Anthony Doesburg: Old standards won't guide move to broadband

Steven Joyce is the first minister to really get the broadband ball rolling. Photo / Rotorua Daily Post

There it was, in a footnote to a press release from Communications and Information Technology Minister Steven Joyce: a reference to the Open Systems Interconnection model of computer network architecture.

I'm willing to bet that in the 32 years since the OSI reference model was drafted, this is the first time it has rated a mention in a ministerial press release - or in the pages of this newspaper.

What does this mean for New Zealand politics? More to the point, what's its significance for the rest of us? And, for that matter, what on earth is the OSI model?

It's a scheme devised in 1978 by the Swiss-based International Organisation for Standardisation, or ISO - giving the model the catchy name the ISO OSI - for making sure the various components of computer networks all work together.

Back then, a network, whether confined to an office or spanning the country, consisted of a mainframe computer connected to screens that could display text but were otherwise dumb. The field was about to explode, however, with local area networks, LANs, of intelligent PCs just around the corner. Also coming was a network to end all networks: the internet.

Ostensibly to avoid incompatibility chaos, the ISO came up with a seven-layer stack of protocols for equipment manufacturers and network architects to adhere to, each layer with a name that is barely meaningful even for network specialists. The dietary predilections of IT types are honoured in one of the several mnemonics thought up to remember the layers: Please Do Not Throw Salami Pizza Away.

So, from the bottom up, they are: physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation and application. Each layer was supposed to correspond to a particular hardware or software function essential to transporting data through a network and the bottom two, layers 1 and 2, were the subject of Joyce's press release.

Now, having learned a little bit about the OSI model, we should promptly dismiss it from our minds. So goes the advice of David Chappell, a San Francisco-based IT consultant who spent the best part of a decade chairing a United States committee charged with trying to work out how the model should be implemented.

Years later, Chappell wrote a blog advocating "kill the beast", saying it was flawed from having been born as much of politics as technology.

"It's not that it's wrong for your government's ministerial announcement to refer to what it's doing with layers 1 and 2 of the OSI model," he says.

"The biggest issue is that this model was defined in 1978. Is there any other piece of technology dating from the late 70s in the IT world that we still use today?" An entire slice of the model, the session layer, was there solely to satisfy German negotiators, who wanted to accommodate a pet network protocol, he says.

The internet, which can be mapped on to another four-layer model based on the TCP/IP protocols, swept the OSI model away, Chappell says, although he admits he was one of those who resisted TCP/IP's rise.

"When I finally understood TCP/IP, and what the internet was likely to become - this was 20 years ago - I realised it was so much better than this OSI stuff, which was massively complicated. TCP/IP, built by practical people, was very pragmatic and solved important problems in useful ways."

OSI, in contrast, cost industry and government billions of dollars, then died.

So why is our ICT minister belatedly paying it attention? In reality, it's probably nothing to be alarmed about. The layers 1 and 2 reference was in a press release about a change of tack with the Government's $1.5 billion ultra-fast broadband plan.

It was to advise parties tendering for a slice of UFB action that the fibre-optic cable to be laid up and down the country - the physical part, or layer 1, of the OSI model - and the signals sent over the cable - the model's data link, or second layer - would be "open", or standards-based. That would ensure users - you and me - could swap from one service provider to another without problem, as we can with electricity suppliers.

This change, say commentators such as the Telecommunications Users Association and internetNZ, is a good thing, so long as it doesn't disrupt the complicated process of awarding UFB contracts and getting on with building the network.

Joyce's - his officials', more likely - willingness to brandish the OSI model in a press release comes about because he's the first minister in decades talking about a national broadband network to actually get the ball rolling. Chappell's advice would be: don't get carried away with the OSI talk, and give the internet its head.

Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist