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It might be big, but it will
There is a myth in telecommunications companies today – partly promoted by the newly integrated IT guys – that the most economical way forward for networks is for the whole network to evolve into a “big dumb network”. This “big dumb network” concept means that there is an IP transport cloud in the network picture and everything else resides on the periphery of this cloud. The theory is that this cloud can have sufficient capacity thrown at it to keep all traffic flowing without congestion or problems. Well, just as there never is a free lunch, there will never be a big dumb network – at least not unless there are big dumb operators. Any network has costs and maintenance requirements. Networks need performance statistics to know which parts are working and which parts need attention. Traffic planning and data are needed to justify investments. Measurable quality parameters are needed to support service level agreements. These things are not possible with dumb networks. It’s time for us to see things for what they are. Networks must support business requirements. IP networks were never designed to support commercial commitments, so we should stop saying we’ll move everything to a big dumb network. Many experts say it will work if we have mechanisms to distinguish real-time traffic from other traffic and give it priority. This might help a little, but it is still going to fail when there is a high load of real-time traffic with the same priority level. The lower priority traffic will also have to be delivered in a reasonable time so delaying it to give voice, for example, priority can only be a very short-term solution. Other solutions involve stacking protocols upon protocols (diffserve, RSVP, etc.) in an attempt to make a best effort technology act like reserved capacity connection network. Routing will be used to make throughput more reliable and support reciprocal traffic handling agreements. Traffic recording will be used to verify billing. We’ll soon be doing all the network management functions that we currently perform for switched networks. So why do we think we can take the intelligence out of the network? A critical step for the immediate introduction of NGN services will be an open discussion on how much intelligence will actually be in the network – a big clever network – and where it should be located. Then, how this intelligence can be used to seamlessly support issues like NGN roaming, consistent inter-domain SIP handling and (inter-domain) QoS must be considered. These are time critical issues, as purchasing decisions for NGN equipment are now under way. A major re-think of how to use and manage IP networks and protocols is long overdue. Current enthusiasm for IP networks exceeds the ability of these networks to deliver large-scale high quality reliable services. This exercise must be performed if large-scale high cost errors are to be avoided. We want to move the mass-market voice telephony to IP networks as this will allow us to open up the rich multimedia service market, but we want to do it right. So, beware of anyone saying a big dumb network is the way forward – they probably don’t have experience of real world network provision and management. Clever operators will implement clever networks. Please send us your comments on this article. |
