
Netheads vs. Bellheads (1996) - cbdumas
https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
======
pjc50
> ""How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like
> RealAudio or IPhone. Then tell them that right now performance is bandwidth-
> limited, but that additional infrastructure is being deployed." Then "once
> they realize their precious voice is becoming just a simple application on
> data networks," point out "that the Internet is also witnessing explosive
> growth combined with 45 percent returns on investment, compared to 5 percent
> growth and only 12 percent or so returns for voice." In short," says Doran,
> make Bellheads realize they are witnessing their extinction."

That was definitely the real fight going on - control over calls and other
services, with the ability to do differentiated quasi-monopoly pricing.
Ultimately:

> "IP is hard to charge for? That's not a bug, that's a feature!"

This is the defining feature of the internet: you don't have to go through the
billing system.

(If you want to see a telco-designed internet protocol that's in wide use, try
SIP: the separation of control and data planes is absolutely characteristic.)

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
> show them something like RealAudio or IPhone

I remember Real, but had forgotten the second - a VoIP phone "Not Cisco’s OR
Apple’s" : [http://www.appleiphonereview.com/issues/see-
this-1996-iphone...](http://www.appleiphonereview.com/issues/see-
this-1996-iphone-ad-not-ciscos-or-apples/)

(first hit on search for "iphone 1996")

~~~
lenticular
Real is still around. They occupy a floor or two of a small office building
near the stadium in Seattle. From what I understand, they are essentially
patent trolls now.

~~~
GauntletWizard
Few things ever cease to exist entirely. There's a hobbiest still running
every flavor of VAX out there; still practicing practitioners of all sorts of
weird cults. Real is no longer a software company nor can you realistically
(no pun intended) use any of it's products. It has ceased to exist in all
senses but historical, and the patent troll firm still bearing it's name
should be seen as antiquated.

On the other hand, there's probably someone there who believes that they're
still fighting the good fight against someone who cheated them, and they might
be right. We've gotten so used to cheaters as a society that we really can't
tell what's real achievement and what's fraud.

------
RyanShook
Sean Doran, featured in the article, was fired from Sprint the week the
article was published.
[https://www.wired.com/1997/11/updata-9/](https://www.wired.com/1997/11/updata-9/)

~~~
azernik
God, Wired used to be so high quality.

~~~
michaelcampbell
Content maybe, but the edgy weird fonts on garish colors at bizarre angles
with varying backgrounds made the print edition unreadable.

------
sverige
The MCI hub in Colorado Springs in the 90s was like something out of a movie.
And everyone that worked there seemed to think they were actors in a big
movie. And the Northwestern Bell / US West / Qwest people were funny, too.
Both sides really did talk and act like they were the rulers of the world, and
actually hated each other with a passion, but I wonder how often they go to
visit the graves of uu.net or others like it. Oh, that's right, most of them
were laid off or quit decades ago.

As an old voice guy, it's still hilarious to me that AT&T and Verizon are the
two biggest players in cell phones, which probably carry most of the data to
end users. The IP guys didn't really figure that one out until it was too
late. So they won the protocol fight, but didn't get paid.

~~~
adventured
> The IP guys didn't really figure that one out until it was too late. So they
> won the protocol fight, but didn't get paid.

AT&T collapsed and was reborn through mergers and slapping the facade name on
a new entity, ending up in the present form as another soon to be bankrupt
gigantic pile of debt with zero growth.

Meanwhile all the money went to the IP world: Google, Microsoft, Apple,
Amazon, Facebook, Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Samsung, etc. The IP world saw
_all_ the value gain, AT&T and Verizon - once you tally the debt, debt
interest, mergers - have seen zero inflation adjusted gain in either their
businesses or their stock market values in 20 years.

> AT&T and Verizon are the two biggest players in cell phones

You're incorrectly assessing where most of the money is in phones, which led
you to the incorrect end conclusion about AT&T and Verizon being the ones who
got paid. Apple all by itself is deriving more value from cell phones than
AT&T and Verizon combined. Google search via mobile is generating ~$30 billion
per year in operating income, that's more than Verizon is making from its
entire mobile segment. Facebook got nearly all of its ~$24 billion in
operating income over the prior four quarters from mobile.

The IP/Netheads are the only ones who actually got paid.

------
ralph84
In the end did it matter? Most of the ISPs who were on the "right" side of the
debate ended up bankrupt or acquired by legacy telcos anyway.

~~~
wmf
Yes, I think the only ISP left with a pure "nethead" philosophy is Cogent (see
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGIKT1yw27A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGIKT1yw27A)
) and maybe HE and they aren't super-successful.

------
rdiddly
Kind of surprised by the number of words in here that I haven't heard in
years, most of which I might add, signify mundane things, not specific
technologies. Examples: "the Net," "netizen," "workstation"

~~~
nyolfen
'netizen' seems to mostly be applied to mainlanders these days

------
kibwen
As someone who was single-digit in years when this article was written, can
anyone give a brief summary of how the fight turned out? Did the RISC-like
sedimentation predicted in the article come to pass?

~~~
EvanAnderson
Insofar as ATM vs. IP, IP "won".

I had some ATM in Customer sites the late 90s as a LAN / backbone technology.
By the early 2000s it was disappearing. IP over gigabit Ethernet and layer 3
switches with wire-speed routing replaced it everywhere I ever used it. ATM is
still inside older DSL networks, but I haven't seen it used as a WAN
technology in a long time.

I don't know enough about the innards of fast IP routers to say, but my gut
says that, given the differences between IP and ATM, there's probably not much
in the way of legacy ATM hiding inside our modern gear.

Insofar as the "Bellhead" vs. "Nethead" mentality, as another comment says,
the majority of big "Nethead" ISPs have all been acquired by legacy telco
interests (I wept inside when CenturyLink acquired Level 3, for example). In
the service provider space, at least, I think that the "Bellheads" won.

~~~
twic
There's a fossil of ATM surviving inside the ADSL protocol (although i suppose
there aren't many people still using that) - ADSL has an ungodly stack of
different protocols, but at some point, there's AAL5, an adaptation layer on
top of ATM, which in turn sits above the physical layer. ATM cells are fixed-
size and short, and AAL5 creates variable-sized long frames on top of them.
PPP then uses that, and IP uses PPP.

Although from what i remember, the physical layer doesn't carry actual ATM
cells; there's some scheme for packing them into large bundles, eliminating
the repeated header, for more efficient transmission. So ATM is a sort of
fiction which helps translate PPP messages into ADSL frames. It's been a long,
long time since i really understood ADSL, though.

~~~
blattimwind
MPoA (you can guess what the A stands for) has replaced the older PPPoA for
VDSL deployments.

~~~
twic
TIL! I see that MP = multi-protocol:

[http://cs.hadassah.ac.il/staff/martin/Seminar/MPOA/mpoa.pdf](http://cs.hadassah.ac.il/staff/martin/Seminar/MPOA/mpoa.pdf)

------
EvanAnderson
This was a seminal article of my youth. I still use the terms "Nethead" and
"Bellhead" sometimes in conversation, and I refer people to the article fairly
regularly. Setting aside the references to particular technologies, I think it
gives a good background on a fundamental philosophical business difference.

------
gumby
I knew ATM was dead when the compromised on a 53 byte cell (I.e. frame) size.

Apart from the comical absurdity of the choice, the fact that they compromised
was the canary that the standards process was a mess. Compare it to the IETF
process that has been quite successful.

~~~
tlb
53 (48 payload + 5 header) was an efficient size for voice. There’s no fixed
size that’s great for data — you always need fragmentation, so it doesn’t
matter much what the exact cell size is. So although it seemed like an odd
number, if you have to pick a fixed size it’s a good choice.

~~~
wmf
IIRC the voice people wanted 32 (+5) for lower latency and the data people
wanted 64 (+5) for lower overhead.

~~~
tlb
Right. But the overhead difference between 48 and 64 for large-packet data is
only about 2%, so data people were OK with 48.

32 would have been a bad choice for data, as a large fraction of all internet
data packets are 40-byte TCP ACKs.

~~~
jzwinck
Aren't TCP ACKs 20 bytes by themselves? The 40 byte total includes IP, which
would not be needed if running on ATM, right?

~~~
tlb
In most uses of ATM, a single VC (virtual circuit) carries all the data
between a pair of switches. The protocol to set up a new VC is pretty
expensive, so it's impractical to set up a VC for each TCP connection or even
between each pair of endpoint hosts.

So mostly, VCs carry a stream of packets between switches, each with their own
header.

~~~
jzwinck
In that case doesn't it mean there are 40 bytes of TCP/IP headers and 5 bytes
of ATM headers plus a mere 8 bytes of payload per TCP packet?

~~~
toast0
ATM packets (cells?) are fixed size, but you can fragment higher level
protocols across them. It's not common to run IP level fragmentation down to
ATM sizes.

------
zatkin
What ever happened to Sean Doran? His webpage[1] is over 20 years old, and I
wasn't able to find anything else about him..

[1] [http://www.clock.org/~smd/new/](http://www.clock.org/~smd/new/)

~~~
ralph84
As of ~3 years ago, he wasn't doing so well.

[https://www.gofundme.com/seandoran](https://www.gofundme.com/seandoran)

------
ttul
Many of my engineering school colleagues were doing internships at PMC Sierra,
a chipmaker whose IP powered the ATM networks. We had many debates...

------
late2part
Neat old story. Sean rocks. Bellheads lost except in lobbying. IP Everywhere
is real. Screw the bellheads. These fools want you to put 5G uplinks in your
house.

------
madengr
Ah, I was also 25 then. I was telling my kids today, there used to be an
internet with no advertisements.

~~~
avmich
They wouldn't be amused trying using that. Glacial speeds - so no multimedia;
no search, no resources which became so traditional one takes them for
granted, like maps, social media...

~~~
imdsm
I actually enjoyed the internet more back then, or well, slightly after. I
think I first went online about 1998. There was something magical about being
a 9 year old fledgling programmer communicating via UDP, port scanning and
connecting to services, and generally seeing what was out there.

I try to imagine it like space now. We're now looking out into space, seeing
what is there. If in 1000 years we have it all mapped out and we just use
Spoogle to locate something – "ore rich moon, ores:bauxite, distance:50LY"
"1–243,123 results" – the fun of searching and discovering will be kind of
lost.

