Kozel: Single network coming

Atlanta - The future of networking is voice and data running over a single TCP/IP layer, according to Edward Kozel, chief technical officer at Cisco Systems, Inc.

Kozel said the result will be simplification and reduced costs as users move from two separate networks to one.

"We are entering the final phase of utter confusion," Kozel said during a keynote address at NetWorld+Interop this morning.

"The processing power is starting to come in line with demand," Kozel said, adding by the year 2000, network bandwidth will catch up with the ability of servers and other devices to transmit data.

Kozel said vendors and users alike are abandoning the idea that voice and data and multimedia cannot be carried over the same pipe because telephony requires synchronous connections, while TCP/IP nets were set up with asynchronous transfers in mind.

Instead, technologies such as Cisco's Tag Switching can label traffic and have the backbone dynamically discriminate and handle each type differently. This allows for optimization on the network - and remains separate from the application layer, he said.

"We have to understand that this is no longer simply a bit transport problem," Kozel said. "Even as the Web solution is becoming increasingly difficult, how we optimize Web technologies is the key technical challenge."

Kozel stressed the importance of SONET to this convergence because it has "a virtually mature path." He predicted that SONET costs will come down dramatically, letting users set up metropolitan and even campus networks based on SONET - now restricted to carrier-level networks.

Kozel continued that Moore's Law, which holds that the power of chips doubles every 18 months or so, and so means more computing power at reduced costs, can also work in the networking arena - by dramatically reducing the cost per bit of data. Local caching of data requested over a WAN is one example, he said.

But Kozel warned all of this could slow or even come to a halt unless the networking industry addresses the current shortage of engineers and other skilled workers.

He called on other vendors to join Cisco in funding networking programs at schools across the country. "This is not going to be addressed by local and federal governments without companies getting involved," Kozel said.