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SMART Letter #25 - August 9,1999
Copyright 1999 by David S. Isenberg
At isen.com we accumulate intellectual capital
the old fashioned way -- we LEARN it.
isen@isen.com -- http://www.isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
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CONTENTS
> BigCo Blues by N.W.B. Request
> Quote of Note: Bob Allen on Internet (1995)
> Network Knowledge from the Edge by David S. Isenberg
> Quote of Note: Jeff Pulver on SIP and AIN
> Smart comments from SMART People, to wit:
A U.S. Federal Employee, Ed K., Zigurd Mednieks,
Pat Kennedy, Craig Harrison, Gary Heaven
> ATM vs. IP -- References (and Comments) from:
David Newman, Andrew Odlyzko, Paul Atkinson,
Kartik Vashisht, Phil Schelinski, Gary Hughes-Fenchel
> The Winners!!!: Invent a Protonym Contest
Thomas Boysden, Douglas R. Johnston, Tom Rabe,
Howard Greenstein, Ozzie Diaz, Kim Allen
> Conferences on my Calendar, Copyright Notice, Administrivia
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BIGCO BLUES - A been-there, done-that report.
by Name Withheld by Request
A SMART Person contributes this up-close personal account
of a company that is not, repeat, is not AT&T -- honest!! (This supports my
hypothesis that fundamentally, all telco culture is the same.) Certain
details have been blurred . . .
"I'm right in the middle of a quintessential 'Nethead
vs. Bellhead' contest . . . My company provides
[a high speed internet service so 'stupid' and
advanced that it is disruptive.] This service has
become successful enough that [Big Incumbent Telco or
BigCo] is buying the company . . .
"The fascinating thing is to watch and listen, while a
very mature, sustaining company tries to assimilate
our very entrepreneurial, disruptive company. The
odds are against them. One striking thing is that
intellectually, [each individual from BigCo can]
describe the challenges very accurately. Senior staf-
fers from [BigCo] know what high speed data, IP
telephony services, and the Telecosm will do to their
homely little [multi] billion dollar . . . business,
and they can cite chapter and verse about the
'big company' mistakes they shouldn't make. And
yet - the behavior of the corporation as a group
appears always to default to the sustaining mentality.
"This occurs almost as 'irony in action'. A group of a
dozen or so managers will come together to form an all
day meeting scheduled weeks in advance on what should
be done about this or that strategic or tactical issue
in our business (the kind of decision we in our
company would ordinarily make after about an hour,
with three or four people in the room). With [BigCo],
most of the people in the room are excess baggage,
and completely uninformed about the issues,
so a lot of the meeting is to summarize facts. Bit by
bit, the large company inhibitions against doing
ANYTHING (primarily fear of being wrong, and
jeopardizing careers, as well as company dogma about
technologies, and not cannibalizing the core) just
freeze the whole meeting into inaction. And yet, when
the managers are each spoken to separately after the
meeting, they individually say things like 'Dammit, we
really need to get moving. We need to just decide on
the best information now and get going, even if we
make some mistakes. Why can't everyone else see that?'
"The will power of the organism as a whole is
dissociated from that of its constituents. . . .
[BigCo] could offer that service in no time flat . . .
When I have discussed this with [BigCo] execs,
they immediately cite all the things this [service],
doesn't do, and use this as an excuse to wait until it's
perfect. They [want] full Quality of Service management,
battery power back-up, 911 access, call waiting, call
forwarding, voice mail, etc. . . . Sound familiar?"
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QUOTE OF NOTE: Bob Allen on the Internet
". . . we have all spent a lot of money in trials and
experiments trying to force the technology into the
minds of the consumers. Until we find applications
that are easy to use, affordable, make people's lives
easier and prove their bottom line, online services are
merely going to be toys. But . . . we are beginning to
get it right, and . . . [they] will be a big part of
people's lives one day." Robert E. Allen, Sept 12, 1995,
Networked Economy Conference, Washington, DC.
Allen was AT&T's Chairman and CEO at the time. I was an AT&T employee in the
audience. I couldn't believe my ears, or my memory, until Sara Watson (then
a conference staffer, now with Emap Media) found the above in the conference
transcript a couple of weeks ago. Thanks, Sara!
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NETWORK KNOWLEDGE FROM THE EDGE
Understanding a network you don't own, don't control
and don't know much about.
By David S. Isenberg
Box: [[(And in the end,) "The amount of inference that
you can make is dependent on the richness and precision
of the measurements you take." Christian Huitema]]
Monitoring the performance of the old, circuit-switched network was easy.
The telco owned the network elements and the routing tables. It knew the
route of every call. If there were network impairments, offending elements
could be detected directly, taken out of service and fixed.
With the Internet, service providers don't necessarily own the network. They
don't know its shape or size. They don't control routing. They can't reach
into the middle to upgrade slow network elements - especially when they
don't own them.
But if services get flaky, customers complain. Better network monitoring
gives service providers an advantage. The network may be stupid; nonetheless
knowledge of it is power.
How do you monitor a network that you don't own, don't control, and don't
even know much about? Christian Huitema, the Chief Scientist of the
Telcordia -- formerly Bellcore -- Internet Architecture Research Laboratory,
is leading the three-year, six-investigator, DARPA-funded Felix project into
its final year of work on the problem.
INTELLIGENCE BY INFERENCE
Felix monitor stations are attached to various points at the edge of the
network. These stations, connected by Internet Protocol (IP), each with a
unique IP address, perform their task via a higher-level protocol written by
the Felix team.
When deployed, each monitor station generates trains of short packets to
each of the others. Every packet's precise transit time is measured. For
each pair of stations, transit times are accumulated. These are used to
discover the topology of the network.
It works like this. Suppose that four monitoring stations, A, B, C and D,
are placed at various locations around the edge of the network. Suppose that
packets one through five travel from A to B in 10 milliseconds, but that
packet six takes 80 milliseconds. Now suppose that six other packets,
launched at the same time, travel from Station A to Station C with a similar
pattern of transit times. Now suppose that a third set of packets travels
from Station A to Station D but shows a very different pattern.
From these data the Felix team infers that packets traveling from A to B
pass through the same sources of delay as those traveling from A to C. Thus,
the route for AB and AC must share common elements. By this logic, they
conclude that the route from A to D, because it has a different pattern of
transit times, shares fewer elements in common with AB or AC.
(At this point I object, voicing my understanding that Internet routing is
dynamic, that it can change packet by packet. Huitema agrees, but says that
observational work by other investigators shows that in practice routing is
usually stable for many minutes, or even hours.)
To discover the shape of the network, the Felix team analyzes the
correlations among the time series of many pairs of monitoring stations.
Huitema compares this approach to a CAT scan. In a CAT scan of the human
body, a series of X-ray "slices" are taken at regular intervals and stored
digitally. Algorithms permit interpolation from slice to slice, so a new
slice through the body -one that has never actually been photographed, can
be constructed.
Huitema says, "The amount of inference that you can make is dependent on the
richness and precision of the measurements you take." Rich measurements
demand robust, scalable analytic techniques. With many stations and many
routes for each station pair, the task rapidly grows complex. Furthermore,
transit times are not normally distributed -- Huitema calls them "heavy
tailed" -- so new mathematical tools must be developed. "It is a hard
problem," he says.
NEW WAYS OF NETWORK MANAGEMENT
The official name of the Felix project, "Independent Monitoring for Network
Survivability," illuminates a big reason for Department of Defense funding -
in the event of attack or other widespread outage (Y2K?), Felix would be
poised to reveal the topology and performance of the remaining network.
The project has other applications, too. For example, it could help
identify optimal routes. It could assist network-engineering efforts by
identifying sources of congestion. It could help the provider of a
distributed service decide which server should serve certain information to
a given client. And it could be used to specify and enforce service level
contracts.
As the Internet has profoundly altered the business models of network
service, so it will irrevocably transform the practice of network
management. The Felix project lays a foundation that doesn't introduce
complication or proprietary technology to current Internet platforms - it
follows the principles that continue to make the Internet great.
Find more on Felix at http://govt.argreenhouse.com/felix.
The article above appeared in the August 1 issue of
America's Network. Copyright 1999 Advanstar Communications.
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QUOTE OF NOTE: Jeff Pulver on SIP & AIN
" . . . SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is gaining
more momentum . . . PBX's, Ethernet phones and virtual
switches are for the first time using the same
communication protocol. The real impact of this
convergence could be the availability of the feature
set envisioned with AIN twenty-plus years ago." Jeff
Pulver in "The Pulver Report", August 9, 1999.
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SMART COMMENTS FROM SMART PEOPLE
A U.S. Federal Employee writes:
"For a variety of reasons the Bellhead drive for
centralized control is a relatively recent phenomena.
It started with AT&T's desire to stop losing toll revenue
due to the prevalence of black boxes and blue boxes which
replicated in-band signaling. Out-of-band signaling
foiled the boxes. Once it was conceived the dreamers
figured out many kinds of wonderful services that could
be offered using the Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN).
I distinctly recall all sorts of wonderful new services
that were going to be offered on AIN 1.0, AIN 2.0, AIN
3.0, etc. That was probably in the 1981 - 1982 time
frame. Today we are operating with AIN version 0.1 after
almost 20 years of development!! That is an order of
magnitude worse than Microsofts many delays in delivering
new operating systems. I have no idea when the Bellheads
will reach AIN version 1.0."
Ed K. writes:
"Comment 1: Careful research (by Clayton Christensen
& others) shows that "disruptive" technologies, once they
prove in, have huge returns that more than make up for
the loses of investing in those that don't make it . . .
[B]ut I don't think that [it] is much consolation to the
Apple Newton people that Palm is so successful today . . .
[T]he first guy jumping off the landing craft on D-Day was
literally on the bleeding edge. That the beachheads were
secured by the end of the day was a small consolation to
that soldier, although no one can deny that the overall
benefits were worth that initial investment.
"Comment 2: No, we should not expect an arms merchant
to have morality. To be an arms merchant to begin with
implies not having morality."
Zigurd Mednieks (Zigurd_Mednieks@msn.com) writes:
"One thing is overlooked in the impact of laptops --
they have an effective plug and play expansion
architecture with PCMCIA. No cables, no errors in
attaching cables. The simple difference in packaging
greatly reduces support costs for laptops."
Pat Kennedy (pat@osisoft.com) writes:
"I thought The Innovators Dilemma was a very good book
. . . one of the key points in each example (disk drives,
hydraulic excavators) is that the disruptive technology
appealed to a different customer . . . with the excavator,
the [established] customer needed a large bucket, but the
ditch diggers needed hydraulic buckets . . . One of the
reasons that the old guard cannot see the new [is that]
not only the innovation [is] different, the entire value
chain is different."
Craig Harrison (caharr7@PacBell.COM) writes:
"If we can put IP directly over glass to the home . . .
doesn't that change the cost model for the 'last mile'?
I would be afraid that a govt. bureaucracy would slow
the process down...but the right spot at the right time
would set a hell of an example for others. Localized
startups could provide regional solutions and
opportunities that take advantage of the 'smarts' on
the edge. Maybe, instead of the last mile, we should
push for the 'glass mile'.
Gary Heaven (gheaven@clear.net.nz) writes:
"I agree with your analysis of a per connection cost
[in SMART Letter #16??? -- David I] especially if we
accept the principle of a demarcation point where the
service provider "gives up responsibility" In homes in
NZ this is on the external wall of the house or at the
last cable terminal. Remember that the US (and New
Zealand) have very high penetrations of copper (either
pairs or coax) per household compared to [e.g., China with
*real*] economies of scale. Solve their problem
(especially with local labour) and we will see a
disruptive technology."
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ATM vs. IP -- REFERENCES (AND COMMENTS):
David Newman (dnewman@data.com) writes:
"You might want to point out that [the argument is]
rather long in the tooth--from 1996. The ATM vs IP
thing was over a while ago, and IP won. ATM also seems
to have lost the more recent IP-over-ATM-over Sonet vs
IP-over-POS debate. I don't know of anyone developing
ATM interfaces at rates above OC-48."
For more on the ATM vs. IP debate, Newman recommends:
1. Steve G. Steinberg's original Wired piece on Netheads and
Bellheads (October 1996) now found at:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.10/atm.html
2. A piece by Fred Baker from the Cell Relay archives that
can be found at http://cell-
relay.indiana.edu/mhonarc/ipatm/1996-Mar/msg00244.html
[In fact, the whole thread entitled "Suggest new protocol
providing QoS" is fascinating -- find it at
http://cell-relay.indiana.edu/mhonarc/ipatm/1996-Mar/maillist.html --
remember to put the whole URL
on one line in the "location" window before sending
your browser out to find these! -- David I]
Andrew Odlyzko (amo@research.att.com) recommends:
Vadim Antonov's "ATM: Another Technological Mirage; or Why
ATM Is Not The Solution," available at
http://www.kotovnik.com/~avg/pluris/ip_vs_atm/
Andrew also mentions that his
"own high-level opinions on the shortcomings of ATM
(at least for the edges of the network) are described
in the Nov. '98 profile in the Australian PC magazine,
at http://www.apcmag.com/profiles/."
Paul Atkinson (paul.atkinson@solect.com) recommends:
"a great article on ATM v. IP:
http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue33/atm.html"
Kartik Vashisht (powerful@gte.net) writes:
"There is one more head, Frame-relay head, that is
also obstinate, also is worshipped by devoted blind
storm troopers."
Kartik continues,
"Reading your paper, a sense of urgency develops and
[I am motivated to make an] earnest effort to avoid
old mistakes."
[Gosh, thanks! *blush* -- David I]
Phil Schelinski (pschelinski@21stcentury.com) writes:
"Before you write that story about the elimination of ATM,
do some market research. See Williams Co. for innovative
networks. Contact Ray Ashton CEO of QICC.COM for his
opinion. Lab and Pilot tests still prove [that] for
Carrier Class Services real QOS still rules. For time
sensitive service its ATM until further notice."
[Will people notice further notice? -- David I]
Gary Hughes-Fenchel (fenchel@lucent.com) reminds us that the below is his
opinion, not Lucent's:
"No need for ATM? The Bell-heads I talk to seem to
think that IP (in its current instantiation) won't
support QoS (Quality of Service). There may be a market
advantage to being able to offer QoS. If you need an
ambulance sent to your house during busy hour on Mother's
Day, the argument goes, you want the message to get
through to 911, and damn the cost. [QoS in IP] requires
additions to the protocol - or at least that everyone pay
attention to all extant fields, which is not currently
the case . . . IP in it's current form is not adequate
for voice -- absent massive over-engineering."
[Here, Gary probably means 'massive over-provisioning.'
To me, QoS *is* over-engineering. -- David I]
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WINNERS: Invent A Protonym Contest
Thomas Boysden (boysden@iname.com) submits:
PROTEST -- the opposite of a contest.
Douglas R. Johnston (drjohnston@att.com) submits:
PROVIRUS -- "anti-antivirus" (that is, software that
scans your computer for anti-virus software and either
removes it or forces it to become a carrier.)
Johnston comments, "I have often wondered if the
anti-virus companies may be secret proponents of
viruses to bolster the need for their products."
Tom Rabe (rabet@kernmedctr.com) submits:
PROGRESS: the opposite of Congress
Howard Greenstein (howardgr@microsoft.com) and
Ozzie Diaz (odiaz@cisco.com) are TIED for:
PROTRACTOR: The opposite of a contractor -- a PROtractor
is actually your advocate in getting an issue solved.
[The winner of this deadlock will be the person who can get *my* contractor
to finish the kitchen -- David I]
Howard Greenstein also offers:
PAA - (Personal Analog Assistant): Person responsible
for handling the scheduling, contacts, research, typing
and faxing needs of an executive. Often portable or
mobile, but rarely handheld due to legal protections.
Kim Allen (kallen@panix.com) submits:
The poor subsist, the rich SUPERSIST.
and
If you're caught pretending, you POSTTEND.
and
Revived inner cities are SUPERURBS.
and
Hindsight is 20/20 -- POSTSCIENCE (cf. prescience).
and
Your PROSCIENCE prompts good deeds (cf. conscience).
and
Polyps are no fun, but a MONOP is more treatable.
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CONFERENCES ON MY CALENDAR
September 27-29, 1999, Lake Tahoe CA. George Gilder's
TELECOSM! Sorry, SOLD OUT! I'm chairing a panel on
The Stupid Network. For more information,
watch http://www.forbes.com/conf/Telecosm99/index.htm
November 4, 1999, New York City. Merrill Lynch Technology
Advisory Board Panel, quite possibly featuring Gordon Bell
(father of the VAX), Phil Neches (founder of database machine
company Teradata), Don Norman (who wrote "Turn Signals are
the Facial Expressions of Automobiles," and other worthwhile
reads), open source spokesman Eric Raymond (I hope! still unconfirmed) (who
wrote the must-read essay "The Cathedral
and the Bazaar"), and several others, no less
distinguished, whose work I don't know as well. I'll
participate too. Save the date. Stay tuned for details.
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permitted for non-commercial purposes, provided that
the two lines below are reproduced with it:
Copyright 1999 by David S. Isenberg
isen@isen.com -- http://www.isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
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Date last modified: 11 August 99