IP: From obscurity to overnight success: After decades in the wings, Internet protocol is shaping up as the transmission method of the future

The sudden explosion of the Internet and private multiservice networks in the last decade of the 20th century is largely defining the 21st century telecommunications network.

It is now obvious that data traffic will comprise the majority of network transmissions well into the future. Recent studies and forecasts indicate that the volume of data traffic will overtake traditional voice traffic no later than 1999, and perhaps before the end of this year.

Mushrooming data traffic has led vendors and service providers to seek new ways to move it more efficiently. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) has increased the volume of traffic that carriers can move across backbones. The advent of OC-48 and OC-192 bit rates has increased the speed. It has also led to new transmission protocols that create and carry the traffic across those media. Frame relay and asynchronous transfer mode have succeeded X.25 in the data protocol evolution, and Ethernet has come to dominate the campus environment.

And now, Internet protocol (IP) is suddenly being cast in new roles, delivering a variety of traffic types and underpinning service offerings. IP's sudden emergence is much like instant stardom: In truth, such overnight successes often have been laboring in obscurity for many years before the big break comes.

Once a disruption, now a threat Carriers are just now realizing that IP is a viable but virtually untapped medium for a variety of WAN data traffic, says Hank Zannini, founder and vice president of business development at Avici Systems. "What's out there works, it just needs to go faster," Zannini says. "The Internet works on TCP/IP, which has won the desktop, so let's just look at making a new switch that makes it go faster."

Those familiar with the Internet and its history are certainly aware of TCP/IP's background. The protocol was devised in the 1960s with the creation of Arpanet, the forerunner of the modern Internet (see time line). But even after three decades, service providers-and therefore vendors-had seen little need to move IP beyond its role as the core technology of the Internet.

Jeff Pulver, IP telephony advocate and president of Pulver.com, refers to the 1995 introduction of the first Internet telephone as a "disruption" that highlighted IP telephony as a threat to traditional equipment and service providers. In the intervening years, developments have mounted, including the development of IP gateways to the public network and the inclusion of SS7 intelligence in IP telephony equipment. Those developments have led traditional carriers to take a fresh look at IP.

"Service providers are starting to use IP voice as an alternative," Pulver says. "Even AT&T is offering IP callback service to Japan."

A convergence of supply and demand is boosting IP's status in the network, says Rob Coltun, a principal at Fore Systems and the Internet Engineering Task Force's routing area director.

"What's happened recently is demand is starting to be there and the speed of the equipment is converging to see that [multiservice IP] is viable," he says. "People are looking at how to do hardware-based [routing] with ATM, frame relay and [multiprotocol label switching]. Traffic is classified as it enters [the IP network], then put on an existing flow, or a new flow is started."

As the midpoint of 1998 approaches, a new product category prepares to burst onto the scene, designed to help service providers make better use of IP. At least four new switch-router companies have introduced their flagship products or will do so in the next few months. Netcore introduced its Everest product at Networld+Interop and will be on hand at Supercomm '98. Avici, Juniper Networks and Nexabit Networks aren't far behind. And established players such as Cisco Systems are beefing up their product lines to keep pace.

The new devices are designed to add functionality and quality of service to IP telephony and bring it closer to ATM and frame relay, as well as the old public network in terms of reliability and quality.

The spark that set off the IP fire has already burned out. Ipsilon grabbed headlines in 1996 when it introduced its IP switching platform. Avici came about as a direct result of the publicity that Ipsilon received two years ago, says Zannini.

"It attracted my attention to the fact that the Internet was growing much faster than I knew," he says.

But Ipsilon's platform never caught on, and Nokia later acquired it. Now called Nokia IP, the company has moved into a new front: developing a platform that includes Internet routing and other applications that will let service providers launch IP-based services. The space that Ipsilon had defined is now so crowded, it made more sense for the company to move in a different direction, says John Carosella, marketing vice president for Nokia IP.

"Everybody's touting that they can move more packets down the wire than the next guy," he says. "For the last six months, we've been focused on differentiation."

But while the company that set the early pace has dropped out of the race, other entrants still are jockeying for position. The rash of development in the wake of Ipsilon's splash has led to a somewhat confusing array of products and terminology, says John Shaw, marketing vice president for Netcore. The term "switching" used to be associated with hardware-intensive functions, while "routing" was associated with software. But the products of the new generation of equipment incorporate routing and switching functions to move IP traffic.

"Anything that handles IP could be called a router or a switch," Shaw says. "It really doesn't matter anymore. The differences [between switching and routing] are so subtle, they've become meaningless."

Nexabit will deliver an OC-48-capable product by August, with OC-192 scheduled to be available by the end of the year, says Gene Wahlberg, sales and marketing vice president for Nexabit. The key for the new generation of switch-router products is to keep pace with line speed growth.

"You need forwarding done in a hardware implementation rather than software," Wahlberg says. "You must have the whole routing diagram in silicon to switch at these [OC-48 and above] line rates."

Routers traditionally have used software for performing the routing functions, but it became evident in 1996 that such architectures wouldn't be able to keep up with the mushrooming traffic growth and the bandwidth to carry it. Networks have been strung together with OC-3 and OC-12 routers, but the traffic demands are becoming too great for those line speeds. With data traffic growing in multiples of five to 12 times annually, carriers are looking for equipment that will not only carry existing traffic but can accommodate higher levels without major overhauls.

While the growth of the Internet has pushed IP telephony to the forefront, Wahlberg says an even greater push is about to come from the next phase of Internet development.

"The Internet today is an area where you terminate your session within the Internet itself. It's like a library in the sky," he says. "It's also built to do e-mail, but not mission-critical commerce and extranet activity. Delays in the router infrastructure keep you from doing that. But as [business] applications become more prevalent, the need [for better switching and routing] becomes more evident."

It's all about scale Developments in another segment of the network equipment industry are also helping drive demand for more robust traffic management equipment. The volume of traffic that can be transmitted over fiber networks is advancing exponentially because of WDM equipment.

"We needed equipment that would scale beyond what Moore's Law is currently scaling at," he says. "We have found a way to build a switch architecture that will scale way beyond Moore's law."

Scalability is the key to Avici's switch-router product and was a flaw in Ipsilon's platform, Zannini believes. The Ipsilon product made the Internet move five times faster but went no higher. "I saw that the opportunity was there for a very fast, scalable system that would not just stop at five times [current speeds] but go to 10,000 times," he says.

Netcore's Shaw says the growth of the Internet and increasing interest in deploying IP services highlight the lack of true carrier-class IP hardware.

"[Service providers] have been building Internet services using enterprise-class products," Shaw says. "Because of the type of equipment, it makes it difficult to build to a big enough scale. It's like building the Empire State Building with regular bricks."

The demand that is highlighting the shortcomings of current IP infrastructures is the result of changes in the way people communicate, especially in the corporate environment.

Intracompany communications helped define a new product demand for Netrix, but the impact will go beyond those networks, says Tony Morris, marketing vice president for Netrix Corp. Netrix, which comes from a background of packetized compressed voice over frame relay, introduced in January its Network Exchange 2210 and Vodex Voice Gateway software, an IP voice solution.

Companies first established time division multiplexing networks to cut voice costs and allocated additional bandwidth to data. But the advent of LANs has reversed that paradigm.

"We understand that the reason that people have IP networks is for data," Morris says. "We can put voice on there, but it shouldn't be at the expense of data."

IP will differentiate itself from frame relay via its universal addressability, he predicts. While frame relay has been primarily used to carry voice in intracompany networks, he says, "IP will be much more of an intercompany technology."

As more companies move more traffic via IP, the public network will experience an increased demand to handle such traffic. Scott Kriens, chairman and CEO of Juniper Networks, says increasing the speed at which such traffic can travel is only half the battle. The new crop of switch routers must allow service providers to control the flow of traffic to prevent network congestion.

Ramping up to terabit and higher speeds is "like going down to the freeway, cutting down the 65 mph speed limit signs and putting up 500 mph signs," Kriens says. "You might try 500 mph when the freeway is deserted and you're alone, but not on Monday morning-unless traffic engineering has been done to make itsafe. From an ISP's point of view, if they can't control the devices and the traffic, the worst thing they could do is make it go faster."

Part of the reason that IP telephony is just now beginning to blossom into a full-service platform is that the Internet boom caught the industry off guard, Kriens says. Vendors are now beginning to deliver equipment that can deliver the performance required to make it feasible.

"[The Internet's growth] has happened much more rapidly than people could possibly have anticipated, and the ability of the industry to respond has been constrained," he says. "People underestimated the size of the problem. There have been projects launched that by the time they were completed, they were not sufficient to handle the problem they were designed to address."

Kriens points to the public network to illustrate the complexity of developing IP networks that may eventually replace the switched network.

"The command and control system for the old public network is hugely complex, but it supports only one type of traffic, it is very slow and it has grown at a rate of only 1% or 2% a year," he says. "The Internet grows at about 7% a week, and it handles multiple types of traffic. The command and control proposition is much more complex than the [public network]."

Despite the enormous complexity of the task, service providers will continue to push development of IP-based networks and service offerings, Pulver says.

Pulver is among those predicting that IP will revolutionize the industry in the last few years of this millennium and have a significant impact well into the next.

"What we're seeing is the conventional wisdom of the telco has shifted. [IP telephony] is not a toy; it's a reality," he says. It will grow what is now an $800 billion industry to more than $1 trillion much faster than it took the industry to grow to $800 billion."

This time line traces the growth of the Internet from its inception in 1962 to 1996, the year that Ipsilon introduced its Internet protocol switch. While the Internet and IP traffic continue to grow at phenomenal rates, these points in the Internet's growth trace the path that brought the Internet and IP traffic to the forefront of telecommunications.

1962 The Rand Corp. begins research into robust, distributed communication networks for military command and control.

1965 Arpa sponsors research into a "cooperative network of time-sharing computers."

1967 Delegates at a symposium for the Association for Computing Machinery in Gatlinburg, Tenn., discuss the first plans for the Arpanet.

1969 Researchers at four U.S. campuses create the first hosts of the Arpanet, connecting Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.

1971 The Arpanet grows to 23 hosts connecting universities and government research centers around the country.

1972 The InterNetworking Working Group becomes the first of several standards-setting entities to govern the growing network. Vinton Cerf is elected the first chairman of the INWG and later becomes known as the "Father of the Internet."

1973 The Arpanet goes international with connections to University College in London and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway.

1974-1981 The general public gets its first vague hint of how networked computers can be used in daily life as the commercial version of the Arapnet goes on-line. The Arpanet starts to move away from its military/research roots.

1974 Bolt, Beranek & Newman opens Telenet, the first commercial version of the Arpanet.

1976 Queen Elizabeth goes on-line with the first royal e-mail message.

1979 Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, two grad students at Duke University, and Steve Bellovin at the University of North Carolina establish the first Usenet newsgroups. Users from all over the world join these discussion groups to talk about the Net, politics, religion and thousands of other subjects.

1981 Arpanet has 213 hosts. A new host is added approximately once every 20 days.

1982 The term "Internet" is used for the first time.

1984 William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in his novel "Neuromancer." The number of Internet hosts exceeds 1000.

1986 Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland creates the first "Freenet" for the Society for Public Access Computing.

1987 The number of Internet hosts exceeds 10,000.

1988 The Computer Emergency Response Team is formed to address security concerns raised by the Worm.

1989 System administrator turned author Clifford Stoll catches a group of cyberspies and writes the bestseller "The Cuckoo's Egg." The number of Internet hosts exceeds 100,000.

1990 A happy victim of its own unplanned, unexpected success, the Arpanet is decommissioned, leaving only the vast network-of-networks called the Internet. The number of hosts exceeds 300,000.

1991 Traffic on the NSF backbone network exceeds 1 trillion bytes a month.

1992 The first audio and video broadcasts take place over a portion of the Internet known as the "M-Bone." More than 1million hosts are part of the Internet.

1993 Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web browser, becomes available. Traffic on the Internet expands at a 341,634% annual growth rate.

1994 The Rolling Stones broadcast the Voodoo Lounge tour over the M-Bone. Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark form Netscape Communications Corp. Pizza Hut accepts orders for a mushroom, pepperoni pizza with extra cheese over the Net. Japan's Prime Minister goes on-line at www.kantei.go.jp. Backbone traffic exceeds 10 trillion bytes a month.

1995 NSFNET reverts back to a research project, leaving the Internet in commercial hands. The Web now comprises the bulk of Internet traffic. The Vatican launches www.vatican.va. James Gosling and a team of programmers at Sun Microsystems release an Internet programming language called Java, which radically alters the way applications and information can be retrieved, displayed and used over the Internet.

1996 Users in almost 150 countries around the world are now connected to the Internet. The number of computer hosts approaches 10 million.