[e2e] Re: Cannara's views - ATM

[John Day]

At 13:27 -0400 4/17/01, David P. Reed wrote:
>At 12:21 PM 4/17/01 -0400, Craig Partridge wrote:
>>And one strong reason is unbundling.  If the goal is (a) to make it
>>easy to track individual "wires" or "subcribers" and (b) do it in a way
>>that doesn't force you to open up your management subsystem to others,
>>ATM is very attractive.
>
>The function is important, I agree, and ATM hardware was an 
>off-the-shelf solution you can kludge to perform it (though why 
>frame relay wasn't good enough is beyond me - maybe all those 
>companies with ATM switches needed some market after the original 
>one died?) So all those wonderful "features" in ATM turn out to be 
>useless, it's just a way to provision a path for packets through the 
>local access provider to some ISP's POP.  And why not throw PPPoET 
>on top of it just to make it look like a dialup circuit so we don't 
>give the users the idea that "always on" is possible?
>
>Maybe the "next ATM" (aka mandated telco industry standard) entering 
>the chute will adopt some version of the hourglass model, rather 
>than the typical "kitchen sink" or "soup to nuts" model typified by 
>ISDN, then ATM, and now 3GPP and Bluetooth.  Sure would save on 
>industrywide NRE and ex-post-facto kludgery.

They most definitely won't.  Why do you think the PTTs have fought 
the hourglass model since X.25?  The primary implication of the 
hourglass model is that the network is always a commodity.  Making 
money in a commodity business is hard work and the margins are small. 
They want the network to be as varied and complex as possible, so it 
can provide all sorts of wonderful services.  The last thing they 
want is the hourglass model.  This is the same reason that cisco is 
arguing against the hourglass model.  Well okay, maybe not arguing 
against it but more advocating the opposite?  They are finding it 
hard to make money on a commodity especially with the competition 
they are now getting.  They are starting sound an awful lot like a 
phone company.

But in their defense we are not providing the big ideas to go forward.

Take care,
John