Where do we go from here?

I have had the fortune of being asked to participate in some of the early National Science Foundation GENI meetings. In preparing material for invited talks, many issues on the state of internet technology started to become clearer to me and some of the members of my team at Qwest Government Services.

First, of course I had to start to understand what the motivations behind the development of a new infrastructure to provide a foundation for networking research in the coming decade. Most of the time many of us that are in the networking service provider business look at the need to increase the capacity of our networks. We worry about improving access to our customers through various means such as building new fiber, leveraging copper, or the bold wireless world. There are many other issues, but staying on the capacity theme, most of the time we add capacity based on the architecture of the network that was designed several years ago. This is usually a good idea as future demand increases usually look a lot like previous demand increases. This incrementalist approach is also fueled by the momentum of a deployed architecture. For most people that are not service providers, the moment cost of hardware is generally dwarfed by operations support systems, network management operations, and staff training.

So, why is this incremental approach in danger of becoming seriously incorrect? There are several reasons, but today we will focus and touch on just two. First, what is happening on the demand side? It only takes a moment to look at the events of the day to understand much of what is changing. Let's put it into click terms. Once upon a time in the not too distance past, a click on the web would return kilobits of data, mostly text and some compressed graphics. Just yesterday, this was transformed with peer-to-peer services for music exchange. This was a click and then a few megabytes. Now, this is all changing and changing quickly. No longer does a click have a defined event of a certain amount of data. Clicks now represent multi-megabit per second video distribution such as YouTube and on demand video downloads of television shows and feature-length movies. It also includes video and audio conferencing that once established stays on for hours at a time. In short, the computer that once was only powered on when dial-up to the Internet is now an appliance that is on 24 hours a day and soon to be engaged in Internet activities of similar duration.

This first issue really drives the second. That is the assumption the incremental increases in service provider backbone bandwidth can be added using the same incremental model that has been used in the past. Not that there have not been significant improvements in the technology used to provide the Internet. Moving to more cost effective wavelength transport services to provide the bandwidth between core routers has certainly improved this basic cost. However, the basic approach of adding increasing layers of backbone bandwidth to core routers to raise the bandwidth boat for all customers on the network, regardless of the type of the application (e.g., video distribution, VoIP, etc.) means that the network must grow everywhere to deal with this increased demand.

So, with an estimated approximately 70% compounded annual growth rate on Internet services, the cost associated with incremental bandwidth approaches may not work. You may ask why this does not work, but the answer is (at least how it looks today) is that the business model of the Internet does not drive adequate money into the infrastructure necessary to support this rapid growth (although it may for a time). What is certainly true is that virtually all major telecommunications customers expect that prices decrease over time for high-capacity services. Thus, either service providers have to increase the prices on their services, find a way to derive revenue from the application side of the Internet (e.g., Google, etc.), or have to prepare to radically change the technology and architecture of their Internet infrastructure to provide more for less capital and operations costs.

Clearly, some blend of these options for increasing revenue and reducing costs will have to take place. However, if the Internet is going to continue to be the foundation for new business ideas, we have to rapidly start planing for these changes to prevent having to catch-up and leaving the Internet as one big congested highway.