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April 22, 2003
Customer-owned networks
My earliest memory of the phone system is when my parents finally bought our phone from the phone company, instead of renting it. I remember feeling anxiety, knowing that we now had the awesome burden of not blowing up The Phone System by improperly installing unapproved equipment. As a born tinkerer, the phone had always been off-limits, because it wasn't ours and I might do something to harm the sacred Phone System.
Today I get phones for free (after rebate) from OfficeMax. They are made in Taiwan or China, and they're so cheap that if they don't work, I just throw them away. I'm sure there's some certification of some sort, but I don't look for it. I don't even bother to pay for the phone company to maintain my own wiring; I know how to run wires in my house (it's just as hard as wiring my doorbell and garage door). And for all the tinkering I've done with phones (including building my own from scratch several times), I've never broken The Phone System. And I've tried pretty hard.
Early in my network engineering career, I realized that I ran a network just like the phone companies did. Of course, their's is much bigger and more complex, but at some basic level, I did exactly what they did. I went to the same training they did, I went to the same conferences they did. I realized that there was nothing sacred or holy about The Phone System. It was just a network. With lots of regulations.
So I ran across this article today. ZapMail. That was before my time. But the principle is very much applicable today, and moreso in the future.
The ultimate destiny of The Stupid Network: I own the network. Just like I owned the phone. If all of the value and intelligence is on the edge of the network, which I own, then inevitably, the rest of the network has little value, and it's only a matter of time until it's not worth owning anything but the edge, which I already own. But it'll be a long, confusing journey to get there.
Posted by pete at April 22, 2003 06:18 PM
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