WorldPort Hedges its Future on Quality IP [LU beats out CSCO and BAY]
[This network doesn't use ATM? No need for ASND?]
totaltele.com
By Phil Jones at CommunicationsWeek
International
12-AUG-98
Talk about moving up the quality chain: a former US
reseller, originally with ambitions in the calling-card
market, is poised to deliver tiered Internet protocol (IP)
services on a global basis.
WorldPort Communications Inc., of Atlanta, Georgia, is
to collaborate with Murray Hill, New Jersey-based Lucent
Technologies Inc. to work together to build a wholly
IP-based global transport network. The network will be
built around Lucent's PacketStar 6400 IP switch
announced in May, and, Lucent claims, will incorporate
advanced management and billing features allowing
WorldPort to offer guaranteed levels of service for voice,
fax and data traffic over IP.
The agreement is a startling coup for Lucent, which has
beaten Cisco Systems Inc. and Bay Networks Inc. to
potentially building the world's first global IP transport
network. But for WorldPort it could turn out to be a
high-risk strategy based on the gamble that global
telecoms carriers are prepared to migrate their voice
services to data networks of as yet unproven reliability.
Delivering definable quality of service over the Internet is
a key goal for many of the new generation of carriers
such as Qwest Communications Corp., and Level 3
Communications. However, it has so far proved an
elusive goal.
"One of the problems of the Internet is that every three
months the number of users doubles, yet customers
need guaranteed quality of service, policy-based routing
and service-level guarantees," said Albert Pols, business
development director for Lucent in Europe.
This has not been possible with IP-based networks to
date because of the difficulty of differentiating types of IP
traffic and apportioning appropriate levels of priority.
However, Jim Hendrikson, WorldPort's vice president of
technology and strategic planning, said his company and
Lucent are to develop the necessary billing and intelligent
network management systems to solve the problem.
"The real issue is the quality of service," said
Hendrikson, pointing out that other IP switching products
from conventional vendors, and router makers such as
Cisco and Bay do not have the capacity to differentiate
and prioritize between different IP traffic flows.
WorldPort's agreement with Lucent will ultimately see
PacketStar 6400 IP switches and Internet telephony
service points installed in 18 cities worldwide, including
New York, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris,
Brussels, Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo and Los Angeles.
However, before the global network is rolled out the
companies will prove the PacketStar technology in a
three-node evaluation network linking WorldPort's New
York node to sites in the Netherlands that were acquired
when WorldPort bought Dutch carrier EnerTel NV in May.
The evaluation will begin in October, and is expected to
be completed by 1999. The global rollout is scheduled for
completion by 2000.
Initially, WorldPort will offer the IP switching capability as
an adjunct to conventional switched services based on
Nortel DMS 100 and 200 devices. In fact, the company
has just signed an 18-month, $30million agreement with
Nortel for a 14-switch circuit-switched network that will
be used for carrying voice traffic.
But over time Hendrikson expects to see many
customers - including large corporate users, tier one and
tier two carriers, and ISPs - migrate their traffic to the IP
transport system. As confidence grows in the quality of
service offered by the IP network, he expects more
conventional traffic to be moved across, offering the
prospect of full virtual private network services over IP.
At the moment, Hendrikson believes, customers are
treating the prospect of guaranteed service levels over IP
with skepticism, but ultimately, he claimed, they will see
no degradation in service quality.
But Stewart Anderton, a senior consultant with Ovum
Ltd., of London, predicts the migration of such basic
services to IP from circuit-switched networks may be
slower than many predict. "I take a very conservative view
of the amount of traffic that will be carried over IP," he
said. "The network being established is only a trial
network."
c Total Telecom 1998. All Rights Reserved. info@totaltele.com |
