We were round at the house of my brother-in-law today. They’ve got 3 kids, two around the age of my daughter. A total riot. My daughter disappeared into the playroom at one point to try on some of the boy’s clothes. She hasn’t quite mastered it yet. One leg into the trousers via the main entrance. One up the bottom of the other trouser leg.
I’ve been reading a bit recently about BT’s “21st Century Network”. My, if you thought my daughter was confused, you should try seeing BT put on its Internet robes. The good news: they’re moving to an all-IP network. Yippee! And the bad news? They don’t believe in the Internet, and you’re going to be shephered onto their private, controlled and metered smart IP network. Oh, and two houses and a small shed in Milton Keynes are going to get fiber laid to them.
There are two possible reasons I can see for such a total repudiation of the stupid network. The obvious one is that BT folks can read, and have absorbed the Paradox of the Best Network, and have decided that a stupid network would be too good for the British public, and not good enought for BT’s shareholders. Fairy nuff, I suppose.
The other one — and the one I really fear — is that BT believe that the Internet is such a cesspool of slime that only a private alternative can be decontaminated and made safe for public use. Although my really real fear is not that this is true, but that BT’s entire marketing budget will be switched to portraying the Internet as an unsafe place to let your kids roam at night. (You should get them off the damned computer, send them outside for some healthy fresh air, and let them break into cars and sniff glue like all the other kids, I say.)
Now, BT might be right. The paradox of the paradox of the best network might mean that the abuse overwhelms the use. Probably not going to happen, for many reasons. But not a trivial thing either, and requires a ton of better governance and accountability. We’re working on it.
(Incidentally, this is one reason why a low-latency MAC like Flarion’s is utterly, totally, vital for wireless. That background packet radiation of the Internet must be delivered to the end point if we’re to preserve the end-to-end principle. Yep, every port scan is vital, every probe is loved. And if you’re like Qualcomm’s CDMA 1xRTT network and take 10 seconds to set up a faux-circuit every time, you’re dead.)
(Superincidentally, I muse whether we’ll move to a socks-proxy style architecture for mobile, where your nominated wired packet relay station does any filtering you desire, including protecting your handset from denial of service attacks, and your carrier only relays packets from that one place, and you only listen to contacts from that one source. This highlights that the network edge begins where the paying customer starts, not where the last packet lands.)
Personally, this return to smart-network-but-on-IP looks suspiciously like the biggest destruction of shareholder capital since, oh, the last time the telecom industry undertook the biggest ever destruction of shareholder capital. If I were a BT investor, now would be a great time to flee in the opposite direction, quam celerrime, mea culpa. You’ve been sent a dinner invite in Hamburg for summer of 1943. Don’t think about the taste of the food: the city’s on fire!
Regardless, watching BT stagger around with its fly undone and shirt inside-out is a sight to behold.
By the way, did I ever tell you of my daughter’s special trick? She loves to pillage her mother’s underwear drawer, and put knickers round her neck like Hawaiian lei garlands. Now if only I were a cartoonist and could actually draw Ben Verwaayen …
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