[1]Clique here for more on the Forbes Marketplace. [2]George Gilder - ASAP Telecosm Archive The following article Feasting on the Giant Peach was first published in Forbes ASAP, August 26, 1996. [clear_pixel.gif] [3]Click here for the whole Intel e-Business story. continued from... [4]Feasting on the Giant Peach ATM to the desktop faces dire challenges, however. Paul Green noticed that the most popular booth at the early May ATM Year '96 conference in San Jose was by a company called Ipsilon. Now partnering with Hitachi, Ipsilon makes an IP switch that dispenses with all ATM software and uses ATM cells only for fast hardware switching. Similarly, NetStar [see Forbes ASAP, "Angst and Awe on the Internet," Dec. 4, 1995], now being purchased by Ascend Communications for $300 million in stock, offers an IP crossbar switch in gallium arsenide with a backplane throughput of 16 gigabits per second. Meanwhile, vendors of Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet attracted increasing attention. Why transform your network when you can get most of the advantages of ATM through new forms of Ethernet and TCP/IP? But in one form or another, ATM switches are still the fastest switches and use their advantage in silicon integration to dominate the top-of-the-line slots in the backbone of the Internet. REVENGE OF BEARDS AND BIRKENSTOCKS The readers of Forbes ASAP will recall Gordon Jacobson and Avi Freedman, East Coast ISPs who have graced these pages contemplating a national network. Tonight, in New York, they are debating the future of the Net with each other and with two executives from a San Diego company called AtmNet who have similar ambitions. I am there to get a view from the pits of the Internet on Metcalfe's lament. Jacobson has a problem, though. He wants to take us to Le Colonial on East 57th Street, which he describes as the hottest bar and best French-Vietnamese restaurant in the city. But the bearded Avi Freedman has shown up in a green T-shirt and Birkenstock sandals, which won't cut it at Le Colonial. A second-floor hideaway, Le Colonial looks like Rick's place in Casablanca, so they say, and it sounds like a bar on the Champs-Elysees. More important to guru Gordon, it allows him to flaunt a tycoon's cigar, unlike P.J. Clarke's, his other favored haunt, which has succumbed to nicotine correctness since Dan Jenkins's novel on the Giants, Semi-Tough, celebrated its smoke and grit. Unlike P.J. Clarke's with its elderly Irish trolls, Gordon tells us, Le Colonial offers "the most beautiful bartender in all New York. You got to see her." Avi, though, has more important things on his mind. Polynomials. They're a dilemma, those polynomials. But Gordon decides to act anyway. We will start out with dinner at Clarke's and then move on to Le Colonial for after-dinner drinks. At the bar, Le Colonial will tolerate the T-shirt, and perhaps, with adequate lubrication, we will be able to relieve the pressure of the polynomials. The Internet is in the process of a horizontal explosion, with new network exchange points popping up everywhere--two in L.A., one each in Tucson, Phoenix, Atlanta, Cincinnati--you name it, a hundred or more network exchange facilities coming online. AtmNet is beginning one in San Diego and has plans to participate in those in L.A. Meanwhile, the P.J. Clarke's waiter, delivering salad with home fries well done and a Diet Pepsi, is struggling with the demands of serving different meals to five customers (that's 25 different possibilities). With mental buffers overflowing and packet losses mounting, he resolves on a polling algorithm, offering the plate to each of us around the table before settling on Avi. Gordon is looking worried; Avi is questioning his confidence that ATM switching can resolve most of the complexity problems on the Internet. SEX AND POLYNOMIALS AT LE COLONIAL I ask whether the problem arises from scanty RAM buffers in the Cisco routers. Avi says no. An entire global routing table still takes just 14 megabytes and virtually everyone on the Net can now handle that. Soon they will be able to handle a gigabyte of routes, no sweat, enough to deal with any foreseeable growth of the Net. Yes, I observe, it's exponential; I talk about it all the time. No, Avi corrects me, complexity growth is not exponential. It is polynomial. This problem will have to wait, however, says Gordon, hailing the waiter. It's time to leave for Le Colonial. Gordon wants Jim Browning and John Mevi of AtmNet to explain how their ATM systems can transcend all these complexities. AtmNet is visiting New York to consult with Gordon and Avi about AtmNet's plans to create a new national 155-megabit backbone across the country. AtmNet already has a 155-megabit-per-second backbone on the West Coast connecting San Diego, L.A. and San Francisco. But they are dependent on the caprices of long-distance carriers to cross the country. Gordon pays the waiter and we're off to Le Colonial. After dinner, Avi's T-shirt and sandals pass. But upon arrival, Gordon is crestfallen: The exponential bartender is off for the night. When Gordon recovers, we all troop to a table in the corner. Thronging the room are models in miniskirts--tall, lithe and pneumatic. Across the table, in front of a large framed photograph with a wraithlike image of Ho Chi Minh in a Huey Newton chair, a sleek young couple in black hungrily writhes through hot kisses. A sultry Asian waitress in a red kimono blouse emerges from behind palm leaves to take orders of port, Courvoisier and Diet Pepsi. Avi is worried that we still don't get his point about the polynomials. He wants to correct me: Strictly speaking it is not exponential (that's when the exponent rises), it is polynomial (the variable n rises). In this case, the complexity of the network rises by n nodes times n-1, which is not even quite the square of n. I got it. The growth of Internet complexity is polynomial. But the growth curve still rises toward the sky, okay? Avi ignores my comment and cruises on. Cisco is selling 60,000 routers a month. It's the low end of the Net that is exploding. Hierarchical segmentation through routers is the answer, reducing the n squared factor to the logarithm of n. "Log n is wonderful," Avi says. "It shears off complexity." The curves are relatively flat. But what about Metcalfe's prediction of a whopping Internet crash in 1996? Avi will get to that. And what is the role of AtmNet's ATM switches? Indeed. Apparently joining Avi in ignoring these tantalizing questions, the girl across the table raises her legs and hooks them sinuously around the body of the sleek young man. The waitress leans forward to deliver the drinks, suffusing the table with exotic perfumes. The two AtmNet promoters insist that the router problem can be overcome through the interposition of ATM switches. Avi dismisses the ATM argument. The complexity curve is still polynomial, he says. Whether routed or switched, the messages have to follow the same physical routes. The complexity is the same. Moreover, Avi's cell phone is on the blink and he has been out of reach for three hours. Gordon offers a show-off Audiovox the size of a pack of cards, only lighter. Avi manages to put through a call. The girl across the table shudders with pleasure as the man reaches out and cups her breasts in his hands. "The FIX is down," Avi sighs. "What does that mean?" I ask. That means, so I learn, a 45-megabit line is out of service and the Federal Internet Exchange, a Washington NAP, cannot trade routes or data with MAE East, Metropolitan Fiber Systems's Fiber Distributed Data Interface exchange point in Vienna, Virginia. This glitch ramifies, creating certain problems for some of Avi's new customers in Washington. The young man whispers something in the ear of the girl. She balks. "No, I'm getting embarrassed," she says. "Let's leave." "I'll call back in 10 minutes," says Avi. The pair unwrap their entangled limbs and staggers up from the table. Avi and the rest of us get up to go. Thus ends the visit to the palmy domain of Le Colonial. Before I can pry in a question about Metcalfe, Avi is on the road back home to his wife and an Internet crisis at 11 p.m., enjoying life as a Diet Pepsi bon vivant polynomial ISP. Anyway, it was time for fresh air. John Mevi of AtmNet needs a break. "Avi talks so fast it makes my ears ring," he explains. "You've got to understand. I'm from a telco environment." So it was that on a steamy evening in New York, on June 17, I returned to consult Avi again on Metcalfe's predictions of a network crash. We met with Gordon Jacobson at Martini's, an Italian restaurant near the Sheraton Hotel on the west side of Manhattan. While Avi and Gordon consume a lox pizza and several orders of pasta, I question these men who live on the Net from minute to minute, day to day, who live in a world of routing tables, TCP/IP address resolutions, and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and Gate Daemons, about what they make of the doom scenario. Avi believes that Metcalfe has ascended to an elevation in the industry that takes him out of the loop. He really doesn't get it. The Merit data is mostly irrelevant. Pings from the Routing Arbiter are weighted as lowest-priority packets. It is predictable and unimportant that many are dropped and re-sent. "That's the way the Internet works. Like Ethernet, it is tolerant of failure. Undelivered packets are re-sent; they show up as a few milliseconds of delay." Metcalfe makes much of Merit's index of router instability, measured by the number of routes announced and withdrawn. In the extreme, instability brings "route flaps," in which waves of announcements and withdrawals spread across the Net in positive feedback loops that congest the system. Avi dismisses this effect. "There have been no significant route flaps in the last six months or more." A large portion of the instability problems is attributable to a bug in Cisco router software that is in the process of being fixed. He confirms the findings of Ken Ehrhart of Gilder Technology Group that shows little correlation between the router instability number and performance of the Net measured by throughput at NAP switches. While all this "wild statistical behavior" went on, the Net continued to perform stably by using other routes, circumventing the congested paths. "That's how the Internet works." Avi sums it up: "Metcalfe has become an elder statesman and now he is doing more harm than good, spreading fear and doubt while the rest of us solve the problems." As Ehrhart puts it, "These Merit numbers bear bad names like 'instability,' 'packet loss' and 'delay.' Metcalfe says these bad things are growing wildly. But in back of these numbers what is really growing wildly is the Internet and that is a good thing." Richard Shaffer's ComputerLetter, for example, reports that MCI's backbone traffic has risen fivefold in the last year. MCI reports that its traffic has grown a total of 5,000% since it opened the backbone in 1994. Like Howard Anderson, Bill Gates, Andy Grove and other bandwidth skeptics, Metcalfe seems to find the explosive growth of his intellectual progeny--Ethernets and Internets--too good to be true. All the sages and titans seem to seek obsessively the worms in the Giant Peach as it hurtles through the air. The message from Avi, Gordon and the AtmNet crew is "Let them eat worms. We'll feast on the peach." Metcalfe's economics arguments are largely true. As Michael Rothschild's Bionomics shows, growth in natural and economic systems depends on running a surplus in every cell. But the cells of the Internet are thriving today. From the creators of the backbone who lease their facilities, to the ISPs who are madly multiplying their points of presence, the leading companies are attracting so much investment and support that laggard behemoths such as AT&T, TCI and the RBOCs are rushing in. The law of the telecosm depends on the principle that new computers and routers on the Net not only use its resources but also contribute new resources to it. If the recent upsurge in Intranets is parasitical to some degree (because these newcomers use the resources of the Net without contributing resources of their own), the ultimate parasite on the scene may be AT&T, which commands perhaps the world's largest Intranet. AT&T has attracted some 6 million orders from newcomers for Net service, with plans to have 20 million by the end of the year, while lagging far behind MCI and Sprint in contributing to the Internet system. Until recently, AT&T's vast fiber backbones carried just 2% of Internet traffic. AT&T preens as the largest and lowest-cost ISP, but its traffic mostly travels the backbones of MCI, Sprint and other national Internet carriers. A key to clearing the current bogs and bit pits of the Internet and preventing a Metcalfe collapse is the enlisting of the full-fiber and switching resources of AT&T to relieve the pressure on the existing NAPs and backbones and to accommodate the Internet's growth. AT&T is currently moving to supply such support. The Intranets criticized by Metcalfe are crucial to the Internet's growth. Like the corporate PCs that spearheaded the advance of PC technology, Intranets spread Internet technology through business, expand the market for high-powered gear, lower component prices, enlarge bandwidth, and bring new users and buyers onto the Net. As for Metcalfe's prediction of Internet crashes from private network overflows, the fact is that no computer memory system could work without the principle of locality--the tendency of memory accesses to focus on a contiguous region of addresses. The Internet is similar. Internal corporate e-mail, for example, is about 10 times as voluminous as remote e-mail. Metcalfe's private Net overflow cascade is mostly a theoretical chimera. Like Ethernets, "the Internet works in practice but not in theory." A second key fact of the Internet is that nothing in modern computer systems could survive the combinatorial explosions of multimillion-line software programs and multimillion-node circuitry without the magic of the microcosm. Semiconductors sink the complexity into silicon, where it gives way to the exponential boon of the power-delay product. The performance of the circuit--measured by its speed and low power--improves roughly by the square of the number of transistors on the chip. A microprocessor using separate components would be taller than the Empire State Building and cover most of New York state. Most of the problems of Internet complexity must be solved the same way that the microprocessor solves its complexity explosion, sucking the complexity into semiconductors and taming it on the chip. This means that Internet nodes would ideally be single-chip systems. Avi is correct; it makes little difference whether these systems are routers or switches. Today the backbone is being renewed by ATM switches because these devices integrate more of the process onto silicon than any other switches. In the future, broadband optics will likely prevail by integrating entire communications systems onto seamless webs of glass. THE INTERNET AS LIFE EXTENDER The internet is a human contrivance requiring finance and physical renewal. In practice, this means capital from phone companies and other large institutions. In the real world, self-organizing systems rely on market incentives rather than bio-analogies. Metcalfe is right that these incentives must be protected and extended in order for the law of the telecosm to conquer the laws of entropy. The key remaining obstacle to the fulfillment of the promise of the Internet is government regulation. This obstacle is being overcome at last by the brute force of bandwidth abundance, stemming from breakthroughs in fiber optics, smart radios, satellites and cable modems. In every industrial transformation, businesses prosper by using the defining abundance of their era to alleviate the defining scarcity. Today this challenge implies a commanding moral imperative: to use Internet bandwidth in order to stop wasting the customer's time. Stop the callous cost of queues, the insolence of cold calls, the wanton eyeball pokes and splashes of billboards and unwanted ads, the constant drag of lowest-common-denominator entertainments, the lethal tedium of unneeded travel, the plangent buffeting of TV news and political prattle, the endless temporal dissipation in classrooms, waiting rooms, anterooms, traffic jams, toll booths and assembly lines, through the impertinent tyranny of unneeded and afterwards ignored submission of forms, audits, polls, waivers, warnings, legal pettifoggery. All these affronts once were tolerable in an age when the customer's time seemed abundant--an available economic externality in an economy of material scarcity. All are intolerable in an age of compounding abundance, pressing down on the span of life as the irreducible scarcity. For all this abusive waste of the most precious resource, the remedy is the Net. Businesses must use its defining abundance--MIPS, bits and gigahertz--to redress the residual scarcity of time. A key way to save time is to economize on space--geography. In practical terms, there is only one way to collapse time and space together. That is to relegate more and more of the routine functions of life to microchips, where room expands as space contracts, and where operations cycle in nanoseconds, and then to interconnect the chips through the technologies of the speed of light. This is the promise of the Internet and it will keep the Giant Peach aloft and ascendant in the new global economy of bandwidth abundance.     [bul_blk.gif] [5]TOP [6]Visit www.heartstream.com _______________________________________________________________ [7]Telecosm Index | [8]Search | [9]ASAP | [10]ASAP Archives [11]Webmaster | [12]Forbes | [13]Gilder Tech Report Forbes ASAP Copyright Forbes 1997 References 1. http://www.global.forbes.com/event.ng/Type=click&AdID=3069&ProfileID=105& RunID=1095&GroupID=1&FamilyID=269&TagValues=254.269.346.696&Redirect=http:%2F%2 Fforbes.clique.com 2. 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