In the midst of the congressional-judiciary jujitsu over the Do Not Call telemarketing list, most members of Congress failed to note the numbers from the American Teleservices Association. Removing a nuisance for 50 million Americans will mean putting 2 to 4 million Americans, largely lower-income types, out of work. What happens in other sectors when we try to eliminate a problem by finding a solution that eliminates millions of jobs?

We've explored in recent columns the implications of a global economy that takes all OEM development in communications to Asia. If the free marketeers are going to promote the notion of comparative advantage developed by economist David Ricardo, they must accept the result of a switch and router industry that becomes 90 percent-based in Guangzhou. The latest trend toward high-reliability, self-healing networks spanning LAN to WAN has me worried about more unintended consequences.

In the name of selling network equipment that "cuts opex and capex to absolute minimums," developers are creating platforms that recover from faults simultaneously at Layers 3 through 7, with minimum human intervention. The cheerleaders for Internet Protocol are proud of saying that they've already shown that high-layer recoverability works as well as physical-layer Sonet protection switching, at a fraction of the cost.

No concepts for self-healing and self-configuring networks work as well as advertised, so humans will remain in the loop to a certain extent. But we're already well aware of how the unionized local incumbent carriers retain more line employees working on infrastructure than may be necessary. If self-healing works even a fraction as well as its proponents hope, the troubleshooters working in physical line maintenance, network planning, route table assurance and even IT management in the enterprise may find themselves made largely redundant.

OK, this is worst-case. The fragility of the electrical grid nationwide should teach us that if we assume all physical-layer problems can be righted by appealing to software, we end up with an outdated physical infrastructure near collapse. We may have to face the prospects of more and more humans being eliminated from the loop.

Loring Wirbel is Communications editorial director for EE Times and its network publications.

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