TECH: Re: Telephons and DSL

From: Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Date: Thu Mar 22 2001 - 12:37:17 MST


From: "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com>

>> Robert, I don't know where you live, but in my area and I'm
>>pretty sure in the whole U.S., we (the RBOC's) do not currently
>>use IPv6, therefore it is unsupported.

>This was what I thought about a year ago, but I thought it might
>have improved since then.

Disclaimer: My opinions are my own, I do not speak for
SBC/Ameritech or it's partners.

They really haven't decided on the standards yet, plus in a big
organization like ours, we have many thousands of routers and
networks that would have to be updated.

>> The problem with routers is of course routing tables and how to
>> update them (what happens when a route is lost?).

>I think you could handle this by periodic "pinging" and
>maintaining who you are able to connect to.

Indeed thats how it is done, but even on small networks these
updates soon take up a significant portion of the bandwidth, and
timing is always a problem.

And of course voice requires networks with QOS (quality of service)
which the current Internet does not.

>> Who's going to build and maintain the network on which this all
>> runs?

>There are a host of people doing the long distance fiber
>stuff and there are a lot of lines drawn all over the
>streets of Seattle and holes in the ground where they
>are laying fiber, esp. downtown (where as you point out
>you get the business $$). [Its kind of funny walking
>across the street reading the blue line labeled MCI,
>the red line labeled Sprint, etc.] I'm primarily thinking
>of a startup that is or would do this. (As you point out
>there are companies doing some related stuff. I think
>Ricochet is the name of one. I was looking for perhaps some
>more detail on how these companies are currently doing.)
>My point would be that if the TelCo's don't get involved
>with this at some point there may not be any more use
>for the TelCo's. You know its "evolve" or perish if
>the environment changes.

Yep, we know, but in our case we have dozens of different entities
and regulators on our backs. Laying fiber is EASY, it's everything
else after that that's hard. and of course all these companies are
just doing this in downtown areas, no one is laying it out to
residential areas, except very wealthy areas.

A GOOGLE search should yield some names.

>> Self balancing how, because someone else has built in all
>> the very necessary backups to this?

>The backups are built into the protocols and the redundancy
>of the datapaths. What is missing at this point are "fast"
>ways of detecting outages and routing around them.

I didn't phrase this well, and you have a very good grasp of some
of the problems. SONET was specifically designed to handle the
outage/reroute problem and is the best example of this tech.

It's all in the hands of the regulators I'm afraid. If things stand
as they are I see three possible results.

1) As the issue stands the RBOC's have little, no, or even negative
incentive to deploy a fiber network. This could result in
drastically smaller RBOC's offering telephone only. Data will be
left to a hoard of others none of whom will build a network, except
in business areas.

2) If the RBOC's can offer data separate from telephone and without
the telecom act restrictions, they might build a separate data
network.

3) Some bizarre compromise of the above two.

It just pain's me to know we have something so much better planned,
and yet I sit here with my feet cast in regulatory concrete.

Brian

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