Less heated rhetoric (about the future)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Tom Fairlie [tfairlie () frontiernet net]
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 11:20 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Less heated rhetoric (about the future)

> Let's put it this way - if a company's business model relies on users
> donating bandwidth, that's abuse of network connections.

At an IIT VoIP conference (http://danada.rice.iit.edu/voip/) I attended last
year, several companies were actively promoting their nano- and femto-cell
base stations for cellular phone service that rely upon the user's broadband
connection to serve as their backhaul solution.

I wanted to be polite, so I didn't say "what a terrible" idea, but it's
clear that companies are making a grab for the user's bandwidth (in addition
to not necessarily giving them the bw to begin with).

As an aside, it appears that almost nothing has changed in the VoIP
marketplace since I left it 6 years ago. Henning Schulzrinne (co-author of
SIP and a sharp, friendly guy) gave a very nice keynote speech in which he
had to admit that most of the market players are still focusing on vanilla
technology (G.711, CLASS/POTS-like infrastructure, etc.). Most of the
vendors there were still worrying about (those neverending) security issues
and economic viability. Ugh!

I used to think that telecom was the safest industry because nobody was ever
going to say: "The network is finished, let's all go home." However, it
appears it's heading that way. A retired executive recently told me that
telecom is "miserable...maybe forever."

I'm starting to agree.

Tom Fairlie

PS If only Dennis Ritchie had gotten Inferno off the ground and into the
switches and phones. I suggested to him back in 96/97 several ways it could
be used to facilitate intelligent networking, and he replied saying that the
business (i.e., switch/cell) groups at Lucent wouldn't even talk to them. No
wonder they closed their doors. Shame on you, Lucent! Another rotten
development: without Inferno/Limbo, we're all stuck with Java now!




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