Network evolution: ISS '97 opening session peers into telecom's future

Opinions flew thick around "Global Network Evolution: Convergence or Collision?" the theme of the ISS '97 World Telecommunications Congress in Toronto last week.

When time ran out on the discussion, there was clearly a convergence of opinions that data and voice traffic will likely become less segregated, but many opinions collided regarding how that will happen.

"It is becoming clear [data and voice carriers] will have to live together," said panelist Pekka Tarjanne, secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union.

"Internet and telephone [traffic] use the same basic mix of copper and fiber. Router and switch functions are both carried out by computers, increasingly by the same computers," Tarjanne said.

But the matter of exactly how and when that merger of data and voice will occur prompted lively discussion.

Of the four panelists, Raymond Steele, managing director of U.K. wireless company Multiple Access Communications Ltd., expressed the most radical view of how the change will transpire (see sidebar).

Steele called for changes in wireless networks to accommodate services and predicted a complete change in switching philosophy.

"I believe circuit switching has got to go," Steele said, explaining that packet switching can accommodate data and voice traffic, while the same is not true for circuit switching.

Vinton Cerf, MCI Communications' senior vice president for data architecture and considered by many the father of the modern Internet, described communications' evolution as a three-wave process. First came the computer wave, then came the information wave, and the next wave will be processes.

"I think we'll see a change as companies try to take advantage of their [capital] investments in the Internet," Cerf said.

The panelists debated the possibility of networks evolving to accommodate the need for data services to meet expected consumer demand, but Glenn Jones, chairman and chief executive of Jones Intercable Ltd., offered a metaphysical viewpoint of the expected convergence of networks.

"Convergence really is a kaleidoscope of new electronic tools," Jones said. "[Network] boundaries of all kinds are disappearing. We must reach out and include the help of philosophers and futurists."

Among the panelists at the ISS '97 opening session, Raymond Steele, managing director for Multiple Access Communications Ltd., a wireless company in the United Kingdom, expressed by far the most radical views of how networks will evolve.

Steele not only predicted that packet switching will entirely supersede circuit switching in general networking, but he also painted a bold picture for the future of wireless.

"The services we have now [in wireless] are very poor," Steele said. "If you want to buy a suit, you don't have to pay the shop in advance. With wireless, you must buy a membership to the shop whether you buy the suit or not."

To allow customers to access only the services they want, Steele advocated a move to "soft" telecommunications, a software-dominated environment where customers would carry not just a wireless handset, but a hand-held "software agent."

"What I'm talking about is a computer in your pocket with a radio antenna on it," he said.

To deliver the services, companies will need worldwide "megacapacity networks" that eliminate satellite links and their inherent delays and instead use so-called sky platforms that are suspended from balloons, Steele said.

"We've got to create low-cost, distributed infrastructure," Steele said, "with cheap base stations [and] fiber links--adaptive and reconfigurable--with many databases."