And the winner is...IP

The architecture question still occupies the telecom industry. What technology will be able to accommodate the exponential growth of voice and data traffic-and manage it reliably?

When BT and AT&T recently announced their global venture, they suggested that the debate is over. Internet protocol has won, and no network can be an island. The carriers plan to combine their international networks, traffic and business products to support services such as electronic commerce, global call centers and Internet-based solutions to support companies and executives on the move.

These applications will be supported by a common network architecture. Based on IP technology, the new platform will initially carry voice and data at 200 Gb/s.

The two companies also agreed to invest $1 billion, split equally, in U.S. businesses involved in high technology and emerging communications markets.

IP will be for global telecommunications what Windows is for PCs.

The backing for this conclusion can be found in two key trends: Customer demands for services are increasingly complex, and the technology has improved dramatically to keep pace.

In a December 1997 Yankee Group survey, telecom managers most frequently cited global reach as their top priority. They demand services that ignore geography, support e-business as it becomes mission-critical and, most important, integrate voice and data services across whole enterprises. For the manager in the U.S., it means enabling a style of work that makes New Delhi as easy to work with as New York.

In a 1998 BT survey of more than 1000 top-level executives at leading companies around the world, more than 90% indicated that telecom likely will become more important in supporting relationships with customers during the next five years.

The technology to support the network that AT&T and BT envision is still being developed, but it is hardly a candidate for "vaporware." Rapid improvements in WAN speed and performance, the stunning growth of the Internet and the widespread availability of broadband services point the way toward a network interconnected to the Internet and providing robust end-to-end managed service.

AT&T has developed an iteration of the open standard IP network. It is in trials at AT&T and in conjunction with several leading universities. It is playing a key role in the Internet2 effort.

BT has begun deploying the infrastructure to carry the IP network.

BT and its family of alliances have developed a Pan-European network to meet the explosive growth in the Internet and demands for bandwidth-hungry, high-speed data services.

The network will have points of presence in 200 cities linking more than 25,000 kilometers of fiber, capable of supporting asynchronous transfer mode and IP services. It is scheduled to start operations at the start of 1999, subject to European Union approval.

For all its promise, the IP network will need to support other types of services as well, such as ATM, for customers that have developed applications using that standard. BT and AT&T have ensured that the IP network will also carry ATM traffic. It would be as if Windows were originally developed to be able to run Macintosh software.

At the heart of the network will be the application layer.

Using this platform, a telecom manager at an oil company could develop specialized applications tailored to its unique business needs. A fire on a rig in the South China Sea could be dealt with by bringing together the best experts within the company, be they in Alaska, Azerbaijan or Austin, Texas. With a few keystrokes, the telecom manager could make bandwidth available for the experts to quickly receive voice, video and data to manage the situation in real time.

For the rest of the industry, the implications are enormous. As the world's leading multinational corporations continue to demand services of ever-increasing flexibility and sophistication, the only way telecom carriers can be leaders and stay leaders is to deploy systems that allow for growth. An open IP standard will be able to support a huge range of customer-to-customer, network provider-to-customer and network provider-to-network provider relationships.