Musings on a weekend…
There are a bunch of people who have made a career out of calling the Internet a stupid network1 – to distinguish it from the Intelligent Networks of traditional telecom service providers. We are told that ‘Stupid’ is the new good – Intelligent is evil.
I’m not sure the model fits. Thinking about the evolution of the network, with tiers for business, PVNs, managed services, deep packet inspection, prioritization, gatekeeper fees, etc. Is that really a stupid network?
Increasingly, it seems that IP networks are becoming application-aware. And conversely, some applications are now needing to consider more of the network characteristics, their variations and their limitations.
Why? In part, it may be because the communist ideal hasn’t worked. Certain applications appear to have human like behaviour: they hog as much bandwidth as they can without consideration for other applications or other users.
Hence the need to apply a little control, a little discipline. I have written about ‘Irrelevant Networks‘ where I wrote:
Customers will challenge communications providers seeking excellence in customer support, excellence in network performance reporting, excellence in guaranteed quality access transport services, with measured availability and well-managed throughput and interconnectivity to multiple major network backbones and interchange points.
If another user or application wants to break through the traffic jam of mediocrity, and indeed, the user is willing to pay a premium to do so, network providers will be happy to accommodate them. Perhaps this puts another spin on the Shaw – Vonage file.
The intelligence of the network may have migrated to the edge, but there still seems to be smarts in the network. The new architecture lays the foundation for access network providers to custom design access to match user needs. It might explain why network providers are looking at charging differential fees to tune the service to match the user expectations for service quality.
That sounds like a reasonable business practice and maybe not so ‘Stupid’ afterall.
1 Look at David Isenberg’s The Rise of The Stupid Network for the root of the terminology.