Voice Over Networks - We are moving quickly into the tornado

As I sit here at VON Fall 2005 http://www.von.com listening to Jeff Pulver talk about how IP communications is now the winner of the telecommunications race, talking about how the traditional TDM Voice and Cellular networks didn't work after Hurricane Katrina but VoIP did, I can't help but remember when my oldest friend Joe Garbus and I were working at Cabletron Systems in New York shoveling shared access 10Mb hubs into Merrill Lynch by the truckload. Financial services seeing the value in high speed networking.

There was one very completely outside of the box opportunity we chased with a guy name Tom Krone who sold a very lucrative chocolate manufacturing business to get into the business of delivering television, voice and data over DSL. This was back in the Fall of 1997 when most of the news about the "Internet" was about how unstable it was. AOL was seeing outages on a daily basis.

The gig required us to deliver video from 25 Broadway from a room with a video server uptown to Trump Tower over a DS3 ATM link to an Ethernet connected set top box. Joe and I had to work with NYNEX field support to get the DS3 link up and running. Joe and I spent more time in the basement of Trump Tower working on getting ready to demonstrate to potential investors the next day. NYNEX really didn't know what was really going on, what the potential was at the time. NYNEX looked at the opportunity to just sell ATM Circuits.

We worked throughout the night and finally after the last jumper was set to set the proper signaling on the Fujisu MUX, all of a sudden we were watching TV being delivered through an Acorn set top box connected to an Ethernet switch that connected to a DSL modem through a DSLAM that connected through ATM to 25 Broadway back to an ATM connected video Server.

Joe turned to me and said "I have seen the future".

Now I sit here today looking at the tornado in front of me to quote Geoffrey A. Moore in Crossing the Chasm. The companies that sit at this point in time get ready to do nothing but "Just Ship" their products.

Christian S. Horner