t due to routing inconsistencies and associated user signalling overheads. 17.9.6 So is the Internet an Efficient Transport System? Not really. It's robust because that's what it's designed for. It was, however, never designed to handle multimedia traffic and if you expect it to deliver the same end-to-end channel performance in terms of latency and jitter as an ATM or circuit-switched network, then any supposed efficiency benefits will rapidly disappear. All Internet protocols are inherently Making Telecoms Work inefficient and either waste bandwidth through transmission retries (TCP/IP) or lost packets (UDP) or a mixture of both. 17.9.7 So Why is the Internet so Cheap and Why does it Work SO Well? Because it is presently grossly overprovisioned and has been financed by the pension funds that lost investors money in the dot com dot bust cycle. 17.9.8 So if IP Networks are Neither More Efficient nor Lower Cost than Circuit-Switched or ATM Networks, Why are Telecoms Operators Deploying Them? Well that's a good question and one of the answers is that to an extent hardware costs are reducing as hardware (and to a lesser extent software) in the network becomes a commodity, but this is in reality a modest incremental process. Complex ATM hardware is being replaced with complex soft switch platforms with high clock speed processors, extravagantly provisioned high-performance buffer memory cards and unstable traffic-shaping protocols. Not really a big leap forward. As the Internet becomes more aggressively loaded over time, the real costs of delivery will start to reappear and will need to be factored in to end-to-end delivery cost calculations. If the route to reduced cost compromises the user experience then this is a self-defeating process. Network Software - Energy Management and Control Will the Pot Call the Kettle Back? In January 1999 we wrote a Technology Topic on Device Access Networks, 'Will the Pot call the Kettle Back? (1). We suggested that the protocols needed to allow devices to discover one another and t