Many people have heard the “A rose by any other name…” quote. Let me offer a network technology slant on that, which is “A dumb pipe created by any technology is still a dumb pipe”. Given that we’ve got operator and vendor commentary that takes the opposite stance, we apparently need to look a bit at why technology doesn’t trump mission for either wireline or wireless. We also need to look at why new technologies could create new services, but not because they smarten dumb pipes.
People and companies share a lot of things, and one is a resistance to change. The longer a given practice has been followed, a given strategy accepted, the harder it is to displace it. Network operators have been offering the service of connectivity for what’s surely longer than anyone on the planet has been alive. It’s no wonder that they see every “new” service as some new spin on connectivity.
Wireless, meaning cellular telephony and broadband, is new in the sense that it’s not tethered, and so becomes a personal information conduit that follows the user around (as long as they don’t forget their phone, of course). That proved to be a valuable capability, and so it’s prospered, but at the same time it validated the operator preconception that if you looked hard and long enough, some comfortable extension to connectivity services would ride in to save the day. All the commentary on 5G, IMHO, stems from that preconception.
Fundamentally, 5G is just an upgrade to mobile networking. I’ve had a 5G phone for some time, and it’s hardly been life-changing, or in truth even offered a noticeably different experience. Then, of course, many would argue that making a mobile phone call wasn’t a noticeable different experience either, it was only the context that was different. I think that’s why so much of 5G interest early on focused on IoT. If you had to connect billions of devices in addition to billions of people, you might well need new and revolutionary technology. But it’s clear by now that we don’t have that need today, and we may never have it.
How about things like network slicing? You can get your own virtual private cellular network, you can create separate networks for separate missions. Isn’t that worth something? Hearken back to the 70s when we saw voice services based on a network-hosted PBX, something called “Centrex”. It got some play, but it didn’t change operators’ fortunes, even in modernized IP-PBX form. As far as having mission-specific networks, that’s useful only if there are missions that ordinary broadband Internet won’t support, that users need support for, and that regulatory policies won’t declare to be a form of paid prioritization.
The driver behind this is simple; IMHO; mobile services are no longer the dependable source of high margins they were in the past. Connectivity monetizes whatever creates it, because it’s a means to an end and not an end in itself. That’s the bad news for 5G and dumb pipes. Is there any good news? Maybe.
5G takes a step, perhaps a decisive step, toward unifying computing and network technology as the framework for services. The sad truth is that when operators and vendors try to use 5G as a crutch to making dumb pipes valuable, they’re ignoring its potential to make dumb pipes smart, and that is the future of connectivity if there’s any future beyond commoditization.
The Internet is an important indicator here. It’s a network, but first and foremost it’s an experience host. The value of the Internet lies only partly in its near-universal connectivity. The other part, the important part, is the support for what people want to be connected with. It shifted us from connection as the experience to connection with the experience. There’s a good argument to be made that the network and the experience are always one, but that means that when the experience is beyond connection, the network has to somehow integrate as tightly with it as possible so as to rebuild its own value. That means unifying connectivity and experience hosting, and that is something 5G could advance, though at this point it would likely have to be an indirect sort of support, in three areas.
The first area is identity routing. From the first, there’s been a discussion in IP networks as to how we address things, or what things we’re addressing. In traditional networks, there is a “network service access point” or NSAP, and this is what the network sees as a user address. In mobile networks, mobility means that the relationship between a user and an NSAP has to be more agile, and in the IETF there have been a number of location-independent routing notions floating about. Mobility management a la 5G (and earlier) is helpful for addressing users who move within a relatively contained area. It would be better to have a strategy that would address users who are “mobile” through any geography, and users who are “portable” in that they may operate from a variety of locations.
The second area is layer relationship management. IP has a data plane and a control plane. 5G has its own “control plane” and considers both IP planes to be its “user plane”. We also have the venerable OSI 7-layer model, which has been steadily augmented with sublayers and which doesn’t conform to the layer structure of IP. We really need to go back to basics here and redefine how networks mix control and data, end-to-end and per-hop, and so forth. Maybe we need to accept that there is no standard layer set, and adopt a model that allows for arbitrary layering. This is what I think “intent modeling” might do, for example.
The third area is session awareness. All networking is justified by experience delivery of some sort, and an experience is a relationship between a consumer and a provider that endures for some reasonable period. The network analog of an experience relationship is a session, something the OSI model defines as living in the fifth layer. How do we dependably understand when a session is being established? There are inspection approaches (Juniper’s Session Smart Routing is among if not the best example of this) but could we make session boundaries explicit? If so, we could identify session requirements in terms of service features, which would then permit dynamic mapping to services.
There is a lot of potential in the integration of hosting and networking, for operators and for the industry at large. The problem is that we’ve accepted goals for that integration that are vague, insipid, conventional, unrealistic, and sometimes all of the above. If we really want to make networks more than dumb pipes, we need to use function hosting to attack areas where connectivity and experiences merge, and that starts by identifying where those points are. Some good discussion on this, endorsed/sponsored by operators, would be very helpful. It could even be essential for the industry’s overall health.