TECHNICAL
The More I Know the Less I Understand 1
Introduction
This article is a brief update to an earlier paper 2 which examined the work of David Isenberg and the Stupid Network concept. Isenberg was an employee of AT&T at the time and whilst the paper did not have AT&T’s endorsement, it was widely available on the Internet and was subsequently published in Computer Telephony in August 1997. Isenberg’s paper was 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. If I recall correctly, I was consulting to Enertel 3 in the Netherlands circa early 2000 (launching an indirect access product) and was made aware of Isenberg’s original paper during that project. An historical note may be in order that I, like Isenberg, am a child of the all- encompassing Telco 4 as I started my working life in what was then Post Office Telecommunications, London City Telephone Area wayback in August 1971.
by John Francis Nolan, First Mile Networks
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SEPTEMBER 2026 Volume 48 No.3
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