Hi Dennis,
Thanks for posting my message on SI. I thought I'd respond to you here, with this free trial membership I just signed up for. May I also say that I've appreciated your posts in the past on Yahoo.
What I saw at Internet World was pretty exciting. I was there to look at VPN and VoIP solutions for our corporation. There were dozens of vendors hawking these solutions. But the key issue for the success of both of these applications is quality of service (QoS). Without the ability to differentiate QoS, the public Internet becomes one big grab bag of bandwidth--grab as much as you can for a fixed fee. The Internet then becomes bogged down with everyone using all they can, without paying for it. So far, no one has been very effective in managing QoS with IP layer 3 technology. GTE has experimented with RSVP, but they seem to have given up. Rather, UUNet and most ISP's are using ATM PVC's to provision internet bandwidth for paying customers. It appears this may be the best way to reserve bandwidth for the customers who pay for it. This is why ATM is so hot now. Forget ATM to the desktop, or MPOATM. ATM will be used for carrier backbones. Soon, (according to Michael Gaddis) ATM's get much smarter, and will be able to specify latency other performance parameters on a per-PVC basis. It looks like Ascend's CBX500 seem to be out in front, being the current product of choice for carriers.
There are a large number of vendors coming out with voice over IP gateways, but most seem to be using NT (haha!), which won't cut it for the carrier market. Ascend will be only one of many vendors in this market including Lucent. I hope Ascend's products succeed in this area, but do note they have a lot of competition.
Bucky89 |
