The next generation of requirements for communication networks won’t be defined by the telecom industry but by the broader information technology industry, said MCI CEO Michael Capellas, in a speech at Needham & Company’s seventh annual Growth Conference today in New York.

"If you’re an application developer today, you’d be saying, ‘I no longer need to know or care what the end device is,’" he added. "When I send something over the network, once it hits the network, I don’t know if it’s a music file, a phone call--it doesn’t matter; it all looks the same to the network. It’s not telecom that defines what happens."

Corporate chief information officers are outsourcing more of their network needs, Capellas said, and getting rid of much of their networking infrastructure at the same time. Devices at the edge of the network will become increasingly simple as networks become increasingly intelligent, he said. "A lot of what used to control the network is in big, heavy operating systems, and they’re going away. The big heavy iron is moving out."

At the same time, system integrators aren’t being asked to run entire networks end-to-end in most cases, he said. Instead, outsourcing tasks are broken up into categories and assigned separately.

Meanwhile, more and more functions will be performed on the network itself, Capellas said. Over time, brokerages will have their networks apply privacy requirements to their data. "If you’re a pharmaceutical company and you could put all the HIPAA rules inside the network, why wouldn’t you do it?" he asked.

In turn, security will become "the number-one concern of everyone in the CIO community," he said. And in three to four years, telecom infrastructure will evolve into "some form of wireless broadband [feeding] into an IP network."

The fastest growing segment of the telecom market is private IP networks, he said, illustrating a trend toward a mix of public and private infrastructure at the edge of networks. "We used to think of the Internet as a big cloud," he said. "Wrong. We used to believe all this stuff would go over the public Internet. But the public Internet is too noisy, too cluttered."