Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

Lately, I’ve been feeling the need to post some stories from my youth (if you ask my wife, she’d insist that I never left it).

Anyhow, I mentioned in an earlier post (”You just covered your eyes and went with it…”) that I helped my dad in his body shop behind our house when I was a kid. My sister and I grew up not knowing for sure just what car we’d be riding in next whenever the family went out, so it was fairly natural that I learned to handle a car at a pretty young age. I was about 8 or so when my dad taught me to drive a 1950 three speed, column-shift Chrysler. I was fairly tall and so reaching the pedals wasn’t too much of a stretch (groan if you must).

So, one Saturday afternoon my dad threw me the keys to one of the cars that he owned (a 1960’s vintage Mustang) and told me to move it out of the way of my mom’s side of the garage. I couldn’t have been more than about 9 or maybe 10 years old and I was in a hurry. I slapped the keys in the ignition and proceeded to turn ‘em. It was a standard-shift… Notice that I didn’t mention pushing in the clutch first?

The car not only lurched forward, but it actually somehow started. Don’t ask me how, but trust me it did (you’d have to guess that the neutral switch wasn’t functioning, huh?). The lurch led the front of the Mustang to end up just in front of my mom’s car…after first passing (not cleanly) through the garage door. Somehow I had the presence of mind to jam on the brake and kill the ignition in time to prevent actually hitting my mother’s Oldsmobile…barely. If the two cars were separated by 6 inches, it was a lot.

Of course, the garage door was smashed up pretty badly and my dad was more than just a little surprised, since he’d been standing there watching the whole thing. I did a Road Runner “scram-in-a-cloud-of-dust” act and ended up in the safety of the space beneath my bed. When my mother found me a bit later, she says that I was praying out loud that my dad wouldn’t be mad and punish me. Personally, I don’t remember that part but given my tender youth and quite possibly hysterical amnesia, I’ll go with what she says.

In the end, my mother was mad at my dad and my dad was mad at himself, but no one was mad at me. I guess they kinda figured that perhaps someone my age shouldn’t have been entrusted with quite that much responsibility. Not sure. Either way, I didn’t end up in trouble and my parents were cool.

When I finally came out of hiding and went out to survey the damage, I remember pretty clearly my father piecing the garage door back together like some kind of puzzle and also his bending the track back into some semblance of its original form. He was a body man after all…

Ultimately, he got it back together ok and I did a little less driving until I was a bit older. But that poor garage door not only wasn’t ever quite the same, it suffered further indignities later on. I’ll reserve that story for a future post.

My grandfather was highly regarded for many things: his intellect, his physical strength, his patience, etc. What he was not so well regarded for was his skill behind the wheel of a car.

When I was a kid, I helped my dad run a body shop out of the garage behind our house, and I remember a number of times having to help him repair my grampa’s vehicles. When you’d ask my granddad why he ran the stop sign or what made him swing into the side of some other car, you’d very likely get an answer like “I didn’t feel like stopping”, or “I didn’t think I hit him that hard”, or perhaps “It’s only a scratch”. He banged up more cars than Mr. Magoo.

So one evening when he was getting on in years, grampa, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I went to the mall in my home town. It was summer and we left the stores about the time the sun was beginning to set. I was busy reading the manual of some doo-dad that I had just purchased, from the passenger’s side, whilst my bride-to-be sat in the back; grampa driving.

As you might guess, I didn’t see it coming.

As I said, I was sitting next to him reading when the car started juggling about, followed very quickly thereafter by a huge bang, a scraping sound, another bang, and another couple of severe pitches. I thought my teeth were gonna come out of my mouth. Naturally I looked up to see what in heaven’s name was happening. It turns out that in the shadows of dusk, my grandfather had driven down a hillside that joined two parking lots at two different elevations. We exited the mall parking lot into the grass of a small hillside, only to arrive at the other lot, first slamming over the edge of the pavement and then rolling over a parking barrier.

I said something to the effect of “Grampa, you just drove down the hill!”. His only response was “Oh.”. I swear that was it. No surprise. No emotion. No further discussion….just “Oh.” By that time my girlfriend and I were laughing so hard that I had to turn my head away to try not to embarrass my grandfather. We were nearly in hysterics and by the time we arrived back at his house, my whole body ached. It was a serious struggle for us to hold it in…the result being that it was probably the closest I’ve ever come to losing bladder control.

Once we finally got home I found out that my future bride had seen it coming and had decided *not* to say anything! All she could do was watch it happen and hold on.

He was a man of many talents and great patience and a lot of what I’ve become comes from him, but a good driver my granddad was not… I miss him a lot.

Move over Mr. Magoo.

So, SuperComm 2005 has officially come to a close. In a way it’s kind of sad, since this is the last one.

For the last 18 or so years, SuperComm was the collaboration of USTA (U.S. Telecom Association) and TIA (Telecommunications, Industry Association) and held in a few places, including Chicago and Atlanta. The two organizations have decided to go their own ways over differing views of the direction the show should be headed in general.

As a result, there will now be two shows, one put on by TIA and the other hosted by USTA. TIA will continue to use Chicago and will be run at about the same time next year, while USTA will be hosting its new show in Las Vegas. It should be interesting how this shakes out for vendors that are used to showing at SuperComm. It was the biggie of the year for Telecom vendors and now that it’s being split up, one wonders how different equipment and service providers will divide their efforts…if they do. It used to be that vendors would use SuperComm as *the* show for introducing new products and services and just being there was practically an implicit “must do”. Now, folks will need to decide if their budgets will support two shows, or if in fact one or the other is more targeted towards the markets they serve. I don’t know what my company plans to do. It’ll be interesting.

It goes without repeating that the focus of this year’s show was IP everywhere. Specifically how voice, video and data can be efficiently implemented in the telecomm vendors’ space. It’s seen as a battle against the cable MSO’s, but I really wonder:

> It seems that the Telco’s are in an excellent position to capitalize on the wireless infrastructure, as they’ve done so well to date. One kind of wonders why they feel the burning need to have the video side too…

> The cable folk on the other hand have long had the video side of things handled really well and have been continually improving their networks. Why would they feel the desire to take voice business from the Telco market?

It almost seems to me that these guys want to play in the wrong sandbox. Mind you, I’m not against competition in principal and I suppose that it helps to drive technology. But, you have to wonder if the end user really makes out at the end of the day. Either way, it’s good for me and my industry and God knows I’ll try to make the best products for our target as I can.

It was a good show. I enjoyed the classes and I think that it was worthwhile attending. Oddly though, I always feel like I’m in another world during these things, what with all the shiny new tech and glitter and fanfare. In the end, I miss my wife and home and reality begins looking really good after about 3 days. I’ll be happy to be back.

Now it’s time to apply what we learned.

I’ve found it kind of interesting that for the last several years, “Carrier Class Ethernet” has been a tag line for various products. The notion behind that phrase is that traditional LAN-based Ethernet doesn’t have the reliability and quality of service (QoS) that other transports like ATM, SONET, SDH, etc. have always had. All very true.

So, various vendors and industry consortia have been trying to get it right. Standards have emerged that are intended to address the gap and to make it possible for Ethernet to be the true transport for the world’s IP and other traffic. MPLS was developed, for example, to address a few needs. One was the need to make it possible to establish a known route through a network, between various end-points. Another reason was to allow equipment to be able to make switching decisions very rapidly, doing the least amount of frame disassembly and inspection as possible.

All that is to say that Ethernet has had kind of a rough road becoming the primary delivery vehicle throughout a Carrier’s network. SuperComm this year has seemed to focus more heavily than ever on IP-based services (voice, video, data, etc. - see the prior post), with a tacit belief that all this will eventually be carried by good old Ethernet.

Here’s some interesting information (based on various vendor’s opinions):

1. There needs to be better QoS features within Ethernet. Vendors then need to make consistent use of them so that end-to-end quality can be assured.

2. Ethernet is quite complex to set up and run when it lives within the core of a large Metro- or Wide- area network. Don’t presume that it’s somehow vastly easier than current technologies.

3. While ATM is assuredly on the decline, last year more ATM gear shipped than ever before. Vendors have de-emphasized development of ATM gear in favor of Ethernet, but these things take time for adoption, once it starts.

4. To achieve the kinds of bandwidth and bandwidth density that the market feels will be necessary, a lot of the existing SONET/SDH infrastructure may not be adequate. If you believe that a consumer will need 50 Mbps, that seems very true. Thus, carriers are pushing fiber directly to xDSL DSLAMs at Gig-E and 10Gig-E line rates. That’s expensive and time consuming.

5. It’s not clear to me whether Ethernet in the core is really any cheaper for the carriers or the consumers directly. I think that various vendors are in the same predicament. Time will shake a lot of that out, but at the moment it could well be mainly customer perception, rather than reality, that shapes the desire for “All Ethernet, All the Time”.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print and I have to get ready for another day at the show.

One thing is very clear: The so-called “triple play” is at the top of the telephony providers’ list of ” things to do”.

Not that this is some kind of news-flash, but there is certainly more evidence at the SuperComm show this year that it’s the current hot-ticket than I’ve seen previously.

That’s what they agree on. What’s perhaps more interesting is what they don’t. For example, one provider claims that 20 Mbps will serve the needs of the market for the next 5 years. Another vendor believes that’s a pipe dream and that in fact, consumers would be using 100 Mbps if it was available today. Still others claim that the only true answer to the bandwidth problem is to run fiber directly to the customer premises. The counter-claim is that one can achieve the same results by parking fiber at the curb, within the last 500 feet of the customer.

One thing is clear to me: There will be no single solution in the coming years that addresses all of the projected needs for bandwidth and associated content. It’s in this blend of technologies that a number of opportunities lie. Moreover, the types of services that will become possible once those kinds of data rates are achieved make for yet more opportunities for those creative enough and gutsy enough to pursue ‘em.

Areas and technologies to watch:

1. Beware the impact of service providers who “selectively manage” their bandwidth. That is, if you buy your pipe from provider “x”, watch out for how they manage the traffic for some service that is provided by another service vendor. If the pipe vendor also offers that service, you may not get the performance you expect. Anti-competitive? You tell me.

2. Mobile content. Look for companies to begin working the notion of “portable data” in the sense that they will offer servers (in your home or on the net somewhere) that know your preferences regarding movies, music, email and other content and will make that content available to you regardless of where you are. The implications for the mobile networking folks is obvious.

3. “Narrowcast” video will begin to find new homes once mobile high-speed networks truly become ubiquitous. Keep a close eye on the cellular providers and technologies like WiMAX to see where they’re headed. It’s clear that your data will become location independent. It’ll be a great time to be a podcaster and video-caster.

4. In-home network delivery systems are beginning to mature. Technologies like “media over cable”, power-line networks, phone line networking, etc. are beginning to take their place in the consumer premise.

It’s looking to me like the opportunities in the telecom market are returning. Just watch whats’s happening in the data, video and voice marketplace to get a small taste of the changes that now beginning to occur.

I’ll be in Chicago at the annual SuperComm show. So, I’ll be posting from there related to what I’m learning as I go. Let us hope for an instructive and useful time…

A co-worker and I will be attending seminar tracks, rather than the usual floor-trolling and booth duty, so our days will be pretty much consumed by that.

With any luck, I’ll get to visit some of the sights while I’m there. We’ll keep you up to date.