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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
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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
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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.
-------
Y2K: LEADING INDICATORS FAVOR "OFFICIAL FUTURE" SCENARIO
Many weeks ago, Doug Carmichael, in his observant online
newsletter "Y2K Week" wrote "It is important to be as interested
in information that disconfirms our bias as supports it. This is
a system, friends. Watch the tendency of emotions to lead
perceptions without further questioning. Not a good sign on
either side. We need to learn to weigh evidence, not shoot
half the messengers."
Well, suppose, just suppose, that the preponderance of
evidence coming in happened to support the Isolated Failures,
Social Coherence scenario. As a reminder, here are my four
scenarios in a space defined by the degree of interlinking
of technological failures and by the degree of social coherence
around millennial events:
Isolated
Technological
Failures
|
|
OFFICIAL FUTURE | WHIFF OF SMOKE
|
|
Social ____________________|_________________ Social
Coherence | Incoherence
|
HUMAN SPIRIT | APOCALYPSE 2000
|
|
Strongly
Interlinked
Technological
Failures
I have been monitoring leading indicators from two key events,
(1) the introduction of the European Currency Unit, the Euro,
which demanded revamping of a huge messy legacy of interlinked
financial systems, and (2) the arrival of January 1, 1999,
during which systems that must look a year ahead would be
exposed to the mistaken math of trying to subtract from "00"
to compute an interval. Y2K watchers have been telling us
that both of these events will presage the advent of Y2K
itself, and serve as valuable leading indicators.
Peter deJager, one of the first visible Y2K consultants,
and one of the most articulate, appeared before the European
Commission about a year ago to plead with them to delay the
introduction of the Euro until after the onset of the
two-thousands. By all accounts, though, the Euro arrived
quite smoothely.
January 1, 1999 arrived with few glitches and no disasters.
Some taxi meters fluttered, Swedish immigration authorities
couldn't issue last-minute travel documents, and movie
tickets by phone were unavailable in some cities. The most
serious report that I saw was that the computers that tracked
ships in Hong Kong Harbour shut down, but captains conned
their vessels under the old system of see-and-avoid, to no
detriment. In fact, I am aware of not a single instance
in which failures were interlinked, in which one failure
caused or amplified another.
On the social coherence front, while there are reports of
people beginning to worry about "stocking up," there are
few signs of disintegrating social institutions. (More
accurately, none of the many, many signs of disintegrating
social institutions are attributable to Y2K!) There was
no detectable effect of January 1, 1999 on stock markets.
Indeed, most of the Y2K action on the social front seems to
be in the direction of "community preparedness" -- a decidedly
cohesive trend!
In total, the evidence now coming in seems to favor isolated
failures and social cohesion -- the Official Future.
Now, let me hasten to remind that the Titanic did, indeed,
sail on a 99.999% iceberg-free ocean -- thousands of miles
of ice-free ocean were not a sufficient leading indicator of
its demise. Unseen disaster might well lie ahead, and
there is no way to certain knowledge. Infrastructure failures
might well be more tightly coupled to other systems, and these
may come due on dates yet to be encountered.
Furthermore, many organizations are working like hell to get
ready, and many of these will not be fully prepared in time.
And many more are still unaware, and this is still a cause for
concern.
From the belly of big businesses we hear rumblings of inept
bungling, slipped schedules, malfeasant management and farcical
fixes. But Korporate Kulcha *always* seemed to me from the
inside to lurch drunkenly between disaster and absurdity.
Any apparent productivity seemed serendipitous. (If you
don't believe me, consider where Scott Adams gets his
material.) I'm beginning to think that this looseness
might actually be beneficial in the face of Y2K -- the
absence of tight coupling inside organizations might prevent
one system's glitch from being another one's poison. Companies
are always coping with internal failures.
Considering our own emotions. When we join in the efforts to
prepare for Y2K, we cannot help but buy in -- I have seen in my
own psyche that when other people's genuine concerns become a
legitimate source of my identification, prestige, and
recognition, it is harder for me to see disconfirming evidence.
And when I have worked hard to get somebody to see the validity
of more extreme Y2K scenarios, it is harder for me to admit that
there is still validity in the less extreme ones. Social
psychologist Leon Festinger, in his 1956 book "When Prophesy
Fails," showed how even the most unambiguous in-your-face evidence
can be ignored when belief is supported by practise and community.
One beauty of the scenario approach is that it supports the
holding of several simultaneous and mutually exclusive hypotheses.
Instead of "right" and "wrong" (and who wants to be wrong,
even to himself?) the scenario thinker considers "this scenario"
and "that scenario." So far, all four of the Y2K scenarios that
I formulated almost two years ago remain. So far events have
not eliminated any of them. Today's evidence seems to favor
the Official Future -- could it be that the arrival of Year
2000 will be relatively uneventful? Let's keep open minds,
and keep watching, even as we work. -- David I
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CONFERENCES ON MY CALENDAR
+ Solutions 99! -- Feb 9, 1999, Denton TX: Sponsored by University
of North Texas, . See http://www.cas.unt.edu/solutions99
or contact Mitch Land <mland@unt.edu>.
+ CLEC Reliability -- February 10, 1999, Atlanta GA, 7:45 - 9:00 AM.
Westin Peachtree Hotel, Atlanta GA. Sponsored by America's
Network. Your Im-Moderator will, once again, attempt to PRO-be
and PRO-voke. Free if you register: 800-854-3112 x446 or
http://www.americasnetwork.com/nr_live/register.cfm
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE:
Redistribution of this document, or any part of it, is
permitted for non-commercial purposes, provided that
the two lines below are reproduced with it:
Copyright 1998 by David S. Isenberg
isen@isen.com -- http://www.isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
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Date last modified: 18 April 99