argument to be made that much-ballyhooed 'P2P' networks will only succeed in a meaningful sense if the infra- structure's ownership, hence maybe management, is likewise P2P-- community-owned. cheers, t ----- Forwarded Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 21:44:28 -0500 To: tbyfield@panix.com From: Gordon Cook <cook@cookreport.com> Subject: Light, IP and Gigabit Ethernet A Road Map for Evaluation of Technology Choices Driving the Future Evolution of Telecommunications Contrary to some opinions, the COOK Report finds that the Internet revolution is not spelled dot com. The revolution is in fact to be found in a total revamping of the transport of bits. While the dot com empires of 1999 collapsed in 2000 the cost effectiveness of pushing the Internet Protocol over glass yielded more dividends than ever before. A growing amount of telecom traffic has migrated to a growing amount of fiber. The pure Internet play throws out SONET effectively doubling available fiber in the case where redundant loops were used. Whereas lighting each new fiber used to call for new bays of OC-48 SONET equipment at $100,000 a bay and up, a strand can now be lit at a gigabit by a $7,000 Ethernet switch on each end. While gigabit Ethernet over glass is the current preferred Internet way, ten gigabit Ethernet transport will be arriving by year's end. If 40 lambdas per strand were high end in 2000, 160 is likely to be common by year's end. With the completion of multiple metro fiber build outs, end-to-end fiber may now be taken for granted by most business customers. The explosion of bandwidth as the result of more fiber and technology that squeezes more bandwidth from each strand has meant that, in some instances, the delivery of a gigabit costs about what a T-1 did a decade ago. The bottom line is that telecommunications which is prepared to forego traversing the legacy PSTN is now upwards of 1000 times cheaper than that which powers a circuit switched voice call. While corporate managed VPNs have been able to avoid the PSTN for some time, a new development has emerged in Canada where customer management of optical wavelengths using the OBGP protocol holds the promise that by year's end users of Canada's new public sector gigabit Ethernet over fiber infrastructure will be avoiding carrier clouds entirely. At the basic levels of both transport and network management the Internet revolution is shaping up to tell the PSTN that it is no longer needed. In telephony meanwhile protocols are being developed that will allow the diversion of large amounts of PSTN traffic to the Internet. ENUM is the major such protocol. This will allow Internet carriers to offer and deliver many services to PSTN attached phones that the PSTN itself cannot negotiate. Other protocols such as instant messaging are shaping up as coordinators for PSTN activity and off on switches that can control Internet connected devices. Fiber to the home is becoming more common and companies like World Wide Packets are gearing up to make gigabit Ethernet termination equipment that will give connected families, telephone, fax, high end video, ordinary TV and data off of the same line. Canarie the Canadian advanced internet agency has some interesting ideas about these developments stating that Divergence rather than Convergence may be the key to low cost fiber to the home. Here is a narrative paraphrase of the language of a slide from the presentation 'Optical Communities' in September 2000. When people first started looking at Fiber to the Home (FTTH), they deemed it to be too expensive because it assumed all services would be converged - date, voice and video. They noted that expensive terminal equipment would be required to segregate voice, data and video services at the home. Meanwhile voice traffic has largely gone wireless. Note that lifeline voice can significantly increase system costs by demanding high reliability and depending for this on DC battery power, 911 services. Perhaps it is time to conclude that the big driver for residential broadband is not voice or video. It is the Internet. Very soon Internet will carry video and second line voice. So instead of building a converged network such as FSAN, HFC, etc build an Internet network only. Divergence rather than Convergence may be the key to low cost FTTH. While the power of the new systems is awesome, there are additional issues that will keep very interesting the life of anyone who must evaluate these changes and plan a winning strategy for the future. While one better be aware of the key differences in the power of the technology when compared to the circuit switched world's way of doing things, one also needs to understand that progress has, in this case, waded out into new and uncertain territory. There are some growth and scaling issues where the answers are not yet clearly understood. For example readers should consider Bill St. Arnaud's paper on scaling issues of Internet growth. < http://www.canet3.net/library/papers/scaling.html> If the suppositions in this paper prove to be correct, then the role of backbones will have to be rethought and much Internet topology rearranged. One of the developments that influenced his thinking occurred on December 4, 2000 when Essex Corp announced an advance that enabled it to push as many as 4,000 lambdas down a single strand of fiber. On December 8 St. Arnaud posted the following to his Canarie mail list. "[Here are some excerpts from a recent article in Lightreading that I believe illustrates the point that Ultra dense wave division multiplexing systems is not about bandwidth, but connectivity. A number of companies are starting to realize that today's Internet architecture (which is still fundamentally based on the old telco network model) will not scale. As intelligence moves to the edge, the existing network architecture must grow at some function related to the square of the number of users. However [the problem is what to do] if the increase in the number of the customer's own wavelengths and the fiber in the network only grows linearly? Intriguingly such a customer owned network architecture starts to closely resemble the neuron architecture of the brain. Perhaps mother nature long ago discovered the most efficient architecture for distributed intelligence? - BSA]" From the December 4, 2000 issue of Lightreading.... http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=2760 "We don't need thousands of wavelengths for bandwidth, we need it for connectivity," says Simon Cao, chief technology officer at Avanex Corp. (Nasdaq: AVNX), a company that's developing high channel-count wavelength systems. Cao figures that the availability of thousands of channels in combination with tunable lasers will make it possible to eliminate complex optical switches, by using wavelength routing instead . That idea is the driving force behind all of Avanex's developments, he says." "Despite its careless capacity talk, Essex has also thought out how to take advantage of the extra connectivity. Moodispaw reckons that Essex's solution will be perfect for customer-owned wavelengths in the access network. About 1 Gbit/s would be adequate to supply a gigabit Ethernet line to a business. Each customer pays less for its wavelength, but the service provider is able to sell to a lot more customers, so everybody is happy." What this means is that we likely soon see customer owned wavelengths of a gigabit. Such wavelengths will be plentiful, affordable and matched to the speeds of the Internet's basic gigabit Ethernet end-to-end architecture. When only the rich and mighty carriers owned fiber and the very expensive lasers that could pump bits and the even more expensive SONET equipment that sustained the bits, we imagined that bandwidth was a valuable commodity obtainable only from "on high," or from upstream. Indeed the carriers recognized their position and charged large sums for the scarce commodity that they delivered. This situation has dramatically changed. If you own a piece of fiber in a metro area network, you can power that fiber with a lambda delivered as gigabit Ethernet for a one time investment of about $15,000. When you run out of bandwidth, adding the multiplexer necessary to turn the one lambda into four is also affordable. In this sense bandwidth can now be generated by customers and used very cheaply at the edge of the network over hops that in ideal conditions can be as much as 100 kilometers. Suddenly these customers can throw cheap bandwidth at quality of service issues. Their whole outlook on life starts to change rapidly. George Gilder was observed to say that "the companies that exploit bandwidth recklessly, will win." On January 29, 2001 Bill St. Arnaud observed "Although I may disagree with Gilder on some of his predictions, I think he's gotten this one right. To date most advanced optical network research is based around the assumption that bandwidth is a precious and rare commodity and therefore we must optimize the network topology and try to extract every possible bit of capacity. One of the underlying assumptions of the existing CA*net 3 network and proposed CA*net 4 network architecture is that bandwidth can be wasted. Rather than concentrating on applications and technologies that optimize the use of bandwidth, we want to concentrate on applications and technologies that waste bandwidth but in doing so derive the maximum benefit for the user - hence our focus on "customer empowered" optical networks. There is no question in our mind with customer empowered networks that bandwidth will be wasted, wavelengths will be orphaned and seen from the perspective of a central carrier the network topology will be less than optimum. But in a world of thousands of wavelengths and near infinite bandwidth who cares? The true measure is whether the customer can easily and rapidly deploy new broadband applications and services." "At CANARIE we are initiating a number of projects with this premise in mind - OBGP which will allow customers to setup and tear down their own wavelengths at will, WDD- wavelength disk drives will drive new concepts in distributed super computing, object oriented networking enables the wavelength to become a software object, community based condominium fiber networks, and much, much more. Stay tuned for more announcements and developments in this area." Arnaud's words portend a seismic shift in the telecommunications landscape. With the exception of some important qualifiers we believe that he is correct. One must understand that, for the time being, bandwidth is cheap only in proportion to the distance that it must travel. Very high bandwidth sent over long distances is still quite expensive. Bandwidth that must be provided on a corporate wide scale for mission critical activities is also somewhat expensive. What Arnaud is talking about will change the world. The only question is how fast. To sum up. Costs are falling. Depending on the regulatory environment, the amount of capital necessary to become a small scale telecommunications provider is rapidly shrinking. Independent back yard gigabit Ethernet providers can deliver broadband services at a fraction of the cost but equal in quality to what is accessible from larger more traditional companies. There appears to be a choice of two paths to our telecom future. One is to go with the highly innovative pure Internet approach of gigabit Ethernet over condominium fiber. Such a choice empowers the customer, facilitates decentralization over centralized control and provides small and innovative businesses with the environment that they need in order to flourish. The other path is to try to fore stall the innovation by squashing competitors with a massive vertically integrated company founded on older technology and leveraging access to content and over a network monopoly so pervasive that people will find they have no choice but to buy it. What could be in store for us all, if things go in this direction, was summarized by Scott Cleland CEO of the Precursor Group on Friday January 19th, 2001. "Precursor believes AOL-TW has budding 'Microsoft-like' potential to grow increasingly dominant by being the leading national company that brings together the various online interfaces (content, Internet access, buddy lists, instant messaging, etc.) to become the de facto consumer online access market standard much like Microsoft Windows brought together the various desktop applications to become the de facto consumer software market standard." On the one hand, the AOL infrastructure, which, compared to what the Canadians are doing, can most kindly be called archaic, has to be a terribly attractive vision for the ILECs. After all, it will give them plenty of time to finish depreciation of their copper plant. On the other hand innovative Internet technology ventures have the most to gain from taking the Canadian road. To facilitate making this choice with more certainty, in this publication we offer a recapitulation of COOK Report interviews on the shifting market domain of the optical network. These interviews are unique in that they treat complex key technical issues with attention to depth and detail found no where else. We believe that they form a set of resources that will permit readers to decide for themselves what direction is most beneficial to the future of their enterprise. As we ponder these developments, we realize that we may be standing on the cusp of events that may overturn the economic structure of the first five years of the commercial Internet. The largest backbones, UUNET and Sprint, set the price of bandwidth and determined conditions for connection to the Internet. Last week WorldCom announced that it was debranding mighty UUNET and Mike O'Dell, the chief architect of the Internet's largest global backbone, left the company. The problem is that these services take more and more resources to pay for ever larger routers and support huge growth rates in traffic. It is beginning to look like revenue derived from running such a facility may no longer match expenses as the availability of alternative sources of cheap bandwidth and Internet transit increases. For the largest backbones sources of power only a year or two ago may now be turning into liabilities. The economics of bandwidth are in flux to such an extent that there is growing suspicion that for many large players business models that were sustainable five years ago have lead to the acquisition of huge debt today and that the next year may bring a round of major bankruptcies as the new economies of the technologies described in this report render traditional business models based on old technologies unsustainable. In the end the path of the internet as the stupid network driven by these new technologies will predominate. We begin this six part report http://cookreport/lightipgige.shtml with a section on the basic Internet architecture and technologies of "Light, IP, and Gig E" to be followed by a section on their adoption in Sweden, Holland and of course our long special issue on Canada. The report may be ordered by clicking on https://secure.fast.net/cookreport/order.html. -- **************************************************************** The COOK Report on Internet, 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 USA (609) 882-2572 (phone & fax) cook@cookreport.com Index to 9 years of the COOK Report at http://cookreport.com For info on new report go to http://cookreport.com/lightipgige.shtml . 'Light IP & Gig E" serves as tutorial on on going economic model of Internet infrastructure - $375.00 **************************************************************** ----- Backwarded _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold