* Technology maturity leads to automation
In the nearly seven years that we have coauthored this newsletter, there has been a striking change in the topics covered. It goes without saying that we didn’t imagine back in May 1998 that a former Baby Bell would today be acquiring AT&T, which, by the way, ran a darned healthy frame relay business. Funny how frame relay services are now considered “legacy services.”
In the early year(s), when we focused on frame relay, we spent a considerable amount of time talking about issues such as whether a given service provider and/or related piece of equipment took appropriate action with Forward Explicit Congestion Notification (FECN) and Backwards Explicit Congestion Notification (BECN) bits. It was assumed that all enterprise networking professionals had a good idea of what frame relay and ATM headers looked like and that these details contributed to running an efficient WAN (which they did).
Today, you’ll seldom see this degree of detail in enterprise-oriented WAN service discussions. The main reason is that the technology, services and related products have advanced to a point that this level of background knowledge is usually not required for having a robust WAN.
The fundamental shift is that with the maturing of our industry, we have moved from the experimental phase to the production phase. Rather than assuming that a new product/service will be fraught with snafus and that you’ll be on the bleeding edge if you implement it, we’ve reached a plateau of stability.
Now, rather than dissecting problems on a bit-by-bit and byte-by-byte basis, we have tools that automate most troubleshooting. In fact, service providers often bundle these tools into the network service. The upshot is that we’re able to concentrate more on applications than on merely getting a service or product up and running.
