Two weeks ago I interviewed Hunter Newby, Chief Strategy Officer of telX at their interconnection facility at 60 Hudson in New York City on the growing ubiquity of IP networks. John Serrao, The HPL's webmaster, was good enough to post it to the Blog a couple of days ago but I wanted to repost it here today with some of my thoughts and an interesting side note to the story.

Click the Image Above or Here to Watch the Interview

First, some of the important take-aways from the interview:

* Hunter estimated there are 8 important interconnection facilities that matter in US and 16 internationally. In these major metropolitan areas where you have competitive access to a carrier-neutral interconnection facilities like telX, metro Ethernet service providers like onFiber Communications, Yipes, and even AT&T can deliver a Gigabit Ethernet connection to the enterprise and with rackspace in a carrier-neutral interconnection facility like telX, enterprises can enter a competitive marketplace where they have access to a wide-range of "Menu Options" where enterprises can then connect directly to other network providers and even other enterprises to share voice/video/data traffic among themselves.

* Enterprises are renting rack/cage space at interconnection facilities like telx and locating their telephone closets at the interconnection facilities where they can directly peer their voice traffic with other enterprises and long distance carriers bypassing the regional bell companies. These peering arrangements are best exemplified by The Voice Peering Fabric which currently peers over 51,691,705,150 VoIP minutes annually, boasts a growing list tier-one providers, and is probably illustrative of how effective visual collaboration networks will peer together in the not too distant future.

* The growth of Ethernet ports (for both transport and extended demarc) in the telX facility has grown over 900% on a quarter over quarter basis in the last two years. The next fastest growing access medium was fiber at 300%.

* Traditional 2.5 and 10 Gigabit long-haul fiber optic networks are now moving to 40 Gigabit wavelength networks with talk of 100 Gigabit wavelength networks on the horizon.

* Costs of public IP transit (best-effort Internet) has dropped to ~ $10 a Megabit in the wholesale carrier hotel.

Second, before any telepresence / effective visual collaboration customers start calling their providers and asking them to lower their network costs, keep in mind that the overwhelming number of locations around the world where telepresence and effective visual collaboration are desireable are not down the street from 60 Hudson in New York City. The cost of building and maintaining an international Quality-of-Service (QoS) network with the capacity to deliver video globally without packet-loss, delay, or jitter which causes the image to freeze/fragment is still unbelievably costly especially at the high-bandwidths required by effective visual collaboration environments.

Third, with point #2 out of the way, the interview with Hunter is illustrative of some of the revolutionary changes that are taking place in IP networking (Gigabit Ethernet to the premise, 40 Gigabit fiber wavelengths, competitive marketplaces at the global interconnection facilities, etc.) that wil, eventually, dramatically bring down the cost of telepresence and effective visual collaboration. This same cost dynamic is also present in virtually every other component of telepresence and effective visual collaboration including the cost of codecs, cameras, display technology, and the environments themselves with mass production and improved manufacturing techniques. More on that in our upcoming publication: Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration, and the Future of Business at the Speed of Light.

Hunter Newby - Chief Strategy Officer, telx

An interesting side note: I have known Hunter Newby since 1999 from my days as a Senior Account Executive with DIGEX/Intermedia Communications when the DIGEX/Intermedia was one of the first Internet Service Providers in the US and telx was selling long distance. Hunter reminded me over lunch in Tribeca after our interview that I had played an ancillary role in telx's move from being a carrier selling international long distance "minutes" to being one of the most important interconnection facilities in the world.

In 1999 the telX facility in 60 Hudson was physically adjacent to Intermedia Communications' equipment room seperated by a wall. I had a customer that was looking to connect to telX but the only connections, at the time, in 60 hudson were T1/T3 local loops provisioned through the carriers. After waiting over a month with no response from the carrier (MFS) Hunter went down to the MFS facility on the 4th floor and figured out that MFS was out of ports on a piece of equipment and were waiting until they had enough other customers to justify buying another card. (In a true-to-form example of the mentality of the telcos/bell companies no one had bothered to inform the customer that they were just going to wait until sometime in the future where they had enough customers to buy the card).

Hunter and I kicked around the best way to "Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome" and someone had the great idea to simply drill a hole in the wall between telX and Intermedia, pull a cable and directly connect without paying a monthly charge for a T1/T3 circuit. There was only one problem: No One Had Ever Done It That Way Before! Hunter and I spent months on what sounds like a fairly simple proposition but in actuallity required me banging on Intermedia management/corporate legal with Hunter wrestling with the property management company that ran 60 Hudson.

While I had totally forgotten the details, Hunter brought them all hysterically back including the fact that the provisioning system at Intermedia ground to halt and had to be re-written because no-one had ever simply physically connected networks together without a local loop and the Intermedia computer system would not advance to the next screen without a local loop Circuit Facility Assingment#. I had also forgotten what a farce it was to simply drill a hole in the wall in 60 Hudson in 1999. It was over a month of wrangling with the property management company, their architects, and almost a month with a union ladder leaning against the wall at telx where the hole would eventually go and FOUR days to finally drill the hole after we had secured everyone's blessings and split the $7500 cost. BTW, Four Days= One day to do a final measurement, one day to stencil where the hole would go, one day to actually drill the hole, and one day of clean up.

That incident was the spark that lead Hunter to question the whole notion of using the phone companies to provision connections between networks and he built the business case for recreating telx as the carrier neutral interconnection facility it is today. Now Hunter and telx have gone on to revolutionize the way that networks connect not just within 60 Hudson but at carrier neutral interconnection facilities around the world. Customers no longer have to pay astronomical recurring charges to the bell companies and access providers like MFS for local loops and circuits get turned up in 2 days vs. weeks or months it use to take. Finally, the ability for upstart ISPs, carriers, and enterprises to locate their own telecommunications gear at carrier neutral interconnection facilities and peer cost-effectively with other networks and carriers has lead to a revolution in telecommunications with the cost of long distance telephony, broadband internet, and private networking dropping rapidly and making applications like Skype, Voice over IP, and eventually cost-effective visual collaboration a reality around the world.