Telepocalypse

OPINION://Over the edge

Having been reading about Session Border Control systems, I've been pondering over what is really meant by "the edge of the network".

The classic end-to-end argument is that a dumber pipe is the better pipe because it is can be repurposed to applications never conceived when it was created. The consequence is that all the application smarts should be "at the edge". This usually implies a single terminating device.

But we're moving to a world where functionality is increasingly spread among multiple devices that co-operate to complete tasks. Is your "TV application" inside your TiVo-style home media server or the smart screen that decodes the video stream? Or in the neighborhood content cache?

We live in a very end-to-end impure environment chez Geddes. We have a NAT router and a caching web proxy server at home. So I don't have an unmediated path from my PC to the Internet. But I don't care, because it is all under my control. The fact that a bit of my network is "smart" doesn't trouble me one bit.

So perhaps the classic end-to-end argument is too techno-centric. The real issue isn't one of dumb pipe vs. smart pipe, and pushing functionality out, but one of control. It's the politics, not the technology, that matters. If I control what's going on, then I don't care how dumb or smart the network is. If the smarts aren't what I need, then I can replace them.

So if the PSTN were to ever evolve (picture: Hades, snowdrifts, river Styx, ice flows), here's what it would have to do to survive. All those switches would need to become open and flexible. They would enable me to run my own agent software. I could use the circuit reservation capabilties to create new functionality that a non-QoS IP network might find harder. I could write better presence management software to deal with wireless devices that go out of range (a classic failure scenario of end-to-end: a disconnected smart device can't do jack). I could create triggers that would operate even when my power is out at home disconnecting my smart home voicemail server.

We already have the technology to do this. Virtual servers, virtual machines, process protection. Stuff IBM and Sun have worked on in the labs for decades. We have the identity technology to know who is running what and where is came from and who to whack if it misbehaves. It's just a question of making it happen. Which will never occur, because telcos believe loss of control is their nemesis, not their savior.