Network World columnists and newsletter
authors share soulful opinions on some of the network topics
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Network World,
09/11/00
Converge
Convergence, where do we stand?
Taylor: A lot of people have the idea that convergence is something new. But we actually had a fully converged network until about five years ago. The only problem was it was converged over the traditional voice infrastructure. And then we had a divergence, if you will, of the two networks into the traditional voice network and the new broadband data network. So what we're looking at now is trying to move the traditional voice network stuff off onto the new network. But it's not going to be an evolutionary network because you have some people who say, 'Well, gee, you're not thinking of enough forward-thinking applications here.' And others who say, 'Well, gee, I'm not sure anything but standard voice from the telephone company with 64K bit/sec PCM is ever going to work.' So a lot of times, depending on your perspective, it's going to take a while and we're going to see a lot more divergence of the appliances and variety of the applications before we start seeing everything coming together in one huge network.
Gibbs: Sure, and if you look at these prototype convergence applications, like NetMeeting, they're OK, but not great. They're just a hybrid of videoconferencing and data conferencing. Even high-end systems are clumsy. The problem is, there's not a killer convergence application. I have my doubts about whether there ever will be one.
McClimans: The point is, convergence comes in two flavors. There's convergence of applications, which brings about blended voice, data and video, and there's convergence from a networking perspective. Five years ago we had a converged network, that's true, but we didn't necessarily have the converged applications.
Gibbs: The question is, does convergence have any big wide world applicability, or do we just have a nice set of services that we feel very smug about within the enterprise? A lot of IT managers are struggling to figure out what really matters. They're asking, 'If I do something internally, will it operate over the infrastructure and will it work with some other company or just to some part of my own company?' Serious convergence, when all services come in to one pipe, any application that has converged capability will fit down that pipe and make sense at the other end - well, that's five years out.
McClimans: That's five years out from a mass-application perspective.
Kearns: Convergence only makes sense when you have sufficient bandwidth that all of your data needs are met and you now have excess bandwidth to do something with, so you've got to have optical networking.
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