To All: What's the one true constant in the telecommunications industry? Give up?
Acronyms!!
I daresay I could go all day within the profession speaking intelligently to my work colleagues, and yet be speaking total "gobble-dee-gook" to the average person. Well, here's a new acronym for everyone. BLEC(not to be confused with BLEEECH!! Heh). It stands for Building-based Local Exchange Carrier. What's that? Just another potential revenue avenue for xDSL technology. See below:
techweb.com
Companies spin DSLAM offerings for multiple-family buildings -- Stampede starts for high-rise access hardware
DENVER - This summer, the equipment stampede is hitting the building-based local exchange carrier (BLEC) market full force. The charge is being lead by familiar digital subscriber line access multiplexer players like AccessLAN Communications Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), Copper Mountain Networks Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.) and Net to Net Technologies Inc. (Portsmouth, N.H.), who are launching building-based DSLAM platforms.
Meanwhile, startups like Accordion Networks Inc. (Newark, Calif.) promise to have offerings in late 2000 that will deliver capabilities uniting DSL and fiber technologies.
The dream, by no means realized to date, is for the multitenant building market to overtake the potential competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) market for DSL services.
The design of access systems for multitenant buildings is often simpler than DSLAMs for public telco central offices. But that doesn't mean selling into the BLEC market is simple. Celeste DeMilt, a telecom consultant hired by AccessLAN a year ago to direct BLEC marketing, said that OEMs have to throw away the rule book in dealing with the new breed of carrier exemplified by startup service providers like Everest Broadband Networks Inc. (see July 17, page 59).
Uniting voice, data services
Some real estate managers like to become service providers in their own right, she said, while others came out of the hospitality and hotel industries. All BLEC executives talk of uniting multiple data and voice services, she said, but few are well-versed in Internet Protocol prioritization technologies, voice-over-IP (VoIP) methods and router/switch technologies. Some BLECs are becoming versed in first-generation DSLAM technologies, but that is only the first step.
At Accordion, for example, the company already is talking about embedding soft-switch protocols like Session Initiation Protocol and Media Gateway Control Protocol into the access systems the company will release next year. Accordion executives came from companies with access expertise like Premisys Communications Inc. and Mayan Networks Inc., and are convinced that building managers will want to add voice services to their locally managed mixes as soon as VoIP begins proving itself out in public networks.
"We will incorporate mediation gateway functions into our systems based on the model of a full point of presence in a multitenant basement," said Rajan Aiyer, vice president of marketing at Accordion.
DSLAM traditionalists often approach BLEC applications from two fronts at once. Copper Mountain Networks, for example, offered stripped-down versions of its own chassis-based DSLAM as early entrants into the multitenant market. But as an adjunct to that strategy, Copper Mountain acquired BLEC equipment specialist OnPrem Networks Inc., which had a mini-DSLAM system closer in architecture to a router. George Marshall, former president of OnPrem, has been put in charge of uniting both BLEC product lines at Copper Mountain.
Last week Copper Mountain announced its first major contract with a BLEC, a $13 million deal to provide WebAccess International Inc. with more than 2,000 OnPrem concentrators and several thousand CopperRocket DSL modems. To help drive more BLEC business, Copper Mountain simultaneously launched a development program for Multi-Tenant Unit accounts.
The effort, dubbed "MTU FastStart DSL," combines development software with service-marketing programs and mirrors a similar program Copper Mountain maintains for competitive local exchange carriers.
AccessLAN is taking the approach of embedding support for voice-over-DSL gateway functions into a new line of DSLAMs designed for the BLEC market, dubbed I-SLAMs for IP services. The PL-1000 family was developed with greater stackability of
services than the PL-2000 line for telco central offices. But two low-end modules for that family, the 8- and 12-port symmetric DSL access modules, were developed specifically with BLEC densities in mind, said DeMilt. More than 92 percent of all buildings in the U.S. have less than 12 tenants, and this represents 65 percent of the entire tenant population. OEMs without a very low-density hardware platform were taking themselves out of the majority of the BLEC market, she said.
"The low-density modules were based on customer demand," she said. "But all the members of the PL-1000 family had to maintain full Layer 3 routing functionality."
Splitterless ADSL
Net to Net, meanwhile, is launching a G.lite (splitterless asymmetric DSL) capability for its DSLAMs that it calls appropriate for either BLEC or lower-cost CLEC markets. By embedding asynchronous transfer mode framing inside its ADSL modules in the Net to Net DSLAM, the company has eliminated the need for CLEC technicians or BLEC building managers to directly provision ATM permanent virtual circuits or switched virtual circuits.
Director of marketing Eric Knapp said the DSLAM offers the ATM interfaces required in the G.lite standard, but keeps those interfaces transparent to service provisioning. This will allow mixes of full-rate and G.lite services to be provisioned from a simpler, lower-cost DSLAM than had been available in the past, Knapp said.
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Interesting, eh? Well.....it is to me! ;-)
John~ |
