In 1997 Isenberg wrote: “A powerful leading indicator of the stupid network will arrive when entrepreneurs, who have no vested interest in maintaining telephone company assumptions, begin to offer profitable, affordable widely available data services.”
I can’t remember if Isenberg’s paper had the same effect on me as when I first heard Up From the Skies [1] way back in 1967, but it too made me sit up and take notice. Isenberg’s paper is considered seminal in that, at the time, he was promoting an alternative approach to the existing orthodoxy in telecoms thinking and more recently, it was considered to be the eighth most important Internet paper ever published [2]. The paper is reproduced below with a view to encouraging discussion amongst ITP members. I will follow it with my own observations.
An historic note may be in order in that, like Isenberg, I too am a child of the all encompassing Telco as I started my working life in August 1971 in what was then Post Office Telecommunications, London City Telephone Area (and subsequently joined the predecessor of the ITP, the IPOEE very soon after). It should be noted that Isenberg’s paper was first written in May 1997 and many of the ‘Intelligent Network’ concepts Isenberg describes are familiar to me. Whilst the paper did not have AT&T’s endorsement, it was widely available on the Internet and was ‘formally’ published in
Computer Telephony in August 1997. If I recall correctly, I was consulting to Enertel in the Netherlands at that time launching an indirect access product, but wasn’t aware of the paper until
early 2000. So here it is.