The devil, they say, is in the details. The difference between motion and progress, they say, is a sense of goal or destination. Well, we have a couple of examples in the news that demonstrates the truth of these statements.
We’re hearing more and more about a plan by FCC Chairman Genachowski that would use some reclaimed spectrum to create a “super-WiFi” network that could span the country and compete with wireless services. Obviously, OTT players like this idea a lot, and obviously the nework operators don’t like it at all. The obvious question is whether this is a good idea, but while the question is obvious the answer is a lot more complicated.
First, it’s my view that Genachowski hasn’t fully shed his VC past; he tends to favor positions on communications issues that are good for the Internet/OTT community and less good for the network operators. That position has its risks when we consider that network operators are already reducing capital budgets on infrastructure wherever possible, and that they’re pressuring for things like settlement with content players and OTTs. We may WANT next-to-free Internet at gigaspeeds, but getting to that is going to take a sophisticated combination of an improved business model and enlightened public policy—if it’s even possible. International regulators have long recommended that telecom regulations be written to balance consumerism with the health of the industry. Genachowski seems to have his seesaw out of whack.
Second, there’s the question of how this new super-WiFi would work. Obviously free spectrum doesn’t mean free networking; there would still have to be money spent to deploy the WiFi radios and to backhaul them to the Internet. There are security and performance issues to be considered. It’s almost certain that the new spectrum isn’t in the current WiFi band (since it’s supposed to penetrate structures better and have longer range, implying it’s lower-frequency) and so current WiFi devices wouldn’t work with it.
Presuming that super-WiFi goes forward, it presents some significant risks. Just the threat of a free national WiFi service could reduce the incentive to invest in wireless infrastructure by threatening future returns. This threat could be magnified by the fact that the new band needed special devices, since it’s likely that even OTT players like Google would rush out to provide the devices, and they would likely not work with standard cellular services. For operators, to get their own customers on the new band could require re-issuing devices or providing dongles or docking units.
And who builds the free network? We’ve had “muniFi” attempts before and they’ve been almost uniformly unsuccessful except in costing taxpayer dollars. I’m really not happy with this new super-WiFi concept because it seems to me that there’s not been nearly enough planning to secure success but plenty of talk to start generating risks to investment. Where are the details? What is the real goal? If the FCC had a serious desire to do this they needed to go about it the right way, the complete-story way, which so far they have not.
Then we have Cisco and SDN. The company finally said something more about its SDN strategy, but what Cisco did wasn’t much more than saying a bit more about their SDN controller and saying that they were going to support SDN on some more devices (no surprise there either). They did talk earlier about a network-partitioning application for the controller, and they’re now adding in more monitoring capabilities, reasonable given their M&A in the monitoring space. But what they’ve not done is fill in the details inside their onePK APIs or talk about just what their end-game for SDN is.
I’ve been saying for months that any plausible SDN strategy has to support three functional layers and two “models”. The “Cloudifier” feeds a service model to “SDN Central” where it’s combined with a network map/model that the “Topologizer” produces, and from that combination you get the specific commitment of resources needed. It’s hard to see how you can deliver SDN without this, and yet we don’t have the specifics on how this functionality would be provided or where the information needed to populate the maps and control everything would come from. Monitoring? Sure, but how? There are IETF standards in at least the consideration stage here; are these what Cisco intends? If so, they say it. If not, then say what IS intended.
Absent details on the “how” of Cisco’s SDN, we really don’t have that goal-line vision that turns motion into progress. We have controller applications that are logical steps to anything, meaning nothing in particular. All this hoopla is overkill for network-slicing and monitoring. What is this all leading to? The funny thing is that I think Cisco knows; it understands exactly what it’s planning and where it’s going. It may be that it’s the best-prepared of the vendors to get there. But gosh, Cisco, I still can’t persuade myself to ride your bus if I don’t know how the interior is laid out and I can’t read the destination from the sign on the front.