Hi Raj,
Qwest bought LCI to get access to the edges. I don't think that they will stop there.
In any event that (edge topology) makes no difference to their highly efficient, high
bandwidth IP backbone.
LCI is second-tier. The big data customers today belong to UUNet, MCI, and GTE. The big voice customers belong to AT&T, Sprint, and MCI. I don't see any of these players easily giving up their plum customers.
They can haul voice traffic at a fraction of the cost of
ATA&T class4 circuit switches.
This is an artificial cost difference. The majority of the difference is a result of Universal Access Fees which must be paid for circuit-switched voice. The gov will not forever let QWEST and their VoIP go untaxed.
Geting the edge traffic onto their IP backbone does not necessarily translate into
voice on layer 2.
Duh, this was not my point. My point is congestion will force any carrier today to use ATM. UUNet, GTE, MCI, AT&T, and all the legitimate big players have congestion issues in their network, and that's why they use ATM. QWEST's network today has no congestion, and if it did, then they could not offer reliable voice services without ATM.
QWEST has built an awesome 8-lane superhighway but they have no traffic and no customers. They have 100X more capacity than they are currently using. Under these circumstances, of course everything works well. An underutilized network works well regardless of which technology is being used. Just wait and see what happens when they start using that capacity (assuming they can get customers, which is a big assumption).
bucky89 |
