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.
Do NAS vendors ever actually use their equipment? My guess is no. I'd love to know if the CEO of 3Com and US Robotics actually use ISDN from home and call in to their office using 28.8 modems. They're probably too busy. My sense is that few people at Shiva actually dial in from home. I'm sure the folks at Ascend don't use their products (because if they did they'd notice all the bugs and the fact that their boxes reboot all the time).
Most people don't realize it but email can be routed just like network packets. If one publishes their email address widely it doesn't make sense to have to change it when you move your office. That's where email routing comes in.
I would guess that large organizations with thousands of people find this a nightmare. It's also something not addressed by mail systems such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus notes. This e-mail routing is really a layer above (or below, depending on your vantage point). It's between the final work-group email server and the router/firewall.
I often wonder why the largest ISP's don't using out-of-band signalling for routing information. The dynamics which routing protocols create are fine for small networks but can create real havoc in a large nationwide network.
Why not calculate all the routes in one place? These days when "next hop shortest path / reachability" style routing is no longer correct, we need to have a central place to apply policy. The interesting thing about policy is that is has little to no place for dynamic rerouting. Policy is a force for rigidity.
It sure seems like the people working on tag switching are more interested in keeping their low-capacity switches and routers alive a little longer than in implementing policy. What the world needs is policy because policy equals differentiated billing rates. This looks like a train to me.
So why *did* we just toss out all bridges in favor of routers just to put bridges (switches) back in?
Is switching mostly hype?
I don't really think switching is all hype, but it does seem like everyone on the planet is making a layer 2 switch. And most are rather feature poor.