KEY POINTS:
David Isenberg has a recurring nightmare. The world renowned technologist and former AT&T executive, who is in Wellington for the annual TUANZ Telecommunications Day, dreams that he is grabbed off the street, bundled into a car and injected. He wakes up to find himself in a cell dressed in an orange jumpsuit and worst of all, disconnected completely from the internet.
It's a creepy dream but one that taps into Isenberg's fears that the internet will become strangled by telephone companies attempting to manage traffic, oppose network neutrality and shape and manipulate networks to maximise their commercial gain.
Some would suggest it is already the norm - witness the Comcast network throttling debate that has been raging in the US for months.
Isenberg's concerns underpin the essay he wrote in 1997 that made him famous. In The Rise of the Stupid Network, Isenberg suggested that telephone companies should stop trying to build intelligent networks, but concentrate on open networks, or stupid networks that are controlled only at the edges of the network.
As Isenberg put it, the stupid network should be built according to three principles:
* with nothing but dumb transport in the middle, and intelligent user-controlled endpoints.
* whose design is guided by plenty, not scarcity.
* where transport is guided by the needs of the data, not the design assumptions of the network.
Put this in the New Zealand context where networks are proprietary, not open, where we are told that bandwidth is scarce and have to pay high prices accordingly, and where transport of data is very much shaped by the design assumptions of the network. It's clear that we have some major problems here.
What's the solution? Well, Isenberg says there are four paths to Kiwi internet leadership: open fibre, open fibre, open fibre and open fibre.
He suggests every company should be making the building of open-access fibre-to-the-home networks a priority so that scarcity of network resources no longer drives the activities of the telephone companies.
In Wellington this morning he held up a piece of fibre optic cable. Said Isenberg:
"If everyone of the 6.5 billion people on earth had a telephone and...were off hook at the same time generating 64kbps and they could get to the type of fibres I describe, a hundred fibres would still be enough. Imagine this cable running down your street and everyone could get 10 or 12 fibres, imagine how close the rest of the world would seem."
It doesn't have to be hugely expensive, argues Isenberg. A 'back of the envelope' calculation he did puts the cost of getting fibre to every business and home in the country at around $4.2 billion. That's fibre to 1.3 million homes, 30 per cent of which are in rural areas. Isenberg said it has been done in places like Vermont, where even farmers get 100 megabits per second.
The status quo, Isenberg rightly points out, isn't working: "Unbundling - it's a little advance but the focus is on copper and asymmetric DSL and kilobits. The dialogue is largely being driven by incumbent companies interested in maintaining the past."
In addition he says advances in fibre optic technology should allow a massive increase in international capacity for any new undersea cable laid between New Zealand and Australia:
"My guess is we could build a hundred to a thousand times the capacity in the next undersea cable for approximately $2 billion." he says.
Here's Isenberg's advice. Ban two words - kilobit and copper. Build this network in New Zealand within five years.
"There's no reason New Zealand couldn't complete this in five years. I would be willing to buy a bond. It sounds like a no-brainer to me," he says.
"Beware of telephone companies bearing new centralised capabilities that would manage scarce capacity. Here's something else the telephone companies don't want us to know. Capacity isn't scarce."
You can see why AT&T, a massive incumbent US telco at the time, wasn't impressed with Isenberg's essay, which soon garnered international attention. As for Isenberg's aspirations for the internet in general:
"My hope is that it stays stupid. My hope is that the internet remains a platform for unfettered information." he says.
That recurring nightmare keeps reminding him of the alternative.
