Picks and Pans

I sometimes wonder if the real issue of the information age isn't
right-of-way and the ability to dig a trench to lay fiber cable.
Someone recently told me that the current limiting factor in the
growth of the Internet is the ability of the manufacturers to make
multi-mode fiber cable. I have this weird vision where all of the train
tracks are replaced with four foot trenches filled with fiber cables.
If this happens, there will be a lot of bandwidth available.

If there does end up being a lot of "dark fiber" for sale, many folks
may just rent "st-to-st connector" physical links and run SONET. Who
needs a common carrier?

With tons of low cost (not free, but low cost - like water) bandwidth
available won't the cost transfer from transport to content? We don't
seem to mind giving the UPS man $3 to deliver our $24 book in three
days. Content always seemed to be the important part to me but the
Internet seems to have it all backwards with free content and expensive
transport. In my opinion that should invert in the future.

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I remember the "PicturePhone"... I was going to buy one as soon as they
where available. Something went wrong, however, and along with those
thousands of Popular Science covers it never made it to market.

I've been using the MBONE for a few years now. It's a cool experiment
which is not quite ready for prime time. I think it will be at some
point, perhaps soon. There's still some technology issues and many
routing and policy issues to be solved but meanwhile the applications
keep progressing.

The first application as audio. Next came video. I recently watched
Vint Cerf give a talk from Japan as I sat in my office in Boston. It
was great - I could understand everything and even view his graphs.
I enjoyed the talk and almost forgot the technology which brought it to
me (this is a good sign).

Now that sound cards and video capture cards are cheap (a reasonable
video capture card is now $99) I would think that video conferencing
over the Internet is going to increase. I ran into "cu-seeme" the
other day. It seems popular in many circles (including, unfortunately
people who like to sell sex). Mitch Kapor once said that it was
pornography which made the VCR take off. No doubt chat+video
conferencing will make the MBONE grow. Personally I'm happy not to
have to board an air plane.

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It's interesting to me that people who know better often confuse basic
routing (which I'll call next-hop-reachability) with policy. Most of
todays routing systems are only concerned with next-hop-reachability.
They don't address policy at all. To me policy looks like "you go in
the slow lane because you're not paying as much as the guy who goes in
the fast lane".

Most of the routing policy discussions I've seen recently seem to have
gotten side tracked on some form of tag-switching. The tag-switching
seems like a way to prop up slow Ethernet switches and dumb ATM
switches instead of addressing the real policy issue.

I think ISP's will (or do) want to charge different rates for different
levels of service. This means policy should determine what path the
packets take, not reachability. I don't think the policy has to be very
complex, but it has to tie together the policy mechanism at a router
port (like bandwidth limiting and fair-share) with the end-to-end path
(like you take the oc-3 and the other guy gets the oc-12).

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