The Network of the Future: A Network of Networks

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A new century is just beginning and a revolution in communications networking is rising on the horizon it’s a revolution in the market for communications services, the community of service suppliers, and the infrastructures for delivering communications. Scientists at Bell Laboratories, the research and development arm for Lucent Technologies, continue to investigate new opportunities in communications networking by delivering services more varied and sophisticated than ever, to be enjoyed wherever a communicating person may be at any moment.

The revolution is broadly a communications networking revolution, not merely an Internet revolution.

The Internet is a new way for people to get information there will be 8 billion web sites by 2003. The Internet will revolutionize the ways people do business. Workers not in the office will not only dial up email but receive full-bore data connections capable of interactive video over secure links that look and feel just like what they would get on desktops within the enterprise. Web-generated revenues could reach a trillion dollars by the year 2001.

However, it would be a mistake to view the communications networking as being only about the Internet but about wireless and messaging and multimedia communications. Some 130 million email subscribers are sending messages at the rate of 5 million per minute. Voice mail users leave messages at the rate of 35 million per hour. For those two sets of message user, the solution is unified messaging. The capability to store voice and text alike is expected to be serving nearly 10 million people by 2002.

And that merely characterizes growth in high-end voice communications. Ordinary telephony itself is growing rapidly, with 700 million new access lines expected to be installed over the next 15 to 20 years, a number equal to the access lines in place today, which took more than a century to accrue.

The networking revolution extends to wireless communications as well. Every day another 50,000 people sign up for cellular telephone service. They join the 200 million who already subscribe worldwide. Wireless users may number nearly a billion by 2015. And digital wireless techniques will soon make possible broadband connectivity where fiber is not an economic option multimedia communications through the air.

Does the soaring demand threaten to topple networked communications? Fortunately, critical resources for carrying communications are also multiplying by orders of magnitude. Each strand of optical fiber may become a virtual rope, packed with not one but 16, or 80 and soon to be many more channels of laser light differentiated from one another by color. By the technique of wave-division multiplexing, optical networking doubles in capacity from year to year, multiplies in capability by as much as 1,000 times per decade.

The communications service sector is also responding as countries all over the world deregulate. Worldwide, there will be 1,000 new providers of communications services by the year 2001, including Internet service providers wireless companies, local-service providers and long-distance carriers.

Some view the evolving “network of networks” concept narrowly as a collection of data facilities. They observe local area networks held together by equipment called hubs and connected to one another across the wide area by routers. But the networking revolution is about more than hubs and routers. It is about optical networking, next-generation data networking, digital wireless networking, broadband access, silicon, software, network management and services. All of these must work together to deliver future services seamlessly. This is the real-world vision of communications networking.

To a great extent the triumph of the network of networks will occur when data and voice networks interconnect universally and seamlessly, and all network access technologies, such as wireless, become co-equal in ability to deliver any familiar service.

Today the characteristics of voice networks are merging with those of data. Voice networks have been circuit-switched, with facilities dedicated per-connection, reliable through strong management tools including intelligent software, and low in cost. Data networks to date have been packet networks, with self-addressed bundles of bits routing themselves through a shared-facilities network, subject to bottlenecks, requiring complex conversions among data transport protocols, high in theoretical reliability and evolving toward reliability in practice, low in initial cost but expensive to maintain.

Infrastructure now being deployed combines the best of both these forms of networking and promises to make the packet model of communications as effective and reliable in practice as it is promising in capability. As a result the communications infrastructure market is shifting to suppliers with breadth in networking. These are the vendors who supply not only voice, wireless, data and other individual forms of network equipment. They also understand the “spaces” in the network actually the spaces between networked networks where the challenges of seamless inter-networking lie today.

The winning service networks will center around a broadband, optical core network, a true information highway. There will be a variety of access mechanisms to business and residence users , ramps, if you will, both wireline and wireless, to carry voice, video and data on and off the highway. Advanced software platforms will enable enterprises and service providers to create rich new services by means of published, standard application interfaces. Transport equipment on the Internet protocol (IP) model will carry much traffic, as will asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) equipment.

Helping to achieve this is the earlier-than-expected arrival of optical equipment carrying up to 80 channels per fiber. Trillion-bit-per second systems are expected by 2001. Individual services will get their own optical wavelength (or color), and keep it across the network with a minimum of conversion to electrical formats. A range of engineering advances in lasers, fibers and channel management promise a day not far off when an individual desktop claims its own wavelength for an intensive session of communications across the world.

Management of disparate technologies within network infrastructures is another key. Voice and data domains require different network optimization. The data domain itself experiences a technical schism between ATM and IP protocols. A network of networks must overcome the challenges, and today it does. A software and hardware-based network management technology is emerging that achieves multiprotocol (IP and ATM) data transport, yet minimizes protocol conversions in the network core, minimizes cost, and maximizes reliability.

Another critical need is to pass traffic between voice and data networks. Converting voice to packets and vice versa is the least of it, achieving a kind of ham-radio connection via Internet. But the news is good. Networks of fundamentally different character can, as of recently, communicate intentions and enable data communications to be as “intelligent” as voice networks with their many calling features, like 800 services, third-party calls, and multiparty connections.

Rich new services not thought of yet by either voice or data network adherents will become possible. Seamlessly woven networks of networks will not only be reliable but, through ample bandwidth and intelligent software platforms, accommodate new services that are developed rapidly, made available on the grand scale of public networks, and able to grow rapidly with any levels of user demand.

Companies that lead this revolution must know the intricacies and challenges of all types of conventional voice and data networks. They will help enable a variety of service providers, such as utility-system providers of fiber-based communications, to integrate service offers into the network of networks while maintaining high networking reliability that a century of voice calling makes people expect and require.

Ingrid Fields is Lucent Technologies’ Enterprise Networks area vice president overseeing sales of telecommunications solutions for moderate-and large-sized business customers in Southern California.

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