Telepocalypse

An ugly picture in a gold frame

Having listened to the IMS: Walled In or Open? session, I think the take-away is that different people have utterly, radically, and incompatible views of the role and purpose of the network operator. You have to reverse-engineer the worldview framing of each speaker to have a hope of understanding what they are trying to say.

At the other end of spectrum from KPN was Mark Logan of BT, who declared the "Internet model" as being an unsuccessful one ecomically. That's a very suppler-centric view of the world. Of course, the roads don't generate much profit either, and we aren't metering the turds as they flow down the sewers and billing based on how much curry you ate. But the purpose of such common infrastructure is to enable the rest of commerce and society to operate. I guess the "muni scare" has jolted KPN into the new reality that the public (and an information-driven society) aren't going to be held hostage to access bottlenecks. Fortunately for BT, they're structurally well placed to deliver abundance too, without worrying about how to tax the value of every bit flowing over the network.

Perhaps I need to volunteer to moderate one of these sessions some day. The important questions are:

• How does your proposed network architecture support or contradict the "end-to-end" model of the Internet?
• How does cross-subsidy between connectivity and service occur (if at all)?
• How does your application enable functionality that can't otherwise be delievered in an end-to-end model? (This is the real "bull**** test".)
• How does your architecture differentiate itself -- from the user's perspective -- in terms of the non-functional aspects of availability, performance, security, etc.? Does the QoS in the network make any actual difference to anyone?
• What are the advantages you see in closure/walls in terms of keeping out unwanted behaviour and abuse? Are such problems solvable using edge-based approaches (e.g. how we filter spam in our email clients).
• How does your architecture relate to technology change at the edge (CPU/memory/storage/battery, DRM, trusted computing, etc.)

Until then, we're going to get far too many Powerpoint slides with boxes of IMS servers glued together, and not enough clear insight into the issues.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:36 AM

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