Happy New Year, everyone. Only six more years till hoverboards!
At the beginning of the new year, there’s almost always a slew of tech news articles and editorial talking about how 2009 will be the year of X.
To wit, it has been the year of “the Linux Desktop” every year since 1999. (Personally, I think that 2008 was the year of the Linux Desktop, but that’s an article for a different day.)
But while predictions may provide some source of humor when they go awry, the paradox is that they should be taken seriously.
Part of the problem with making predictions is that if the result is positive, they can become self-fulfilling, negative, and they become self-avoiding. Look at Y2K. The world thinks nothing happened – however, if you were in IT during the late 1990s, you know that Y2K required a major overhaul, increased upgrades, etc. Y2K wasn’t a disaster overhyped, it was a disaster avoided through massive hard work. It also may have had no small part in the zenith of the tech boom of the 1990s, as companies bought new hardware before the usual refresh cycles.
Network World is making one big prediction that I think does deserve some attention.
The first is Steve Taylor and Larry Hettick’s prediction that 2009 will be the year of IP video.
Our observations: We recall the days when public and enterprise networks were engineered first for voice and data second, but as data traffic demands grew, the engineering focus by necessity had to change to data first, voice second. We see the same evolution in network engineering focus as video demand grows to surpass data. We also note that while some enterprise IPV will be sent and received entirely across private networks (especially for telepresence), inter-company and business-to-consumer traffic will principally cross the Internet - so service providers will need to accommodate both consumer and enterprise video traffic in a way that does not compromise voice and data network integrity. And with the consumer market for Internet delivered commercial video also beginning to burgeon, the task of managing all the video traffic across the network cores will not be trivial.
I suppose that now would be a good time to mention that we’re probably going to be stepping up our Whiteboard Video series articles in the new year.
In addition to teleconferencing, video’s simply a simple way to convey information to those who learn by both sight and sound. It’s much easier to explain a concept when you can show them, rather than just telling them about it. Maybe one new years resolution could be to check with your marketing and sales departments to see if they have any plans to put video online for customers, or with HR to see if there’s any important training videos going out on the intranet.
The problem is that video, voice, and data all travel on the same pipe. If one of those three monopolizes the pipe at the expense of the other two, it doesn’t matter how large or how small the pipe is. Network monitoring and proactive management is sorely needed in a “triple pipe” environment. Proper network management allows you to mitigate the worst problems with an oversubscribed line until you can get more bandwidth; but improper network management will cause problems no matter how much bandwidth you add.
