DAMN THE INCUMBENTS. FULL SPEED AHEAD

Filed Wednesday, December 20. 2006

Wake up and smell the fiber. Craving speed and creating the best is very American and we are not behaving like Americans, writes James Carlini.
The American people should be outraged at getting a second-rate solution for something as critical as its network infrastructure. It goes against what average consumers demand in almost every other product and service arena.
Speed is the common measurement that cuts across many products and services as the general metric for assessing whether or not a product is good, bad or world-class.
 
Speed is Good
Altering Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” line from the movie “Wall Street,” “speed is good”. People want speed in everyday processes and should be demanding efficiency rather than bureaucracy in the regulation of the network.
 
Who wants a slower car? Who wants to spend more time on a commuter train going to and from work? Who wants to wait in a grocery checkout lane or in this season’s favorite: the post office? Who wants to wait 10 to 15 seconds for downloading a file if they can get it instantaneously?
What about things you can’t have today?
 
What about downloading a first-run movie in 10 seconds to watch on its opening day? Is that too slow? Make that less than a second. What do most people do when going to a far-away vacation destination? Take a train, a plane with two intermediate stops or a non-stop plane?
 
People take the fastest route. They want to get to their destination as fast as possible. Most people wouldn’t want to spend time waiting or traveling at a slower rate. The same should hold true for their network infrastructure.
 
Go on any trading floor and tell the traders their line will be 250 milliseconds slower than the person next to them for the session and see if you walk away alive. Go to those same traders and say you’re installing a faster network connection for them and they will be 250 milliseconds faster than anyone else on the floor.
 
Technology should take the “wait” out of everything. That’s what people want in everyday life. While there are many reasons we could list, all you have to do is look around you and see what people are doing.
 
Going Against Universal Truths
A long time ago, I came up with four universal network truths for viable organizations. This was long before DSL, the “triple play” and Wi-Fi. Some things are always true and are accepted as the basic framework for any type of viable network:
  1. Networks never get slower. When was the last time you heard someone say they are downgrading connectivity?
  2. Networks never get smaller. You are always adding to networks by adding users through acquisitions, new applications, etc.
  3. Networks never stay the same. Organizations are always adding on or changing network configurations due to acquisitions, mergers, downsizing and other organizational fluctuations.
  4. Networks never work all the time. All networks can fail. You may have 99.999 percent uptime – even 99.9995 percent or maybe even 99.9999 percent – but no one has 100 percent. No one.
While these universal laws of networks are still relevant, we still have many people who are clueless about them. Once you understand them, you realize you’re going to have to spend some money to have the best network infrastructure and you’re not going to tolerate anything that’s inferior.
 
Second best is not acceptable. It shouldn’t be sold in the U.S. as “the next generation of network solutions”. Americans want the best. Trying to sell us something else doesn’t work. Eventually, those companies are found out and paid back by consumers voting with their pocket books.
Need an example? Just check the stock prices of Ford, GM and Toyota. What do you drive?
 
If there was real competition within the network infrastructure area, we would be using the Toyota fiber network or some other quality network with data, video and voice screaming down on gigabit speeds.
 
Why Are We Accepting Second Best?
Today, we should be looking at rolling out fiber to the premise (FTTP) or a wireless equivalent that can provide gigabit capability. Anything in the planning stages at this point should be looking at gigabit if not multi-gigabit speeds.
 
California has had a broadband initiative of “1 gigabit or bust by 2010”. There, everyone is supposed to have 1 gigabit access by 2010. This is a very good objective. Hopefully, that state will attain that goal in the time frame they have designated.
 
Just like “best practices” are a moving target, goals for bandwidth speeds are also a moving target that have to be carefully understood. What target speed should be the national goal? Is California’s 1 gigabit the speed goal? This decision is critical because it would put some pressure on the traditional phone company (AT&T) to get its act together.
 
Current solutions by AT&T – Project Lightspeed or U-verse – fall dismally short of putting America back on top. The top speed offered is 6 Mbps and the future speeds are touted at 25 Mbps to 30 Mbps. There are intelligent industrial campuses that are looking at implementing 40 Gbps speeds today. Project Lightspeed looks more like “Project Speedlite”.
 
With other countries looking at gigabit speeds and universal coverage, our traditional phone companies have tried to put the bureaucratic brakes on innovation and global competition to milk another couple years of profits on copper-based infrastructure that should all be replaced today.
 
What was cutting edge in American network infrastructure is now cutting corners to squeeze another couple years of profits instead of making the investment to leapfrog everyone. You haven’t sold me.
 
Carlinism: Don’t sell me a painted-up stagecoach and tell me it’s NASCAR.

Last modified on 2008-08-28 06:16

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