Future For Networks Is Data, Not Voice
(11/11/97; 1:00 p.m. EST)
By Mo Krochmal, TechWeb
NEW YORK -- Qwest Communications CEO Joseph Nacchio
has taken a look at the WorldCom-MCI merger and sees the
personality of WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, but gets lost on
his logic.
"Bernie is a smart guy," said Nacchio at the Communications
Managers Association conference here on Tuesday. "But the
question is: How can you spend that much money for a company
[in] voice long distance?"
In a global marketplace where annual spending on
telecommunications services is expected to eclipse $1 trillion by
2001 -- and $150 billion in the United States -- the future for
networks is not in voice, but in data, said Nacchio, who has been
at Qwest for one year after 26 years at AT&T.
Denver-based Qwest, which had its initial public offering last
summer, is a year-and-a-half from completing a fiber-optic
network that will connect 120 cities in the United States and
Mexico.
"The carriers want to give you 56 kilobits per second that looks
like voice," Nacchio said. "It's not because they take stupid pills in
the morning; it's because they are used to the structure of an
oligopoly."
Voice will consist of less than 1 percent of network traffic by the
year 2004, Nacchio said. The majority of telecommunications will
be in the form of packets -- little bits of data that carry video,
audio and e-mail. The bottleneck, Nacchio said, is bandwidth.
A native New Yorker, Nacchio paraphrased former FCC chairman
Reed Hundt: "We need a data network that can carry voice rather
than a voice network struggling to carry data."
When Qwest has completed laying 16,000 miles of fiber-optic
network in 18 months, it will be selling capacity by the barrel,
Nacchio said. The company is burying hardened conduit 4 to 5 feet
deep in railway beds. The twin conduits each contain 48 fiber optic
cables, with each cable having a capacity of 8 gigabits.
While the network is being finished, Qwest is aggressively selling
service in Colorado for $4.50 a month and charging 10 cents a
minutes at any time of the day.
"TCP/IP is fast shaping networks -- public and private," he said. |
