(continued from Friday)
Telecom guys were intimidated by Internet guys. I knew about fiber optics, what SONET was, and how LEC interconnection worked. The latter was a big deal. I led MFS’s effort to interconnect its local switched networks with the RBOCs. These interconnection agreements–and the network interconnections that resulted–were brand-spanking-new. Very few people understood them. At that point in time, I likely had as good of an understanding (from a business perspective) as anyone in the industry. However, when it came to the Internet, I was very aware that I didn’t understand much–at least not compared to a guy like Jack Waters.
“Jack, what do you make of Jim’s notion of connecting up SS7 and IP?” I asked.
“Sounds like a great idea,” he responded casually.
Did he know what Jim was talking about? I couldn’t tell. He played off like he did. Did he think I knew? I played off like I did. I don’t know who let on first that they had no clue.
You see, Jack knew the guts of the Internet inside and out. He was part of the in-crowd who defined peering. He knew all there was to know about what TCP/IP was. He was integral in building the biggest Internet backbones of the era. However, I discovered, he knew about as much about SS7 and LEC interconnection as I knew about the Internet. Why would he know anything about these? His entire career was in the world of the Internet–which back then had nothing to do with the PSTN. In fact, the Internet guys despised the PSTN–it was archaic and, oh yeah, not scalable. “Scalable” was one of the favorite terms of the Internet crowd.
Jack was able to explain what was meant by “Internet Protocol”. He educated me on how peering and transit worked. He helped me begin to get an appreciation for what the Internet really was. I had done a fair amount of work on implementing massive Internet projects for UUNET. The education provided by Jack helped me piece together the work we did for UUNET. Through all of this, the power of IP as compared to the PSTN was becoming more clear.
By this point, it was the end of the week. I still didn’t know what Jim was talking about, but now I knew a bit more about IP. My mind was racing.
(to be continued)
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