Dandelion diagrams while not fractal, explode outward as you follow them. Putting the diagram in motion as you traverse a branch, it looks like the flower seeds are continually folding outward - from any branch it blossoms into another seed cluster. These 3D diagrams, as complex as they are, are only tracing the physical structure of the Internet. Diagramming the entirety of the logical connectivity and routing in the Internet involves a higher order of complexity; services and protocols are yet another layer to be overlaid on routing and connectivity diagrams.

Navigating the Seas of Complexity

The edge of the telecom world is becoming increasingly complex, to the extent that we do not really understand just how complex it is. This means that while we must continue to increase our understanding of what is going on out there and build the mathematical tools to describe and analyze it, we should not be fooled into thinking that we can manage this complexity in anything like the way we used to manage traditional networks and services.

our watered-down understanding. Our choices of what to select and what to pass over, in our efforts at simplification, may not be what is important. Indeed, our choices for simplification rarely match the true drivers of complex systems. Now that we are starting to build an understanding of complexity mathematics – this description of large complex systems with their hard-to-find strange attractors – we should realize that our management tools and our understanding of linear processes and logic flows just do not cut it, no matter how sophisticated they seem to be.

Should we really try to manage the ocean, to calm the winds and still the currents? Could it be that we might be better-employed building ships, charting currents, deploying

The traditional world of telecoms was like a collection of well-managed lakes connected by an orderly system of canals. The global network of today is more like an ocean.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities ... [Henry David Thoreau].

Some network service providers still aspire to manage this metaphorical ocean, in much the same way as they used to manage the lakes and canals in the old days. So, in most telecom planning and design activities, everyone continues to use two dimensional drawings for workflows and for decision analysis trees which, even with computer programs sketching and stretching them out for us, keeps the choices limited and the logic flows simple. But “the map is not the territory”: simplifying things because we cannot grasp the complexity is not really simplification, but rather a representation of