Full Article on ASND's AT&T contract, Part I
By David Rohde of Network World, NewYork
[No online article yet, I have to type it from the print]
Someone in the telecommunications industry does believe in Moore's Law after all. And of all the people, it turns out to be the chairman of AT&T.
The carrier's new CEO, C. Michael Armstrong,last week announced a radical change in AT&T's network, which will provide hundreds of new users access points for IP, wireless, and local telephone services. Combined with a new effort to slash the company's head count and overhead, Armstrong indicated in public - and even more emphatically in private - that the plan is designed to bring down the cost of both voice and data networking for business users.
Armstrong told a crowd of Wall Street and technical analysts here that AT&T will move to an edge switch architecture that terminates dedicated access lines on local telephone switches instead of AT&T's heavily taxed long-distance circuit switches.
According to analysts and AT&T insiders, Armstrong and his deputies are also committed to installing a substantial number of new data switches at the edge of network to provide a transparent IP user interface.
The idea, they says, is to beef up AT&T's WorldNet IP services with economically attractive offers that utilize FR or ATM trunking in the carrier backbone without forcing users to actually subscribe to frame or ATM services.[good opp for B-STDX 9000 and GX 550]
Armstrong gave the clearest statement yet by a major telecom executive that some variant of Moore's Law - the dictum that computer processing power doubles every 18 months for the same cost - might eventually apply to telecom, as well.
AT&T could count on selling more services to business and residential users as price stops being a barrier, Armstrong said.
A major partner in AT&T's plan is expected to be Ascend Communications Corp., which last year purchased ATM switch vendor Cascade Communications Corp.
Frank Ianna, AT&T's executive vice president for network and computing services, confirmed that AT&T this year plans to purchase 112 of Ascend's CBX 500 multiservice ATM backbone switches from the former Cascade family, plus 50 B-STDX 9000 edge switches with IP interface, largely to provide a transparent ATM backbone for what users will simply view as IP services. Ianna added that AT&T has a rapidly growing demand for native ATM services as big users max out their T-1 FR links. |
