It is nice to see the industry is getting its act together and working together.
"You are looking at history"
Tom Starr proudly walks us around the interoperability pavillion
The chair of the T1E1.4 committee was beaming as he walked us around the booth. The display cases held twenty DSLAMs, the exhibit area thirty vendors equipment. Everything was connected to everything, and it worked, both at G.lite and full-rate DMT. Essentially every major vendor in the industry was included. Jay Fausch of Alcatel, remembering our reporting last year on the search for full-rate interoperability, had emailed us the exhibit would be impressive, but it was even more extraordinary than we expected. We asked a dozen technical people about interconnect problems, and the answers were so few we were amazed. Barbara Tien of Netopia gave us the key demonstration. She logged on to DSLprime.com, then reached up to the patch panel above the router. She pulled the cable from slot #6 on the patch panel (the Fujitsu DSLAM), and plugged it in to #8 (an Alcatel DSLAM). After a moment, she clicked on our news, and it came right up. She could have done the same with a dozen other DSLAMs on the panel.
Tom would be the first to credit the literally thousands of people who made interoperability work, but a few must be singled out. Scott Valcourt of the University of New Hampshire has been supervising the testing (don't hire away all his graduate students before they finish the program, please!) Hans-Erhard Reiter has proved a skillful diplomat bringing the industry together, while Mark Peden and Nabil Gebrael are organizing the public outreach for the Forum.
Perry P. |
