IP: 10 gigs to your home -- move to Canada?

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Wed, 03 Feb 1999 08:18:20 -0500
To: farber () cis upenn edu
From: "David S. Isenberg" <isen () isen com>
Subject: Of IP interest?

Dave,

Perhaps the excerpt from SMART Letter #16
below will be of interest to the IP list --
I certainly think that Bill St. Arnaud's work is
very important and deserves more attention than
it has been getting!

If you concur, please feel free to post.

David I
-------
!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()
------------------------------------------------------------
            SMART Letter #16 - February 1, 1999
        For Friends and Enemies of the Stupid Network
             Copyright 1999 by David S. Isenberg
  isen () isen com -- http://www.isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
------------------------------------------------------------
!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()

CONTENTS:
>  Lead essay: 10 Gigabits to Every Canadian Home by 2005
>  Quote of note: FCC Commissioner Michael Powell
>  Y2K: Leading Indicators Favor "Official Future" Scenario
>  Conferences on My Calendar, Copyright Notice, Administrivia
-------
10 GIGABITS TO EVERY CANADIAN HOME BY 2005

[Prolog:  Imagine 10 Gbits -- enough bandwidth for over 150,000 
phone calls -- in your living room.  As transmission technologies 
become cheaper, simpler, faster and more capable -- by a factor
of 10 every year or so -- 10 Gigabit access becomes as cheap as
yesterday's less capable, more complicated technologies.

Both DSL and Cable Modem technologies are several years
old -- they date from times when DS-3 (45 Mbit) was fast,
and they predate the advent of WDM (and even the deployment of 
OC-12!). 

As my article below lays out, it is now "thinkable" (to use
official FCC technical terminology) to bring this year's new 
backbone technology straight into the home.

But incumbent network providers are uniquely disincented to act.
Clearly there are no applications and there is no customer demand.
Besides 10 gig will completely cannibalize the last remains of their
mainstream business -- imagine more throughput in your home than
in a Class 5 office! How long will 5-cent Sundays seem attractive?

In the process of implementing today's latest technology, Canada 
just might demonstrate to the world that what comes after 
kilobit access is gigabits -- and "that giant sucking sound"
will be investment dollars following economic growth, which
will be following bandwidth north. -- David I]

--

CANADA BRINGS FIBER HOME: CANARIE proposes gigabit Internet 
to the home while U.S. telcos diddle with DSL.

by David S. Isenberg

BOX:  [To Bill St. Arnaud, convergence is a backward 
looking attempt to preserve existing assets.]

When Bill St. Arnaud tries to show earnest telco types the 
leading edge, he might as well be talking Martian. When he 
explains how he'll deliver gigabits via fiber to the home 
(FTTH) for about the same cost as megabits via Digital 
Subscriber Line (DSL) or cable modem, their minds seem to 
be stuck in the traffic jam at the intersection of IP and SS7.

In the midst of the distracting pseudo-battle between DSL 
and cable modems, it is hard to remember that FTTH is still 
the broadband endgame. Despite the pall of failure around 
early-1990s interactive TV, the supremacy of fiber has been 
clear as glass for over a decade. 

St. Arnaud, the mild-mannered Director of Network Projects 
for the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, 
Industry and Education (CANARIE; www.canarie.ca) has not 
lost sight of this truth.  The newest CANARIE project, 
CA*Net 3, will throw away Synchronous Optical Network 
(Sonet) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) to become the 
world's first all-optical Internet backbone.  

St. Arnaud believes that this design can be extended into 
the home.  He proposes to throw away DSL and cable modems 
too, bringing CA*Net 3's all-optical multigigabit Internet 
into every Canadian home by 2005.

WDM IN LOCAL NETWORKS
In long-haul networks, Wavelength Division Multiplexing 
(WDM) has increased fiber capacity by a couple of orders of 
magnitude in two short years. This year, a single fiber 
will have throughput for 15 million calls -- enough to 
handle the entire U.S. busy hour.

But WDM has not yet hit the local loop.  St. Arnaud thinks 
it's because established providers are tangled in reuse of 
their own nets.  Cable companies have cable modems so data 
service can run on existing broadcast-oriented networks.  
Telcos have DSL, which is backward compatible with twisted 
pair.  For both, the key word is "backward."

The same goes for networking protocols. SONET provides a 
reliable voice (connection-oriented) network. ATM's goal 
was a single protocol for handling voice, video and packet 
services.  Neither anticipated Internet Protocol (IP).

Both SONET and ATM become shaky when they're not propped up 
against legacy networks. SONET becomes unnecessary in an 
all-IP world, because packet protocols like IP thrive even 
when lower layers are unreliable.  ATM loses when Internet 
telephony and audio-on-demand thrive, because more 
bandwidth and a few IP tweaks promise to make real time and 
streaming media scream.  

To St. Arnaud, the whole idea of *convergence* is a 
backwards-looking attempt to preserve existing assets.  He 
proposes a *divergent*, third residential network for 
Internet traffic only, installed alongside telephone and 
cable feeds.  Like the CA*Net 3 backbone, it'll have only 
two layers, Internet Protocol and WDM -- information over 
light.  It'll be a Stupid Network -- cheap and simple, 
under-engineered, over-provisioned, and controlled at the 
edge by users.

GIGABITS FOR MICROCENTS
Installation (right-of-way, trenching and conduit) 
represents the most cost.  In a 100-kilometer metropolitan 
network, a conservative installation estimate is $4.3 
million. Routers and equipment to light the fiber might 
cost another $1.8 million. Using today's 128-wavelength 
equipment, a single 48-fiber cable would serve 6144 homes.  
Each home would have its own WDM wavelength that could be 
lit at 2.5 gigabits per second (the OC-48 rate).  This 
computes to $1000 per home.

The alternative, new Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) to support 
cable modems delivers hundreds of times less and costs half 
again more.  Even retrofitting existing cable to carry two-
way data could cost $600 per home.  DSL, somewhat cheaper, 
delivers even less.

CANARIE's optics would meet residential equipment at an 
Ethernet interface.  The step from 2.5 gigabits down to 1 
gigabit Ethernet might seem wasteful.  But St. Arnaud 
points out that the next Ethernet evolution -- 10-gigabit 
Ethernet -- just happens to match the rate of OC-192. Local 
and wide area nets would merge in yet another fundamental 
simplification.

WHY CANADA CAN
In Canada, a lot of municipal fiber already exists, thanks 
to favorable regulatory policy.  But in the U.S., bean 
counters of communications behemoths shy from huge 
installation costs.  They look at today's applications and 
figure that current networks can be kludged to handle them. 

Make way for high-definition Internet video on demand -- or 
whatever truly broadband application Canadian users dare 
discover. CA*Net 3 could make Canada the center of the next 
Internet economic boom.  Meanwhile, U.S. telcos manage 
mawkish mergers, dither with DSL and forget fiber to the 
home.  Look north, young entrepreneur.

--
This article first appeared as "Intelligence at the Edge #6"
in the February 1, 1999 issue of America's Network.  
Copyright 1999 Advanstar Publishing.

--
[Epilog:  There was so much here that didn't fit into a 750 
word America's Network article.  I had to leave out huge 
chunks of St. Arnaud's gigabit Internet story, including 
(a) the huge cost of all the layers of DACSes and MUXes to 
convert between higher OC-x rates and lower cable modem speed,
(b) the fundamentally different traffic characteristics of
Internet traffic (most notably its asymmetry) and how that
further obsoletes the Sonet paradigm, (c) more about attempts 
to match OC-192 framing and 10 Gigabit Ethernet framing, 
(d) a few more of the cost comparison details, and (e) how 
completely some audiences miss the enormity of this amazing 
message.  Fortunately, you can read about most of this is in 
St. Arnaud's white paper at 
http://www.canet2.net/frames/startarcheng.html -- David I]
-------

Quote of note: "I'm tired of hearing about thinking out of 
the box.  Let's GET OUT OF THE BOX."  U.S. FCC Commissioner
Michael Powell, at New Jersey BPU telecom meeting, 
November 6, 1998.
-------
[**snip**]
[for the entire SMART Letter #16, contact isen () isen com]

[to join the SMART list, please send a brief, *personal* 
statement to isen () isen com (put "SMART" in the Subject 
field) saying who you are, what you do, maybe who you work 
for, maybe how you see your work connecting to mine, and 
why you are interested in joining the SMART List.]