Curtis,
>>Nortel is going around with buttons that say "I speak IP" and have
adopted the "Web-tone" slogan. In addition, they have taken a ~20%
equity interest in avici-- www.avici.com<<
Avici is pretty potent stuff to be entering into a new voice technology with. Down the road it will be useful to supplement and ultimately replace , possibly, their SuperNode front ends for their DMS and SONET environments, though. That's what I assume you are referring to, since Terabit routers are hardly entry level devices for getting your feet wet.
The first lapel buttons I recall seeing as a youngster stick out as an icon in my mind. They said "I Like Ike." I saw these over that newfangled contraption called the television. Many folks at the time said that the TV would never replace the radio. TV has replaced radio, and Web pages have replaced lapel buttons.
>>Tis easier for a Datacomm company to "do voice" than it is for a transport/voice company to "do data"<<
There is more than a little bit of truth to what you state, from a technological perspective, at least. It would be a no brainer, if in fact we were talking about migrating to IP voice, en masse, but that is not the case. In fact, Cisco may find more opposition from the comptroller's offices in large enterprises than from Lucent on this matter.
Billions of dollars in depreciating investments are still out their, and backwards compatibility with those systems will play a large role in the introduction of IP enhancements going forward. Add to this the penalties of premature terminations for existing telco line contracts, and the maintenance agreements for inventory and repair of PBXs and other extant voice systems, and we can add another two or three inhibitors to newcomers taking market share without a fight.
And let's not forget that most voice is already digitized in one form or another into streams, and even switched services adhere to rigid framing and routing rules, save the black wire into the home.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
