     |
|
 In
January 1984, Ma Bell, as she was known, was laid to rest. The New
Year saw the formation of a new AT&T and seven regional telephone
holding companies, known as the regional Bell operating companies.
The breakup of AT&T, the national telephone monopoly, was the end
of the road for a government antitrust suit against the company that
began in 1974, in which AT&T agreed to divest itself of its 22 wholly
owned Bell operating companies that provided local telephone service.
Whichever way you look at it - for better or for worse - the telecom
industry has never been the same.
Telecommunications Act of 1996
What the breakup of AT&T never achieved, the Telecommunications Act
of 1996 was supposed to rectify by creating the concept of competition
in the local loop. Liza Draper, principal at McQuillan Ventures, a
network technology consulting company, says the telecom act was the
single most important piece of legislation related to telecommunications.
"It changed the landscape for service providers and created the opportunity
for venture-backed start-ups to sell equipment into the marketplace,"
she says.
Rosemary Cochran, an analyst at Vertical Systems Group, adds that
the law was a bellwether spurring the competitive local exchange carriers,
DSL services, and a slew of other cable and telecom companies in an
environment reminiscent of the Wild West.
The router
 The
router let companies establish more complex data networks. "I can't
even imagine distributed networking without the router,'' Gartner's
Neil says.
Before TCP/IP, the realm of networking existed in the world of multiprotocols
- SNA, X.25, DECNet.
With the advent of TCP/IP, the network industry saw the demise of
time division multiplexing (TDM), which firms used in their attempts
to integrate voice and data. "But TDM didn't lend itself to IP, and
the circuit/packet issue became important," Cochran says. For new
applications, desktop networking and LAN internetworking, the multiplexer
didn't cut it.
Cochran notes that in 1986, the router market was less than $100 million.
Today, it's a multibillion dollar market that continues to increase
as networks run more data than voice over their networks.
Packet technologies
 In
packet technologies, IP or anything else, voice and data are treated
as a stream of packets. With the introduction of packet technologies,
the network industry saw a change in the types of customer premises
equipment (CPE) and services that carriers could deliver. The lines
between public and private networks also began to blur.
Sold as a service, frame relay provided a way for carriers to drum
up new enterprise business. This packet technology was well-suited
to LAN traffic, and the industry saw businesses route LAN traffic
onto frame relay networks. Many organizations replaced leased lines
with frame relay services. The carriers began to provide businesses
with CPE that the carriers also offered to manage.
IP
Considered the great unifier that changed the way people thought about
protocols, IP today is known as the protocol of the Internet. "IP
has become the universal protocol, the interoperability protocol,"
says Frank Dzubeck, president of Communication Network Architects.
As IP became increasingly popular, a dark shadow fell over Open Systems
Interconnection and IBM's SNA. "There was no longer any need for them,"
he says.
Going forward, industry watchers expect there to be one protocol -
IP. Part of the beauty of IP is that it is associated with a different
way of thinking. "IP isn't associated with one company, nor does it
come from the normal standards body," Neil says. Instead, IP developed
on a distributed ad hoc basis to become what it is today.
Birth of Cisco
An $18.9 billion company, Cisco is a worldwide leader for networking.
"Cisco is the company that brought marketing to the network space,"
says Kathryn Korostoff, an analyst at Sage Research.
Prior to the advent of Cisco, which incorporated in 1984 and shipped
its first product in 1986, it was accepted practice for corporations
to make buying decisions based on technology with no emotional bond
to the purchased product. "Cisco has built a brand name as the safe
choice with which you can't go wrong," Korostoff says.
Fiber-optic networks
For starters, fiber-optic networks increased the capacity and reliability
of networks, particularly long-distance networks. This technology
also flattened out the cost of communications. "It used to be that
long-distance calls were more expensive than local calls," Gartner's
Pultz says. "Today, in large part because of fiber-optic networks,
it's almost as cheap to go long-distance as it is to go local."
One of the key technologies in fiber-optic networking is the laser.
With the advent of the reliable, low-cost laser, which is how signals
are sent over optical fibers, you can have more of them. "The inexpensive
laser created fiber-optic networking," Dzubeck says. There was a time
when lasers used to be a big dish and cost $50,000 to $100,000. "Today,
they cost $5,000 to $10,000," he says.
With the advent of faster lasers, better filters and amplifiers, the
industry is moving toward an all-optical switching environment - the
next step in carrier networking.
The Internet
 The
Internet has changed the world of networking more than anything else.
"What it comes down to is that prior to the Internet, it was difficult
to access resources over a network," Pultz says. In contrast, having
a universal network, and network resources, that anyone can access
via a common means, is revolutionary.
The Internet, and related technologies, created the next wave in business
- the Information Age, changing forever the way business is conducted
worldwide and opening new channels for interbusiness communications
as well as business-to-consumer communications.
World Wide Web
 In
the high-tech industry, ease of use is everything. So when the first
Web browser was written in 1990, the popularity of the Internet took
off. The Web is a system that lets users interact with documents stored
on computers across the Internet as if they were parts of a single
hypertext.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1990 while working at CERN (the
European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The WWW
is an Internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information
sharing.
Bernie Ebbers
Considered a model of people who have shaken up the industry, Bernard
J. Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom, was an outsider, a nobody, in telecom.
Today, he is considered one of the industry's most powerful people.
With revenue of more than $37 billion and approximately 77,000 employees
based in more than 65 countries, WorldCom is an industry leader in
global communications.
Known as the "Man from Mississippi," although a Canadian by birth, with
a degree in physical education, not an M.B.A., Ebbers built WorldCom
from the ground up through a strategy of acquisition and consolidation
that began in the early 1980s. His ultimate coup was the acquisition
of MCI (the No. 2 provider) by WorldCom (the No. 4 provider at the
time).
"It was a stunning event. Over the years, Ebbers has demonstrated
how an entrepreneur with an idea could change the structure of an
industry," Neil says.
Java
Sun's Java is a programming technology that revolutionized how applications
are developed and processed. Known for its write once, run-anywhere
capability, Java won favor in the marketplace by making it easy to
build and deploy applications that can run on any network, on any
operating system.
Java is significant because it allowed network developers to start
moving pieces of code around the network, executing on different devices.
The beauty of Java is that it helps reduce the time and costs associated
with application development given its platform and device independence.
The availability of capital
The unleashing of capital over the past decade has been significant
for the networking industry, opening the floodgates for countless
start-ups.
Remember the corporate funding of skunk works and spinoffs? "That's
back when it took a start-up two years to raise $20 million and another
year to move ahead," Vertical's Cochran says. Now by comparison, it's
pretty easy for start-ups to get cash. However, more recently with
the sparkle on the high-tech industry growing dim in the world markets,
networking companies, among others, are seeing a tightening of the
purse strings.
"It will impact the markets, but I think it's a good thing because
we'll see more quality," Cochran says. "Ultimately, the cream always
rises to the top."
Loss of privacy
 If
the ultimate objective of networking is to achieve "anywhere, anytime"
communications - perhaps the single greatest advance of networking
- something has got to give. Is that something a loss of privacy?
In the corporation, the requirement to be reachable - by telephone,
cell phone, pager, e-mail - has become accepted work practice. But
what are the implications - health, turmoil, aggravation - when we
come out of the other side of this great advance.
Clearly, there are advantages to always being in touch - the automobile
industry can send information or help to drivers on the road, industry
can speed the supply chain, business communications can occur without
skipping a beat.
Less explicit, however, are the implications on individuals and cultures,
as pervasive networking follows you - everywhere.
Related
links
Haber is a freelance writer living in Massachusetts. She can be reached at lthaber@mediaone.net. Send this article to a colleague
|
|
Responsible for insuring the safety of your network?
NWFusion offers two FREE security e-mail newsletters to help you keep your enterprise network
secure.
Click here to sign-up.
Click here to sign-up.
Three free and easy ways to bring Network World's in-depth editorial content to your own Web site.
Learn more
Learn more