NYC telecom journey Day 2: Getting sucked into IP’s black hole and awaiting a network endpoint explosion

NEW YORK — My travels earlier this week to two telecom conferences here uncovered imminent change coming for the industry. Wednesday’s stops unearthed some hot new technologies expected to cause that change and others that will result from it.

A 10-block morning walk to the Wall Street Technology Association conference at 54th and Sixth taught me that Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law are intersecting. Moore’s Law states that processing power doubles while its cost halves every two years; Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of the network increases as the number of endpoints increase.

Network analyst Nick Lippis was the morning’s guest speaker and he gave a lot to chew on for the rest of the day. Lippis said that the intersection of Moore’s and Metcalfe’s Laws is creating an IP “black hole” into which all legacy telecom and even national entertainment networks will be subsumed.

“We’re just at the beginning stages of seeing all that stuff sucked in,” Lippis said.

Several “meta drivers” are behind this, including client/server computing moving to peer-to-peer networking, low cost WAN bandwidth allowing data-center consolidation and shadowing, wired and wireless access becoming smart secure access, and networks migrating from a connectivity service to a business platform.

Such trends will shape the future of network technology, he said, which will include a 400% compound annual growth in the number of RFID-enabled endpoints. RFID and mobility will be “the biggest growth area in terms of Metcalfe’s Law, thanks to Moore’s Law,” Lippis said, referring to the leaps in processing power and dives in prices fostering growth in networked endpoints.

Other futures include virtualization brought about by cheap, plentiful bandwidth; device consolidation leading to service expansion, such as firewalls, voice and video being integrated into routers and switches for network admission control, VoIP and telepresence services; unified networking; nonstop networking for business continuity and disaster recovery; networks attaining application “fluency”; on-demand secure access; and the emergence of value-added service providers offering hosted IP services, managed IP telephony and business-to-business telepresence in addition to bit hauling.

Lippis also offered some predictions: by the year 2010, the number of endpoints will reach 1 trillion, from 1 billion today. He also believes that cross continental gigabit WAN links will be the norm for the largest global businesses.

Fifty percent of Internet services will be accessed by mobile devices in 2010, Lippis forecasts, and softphones will be available on 100% of desktop and laptop computers shipped, leading to an 80% drop in the use of fixed phones.

The number of communications software developers will grow into the millions from the thousands, Lippis predicts, while location, security and mobility services will replace connectivity services.

Lippis’ futures and predictions were underscored by four vendor presentations on hot new technology being deployed now in its early stages. AT&T said RFID and sensor networking is a “silent revolution” that’s providing ubiquitous access to personalized and business applications.

“We’re seeing an explosion in the amount of endpoints on our network” due to RFID and sensors, said Paul DiGiacomo, AT&T director of emerging technologies and sensor networks.

EzeCastle Integration, a provider of outsourced technology services, reviewed new storage architectures for enterprises, and the role of SANs and encryption in data protection and disaster recovery. Avaya offered ideas on how to instrument a “communications-enabled business process” environment – much like that in a service-oriented architecture – with complex event detection and notification.

And AMX, a provider of audio/visual resource management tools, suggested ideas on how to gain control over the proliferation of incompatible A/V and video endpoints, and stay on top of changing technology, untrained users and scheduling conflicts.

The WSTA event provided lots to think about and digest on the short subway ride to the UBS Warburg Global Communications conference at the Grand Hyatt. There, vendors and service providers talked up more hot technologies for enterprise and consumer networking.

F5 Networks, a maker of Layer 4-7 switches for application acceleration, discussed a new Big-IP switch coming late next year, code-named Montreal. It’s a chassis-based product featuring 30Gbps performance for Layer 4 switching, 24Gbps for Layer7, 24Gbps for SSL and 24Gbps for compression.

That’s three to four times the switching capacity of F5’s current high-end switch, the Big-IP 8800, which is in beta tests with more than 40 customers but will ship “soon,” according to John McAdam, F5 president and CEO. Another priority for F5 is to put its TMOS operating system in its WANJet optimization device, which was obtained via last year’s acquisition of Swan Labs.

F5 hopes to TMOS-ize WANJet by next summer.

Cisco’s service-provider business is focusing on video for the home, managed services for business, and mobility for people on the go. Household bandwidth needs in 2010 will reach 1.1 Terabits per month, driven largely by HDTV, said Nick Adamo, Cisco senior vice president for service provider sales.

Adamo also put in a plug for Cisco’s recently unveiled telepresence equipment, which he said was built for service providers providing 10Mbps to 12Mbps of bandwidth per location.

“Telepresence is putting service providers front and center,” Adamo said. “It’s the perfect application for Metro Ethernet.”

EarthLink, meanwhile, lent credence to Lippis’ remarks about service providers moving into the value-added services space. EarthLink is focusing on four growth initiatives – VoIP, municipal Wi-Fi, VPNs for small/medium enterprises and 3G wireless – in an effort to broaden its scope.

“We want to move from just being an ISP to a total communications provider,” said Kevin Dotts, Earthlink CFO.

EarthLink is bullish on its DSL HomePhone product. It can provide 8Mbps of Internet access along with unlimited local and long-distance calling with e911 capabilities for about $70 per month, Dotts said.

EarthLink also can provide 1Mbps of municipal Wi-Fi access for the price of dial-up, and is even offering 7Mbps to 8Mbps of service in Anaheim, Calif., Dotts said. EarthLink will be testing voice on its municipal Wi-Fi network in the first quarter of 2007, he said.

We’ll wrap up our New York City telecom conference journey tomorrow with coverage of the last day of the UBS Warburg Global Communications conference.