Why the “Stupid Network” isn’t Our Destiny After All

[Commentary] A decade and a half ago, as Internet adoption began to accelerate, David Isenberg wrote what may well have been the manifesto for the revolution, “The Rise of the Stupid Network.” He argued that seismic shifts were shaking the very foundations of the telecommunications industry: data traffic was overtaking voice, circuit switching was succumbing to packet, price-performance was radically improving, and customers were increasingly taking control. The network, he contended, should be “stupid,” carrying bits from point A to point B, and not doing much else. Functionality was best delivered by intelligent endpoints interacting over a dumb network. As he foresaw, the interoperability benefits of a ubiquitous protocol like IP, which has now worked itself into our smartphones, tablets, and TVs – not to mention everything from electric meters to light bulbs – cannot be denied. And, thanks to Moore’s Law, even preschoolers can have hundreds of GigaFLOPS at their disposal for less than the price of a swing set. Of course, 15 years is a long time, especially in the field of computing and communications. So the question is, does Isenberg’s line of thought still hold true? I would argue that, rather than stupid networks, we’re entering an era of “pervasive intelligence,” where endpoints are intelligent, but the network can be as well. Networks can be smart. Tunable. Programmable.

[Weinman is a senior vice president at Telx, a provider of interconnection and data center services]