Rise of the Stupid Network
Why the Intelligent Network was
once a good idea,
but isn't anymore. One telephone company
nerd's
odd perspective on the changing value
proposition
by
David Isenberg - isen@isen.com - http://www.isen.com/
INTRODUCTION:
OBSOLETE ASSUMPTIONS & ENDURING MENTAL
MODELS
Design-by-assumption works as long as assumptions hold. Assumptions
are shortcuts to useful efficiencies, provided they are not violated.
The classic telephone company value proposition, embodied in today's
telephone network, holds:
- that expensive, scarce infrastructure can be shared to offer
premium priced services,
- that talk - the human voice - generates most of the traffic,
- that circuit-switched calls are the "communications
technologies" that matter, and
- that the telephone company is in control of its network.
Telephone companies still behave as if these assumptions hold
despite:
- up to several thousand-fold declines in key infrastructure costs
over the last two decades,
- a 20 year double-digit annual growth rate in the volume of data
traffic, so that the volume of data traffic is now overtaking the
(also growing, but more slowly) volume of voice traffic,
- the many different data types that now travel over the telephone
network (despite the fact that the network is not optimized for all
these data types),
- the many different types of "communications technologies," from
television to Ethernet, that are not part of telephone network
architecture, and
- the Internet, which, because it makes the details of network
operation irrelevant, is shifting control to the end user.
The Intelligent Network is a straight-line extension of the
four assumptions above - scarcity, voice, circuit switching, and
control. Its primary design impetus was not customer service. Rather,
the Intelligent Network was a telephone company attempt to engineer
vendor independence, more automatic operation, and some "intelligent"
new services into existing network architecture. However, even as it
rolls out and matures, the Intelligent Network is being superseded by
a Stupid Network,
- with nothing but dumb transport in the middle, and intelligent
user-controlled endpoints,
- whose design is guided by plenty, not scarcity,
- where transport is guided by the needs of the data, not the
design assumptions of the network.
The Stupid Network is not all here yet. It is in its infancy. It
needs to get stronger and, well, a bit more coordinated.
Some telephone company people realize that things are changing, and
must change. But they are hemmed in by conscious, deliberate, long
established telephone company practices. Many are also hobbled by less
conscious telephone company mental models of "communications,"
"technology," and "customer needs." While these people may realize
that the old ways are becoming obsolete, they live in a world
conditioned by an encompassing, arcane legacy that only remembers
"rational," incremental change.
(Note: here "telephone company" refers to large companies whose
main business is to provide circuit switched voice calling service. In
the United States, most of these are the heirs of the Bell System
legacy - but Sprint, MCI, GTE, SNET, and others might also try on this
shoe, and if it fits...)
COMPUTERS AS SCARCE RESOURCES
It used to be more expensive to complete telephone calls than it is
today. The operator-completed call gave way to call completion by
electro-mechanical switch. Then, in the late 70s, the era of computer
controlled electronic switching made placing calls even cheaper and
more reliable.
In those days, computers, including those that controlled
switching, were still considered expensive, scarce resources. When I
worked in the nascent electronic toy industry in 1979, a single
insight that eliminated six transistors paid my way. And the same
factor - the need to save two expensive bytes of memory - laid the
basis in this era for the Year 2000 Problem (stay tuned to the
eleventh hour news for more on THIS story!).
Now computer circuits are thousands of times cheaper. Moore's Law
is what we call the ongoing improvement in computing cost and power.
But in the 70s it was not generally known to be a `law' - to most
telecommunications engineers (and to humanity in general), it has
become the most game-changing wild card played in recent times.
Telephone networks have been designed for optimal use of scarce
resources. The local exchange in your city, which handles the last
four digits of your telephone number, theoretically could handle up to
10,000 telephones, e.g., with numbers 510-547-0000, 0001, 0002, et
cetera through 510-547-9999. But the switching office is not designed
to handle 10,000 simultaneous calls. It is designed to handle far
fewer, maybe one tenth of that, based on the assumption that even in
the busiest time of the day, only a fraction of its telephones will be
active at any one time.
The network works as long as engineering assumptions (e.g., the
length of a call, the number of call attempts, etc.) do not change.
But let the assumptions change episodically (e.g., Rolling Stones
tickets go on sale), or structurally (calls to Internet service
providers last several times longer than voice calls), and the network
hits its design limits - completing a call becomes a matter of try,
try again.
What if network design were based on another assumption - that
computation and bandwidth were cheap and plentiful?
DOING "INTELLIGENT" THINGS WITH PHONE CALLS
Once the telephone companies began doing digital switching, the
idea that you could do "intelligent" things with calls was not far
behind. The concept of network control was extended to let various
centralized resources - digital switches, databases (Service Control
Points) and signal processing systems (Intelligent Peripherals) -
communicate among each other by extending the telephone network's
control protocol (SS7).
As noted above, the main force motivating the Intelligent Network
was a telephone company attempt at "vendor independence" so telephone
companies could get better deals from their suppliers. Thus,
Intelligent Network specs were meant to encourage vendors to design
their equipment to work in a multi-vendor environment - to
interoperate. As a side benefit, almost an afterthought, some of the
newly specified equipment could also interoperate with the business
systems of certain customers - but only via limited, cautiously
designed interfaces. Virtually all of these services center around
call completion, automation, and billing. This, in a nutshell, is the
concept marketed as the Intelligent Network. Some Intelligent Network
service examples include:
- Routing calls to different numbers than the one that the caller
originally dialed (this is the basis of e.g., 800 service).
- Giving caller choices before the call is completed ("push one
for domestic reservations," etc.).
- Saying, "Calling Card, Collect, Third-Party, or Operator" to
control payment options.
- Verifying that the calling card number is valid in "real time."
- Supplying calling party numbers directly to customers for
database lookup (which is why I must verify from my home phone that
I got my Citibank card in the mail).
Expensive computers, intertwined in central network operations, do
this. Belief becomes reality. But wait! The telephone companies are
now losing design hegemony - the news that "The Internet is here!" is
beginning to penetrate the telephone company inner sanctum.
MEETING CUSTOMER NEEDS
The astute reader might by now suspect that the main beneficiaries
of the Intelligent Network are the telephone companies themselves.
Nevertheless, telephone companies propound a "philosophy" that the
Intelligent Network makes it easy to introduce new services and new
technologies, and to meet new customer needs.
New customer needs, when they are detected, filter into the
telephone company slowly. Some needs, the ones with big, obvious,
immediate payoffs, get attention from decision makers, who then
request a business case, which must then get approved. The next step
is the development plan, followed by the Operations, Administration,
Maintenance, and Provisioning Plans. Then if all goes well, the
telephone company might begin the process of implementation. This can
take years, or even decades (witness ISDN).
If you hate hanging on hold, you are part of a huge latent market -
do you know anybody who doesn't? Yet, telephone companies have yet to
use Intelligent Network capabilities to effectively ameliorate this
problem. Now, suppose Internet Telephony gets as good as telephone
company telephony (see below), and some enterprising independent
programmer wants to make a product that solves the problem of being on
hold. They would simply write an end-user application and sell it from
their web site. If it works, and people like it, they will sell lots
of it. If not, they might try again. But they don't have to go through
any long, bureaucratic economic justification, business planning, and
technical development processes - they just do it. Internet Telephony,
because the Internet Protocol works at the level that user software
manages the session, takes the telephone company out of the value
equation.
THE INTERNET DIS-INTERMEDIATES THE TELEPHONE NETWORK
The Internet breaks the telephone company model by passing control
to the end user. It does this by taking the underlying network details
out of the picture.
Let's look at how this works in the case of voice. To the telephone
company, there is one main way of transmitting voice - sampled in 8
bit bytes, 8000 times a second, for an aggregate rate of 64 kbit/s.
The entire telephone network is designed around this rate. But if you
want to send voice on the Internet, you can encode it at any rate you
want, and send it at any rate up to the one that the slowest
underlying network link supports. The recipient must have the right
decoder running in her intelligent terminal, too.
The very name, Internet, denotes that it is designed to network
networks. You can use Internet Protocol on an Ethernet to communicate
with an X.25 network, an FDDI network, or a modem - lower layer
protocols are submerged, made irrelevant. So if you are on an (e.g.,
10Mbit/s) Ethernet, and your endpoint application wants to send better
quality 256 kbit/s voice, no problem. You can't do that with the
telephone network.
Or, with a different application (on the same endpoint and network)
you can send six different interwoven 10 kbit/s voice streams to six
different destinations at the same time. And you don't have to tell
your Stupid Network provider anything about it, or pay a premium to
install anything special. The network provider becomes virtually
irrelevant - the user controls the relevant capabilities.
TRUE VOICE, FALSE START
I contrast the flexibility of a Stupid Network with my experience
as a member of AT&T's True Voice technical team. AT&T True
Voice was a valiant attempt to improve circuit switched voice quality
as much as possible in the context of current network architecture. If
we had not been constrained by network architecture, the easiest way
would have been to increase the sampling rate or change the coding
algorithm. But to actually do this, we would have had to change every
piece of the telephone network except the wires. So we had to work
within the designed 64 kbit/s data rate.
An astute AT&T perceptual psychophysicist (and a friend of
mine) determined that voice quality could be substantially improved by
boosting the bass part of the signal, that part of the audio spectrum
between 100 and 300 cycles per second. But as we set out to implement
this conceptually simple improvement, we kept running into the problem
that there were too many places in the network that had built in
"intelligent" assumptions about the voice signal - echo cancellers,
conference bridges, voice messaging systems, etc. - and too many
devices that depended on these acoustic assumptions for their correct
operation - modems, fax machines, and a surprising number of strange
devices with proprietary analog protocols. After about two years of
intense effort, we made a noticeable difference, one that most
listeners preferred (if asked explicitly), but it was not as large as
it could have been. There was too much "intelligence" intertwined with
the basic transport.
The True Voice experience led me to see the advantages of a network
- a Stupid Network - that would let you stuff bits in one end and get
them out the other without getting tangled up in cobwebs of legacy
assumptions. Want a different voice quality? With a Stupid Network,
you'd get a different program, install it in your intelligent end user
device and run it.
A NETWORK ENGINEERED FOR USE
There is no longer first-order economic justification for a
telephone company to engineer and control scarce, expensive, network
resources - the basic conditions no longer obtain. The age of
plentiful computing is here. I have a multi-color, three dimensional
screen saver that uses the entire capacity of my 200 MHz Pentium. The
designers of the Intelligent Network never imagined such "wasteful"
use of processing "intelligence." The age of plentiful bandwidth is
just around the corner, as several families of technologies (fiber,
satellite, cable modems, xDSL, LMDS, and low power TV, to name just
six) line up to break the local bandwidth bottleneck, and as the
capacity of backbone fiber has risen from 2 to 6 to 10, 20 and 40
Gbit/s over just the last few years.
The age of centralized control is ending too, with the rise of the
next generation of Internet - and especially the appearance of
circuit-like Internet mechanisms, such as those in the latest version
of Internet Protocol (IPv6), designed to tame delay and improve
real-time two-way Internet voice.
JUST DELIVER THE BITS, STUPID
A new network "philosophy and architecture," is replacing the
vision of an Intelligent Network. The vision is one in which the
public communications network would be engineered for "always-on" use,
not intermittence and scarcity. It would be engineered for
intelligence at the end-user's device, not in the network. And the
network would be engineered simply to "Deliver the Bits, Stupid," not
for fancy network routing or "smart" number translation.
Fundamentally, it would be a Stupid Network.
In the Stupid Network, the data would tell the network where it
needs to go. (In contrast, in a circuit network, the network tells the
data where to go.) In a Stupid Network, the data on it would be the
boss.
Instead of fancy "intelligent" network routing translation, in a
Stupid Network, intelligent end-user devices would be connected to one
or more high speed access networks - always listening for relevant
information, for data addressed to their owner. Sometimes a
"communication" might be a few bits, perhaps a short, pager-type
message. Other times, it might be longer, like email. In the event of
the need for two-way voice communication, an initial message might
state the identity of the "caller," and/or inquire of the whereabouts
of the owner. The intelligent end-user device could apply its
knowledge of where its "owner" was, and who the caller was. Then, if
it were programmed to do so, it could launch a message to its owner,
telling of the call, the caller's identity, location, and any other
information. It could also forward as much information as
practical.
End user devices would be free to behave flexibly because, in the
Stupid Network the data is boss, bits are essentially free, and there
is no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data
type.
IDIOT SAVANT BEHAVIORS FOR DIFFERENT DATA TYPES
In the current telephone network, voice is the assumed data type,
unless specially ordered, high cost services are ordered. But in the
Stupid Network, because the data is the boss, it can tell the network,
in real time, what kind of service it needs. And the Stupid Network
would have a small repertoire of idiot-savant behaviors to treat
different data types appropriately. If the data identified itself as
financial data, the Stupid Network would deliver it accurately, no
matter how many milliseconds of delay the error checking would take.
If the data were two-way voice or video, the Stupid Network would
provide low delay, even at the price of an occasional flipped bit. If
the data were entertainment audio or video, the Stupid Network would
provide wider bandwidth, but would not necessarily give low delay or
absolute accuracy. And if there were a need for unique transmission
characteristics, the data would tell the Stupid Network in more detail
how to treat it, and the Stupid Network would do what it was told.
The Stupid Network would let you send mixed data types at will -
limited only by the knowledge and imagination of the application
programmer community. One way voice messages, multi-way voice
conferences, two-way video, email, documents, audio and/or video
entertainment, whatever, could be mixed and interspersed at will,
within and between sessions. You would not have to ask your Stupid
Network provider for any special network modifications - its only
function would be to, "Deliver the Bits, Stupid."
One thing about the Stupid Network is clear - the physical elements
that comprise the network would be neither expensive nor scarce. There
would be little profit margin in shipping dumb bits. There would be
lots of high value Business Ideas supported by the Stupid Network,
above and beyond transport.
LEADING INDICATORS
A rudimentary form of the Stupid Network - the Internet - is here
today. The telephone companies are beginning to realize this. Fearing
erosion of their control and, more importantly, their revenue stream,
they have been quick to call for the banning of Internet Telephony,
quick to call for the federal imposition of charges on Internet
access, and slow to implement widely available, reasonably priced
broadband services. This creates a chicken and egg problem - while the
hungry wait for dinner and breakfast.
A powerful leading indicator of the Stupid Network will arrive when
entrepreneurs who have no vested interest in maintaining telephone
company assumptions begin to offer profitable, affordable, widely
available data services. Watch Metricom's Ricochet modem service, an
early entry in this market. Will entrepreneurial broadband service
follow? There are several early efforts, for example, Sky Station
International, which plans to launch self-propelled balloon-based
transcievers over major cities to deliver personal 1.5 Mbit/s service.
Meanwhile, we will see how advances in Internet Technology (such as
IPv6 and the Internet II initiative of leading universities) evolve -
here the ability of the Internet to offer low delay services, such as
two-way voice, is the key indicator.
To counter these threats, the telephone companies are now speeding
deployment of Intelligent Network services, much like sailing
merchants responded to the threat of steam by inventing faster sailing
ships in the mid 1800s. The beneficiaries of this accelerated
Intelligent Network deployment are big businesses - who can offer
cheaper help-desk type services with lower human labor costs.
Nevertheless, despite this current Intelligent Network buy-in, if big
business finds that it is better served by the Stupid Network and
premises based intelligence, it will not hesitate to switch.
The Telecom Act of 1996 and the World Trade Organization telecom
agreement of 1997 can be seen as attempts to preserve oligopolistic
hegemony of the telephone companies. The thrust of both is to allow
big companies to band together to create a marketplace dominated by a
few large players in place of government control. Will there be
unintended consequences of these agreements? Count on it! Will they
hasten or impede the advent of the Stupid Network? Hmmm.
THE STUPID NETWORK'S NEW VALUE PROPOSITION
The shift from scarcity to plenty is often the harbinger of new
value propositions. For example, as computer power got cheaper and
cheaper in the 1980s, there was much talk of a shift in value from
hardware to software, but it was not easy to see how the shift would
unfold. In fact, it appears that only one person (Bill Gates)
understood it fully. The changes that now portend the Stupid Network
are likely to shift the telecommunications value proposition from
"network services" to something else. If I knew what it was, I would
not be wasting my time writing these words.
Given that disclaimer, I have three brief observations:
-
It is rare that a market is completely killed by the next
generation of technology. Neither TV nor the VCR killed the movies.
Neither the minicomputer (alas, remember them?) nor the PC killed
the Mainframe. We still have ships and railroads, though their
markets are both diminished and changed by the car and airplane. The
"paperless office" exists - but mine is cluttered with books, memos
and magazines that are printed on paper. So it is likely that the
Stupid Network and the Intelligent Network will exist side by side
for some time, or even share merged definitions, functions, and
value. It is also likely that "deliver the bits" companies will
exist in a Stupid Network world, but given much lower profit
margins, they will not look much like telephone companies.
-
Telephone companies themselves could cannibalize their own
product. Smarter companies often field new products that replace
current profitable product.
-
Sony does this several times a year - it tries to learn from
its own mistakes faster than its competition, fielding new
products that improve on its old before such improvements become
obvious to their foe.
-
Boeing does it - the 757 and 767 cut into the top of its 727
market and the bottom of its 747 market with fuel efficient, and
crew efficient new designs - we can only hope that Boeing does not
become complacent now that it is has beat out its strongest
competitors.
-
Intel does it - having been the first to articulate Moore's
Law, it now drives it with a new, more powerful chip every 18
months or so, long before the old chip is obsolete - it realizes
that if it stops, there are other chip makers that would be glad
to take leadership of that market.
Telephone companies could do it too, but it is unlikely as long
as their senior managers prefer to talk with lawyers, regulators,
consultants and financiers more than with experts in their own
employ.
-
Telephone companies could reinvent a place for themselves as
purveyors of new values propositions brought by the Stupid Network.
They will have to, because their old value proposition will erode as
the Stupid Network grows. In a "deliver the bits" world, so much
information, and so many courses of action, will be available, that
there will be a great need for known, trusted authorities.
Businesses with brand reputation and staying power will be
guarantors of transactions, holders of critical information,
organizers and filters of information, and even voices of reason,
leadership, and "objectivity." (Of course, they will need to HAVE
reason, leadership, and objectivity to do this.) There will be other
roles for big companies in the world of the Stupid Network, and
"forgetting organizations," who are able to abandon old models when
new ways no longer support old assumptions, will find
them.
THE CHOICE BETWEEN LIVING AND DYING
Former Shell Group Planning Head, Arie deGeus, in his master work,
"The Living Company" (Harvard, Boston, 1997), examined thousands of
companies to try to discover what it takes to adapt to changing
conditions. He found that the life expectancy of the average company
was only 40 years - this means that telephone company culture is in
advanced old age. De Geus also studied 27 companies that had been able
to survive over 100 years. He concluded that managing for longevity -
to maximize the chances that a company will adapt to changes in the
business climate - is very different than managing for profit. For
example, in the former, employees are part of a larger, cohesive
whole, a work community. In the latter, employees are "resources" to
be deployed or downsized as business dictates. As the Stupid Network
arrives, as the business idea shifts from scarce physical
infrastructure to something more knowledge based, company culture will
need to adapt to the truth that, "Nobody knows as much as all of
us."
Whatever we discover to be the new Stupid Network value
proposition, my working hypothesis is that it will be based on
intelligent end user devices, intelligent customers, employees whose
intelligence is valued as a corporate asset, and companies that can
learn.