I've been reading over dinner my most recent copy of the cerebrally invigorating VON Magazine. Its tagline is "Voice on the Net". It's clearly the best of the bunch in terms of tracking the disintegration and reformation of what was once upon known as the telephony industry.
Anyhow, what strikes me is that there are only two basic stories that ever seem to appear.
The Type A story lists some visionary who early on decided that IP was going to win the networking war over the evil and deranged forces of ATM and frame relay. And wow, isn't this IP stuff just the most splendid way of building a smart network. It all plumbs together so well. We're off into the nirvana of a Next Generation Voice Network. Even better, we've set up a money pump to drain the PSTN revenue pool and divert some of that lucre into our new all-IP world. Invest in us! We're the future!
The Type B story is normally relegated to one of the usual suspects' opinion columns. Whilst there may be some passing focus on the arbitrage opportunities of the writhing carcass of traditional voice, that's not the main issue. The Type B story is where the functionality has truly dispersed to the edges of the network. The uprising of the edge against the center is complete.
I often see a confusion in my own work between "packet-based" and "architected for the stupid network". I see architectures and products based on the belief that deploying the technology of the future automatically associates you with the successful business models of the future. Sorry, no banana.
The Type A/Type B is a bit like the difference between those who merely went on the IP jihad, versus those who actually became martyrs.
I'll leave you to decide whether that's an apt metaphor or not.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:40 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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