While the Telstra show was hitting fever pitch in Canberra last Thursday, Simon was in Singapore, espousing the virtues of the Internet Protocol (IP) to delegates at an investor day hosted by Optus parent Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel).
Simon told investors he had identified six major telecommunications trends among enterprise customers, with migration to IP-based virtual private networks top of the list.
Other, related trends included the ongoing uptake of Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony and migration to Ethernet as a transmission medium.
Simon obviously keeps a keen eye on his current and potential customers. Virtually every chief information officer (CIO) or IT manager your writer has spoken to recently is eagerly anticipating a switch in the mid-term to VoIP and other IP-based technologies.
But, like any change, the current obsession with IP comes with a catch.
Simon admitted some "traditional" data services would be retired due to Optus's new focus on IP.
Most CIOs may be eyeing IP, but some aren't and Optus might lose the odd customer who is happy with what they've already got.
At least one of Optus's own technology migrations associated with the change to IP isn't going perfectly either.
The telco was last week forced to admit to problems with its own network, sourced by Internet service provider (ISP) Exetel to a botched move by Optus from legacy ATM technology to the latest and greatest Gigabit Ethernet.
The increasing use of Ethernet is associated with the transition to networks based on IP and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) technology.
Exetel claimed some 3,000 of its own customers were affected due to the ISP's dependence on Optus's backbone Internet links.
While Optus said the problem is likely to be fixed soon, the issue was a timely reminder that every technology migration involves unexpected headaches, and the move to IP is no exception.
What do you think of the ongoing move to IP? Is your telecommunications provider pushing you onto new services a little too early? Drop me a line at renai.lemay@zdnet.com.au and give me your thoughts.
Thanks Renai for raising this issue.
Okay so Optus are behind the 8-ball, it is fairly clear. They clearly have a passion and a desire to be changing their core (well, 'outer core') network technology, due to economies of scale available for using Ethernet instead of ATM for backbone transport. Other providers may use Packet-over-SDH (aka Packet-over-SoNET) optical networking to achieve this (e.g., Telstra). Optus have a legacy ATM network with SDH transport (of the ATM, no less), but this is hardly unusual for a large telco in any market internationally. Given you can run IP directly on top of SDH circuits, or run MPLS on the SDH circuits (gives you more flexibility but also more headaches and network management dilemmas), it is a worthwhile change to make. This is not an unusual challenge that they face, with the increasing bandwidth demands of modern services. ATM networks have run out of cost-effective scalability (you cant pump more data down just one pair of fibres or wavelengths on ATM, because amongst other things, the small cell size limits just how fast these switches can process data).
But Renai, please don't mix your apples and oranges. IP is not Ethernet, and IP is not ATM. IP runs on top of either of those two technologies. Optus were running IP on their ATM network, too, of course.
Was it really a 'botched move to Ethernet', or did they just run out of international bandwidth? (something that has happened numerous times before). If I were a wholesale customer of Optus', I would certainly be asking for some sort of assurance, written, that they can actually keep up with international IP traffic demands as they drive wholesale ADSL traffic, particularly as they introduce ADSL2+ wholesale services.