Las Vegas - The future is converged networks, in case you hadn't heard.
In a speech that echoed the theme of last year's NetWorld+Interop in Atlanta and his speech at ComNet in Washington, D.C., 3Com Corp. CEO Eric Benhamou extolled the virtues of putting voice, video and data on a single network.
"Voice networks are similarly structured [to data networks] and totally parallel," Benhamou told attendees of his keynote at Interop 98 here. "Where the voice signal becomes digitized, it can be converged."
Benhamou pointed to the city of Winston-Salem, N.C., as an example of a successful network that could see even more results if it implemented converged voice, video and data.
Having experienced the tragedy of a youth that fell through the cracks of several local agencies, Winston-Salem created a network of its youth services. The metropolitan area network, dubbed JasonNet after the young boy who sparked it, links the police, schools, juvenile intake for the court, Mental Health Services and the Department of Social Services. By sharing information about the city's youth, Winston-Salem hopes to avoid similar tragedies. Benhamou said the next step for JasonNet is to use videoconferencing and telephony to confer on cases.
"Teachers can learn about their students, and not just by looking at static pieces of paper with grades," he said.
Benhamou did depart from his convergence sermon to chide AT&T for last month's frame relay network outage. "The only comfort I took was that it was Cisco switches and not 3Com equipment," he said. "But Wells Fargo did have backup, its 3Com equipment."
"There clearly is a dark side to technology," he said. "Networks do fail and our dependency on them cripples us."
