Avaz Networks expects good reception for products
Business Times (Malaysia), Dec 27, 2001
BY CINDY YEAP
AVAZ Networks Inc is confident of a good reception to its products, touted as being able to slash a telecommunications company's (telco) capital spending by 90 per cent.
The company said a telco can cut its operating expenditure by more than 50 per cent by using its fully-programmable single-platform solution that addresses high-density modem and gateway needs.
Its chairman and chief executive officer Safi Qureshey, who was in Kuala Lumpur recently, said the company had several meeting with local telecommunications carriers like Telekom Malaysia Bhd to further explore cost-savings possibilities.
"They're very interested. They want to know where the future is going, how to provide the services people want and what type of technology is available that they could talk to their suppliers."
"With better technology, they can offer more capabilities at a lower cost. We can bring technology to them at a lower cost, and they can pass on that savings to their customers by being able to offer future services at lower costs," Qureshey said.
Avaz sells its products to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Cisco Systems Inc and Fujitsu Networks Inc.
"We're in the process of exploring possibilities. Our real interest is people who make the equipment. Telcos like Telekom are our customer's customer. By introducing new technologies to the telcos, they are more aware of the possibilities and can acquire them from OEMs. We can also learn their needs and try to fulfil them when we come up with new solutions," he said.
Avaz is also indirectly targeting other telecommunications carriers in the region like Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, Pacific Century CyberWorks Hong Kong Telecoms, Nippon Telephone and Telegraphs and China Telecoms.
The California-based semiconductor and software platform provider, with over 170 scientists and engineers worldwide, is in the process of applying for Multimedia Super Corridor status and will be having a presence here in January.
"Aside from talking to telecommunication carriers and OEMs, we are also talking to local universities like Universiti Malaya, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Multimedia Malaysia to set up a collaborative training facility to train local talents like the centre we have in Pakistan," Avaz's international business development manager M. Mahboob Akhter said. The company is also contemplating of housing their Malaysian operations in the UPM-MTDC Technology Incubation Centre or Technology Park Malaysia.
Qureshey meanwhile said the company believes that most of telecommunications will be "packetised" within a decade with the continual vast technology advancement. "Today there is the legacy circuit switched networks and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The predictions is that most of the traffic will go IP. Historically, data was riding on voice. We believe that over the next 10 year voice will be riding on data packets.
"What people would want to look at is the cost of running an Internet- based network, which is much lower than running the telephone network on circuit switch, (which is) what telephone companies are using now," he said.
On the lower voice quality of service of Internet-based call as compared to traditional public-switched copper-wire telephone network presently, Qureshey said: "The problem is being addressed as we speak."
"Our solutions has added quality of service (QoS) features that enables network to be programmed to give voice packets utmost priority as compared to less time-sensitive data traffic like electronic mail. The public will not know and care whether its circuit switched or packet switched. There would be some sort of a service level agreement on quality of service and priority of service. Virtual private networks are already build on an IP networks," he said.
He cited recent technologies like IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) which was the long-awaited upgrade to the existing IPv4, the Internet's main communication protocol. IPv6 solves the network address limitations of the current IPv4 protocol by replacing IPv4's 32-bit addresses with 128-bit addresses. Because of its longer addresses, IPv6 can support a virtually limitless number of individually identified systems on the Net - which is critical for wireless applications - while IPv4 can support only a few billion systems.
Backers of IPv6 recently suffered a setback with the discovery of security flaws in the protocol, forcing the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to once again come up with a new method for authenticating roaming devices that use IPv6 addresses.
Qureshey said telcos want equipment that is high-density, low-powered and programmable. "Sending engineers out to the field to check on equipment requires a lot of time and money. What we've designed allow equipment to be remotely programmed and monitored from more than 100 miles away. This saves costs and time. Diagnostic traces can be put on the equipment and periodical reports in three hour intervals, for instance, can be sent in to the monitoring headquarters to alert of any changes.
"Functionality can also change with time. The ability to reprogramme equipment would also save costs, and our solutions allow that," he said.
AVAZ provides Remote Access Services (RAS), Voice over Asychronous Transfer Mode (VoATM) and VoIP today with wire-speed security and Internetworking of IP, Asychronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Time-division Multiplexing (TDM) networks, as well as low-cost, reliable back-haul solutions for wireless and wire-line networks.
As part of its broadband strategy, AVAZ intends to provide tri-mode wireless Base Transmission Stations (BTS) for 2.5G and 3G and Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTS) on the same platform. These offerings provide benefits of 8x-10x the performance and 1/3rd to 1/10th the power, at 1/2 to 1/5th the total systems cost and in dramatically less physical space than any other shipping or planned solution.
The AVAZ solution includes silicon and software for broadband universal port processing and encapsulation for packet (IP) and cell (ATM) networks, including protocol Internetworking. The AVAZ Soft Engine, Universal Port Engine and Packet Engine enable carrier class equipment manufactures to provide their customers a scalable high-density, central-site modem processing platform and high-density gateway platform that is fully programmable and that can be dynamically and remotely managed, debugged and upgraded.
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