The low-down view

While I was growing up, some of my favorite stories were about people changing roles to gain a different perspective. Recently I experienced my own prince-to-pauper conversion and left the castle towers to rub shoulders with the common folk.

In fact, I did more than rub shoulders. I built LANs and client/server applications and fiddled around with all sorts of wireless and wireline access technologies. I did what many people are doing today: leaving big, inflexible corporate bastions and "dot-comming" into loosely knit, geographically dispersed Internet-based guilds, or intranets.

My guild, or specialty, revolves around the structural change taking place in the communications industry. While many believe this change is about convergence, I believe it is about divergence. While many believe it calls for commoditization, I believe democratization may be the force at work. While many call it a revolution, I see an evolution.

In the end, I believe this change will result in infinite demand being infinitely segmented as the real movement of information, goods and people shifts to a virtual (or network) movement of the same. This means that telecom services, which today represent 5% of the gross domestic product, could well represent 10% within 10 years.

This view is consistent with the hype about the new economy being dished out by my former brethren in their castle towers. They call it the Internet, and they righteously view it as the solution to all evils.

Fortunately, down at street level I am made sanguine by my own daily observations. I see the physical constraints and harsh realities that will affect the creation of the new economy. In other words, it isn't gonna be as easy or profitable as the tower-dwellers believe.

So I offer the following long-term prognostications:

* Today's edge-centric, disparate voice and data networks look uncomfortably similar. They share a common genesis in inefficient government regulation. They will give way to centralized hierarchical networks as access monopolies and duopolies are broken. Witness Cisco's purchase of, and subsequent problems with, ATM packet technology.

* Applications and intelligence, particularly in the data processing and communications world, will become increasingly centralized on the network. My own experience setting up a fast Ethernet home LAN for six computers with high-speed access to the Internet is that hundreds of megabytes of superfluous and contentious information at the edge of the network is inefficient. I would rather buy hardware components, a simple operating system and high-speed access, then download an operating system optimized for my needs on a daily basis. Does this model look like the path Linux is taking us down?

* Vertically integrated, all-things-to-all-people carriers are going through the final throes of extinction to give way to horizontally differentiated intranets focused on protocol layers as defined by my TelStack framework. Currently, none of the financial markets has efficiently modeled the return on capital of this information economy where software and hardware elements are becoming obsolete in days and weeks.

The TelStack model provides a framework to balance the demand side of the networking equation with the supply side. It morphs the regulated world of telephony onto the competitively derived seven-layer OSI protocol stack, in the process defining the physical, transmission, switching, network/service/business management and application layers.

Different protocols and technologies fit easily into the TelStack, and in fact provide a clear understanding of how the pieces fit together. Originally, I perceived the TelStack as a two-dimensional matrix, but I found that infinite applications or services added a third dimension. The result is a 3-D upside-down pyramid whose base expands infinitely upward as the networked economy grows.

The complexity of the pyramid increases geometrically until the infinite demands of the application layer have to be procured, supported and stimulated by all the layers below. Ultimately this structure will provide the most effective matching of demand with supply.

>From the tower, people view a vast, flat world and can only guess at the >growth. Down on the surface, we can see the complexity of layers >supporting the growing base and the deficiency in some of the supports >that could undermine the profitable and even growth of the base.