It’s another event week for me at Networking Field Day 25 and I’m continually impressed with the level of technology that we see in the networking world. I think back to how things looked when I was still deploying the networks I built and it seems like a hundred years ago instead of a decade. More software driving better outcomes for users. Easier collection of analytics and telemetry to understand how to tune things and make them faster and better. And, honestly, more need for advanced technical people to tune everything and make it work better.

When you consider that the last year has been done over the Internet for most of us it gets even crazier. Meetings, software productivity, and even food delivery has been driven by apps running in the cloud that we communicate with over the Internet. I can remember a time when I didn’t have a mobile phone in my pocket with Internet capabilities. Today I can barely imagine not having it at my fingertips. When the network is not doing things the way we want we quickly find out how dependent we’ve become on our connectivity.

Generational Differences

My children are amazed that dial-up networking used to be a thing. I remember rebuilding Winsock stacks in Windows 98 for Gateway in order to troubleshoot 56k modems not connecting to AOL at the beginning of the millennium. Today my cable modem gets me where I need to go when I’m home and my 5G phone does the heavy lifting for me when I’m on the road. Need to look up a price on something? Or know the temperature? Or just listen to a song you remember from your childhood? It’s all at your fingertips. I can’t imagine that kind of connectivity back when it took a minute or two for the phone to scream out the song of Compuserve at my house.

My in-laws have a DSL connection that suits them just fine for their needs. It’s painfully slow for me. I couldn’t live with their slow connection and inability to run multiple things at once, like video streaming and Zoom meetings at the same time. They don’t live very far from me either. The difference in their connectivity is shocking. And yet, we just expect to be able to get online any time we want.

Remember ATTWIFI at Starbucks? Remember when your iPhone would automatically connect to give you better speeds when your 3G was overwhelmed? I can recall getting into a situation where Cisco Live in Las Vegas made my phone unusable outside of the conference. Today that situation would be unacceptable. And we’re barely a decade removed from those days.

As I keep seeing technology moving along even faster, including things like silicon photonics promising speeds north of hundreds of gigabits on the uplink side, I wonder how our next generation is going to feel about not being able to watch 8k TV shows in a self-driving car on-demand because there’s not enough bandwidth. I laugh when I remember the need to swap out DVDs on car trips so my eldest son could have entertainment. Today my youngest is happy to binge watch shows on Disney without interruption because of the networks we’ve built.

Creating Dependence

What we’ve built has created the world we live in. But we also have made it a world dependent on what we’ve built. I realized that months ago when my network connection kept going out during a winter storm. Without connectivity people feel lost. I had a hard time getting things done offline without being able to look up information or get emails sent out. My kids are beside themselves without access to anything online. Their board games were boring. They couldn’t play video games offline because all the cool features were on the Internet. By the time the connection came back it was almost Lord of the Flies around here as the minutes ticked on.

We no longer have the luxury of shrugging our shoulders when the network goes down. It needs to be treated no differently than the electricity or water in a building. If we neglect it we risk alienating our users and stakeholders. We need to be firm when we need new equipment or better designs to ensure resilience. Instead of making everything cheap and barely usable we need to remind everyone how reliant they’ve become on the network. If it’s necessary it is absolutely worth investing in. Moving to the cloud or becoming more and more reliant on SaaS applications just reinforces those decisions.

Tom’s Take

Either the network is just a tool that doesn’t need investment or it’s a necessary part of your work that needs to be treated as such. While I would never suggest unplugging anything to prove a point I think you can point to specific outages that would do the same thing without the chaos. Every time you tell your stakeholders they need to invest in better switches or new access points and they push back about costs or try to suggest a cheaper alternative, you need to stand firm. In a world where everyone is dependent on Internet connectivity for all manner of their lives you have to treat it as a necessity in every possible way. You can tell your stakeholders to spend their day working from their phone hotspot if they don’t believe you. It’ll be like taking a trip back to the early parts of the millennium when networks weren’t as important.