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Let me try a spontaneous hit on this. The obvious losers are the intelligent network vendors; the problem is that the leaders in Sonet et al are also leaders in WDM, ie Lucent, Nortel, Siemens, Alcatel, Tellabs, and such. So the losers will be the big networks that bet on managed bandwidth with its complexities over big bandwidth with its simplicity, scalability, and flexibility, pushing the intelligence to the edge. Sonet vendors can be truly big losers with WDM, which allows add-drop functions without processing the entire bitstream as Sonet requires. These losers include all the RBOCs and probably Sprint if it sticks big time to its ION, with per bit metering and ATM everywhere. Newbridge has bet big on ATM but is shifting aggressively now. Companies like PairGain that hide under the T-1 umbrella and ultimately Microsoft, which is optimizing everything for quality of service, compression, and control from the desktop. Hey, this is a offhand guess, but the price was right. |
