From: Sean Doran[SMTP:smd@cesium.clock.org] Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 1996 5:11 PM

WRT your list, I don't think that either videoconferencing or connectivity to the PSTN is a particularly interesting thing to do with the Internet, in that I don't see either as being a fundamentally important Internet application.

I think that any and all services my customers want are at least interesting, if not extremely important. I also think it is very interesting to leverage those customers' local loop circuit investments by providing as many services over the same infrastructure as possible.

Various people, including a Sprint Canada reseller, will tell you that ALGs exist that convert various voice-over-Internet things into signals that can be dealt with by PBXes and other telephony equipment. There are at least two SS7<->IP gateways in development with what appears to be short times-to-market ahead.

One of these is being built along the lines of what PNO like an RBOC or a PTT or a cable company might want to deploy in their own facilities.

These are neat hacks which will do fun things to international and national long-distance tariffs worldwide, in that you may suddenly have two QOSes for voice: one which is a side-effect of IP connectivity and which is of iffy-to-tolerable-to-good quality, and one which has metered, often distance-and-time-of-day- sensitive charging and a generally predicatably very-good-to-excellent quality.

And I have in fact seen a demonstration of "Internet Phone" over a cable modem, through a gateway, and into the PSTN. I would of course like my customers to have access to _both_ levels of quality, and all of it through the same infrastructure. I'm one of the evil, greedy, money grubbing capitalists who, while willing to invest millions of dollars in network infrastructure, want to sell its use in a variety of ways.

We're now down to 155Mbps medium speed to the desktop. I imagine that we can avoid arguing about the small details of cell tax and the like, and start looking at Gbps ethernet and other forthcoming LAN issues. They really are LAN issues; the Internet vs global ATM really isn't a factor here, nor is really IP vs ATM on a protocol-to-protocol basis.

I accepted your 'today' challenge, but agree about the LAN orientation. I don't agree that there must be a "vs" between IP and ATM, cell taxes and the impact of either infinite or perpetually constricted bandwidth notwithstanding.

| Oh, and by the way, given that the local loop provider has OC-48 SONET | provisioned to this particular location, we could just as easily have | provisioned the connection to our backbone at OC12 as opposed to OC3. Did | I miss the Cisco announcement of an OC12 IP-SONET card?

You may wish to discuss an NDA presentation on the forthcoming generation of routers from each of Cisco, Juniper and Bay Networks.

Again, my post was based upon your assertion that this could be done today. I sincerely hope that a new generation of routers is forthcoming asap that can match ATM speeds.

So, just to clarify things, I don't discount ATM as a technology entirely, I just think that its time as something between IP and SONET for big-I Internet applications (other than *maybe* for customer aggregation and the like), is ticking away...

Time will tell, and meanwhile, there is ample room for a variety of network architectures and business models. Clearly the arguments on both sides have resulted in new technology which falls somewhere in between. This can only be A Healthy Thing (TM). -- Jim Browning