Free will

As fine as it might be to open up the SS7 network and provide alternatives, there is a downside. Having too many options can be just as disconcerting as having too few.

Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce — it's an option. Super mocha café latte — it's an option. Paper or plastic — it's not just an option, it's a moral dilemma.

Never before have there been so many little routines for exercising our free will. We face choices everywhere. Buy a new car and you have to choose between the Capri package or the LS, between the vanity mirrors or the vanity plates. Buy a new home and you'll option yourself to the poor house.

The choices are endless. Options, options, options. And always they come at a price. Only in an economy such as ours — provided it holds up — could one have so many choices, so many alternatives.

Leading this economy is the communications industry, fueled for better or worse by the pretense and practice of competition. The industry's future and mutual success is predicated on the concept of providing alternatives through open competition. Many may argue whether or not this is in fact the case, but hey, get over it.

There are alternatives where there never were before. And you might want to try some of them before they run themselves out of business.

Competitive carriers often decry that their own alternatives are few. They must deal with the local incumbent or go home. They must push at every door and kick in every window.

It's all true. No one said it would be easy. And nowhere has this been more evident than in today's signaling network. Sure, emerging carriers have options. They can choose an alternative provider like Illuminet, McLeodUSA or TSI Telecommunications for signal transfer point connectivity and for access to the various intelligent network databases, but they still have to talk SS7. They still have to play the RBOCs' game.

However, I am no longer convinced this will last forever. At the risk of sounding like ex-Bear Coach Dave Wannstedt, I will go so far as to say I believe the pieces are beginning to fall into place for convergence to actually converge, for closed networks to unlock their gates and for the best of the Internet and telecom networks to coalesce. And it all starts with the signaling network.

There is just enough consensus on protocol standards and interfaces to begin to accomplish things. Naturally it all depends on the economy. If its declivity is brief, carriers will begin to deploy the new generation network technologies in earnest. If the slide continues, I will happily point to that and say “only if.”

In this issue is an article on SS7 alternatives — a vague term that begs clarification. SS7 alternatives provide a fresh approach to unlocking and distributing the intelligence at the core of the SS7 network. Some strive to streamline the process, others to circumvent it. They promote change. They are not all alternatives to SS7. Some make use of SS7 to provide alternatives.

As fine as it might be to open up the SS7 network and provide alternatives, there is a downside. Having too many options can be just as disconcerting as having too few.

Emerging carriers only need to consult the theorem of “Buridan's ass” to know they should really do their homework when chasing between technology alternatives. Buridan (not his ass) was a 14th Century French philosopher who is credited with proposing a moral dilemma associated with the deterministic view of free will. It said the will must always choose the greater good. Buridan's proverbial donkey starved to death while standing between two equally alluring and equidistant bundles of hay because the animal had no rational basis for preferring one bundle over the other.

Hee-haw.

Contact Tim McElligott at tmcelligott@intertec.com