Buzz roundtable: Convergence, 09/27/99

Convergence

Network World Fusion, 09/27/99

Obviously there's been a lot of buzz about (convergence) for some time now, the idea of supporting voice, data and video over a single IP network. What's your take on the whole status of the convergence movement?

Bradner: It's a religion thing.

Nolle: Convergence is crap.

Bradner: The same people who are telling you that IP is going to solve all your problems are the ones who told you three years ago that ATM was going to solve all your problems and ATM was going to get rid of IP. Now IP is going to get rid of everything. It makes just as much sense.

Nolle: Which is to say no sense.

Bradner: Which is to say no sense at all.

Nolle: The real question with the whole idea of convergence, to the extent that there was any utility to it all, is based on an assumption that in an age when optical networking is bringing about potential for massive declines in unit cost of transport bandwidth, we would nevertheless find it useful to save money by consolidating traffic. Now, it doesn't make any sense to me if bandwidth cost per unit is declining why the value of traffic consolidation is not similarly declining. Then what we would be saying is, if there was any cost associated with migrating to a converged infrastructure, that cost would probably be less and less justified as optical technology improved. And therefore convergence is a dumb idea.

Bradner: That's exactly right, but that won't stop many folks from continuing to talk about it.

Nolle: I agree. Reality has never been particularly useful to the industry. It certainly isn't any fun.

Bradner: A particular example which seems to be way off the wall is converting all of the cell phone industry to IP-based telephony. That seems to be really whacko.

Kobielus: Why is IP telephony or why is IP wireless networking whacko in your opinion?

Bradner: What does it gain you? It requires you to have a network that's significantly more complex and harder to run than the existing telephony network.

Nolle: And it displaces a huge amount of extant technology at the instrument level where the customer sees it and at the infrastructure level. And at the end of the day what you get in terms of service, if you're lucky, is only a little worse than you had already.

Bradner: I think you can get something that's the same or even better in many cases, but the point is you don't gain that much from it. I don't see any particular reason to believe convergence is going to be cheaper. I think it's probably going to be more expensive than quickly amortizing existing equipment. The voice world is hardly growing at all. Particularly if you take away fax and things like 800 calling, [many people now use the Web where they once made toll-free calls]((need to check that – I think that's what he meant.)), the voice market is relatively static and the infrastructure for it is already in place. If you pull some of that fax and 800 stuff off of the existing voice infrastructure, it can last for another 10 years with effectively no increases in investments. So why would you want to throw all that away and spend a lot of money on something else? If you go look at what Qwest and Level 3 are doing, they're actually putting in big phone switches.

Nolle: That's really the irony of the whole convergence debate. People look at convergence as though we had no extant investment in infrastructure. And no matter how you slice the technology and no matter what your technology religion is, buying something new is always more expensive than keeping the thing you've already got, assuming the thing you've already got is serviceable and is providing what the customer wants to get.

Kearns: That's not entirely true.You can always buy something new and save money if it's a good bit more efficient.

Bradner: A good bit more efficient.

Nolle: We've had a real lack of any demonstrable examples of that in public networking as far back as I can remember.

Kobielus: Consumer-based IP telephony seems to be efficient.

Bradner: It's efficient because it's cutting through regulatory crap, it's not efficient because it's a good way to provide the service.

Nolle: It's also very limited in terms of where it's applied. Consumer IP telephony is mostly used, as Scott says, for regulatory arbitrage in international calling.

Bradner: Or in students trying to talk to their friends.

Nolle: In all the surveys we've done and in all the the straw polls we've participated in at conferences, the business users and premium users who account for most of the revenue have always come back and said, basically, "We're not willing to pay the price of moving to an alternative telephony strategy in terms of quality and compatibility with our existing equipment because there's not enough money on the table to make it worth the effort."

More of the roundtable

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Corporate portals
PDAs
E-mail overload
Windows 2000
VPNs
PKI and security
Buzz
Managing the buzz in your enterprise
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