I noted yesterday in my blog that vendors and operators alike were guilty of what might be called “Oldthink”, the practice of honing in on today’s problems through the mechanisms of past solutions and thus simply reinforcing the past instead of creating a future. We have other examples of that phenomena today, and in other places.
Public policy is a good example. Regulations on telecom are based on an industry structure, service set, and competitive situation that doesn’t exist any longer. AT&T, speaking at an industry event, noted that there are more Skype connections active at any given moment than there are wireline voice lines from both AT&T and Verizon combined. But we regulate lines and not connections. We have “technology-neutral” notions of how voice services have to be offered but often these regulations inhibit new technologies. VoIP services can’t be used to replace wireline voice, we say, unless they provide E911 except that there are plenty of people who use VoIP services like Google Voice or Skype as their only voice service.
Net neutrality is of course the most problematic of the policy issues. Google raised eyebrows by proposing to apply decidedly non-neutral policies on its own fiber services. Mobile has different neutrality rules than wireline, and in all cases we’re playing a silly game and saying that you can’t offer priority delivery for experiences to consumers if the service provider pays—the consumer has to pay instead.
A good test of any policy is how many times you have to make exceptions or overlook violations to avoid being trapped in something patently stupid, and by that test our telecom policy is an abysmal failure. What we need to be doing is asking how to balance the clear need for more investment in and differentiation of access to the Internet with the need to avoid saddling new ventures with undue cost burdens. Could we not provide a “curb lane” for the Internet that would be free to providers but best effort, and still have a “passing lane”?
SDN and NFV at the technical level are other examples of Oldthink. How many times do we hear that these two things are going to spawn a total revolution, laying waste to old network techniques and causing chaos among vendors? Services, security, management and operations—all these things get transformed. Or so they say. The problem is that when we look at SDN application we see people building SDN networks that replicate Ethernet or IP as the services and that run on legacy switches and routers. Where exactly is the revolution here? I can see revolutions if we can build network services with different devices, or build different services with the same devices, but isn’t “different” kind of the watchword of revolution? How many barricades have been stormed to keep things the same?
Underneath all of this is a single truth, which is that we’re in the software age. Public policy on telecom has gotten off-track because it’s still regulating telecom hardware when the services are software-based. SDN and NFV are being misunderstood and misapplied because we’re only capable of thinking of the future of networking as being the future of virtual devices that map 1:1 with current devices in capabilities. We think we’ll manage an NFV cloud by managing a collection of virtual stuff that looks to the management system like a real router. How, if we build a network that has to be managed as a router network, will that network ever rise above what we can now do? It’s a kind of “You are what you eat” principle, and service management should never be allowed to dictate service evolution. It has to be the other way around.
Organizationally, you can blame this on SOX, and I’ve done that, but I think we also have to accept a measure of responsibility ourselves. I get all kinds of comments from people who can rightfully be called network experts but who can’t conceptualize the notion of connectivity except in the framework of IP and IP subnets and default gateways and DNS and DHCP. We’ve made these touchstones of the here-and-now into the goals for the future network, when we should be asking how in a mobile world with users in no particular place doing no specific thing could best be connected. The solution for mobility management in the future, in this age of SDN and NFV, is still said to be a feature of IPv6. This, when we can control forwarding explicitly and define connectivity any way we like.
We could build a network that could happily connect users with five or six different addressing models at the same time, even with each other. We could build a network that could allow users to roam around at will without having the fancy EPC manipulations that today keep us connected to sources when we move from cell to cell. We could optimize and re-optimize content delivery and cloud access across a totally dynamic set of consumers. But we have to think differently to do that.
Vendors will tell us that these kinds of changes would be too hard for the market to absorb, that operators would never “fork-lift” their networks to adopt them. Well, how do we know that we can’t tolerate the trip if nobody shows us the destination? Operators say that vendors expect them to sign a blank check to support any of these revolutions, but is “Out with the new and in with the old” the only alternative to the other way around—nothing in between?
Might it be that deep inside, we’ve become too comfortable with the state of the art? When I got into networking there were probably four or five data architectures vying for attention, and a good pro knew them all. Now we have one, and one is all that “good pro” knows, or wants to know. It may be that the long-sought IP convergence also created IP fossilization. A tagline from one of my old projects comes to mind; “Think outside the bit”. Good advice for our time, I think.