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March 1, 2003
We got what we want, now what?
I have worked in strategic technical positions most of my career (sometimes I actually had titles that matched what I did, too). I was able to take direction from industry luminaries, futurist pundits, some of my favorite magazines (Boardwatch Magazine, Wired, Red Herring, Business 2.0), synthesize it, expand and extend it through my own thinking and experience and discussions with a lot of other people. Very often my role, as strategic as it was, was mostly tactical maneuvering to get to where it was obvious that we should be.
UEN wasn't much different of a situation. Two years ago I began formulating our three-year strategic plan (since I'd previously spent most of my time at start-up companies, this was a real treat to do a plan longer than six months). In fall 2001, we began aggressively pursuing what we thought would at best be a 3-year effort to convince carriers and network vendors to start building to our requirements for a GigE network. We were literally laughed out of some of our first meetings, with many people telling us that we would never get GigE services and even if we did, what would we possibly need 1000 Mb/sec of bandwidth for, anywhere on our network (our network is mostly DS-3 on the backbone with T1 to the schools).
In spring 2002, we signed our first contract with two carriers to build GigE between three core sites in the metro area. That was quickly followed later in the year with contracts and plans with a few cities in Utah County who were building municipal fiber networks that passed a few of our schools, and later, a contract with UBTA to build GigE to our schools in Vernal and Roosevelt. We hoped that this would be the start of something, but it looked more like low-hanging fruit and we were fully expecting another several years until other areas would get GigE service.
Within a few months, the momentum created by those first few successes resulted in every telco in the state finding a way to get GigE to some initial core sites and schools, with plans to build to every school in the state over the next several years. Many sites will get a 10x bandwidth increase for the same cost. Suddenly, our 7-10-year plan turned into a 3-5-year plan, with many of the most critical locations addressed in the first wave. Now, "all" that needs to be done is get the funding and build the network. Simple execution.
So, we're 3 or 4 years ahead of where we expected to be, and probably 5-10 years ahead of the rest of the industry, which is only recently began deploying GigE in a limited fashion (certainly not to 100's of sites in mostly rural and residential areas), and with disruptive pricing only in the largest cities. The industry pundits are still talking about how we should be deploying GigE at disruptive prices. If we're already doing that, what do we do next? Who do we look to for direction? It's an unusual and rather uncomfortable position to be in. This is the position every strategic thinker always wants to be in, but few have been able to reach. This may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
We are already finding that being at the forefront with GigE means a shift in how we engineer and operate the network. Our first implementations have turned up lots of minor but frustrating problems as vendors, telcos and UEN work out kinks with new products, new designs and new operations processes. There are a lot of unknowns, and a lot of things to be afraid of. We will have a lot more of these experiences getting new technology implemented, and learning from experience what works well in designing and operating this new network.
QoS will be another interesting area. For the decade people have talked about converging all networks to a single IP backbone with QoS to make them work together, there's very little experience in the industry with making this work. We will learn a lot as we figure out what works and what doesn't, and find out what it means to manage a converged network.
For the future, we have to look to different, maybe less-obvious and less-clear direction. We will have to look into a much less clear future and figure out ourselves what needs to be next. We may very well become the pundits who start writing about what's next, at least what's next for UEN.
Posted by pete at March 1, 2003 8:51 AM