The AT&T network is designed to drive innovation at a fast pace, said Hossein Eslambolchi, President of AT&T Global Networking Technology, in a keynote address at the Spring 2004 VON conference in Santa Clara, California. Eslambolchi kicked off his presentation with a "Top Ten" list of technology trends and predictions affecting his network:
- 1. IP is a PacMan and will eat everything in its path for the next 25 years
- 2. Broadband is becoming common, driving traffic onto the backbone
- 3. The Wireless Internet will be big -- look for 4G and 5G over the next 3-5 years to really shake things up
- 4. Sensor networks will be everywhere -- RFIDs and IPv6s will add vast numbers of endpoints to the network
- 5. Convergence of communications and computing is happening now
- 6. Death of Locality -- your ID is bound to an IP address rather than a geographic location
- 7. Security needs to be everywhere
- 8. Next gen distributed computing is growing -- grid computing will tap into the huge amount of PC cycle time
- 9.Home LANs will proliferate -- Wi-Fi will top 100 Mbps
- 10. Data mining -- petabytes of data crossing the network need to be analyzed to deliver better intelligence
Eslambolchi said AT&T has embarked on a plan to retire its legacy TDM equipment over time, d replacing its workhorse circuit switches with a pure IP/MPLS architecture that runs over an intelligent photonic mesh core. His design goals are to transform the network to be provide the lowest cost, the greatest scale, and the greatest flexibility in service offerings. Two key elements of this architecture will include a multiservice access box and multiservice edge box -- not a "God box", said Eslambolchi, but an "AT&T" box, which will be introduced into the network in Q2. The multiservice edge box will tie into the IP/MPLS core. An application aware network layer will run on top of all this hardware, supporting consumer services such as the CallVantage offering, integrated messaging and e-communications. Nevertheless, Eslambolchi acknowledged that TDM is not going away any time soon and that we are going to be living in a hybrid environment for at least a decade.
AT&T has been working on a number of VoIP security issues, including ways to prevent the fradulent use of VoIP services, methods to guard against denial of service attacks, and ways to deter the evesdropping of VoIP packets along the media path. Rather than voice over IP, Eslambolchi prefers the term "Services over IP" (SoIP) to describe the next wave of networking.
